Hello dear ones! I don’t have much of a preamble for this week’s newsletter, except to say that there’s an exciting new workshop announcement at the end, so make sure you get there!
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. Paid subscribers can listen to it here. Reminder that you have until January 23rd at 11:59pm MST to submit your questions (guidelines at the end of the newsletter).
If you love this newsletter and have the means to make monthly contributions, you can upgrade your subscription here! Paid subscribers get access to OPENINGS.
If you feel called to screenshot parts of this newsletter that are speaking to you and you wanna share it on your social media, PLEASE DO! If you could tag me that would be extra special <3
Don’t be afraid to leave a comment! I LOVE engaging with folks and learning more about you!!
THOUGHTS & FEELINGS
Content Note: intrusive thoughts, violence against women, abductions, murder, home invasion, parental neglect and emotional abuse
Intrusive thoughts are something that I’ve lived with for all of my life. I can recall how, at the age of five or six, I ran into the house terrified of a van that I could see driving down my street. Perhaps I was afraid because these years, 1990-1991, were the years of the Schoolgirl Killer Murders. But I have no memory of my parents talking to me about these events. Whatever their cause, these fears morphed into intrusive thoughts that would return again and again throughout my childhood and adolescence: It wasn’t safe outside. One day, I’d surely be abducted and killed.
During my teenage years these intrusive thoughts intensified. Not only was it unsafe outside, but my home was also a place where danger could occur. Watching the film Red Dragon planted a new fear of home invasions. I’d hear the slightest sound at night in my bed and I’d lay awake until the sun came up, convinced that someone was in the house. As long as I stayed awake, cordless phone clutched in my hand ready to call 911, I’d be okay. When this fear hit its peak, I spent months sleeping in a spare bed in my father’s room, believing that I’d be safer there (my bedroom was, I reasoned, the first one up the stairs). Part of my nightly ritual involved standing at the bottom of the stairs, my father in front of me, as I watched my brother lock our front door. Looking back, I can see how these behaviours were the symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder and complex trauma.
I’d continue to live with these nightly terrors until my early twenties. By then I had a new ritual: I’d call my best friend. As I perched on the stairs, my bestie would tell me that she’d be right over. Or, if she couldn’t be there in person, she’d stay on the phone with me as I searched through each room of the house, making sure that there was no one lurking in the dark. Never once did she tell me I was acting crazy or call me irrational. As a teen, I kept these fears to myself because I knew that if I told my dad why I needed to sleep in his room, he’d do exactly that. What I recognize now is that Natalie was giving me the missing experience I’d needed growing up: someone who could witness my fear, validate how scared I was, and support me in feeling safe.
The other thing I recognized is that my intrusive thoughts of home invasions were a protective mechanism that kept me from acknowledging that the real danger was already inside the house – the real danger was my father. The grief of this acknowledgment would have been too much for teenage me to bear. And so my intrusive thoughts acted as a distraction by projecting the fear onto something else. When my bestie showed up for me in the ways that I’d needed and never received, the intrusive thoughts got quieter and less frequent. I was ready to grieve the missing experiences.
These are perhaps the most intense of my intrusive thoughts, but certainly not the only ones. Other frequent visitors are “you’ll never be loved” and “if, somehow, you are loved, that person will die young.” Anytime a partner was more than five minutes late coming home at night, I’d be sitting there in bed thinking about all of the ways that they might have died. When I’m single, I repeat a different set: “you’re destined to be alone forever because there is something inherently unlovable about you” and “your needs are too much” and simultaneously “you’re not enough.”
These beliefs and the intrusive thoughts that come with them, I’ve come to learn, are my trauma brain’s attempts to care for me. When trauma happens to you, it takes away your sense of control. And when that trauma is part of your everyday life, your sense of self gets shaped around the belief that you don’t have control ever. In an attempt to assert your autonomy, you learn to blame yourself when bad things happen. “If I’m the problem, then I can change me,” you reason. But the problem has never been me. I was never too much or not enough. I was a human being in need of love and care and affirmation. And my father just wasn’t able to offer me those things. Given that there was no way to change him, I’d blame myself. And in doing so, I’d keep the grief at bay.
This past week I sat with my therapist and processed some more recent intrusive thoughts: “I’m a burden. I’m annoying. I need to not ask for anything so that I don’t annoy people.” During our session, I started to feel grief coming up. “Let’s explore that,” my therapist suggested. What I realized is that I spent most of my life shrinking myself, pretending to be this totally self-sufficient human, because I was afraid that I’d ask for what I needed and be rejected. Or, if my needs were met, my father would eventually hold these acts of care over my head to coerce me into doing something for him that I didn’t want to do.
