Hello dear ones!
I shared a series of memes on December 19th about reparenting ourselves. With reparenting, we give ourselves the experiences we missed growing up. In the list I included verbal affirmation, celebrating my weirdness, and consistency. I asked folks which ones they struggled with and a few different people said consistency. So I thought that that would be the theme of this newsletter.
Before we dive in, just a few reminders:
The first episode of OPENINGS is here and the themes are: friendship, what to do when your humans can’t show up to offer care, and internal family systems therapy. You can listen to it here.
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THOUGHTS & FEELINGS
Growing up, my home was a paradoxical space where order and chaos lived comfortably side by side. My father had rules that must be followed and punishments that would be doled out if the rules were broken. Though those rules only seemed to apply to me. My brother would come home past curfew and get off scot free. There was no consistency in how we were parented.
At the same time, our house was overflowing with objects that made rooms impossible to navigate; dishes piled up in the sink until I’d eventually cave and wash them all; the kitchen table unusable because it was covered in paperwork. Our home lacked organization. It was was a space of chaos: emotionally, psychically, and physically. This meant that I came to normalize chaos, to desire it. Consistency = boredom.
I’d watch this play out in my teenage years and into early adulthood. Whenever I’d be in a stable relationship, I’d freak out. I was compulsively drawn towards on-again-off-again relationships. The hot-then-cold was familiar to me. And because it was familiar, it was deemed safe by my trauma brain. It’s wild to me how the wires can get crossed in our safety mapping: chaos and danger become safe, while stability and consistency are felt to be dangerous.
The authors of Nurturing Resilience: Helping Clients Move Forward from Developmental Trauma explain how “When our social environment is chaotic and lacks consistent feedback about safety versus threat, our differentiation between these two possibilities can become confused or even absent, tuning us more acutely towards assessment of danger and perhaps limiting our ability to recognize safety” (25). Our ability to recognize the difference between the two is called “neuroception,” a term coined by Stephen Porges, and strong neuroception depends upon interoception (our ability to feel safety internally) and exteroception (our ability to sense safety externally). If you grew up in a chaotic and unstable home, you may have underdeveloped interoceptive, exteroceptive, and neuroceptive capabilities. So much of my recent therapy work has centered on building these skills.
If my teenage years were all chaos, my early adulthood was the opposite (don’t you just love how our trauma brains swing us from one end of the pendulum to another?). I feared change more than anything else. If plans changed, I’d have a panic attack. If the bus was two minutes late, which meant that I’d be two minutes late, I’d dissociate. I didn’t want anything to change ever. When a relationship would end, I’d clutch desperately to it so that I could avoid the grief that would inevitably come with this change. Consistency now equaled safety, but to the point where any blip would be felt as though my world was crumbling around me.
From my mid-twenties to, well, today, I’ve been learning how to find the balance in between total chaos and total consistency. Because we actually need a little bit of each in order to build our capacity to return to our window of tolerance. If everything is always good and calm, then we’ll struggle to regulate when things become challenging. And if everything is always chaotic, then we will experience distress when things are calm. This is why I come back to the reminder that secure attachment isn’t formed by the absence of rupture, but by rupture followed by repair.
Because the reality is that shit is just going to change — I’m going to change — and people won’t always be able to show up for us exactly when we need them. Change is this funny thing that happens when you commit yourself to your healing. But there are ways that we can feel empowered by change, where we can show up responsively in the face of the unexpected, rather than from a place of reactivity.
It is here that I think of adrienne maree brown’s theorization of intentional adaptation in her book Emergent Strategy. brown writes: “I am talking about the combination of adaptation with intention, wherein the orientation and movement towards life, towards longing, is made graceful in the act of adaptation. This is the process of changing while staying in touch with our deeper purpose and longing” (70). brown turns to nature to illustrate how intentional adaptation works, focusing specifically on murmurations, shoals, and swarms:
“each creature is tuned in to its neighbors, the creatures right around it in the formation. This might be the birds on either side, or the six fish in each direction. There is a right relationship, a right distance between them—too close and they crash, too far away and they can’t feel the micro-adaptations of the other bodies. Each creature is shifting direction, speed, and proximity based on the information of the other creatures’ bodies” (71).
Think of geese that fly in a v, with one at the front of the pack to guide the others. Eventually, the front goose tires, and another goose moves up to take its place. They adapt, with the intention of keeping the rest of the group moving safely.
As I try to create consistency in my life, I do so with a commitment to intentional adaptation. I’ve been longing for more routines and rituals in my daily life, especially around the start of the day and end of the day. In my ideal world, I’d wake up at 6:30am, do some yoga, make my coffee, sit and journal or read for half an hour, and then get ready for my work day (all without looking at my phone). Most days, I wake up somewhere between 7:30-9, don’t do yoga, scroll Instagram while drinking my coffee, and maybe do a bit of reading or journalling. As someone living with chronic pain and neurodivergence, I need to know that I can sleep later if my body needs it; that I can do some stretching later in the day if that feels accessible. What remains consistent is my commitment to intentional adaptation.
PRACTICES
If you’re looking to build more consistency into your daily life, here are two some practices and a few hot tips that have worked for me:
Journalling. It’s taken me YEARS to make this a fairly consistent practice in my daily life (and I realize that there have been weeks, recently, where I haven’t written a word). Unsure where to start?
Pull a tarot card every morning and journal about the imagery. If you don’t have a tarot deck, you can download a free app for a tarot card of the day.
Also loved Esmé Weijun Wang course called “The Rawness of Remembering”: “a self-paced online course about restorative journaling through difficult times, built by someone who’s been in the trenches.”
Rituals. Connecting to the rhythms of the moon cycles has been a deeply healing practice for me, and one that can involve as much or as little work as I want. Unsure where to start?
I love the Chani app so so much that I’ve paid for a monthly subscription so that I can listen to her mini podcasts on each new and full moon and have it tailored to my chart. She also offers journal prompts and ritual suggestions.
For the full moon: take a bath and use a bath scrub to remove all of the dead skin that you’re shedding. For the new moon: plant a seed (literally or metaphorically). I’ll often write down intentions for the new moon that I plant and for the full moon I write down what I’m shedding and then I burn each slip of paper, thanking each piece for whatever wisdom it was offering me.
Hot tip: start small!! You don’t have to plan a four hour ritual. You don’t have to journal for an hour. When starting something new, remember that our trauma brains can freak out at the newness. And so we start small. 5 minutes of writing in the morning; 10 minutes of ritual. And we tweak as needed because #IntentionalAdaptation.
ACTIONS
In two days one of my besties is offering a free class that I want every human in the world to attend:
Why take the class? Here are Varvara’s words:
Our feelings offer us information. They are always telling us something - about what we're experiencing personally or collectively, about what we or our ancestors have survived, about what we long for and what is asking to be created. 🔮
Feelings drive us to make social change.
They long to be expressed.
Moved through.
Spoken.
Felt.
Feeling is a birthright.
This patriarchal belief that emotions are weak and therefore not to be felt has caused great wounding to ourselves and to our world. Learning how to feel our feelings is an integral part of healing that not only impacts us; feeling our feelings helps us show up and care for others more deeply.
Note: there will be a recording for everyone who can’t attend live!
Thanks so much for reading!
xoxo