Hello dear ones,
I know that the holidays can be a really challenging time for so many reasons. I hope that you’ve all been able to experience some gentleness, and hopefully some moments of joy. From the solstice into the Gregorian calendar year changing, this season for me is always one of deep reflection. I’m thinking about the growth that occurred over the past year, the places that I want to grow into, the visions I want to dream into existence. As a yearly tradition, I pick a word and set it as my intention. In 2021 my word was SURRENDER; 2022 has been MYSTERY; and for 2023 my word is TRUST. I wanted to share some reflections on these words with you here.
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“Just trust,” people will tell you, as though it’s a simple task. Like willing yourself to breathe. For me, trust has always been a troublesome thing. Sometimes I’m not even sure that I know what the word means. And so I look it up:
Trust (n): Old Norse traust: “help, confidence, protection, support”
Trust (v): Old Norse treysta: “to trust, rely on, make strong and safe”
I read these definitions and questions arise: What if you didn’t receive the help, protection, or support you needed growing up? What if those charged with caring for you did not give you the confidence to believe in yourself? What if there was no one to rely on except for yourself? What if safety is an embodied feeling that you rarely, if ever, got to experience?
I remember a therapy session in my mid twenties. I was telling my therapist about how devastated I was by a partner’s transgression (I can’t even remember what it was, but that’s not the point).
“I just gave him my trust,” I told her. “And he broke that trust.”
“Margeaux, I wonder if the reason this hurts so much is because you didn’t make him earn your trust. Breaks of trust will always hurt. But they hurt even more when your trust was a gift that you just gave away.”
The idea that someone could earn my trust was foreign to me. I had no concept of what that would look like in practice. I’d spent my whole life under the belief that humans are inherently trustworthy by nature. That trust was something that was automatic.
I can see how trauma can have one of two impacts on our capacity to trust: either we trust no one and nothing or we swing to the other end of the pendulum and trust without discernment. The former offers us protection, while the latter enables us to access connection. When it came to trusting people, I’d chosen the latter. When it came to trusting the universe, situations, relationships, I had no trust. It was too scary. I needed to be on the lookout for the other shoe to drop. My mother’s death when I was 11 ended my happy childhood and brought with it the emotional and psychological abuse I’d experience from my father. “Nothing good can stay,” played on loop in my mind; it was a refrain buried deep in my bones.
Over the past three years, my somatic therapist and I have been working on building my capacity to trust in moments of uncertainty. And it has been no easy task. Trauma wants us to have definitive answers, control. In a recent session, my therapist remarked that trust has become a synonym for control. We might believe that the universe is in total control of what’s meant to be, and so we trust in the universe. Or, we say “I can trust you/this situation if I have the certainty that nothing will go wrong.”
What’s funny about this trauma logic is that things have gone wrong. And we survived! While there’s little to nothing we can do to control every possible scenario, we can trust in ourselves, in our capacity to show up when we need to. We can build up our immunity to uncertainty by being with the scary feelings that emerge when we’re faced with an unknown. We can choose to turn towards ourselves. This is how we build safety. This is how we build trust.
Last week, once I’d chosen the word TRUST as my intention for 2023, I made a collage to help myself embody this intention.
These words are a reminder to my trauma brain: “I’m fine. The world didn’t end when I let go.” Surrender was my word for 2021. I wanted to build my capacity to let go. This was an act of trust in myself. I knew this work wasn’t over when 2022 came, and so I chose the word mystery as a way of reframing uncertainty. What if I could see the unknown as a mystery, something magical? And now, for 2023, I am continuing this work by choosing the word trust.
I want to build my capacity to trust in the infinite, unknowable possibilities. I want to be able to trust in what I don’t yet know. I want to see trust as something that is built on a long arch; we don’t just leap into it. I want to see trust as an act of aligning my inner compass so that I’m taking actions that are coming from my present self. Part of trust is choosing to believe. And so here I am, setting these intentions, and choosing to believe that they’re possible to achieve. “I’m fine,” I will tell myself when uncertainty and fear rear their heads. “The world will not end if I let go.”
2023 is ruled by the Chariot card in the tarot (2+0+2+3=7 and 7 is the Chariot card). This card asks us to trust that we’re ready to carve our own path and step out of the support of the chariot. It is also a card that calls on us to build an internal sense of safety, a home within ourselves, and remember that we can bring that home with us on our journey. Self-trust and internal safety can be particularly challenging for folks living with trauma. If this is something you’d like to work on, I invite you to join me for my workshop “Visioning for 2023: The Chariot Year” taking place on January 5th from 3-5pm MT (recording will be sent all to all who register).
In this workshop, we’ll bring a trauma-informed lens to working with the medicine of the Chariot to help us create a vision for our growth and healing in 2023. Participants in this workshop will:
Receive introduction to the Chariot card and its ruling planet (the Moon) and sign (Cancer).
Learn about how trauma impacts self-trust and embodied safety.
Walk away with strategies for building self-trust and a felt sense of safety within.
Be given time to work with the collage kit provided to create their own vision board for the year ahead.
One of my favourite organizations, Spring Up, has launched their programming for 2023. Spring Up is a collective of care workers, transformative justice practitioners, liberatory educators, and coaches practicing and teaching the liberatory arts at bluelight academy.
They’ve got a bunch of offerings, but the one I wanted to highlight is their Transformative Justice course, as I’ve learnt SO MUCH from their transformative justice workbook, and so I can only imagine how great the course will be. bluelight academy's flagship Transformative Justice course is an overview of core Transformative Justice practices, references, and skills. This multimedia course provides videos, readings with audio recordings, coaching, and grounding practices to support you in integrating everyday Transformative Justice into your life.
You can use the affiliate link below to check out all of their offerings:
If you’ve made it this far, thanks so much for reading. Your presence means the world to me. And if you feel like becoming a subscriber, you can: