Tag: Boundaries

Learning to Speak Up

On By sambullingtonLeave a comment

Growing up with my mom, it was definitely not safe to speak up. I learned all sorts of deflection and concealing behaviors in order to keep myself from harm. Over the years, I learned to conceal my real feelings even from myself. I stopped letting myself be aware of how I was really feeling, especially if it seemed to be in conflict with someone else’s needs.

But now all of a sudden I can see these deflection and concealing behaviors, and I’m starting to let myself not only be aware of how I’m really feeling, but even to speak it aloud to others and to take action from this awareness! And it has been life changing!

There’s one pattern I learned from growing up with my mom that now I’m recognizing myself doing all the time! When I’ve spoken something that feels risky (say I’ve said something strongly or revealed some potentially threatening information), rather than allow there to be space and silence afterwards, I will immediately jump in to try to distract us. Specifically I will point out something that is mundane, hence safe, and something that is shared (i.e. “That smells nice” or “Look at that neat bird”). 

When I told my partner my realization, she commented on what a creative and smart strategy it was for dealing with my mom! A way to minimize risk and maximize potential intimacy. It is a way of de-escalating, of defusing potential charge (including my anxiety and the other person’s). And it is a strategy I’ve seen other family members use, though with different flavors—basically fill all the space so that nothing unpredictable can happen.

I’m learning with my partner to be more authentic in my presence and more direct in my communication, noticing all my habitual ways of coming at things sideways. I’ve seen with her the ways it can undermine trust so I’m very motivated to notice and change those behaviors. And as I’m doing that, I’m noticing the freedom and clarity arising in my own being.

I’ve not just been practicing with my partner—I’ve been speaking my mind all over town in all my relationships! Whereas previously I would have a lot of anxiety in my body in anticipation and a lot of self doubt afterwards, now I am just meeting the moment with my truth every day without even really thinking about it. It has been very empowering!

In one of these situations, I needed to address a housemate who’d been eating my food. Doing so successfully and undramatically, I was prompted to write a (somewhat hilarious) list of other possible responses I would have used at other times in my life.

Options:

My housemate is eating my food. I can:

I can silently stew about it

I can make it ok by telling myself it’s not a big deal

I can avoid it by not leaving food in the kitchen

I can extremely avoid it by moving out

I can avoid my housemate

I can give my housemate the silent treatment and see if he figures out why

I can tell my friends what a jerk he is

I can talk to my landlord and hope she’ll say something to him

I can talk to my landlord and ask her if she’ll say something to him

I can explode at him after weeks/months of silently stewing

Or I can just say please stop eating my food! An act of love for us both!

Despite the humor of its ridiculousness, looking over this list was humbling and painful because these are all the strategies that I have used my whole life. Not even allowing myself to know how I was feeling, absorbing all the consequences inside myself without even telling the other person I was feeling distressed, siphoning off my anger and helplessness through utilizing others, feeling like a victim and wanting to be rescued, overriding my feelings and abandoning myself, wanting others to know and not wanting others to know how I was feeling, being afraid of creating rupture in the relationship (while creating rupture in the relationship by not speaking up), and feeling ashamed and unreasonable for even having feelings or preferences. My main survival strategy with my mom was to be like water and just flow around obstacles without ever confronting them directly so I have many clever means of practicing avoidance, internally and externally.

What my partner helped me to reflect upon was the consequences of all of these avoidance strategies. The consequences on me and my well being of internalizing so much about my own experience. The lack of trust inherent in that internalizing process, making it hard for me to feel met when others don’t know what’s going on for me. And the loneliness and frustration of not actually being known because of keeping so much inside. The consequences on others, as I make them into enemies and engage in silent, or not so silent, warfare. The erosion of my relationships with them as a result of my withholds. And the painful messages that get silently reinforced for us both: that my feelings and needs don’t matter, that relationships are unpredictable and unsafe. And the consequences on community and our collective life when we aren’t authentic or direct. The polarization that happens when we take sides or hold distorted views of one another based on incomplete information. The vomiting of our negative emotional states onto one another. The messiness that results from being triangulated into situations that aren’t ours.   

I am so grateful to be starting to recognize all of these survival strategies in myself and to suddenly have the inner tools to start making different choices. I know that the more I enact these new skills of direct communication, the more positive reinforcement I will have for stabilizing these new ways of being.

New Sam

On By sambullingtonLeave a comment

It was just the first anniversary of my mom’s death. It is amazing and beautiful to me that her presence now is a deep source of comfort and refuge and safety, of guidance and companionship, the kind of relationship I’d always longed to have with her which was impossible due to the ways her trauma made her unavailable, harsh, and unpredictable. What an incredible gift to finally feel close and safe and nurtured with my mom, truly worth waiting for.  

This entire last year has been a process of disentangling from my mom, watching dissolve the cloud of fear and self-protection and defensiveness that I’ve lived in all my life, often without realizing it. As I mentioned in my last blog, I’m only slowly noticing its existence by noticing its absence. As I also mentioned in my last blog, the most painful aspect of dealing with my mom’s death has been the way that my partner has had difficulty being able to show up for it, so while my partner was out of town for 2 weeks for a silent retreat, I took myself to Ozark Sufi Camp to grieve and honor my mom with spiritual family. It was the perfect place for me to be.

The camp theme–No Part Left Out–was incredibly resonant for me in looking at the legacy of my mom in my life, all the distortions built into my personality structure as I learned to contort myself in life to try to stay safe. And the theme was a healing framework to hold the significance and complexity of my mom’s passing in my life—the deep honoring of her, the sorrow of losing her, and the tragedy of missed opportunities, as well as the relief and liberation resulting from her absence. 

My camp experience felt like an initiation, a big leveling up resulting from the momentum of the transformative work I began soon after my partner left. I am now a person who sets boundaries! It began with saying no to a spiritual retreat leader but quickly spread to family members, friends, even total strangers. I tend to continually let people overstep—and often don’t even notice when it happens–because I could never stop my mom, but now I am someone who pushes back on that. Throughout my life I never expected people to be able to show up to do their work because my mom wasn’t able or willing to, but now I am someone who does only my 50% and expects others to do their share. I previously would work really hard internally and externally to make it all ok, but now I can see that it is not mine to make ok. And my little girl is everything to me now—my loyalty goes to her. And she is learning to trust me more not to abandon her over and over as I chase after unavailable others and squash myself to try to keep everyone happy in all the ways my mom trained me to be. It is only the beginning sprouts of these new ways of being, but they are manifesting into form rapidly. 

Interestingly, my mom has become my biggest guide and ally in this work. She came to me at Sufi Camp in the form of Armadillo, whose medicine is boundaries—offering her loving support and help with this important work I’m doing, knowing as a soul that it was her personality wounds that created my need to do this important work. While I will never know what would have been possible with my mom if I’d ever said to her that I didn’t like how she was showing up and wanted it to change, I can practice that with my partner and others and see what happens.

So this has been a time of deep and accelerated growth, insight, empowerment, and clarity, learning about my limits and withholds, freeing myself to speak, saying no more often than ok, taking truly unprecedented action in my life with courage and consistency, becoming a new person in front of my eyes (as my testosterone self turns 18!). While one friend tearfully confessed that she missed Old Sam, the placater and bridge builder, it is clear to me that there is no going back from here, even if it creates some significant disruption in my life. 

I returned home from Sufi Camp with a stomach virus that felled half the camp on the last day. Spending 2 days in bed puking my guts out was a sacred death ritual to my old self, born into my mom’s trauma and conditioned to serve her rather than my soul. It allowed me to purge that residue from my body, just as smashing the clay sculpture I did at Sufi Camp in a parts workshop helped me purge that residue from my emotions.     

On the eve of my partner’s arrival back in town, the stars really seemed to be lining up for a spectacular culminating experience: seeing the Northern Lights for the first time, something that’s long been on my list of desired experiences! It seemed like such a fitting conclusion to the 2 weeks I’d just had, of appropriate magnitude and a whisper from Spirit acknowledging the important deep inner work I’d faithfully done. Well, the Northern Lights literally came to my door, but I missed seeing them lol! Realizing this felt sad and confusing at first and made going back into the darkness (and letting go of the hope of light) feel like a defeat somehow. I felt my spirit start to sink.  

But then I remembered I like the darkness—I am a creature of the night so it is my element—and so going back to the darkness felt comforting and surprisingly like the affirmation of myself that I thought the Northern Lights would provide. And the darkness didn’t have to feel sad or scary or alone—because I think there was something about it that perhaps tapped into my fears of the void. But then I remembered that the void is the womb—the place where new beginnings are generated, the East. Which was just perfect for me because I had just completed a fierce and vigorous ritual of release to the West, the place of letting go of what no longer serves us. Which is why I had turned my back to the west when the Northern Lights came.

And just as I wouldn’t have experienced the beginnings of that comfort and refuge with my mom if my partner hadn’t broken up with me for a time last year, if my partner had been here this year, I wouldn’t have had all this accelerated growth, nor written this blog about my journey. Nor would I have been inspired tonight to write this blog if I’d seen the Northern Lights.

All the puzzle pieces that align this way and that for us to have our particular journeys of healing and awakening and emergence. The unfolding is just fascinating, and I’m learning to trust that each experience that I’m having is exactly the right one for me. The new views you can see around each new corner often makes me speechless with surprise and wonder, and often make me laugh with both hilarity and humility. All I can wonder is where will I be taken next?

The Northern Lights from my driveway (taken by my housemate)