Right now I’m needing a lot of support and care. I’ve moved to a new city, am living on my own, do not drive, and it's a polar vortex. I am lonely and sad and afraid. And I need a lot of care – emotionally and logistically. As soon as I went 24 hours without talking to my best friend, the intrusive thoughts arrived: I’m a burden. I’m annoying. Each time these thoughts came up in my therapy session, I could feel tears come to my eyes: grief wants to come to the surface. If I continue to spiral in these intrusive thoughts then there’s no space to acknowledge the grief of being made to feel like I was a burden by the very person who was supposed to love and care for me more than any other. Whenever I feel old beliefs returning, I know that these intrusive thoughts are a sign that I need to grieve a missing experience. And grief work might be the most terrifying thing for our trauma brain.
In this way, my intrusive thoughts are my trauma brain’s attempt to care for the younger me who wasn’t able to grieve. It sounds paradoxical because the intrusive thoughts make me suffer. But at one point they saved me. Now that I’m no longer living in a near constant state of dissociation, the intrusive thoughts hurt me. I need to bring my trauma brain up to speed, show it that I’m an adult human now, that I’m capable of holding and processing and being with this grief for all of the missing experiences in my life. The grief doesn’t have to overwhelm me anymore.
Reframing my symptoms as acts of care on behalf of my nervous system has been transformational. When I see these symptoms as acts of care, I can reach out to the scarred parts of me with compassion and care. When I see them as a burden, then they only scream louder. Intrusive thoughts are an opportunity for me to offer myself the comfort and validation that I needed then and that I continue to need now. In this way, my intrusive thoughts are a sign to care for myself.
PRACTICES
Here are a few practices that I use when I’m experiencing intrusive thoughts:
Place my hands over my heart. I will hold this position for as many minutes as I need until I start to feel less agitation. This is my #1 somatic go-to when intrusive thoughts are present and the grief needs to flow.
Validate the scariness of those thoughts. Trying to rationalize our way out of our intrusive thoughts does very little because the part of our brain that’s activated is our emotional and somatic memory centre. Thus we need emotional attunement and somatic care to move through intrusive thoughts.
Sometimes intrusive thoughts can take the form of ruminating about work that you need to do or things you want to write – exactly as you turn out your lights and want to go to sleep. The fear is that if I don’t get up and do X thing right now, I’ll forget and this bad thing will happen. I give myself permission to take out my phone and open my notes app to jot down these thoughts. If you don’t keep your phone in your bedroom, you can keep a notepad and a pen on your nightstand. Doing so shows your trauma brain that you’re not ignoring it and that you also want to have some boundaries.
ACTIONS
Yesterday I had the most amazing time running my workshop “Aligning Our Actions With Our Values.” I want to share the core values activity for folks to do. Bonus points if you do this activity with another human. Here are some questions you can explore on your own or with another person:
Why is this value important to me?
How would I define this value?
What does it look like for me to put this value into action?
EXCITING ANNOUNCEMENT TIME!!!
I was recently asked to bring my Trauma 101 training to the folks at the Sexual Education Centre at the University of Toronto and it’s inspired me to offer this training to the public for the first time ever AND with a fun new name!
The Traumatized Urge
Or, a webinar that could be called Trauma 101 but that didn't sound as fun
When: Friday, February 11th, 2022, 3pm-5pm MST via Zoom
Cost: $25-85 & Free tickets for BIPOC
Webinar will be recorded and sent to everyone who registers.
About the webinar: As we gain a greater understanding of just how pervasive trauma is, we need to work towards building a trauma-informed world. The reality is that medically accepted definitions of trauma remain limited to post-traumatic stress disorder, leaving so many of us with complex trauma alone to figure out: a) that we even live with trauma; and b) how to cope with our symptoms. It doesn’t help that so many medical practitioners subscribe to a pathologizing logic, in which living with trauma is seen as a sign that the individual is broken and in need of a cure. This logic only deepens trauma survivors’ experiences of shame and prevents us from receiving the care we need to heal. We need a depathologized understanding of trauma that centres survivors’ needs, celebrates the magic of peer support, and acknowledges the role that systemic oppression plays in causing trauma.
In this two hour webinar, participants will:
Learn about pathologizing and non-pathologizing definitions of trauma, trauma symptoms, and trauma responses.
Gain a neurobiological understanding of how trauma impacts our nervous systems and our brain development through polyvagal theory, the structural dissociation model, and parts work.
Be introduced to practices of caring for ourselves and others living with trauma that celebrate peer support and help us move towards healing.
Receive a 20+ page workbook that covers everything from crisis support and care team planning to what to say and not say to folks living with trauma.
Guidelines for OPENINGS submissions
Email me at hello@margeauxfeldman.com with the subject line OPENINGS SUBMISSION
Please keep your question to 250 words
Deadline to submit for OPENINGS #2 is January 23rd at 11:59pm MST
If you aren’t a paid subscriber but wanna be…
Just catching up on the last few newsletters and continuing to feel very seen and connected through what you write. Thank you for all your work and for the invitation to comment and connect here <3