This was me

 

This was me. I had been with my husband for two dozen years and suddenly I had anger coming out of me -- toward my husband and toward my children. I had NEVER been an angry person. Where in the world was it coming from? I honestly was blaming him and probably would have continued to do so -- until the Lord knocked my legs out from under me. I was also living with daily and debilitating migraines that no doctor or medication had been able to touch. 

 

I had had friends try to point out some of the behaviors they were witnessing, but I could NOT see these behaviors as a problem. Do all the things and keep everyone happy and be super nice to everyone and never say 'no.' Why were those bad things? 

 

It is so hard to see your own dysfunction because the behaviors seem SO normal to you. When someone doesn't hear your well-meaning words, remind yourself that God is bigger. God got a hold of me despite me not listening to the people who tried to help, and I am healing in AMAZING ways! I couldn't hear it from my friends or even my husband but that didn't stop God!

 

Today I rarely feel anger toward the people I love. And the migraines I lived with for nearly all of my adulthood are COMPLETELY gone! (Like, seriously, I NEVER get headaches anymore. Kind of crazy.)

You MUST heal if you want to really live. I'm still healing, and it is the hardest thing I have ever done. But I can't imagine ever returning to that Wendi we saw peeking her head out in 2022. Never again.

 

P.S. And part of my journey includes KNOWING that the Lord is calling me to share truth with people and that they won't like it. That is TERRIFYING for a people-pleaser so God and I are still working on that one. It'll take some time.

Feeling again

I can't even express the changes occurring in me during the last six months -- but even more during the last two months. I have realized that I have spent most of my life not truly FEELING. Now, I am FEELING. Quite amazing. I cried during a song on the radio the other day. I don't have a recollection of ever doing that. (And I am not talking about crying during Christian/spiritual songs -- I think that's a different emotion than what I am expressing.)

I think my grief is integrating. My safety is increasing. My nervous system is no longer clamping down as hard. It's not about the song. It's about the permission.  

This has been BRUTAL hard. Beyond words hard. Rewiring your nervous system is NO JOKE. But I have moments (and not as often as I would like right now) that I think: "I can't wait to see the Wendi that emerges on the other side of this."

“Something that was held very tightly is now allowed to move a little.”

That’s not regression. 

That’s thawing.

 

The Role of Grief and Sorrow in Healing from Trauma: Session #2

(I type this as I go so please excuse my mistakes.) 

I am attending Adam Young's monthly Saturday conference. This month the topic is "The Role of Grief and Sorrow in Healing From Trauma." The second session is with J.S. Park.

Session #2: Unraveling Myths About Grief

MYTH #1: Grief looks somber, solemn, single tear, controlled.

MYTH #1.5: You can only grieve certain kinds of loss (like death).  

MYTH #2: Grief is letting go, moving on, from negative to positive. 

J.S. Park is a chaplain, and he is sharing how he helps with grief. He says that whatever he says IS the grief. It may be screaming and crying or laugh or shut-down. It is ALL grief.  You will need to allow your body to go through whatever your body goes through.

And while this is happening, life keeps going. Someone may come in the room where grief is being dealt with and tell you that you have to move your car because you are double-parked. 

EMERGENT GRIEF: The moment the grief happens. Your body will do whatever it voluntarily wants to do in this grief. 

INTENTIONAL GRIEF / CONSCIOUS GRIEF: This is more intentional and purposeful grief with cultural elements. Woven with tradition practices.  

Many of us have COMPARATIVE SUFFERING "I haven't had it as bad so I shouldn't be grieving."

All change involves loss and all loss involves grief. 

A break-up can lead to pain as much as a death. Losing a job can cause very difficult pain as well. You can lose a dream, faith, or world-view. 

What are some non-death losses that you have experienced? We have permission to grieve these things.

Grief is NOT linear. Grief isn't about eventually letting go. "It's okay that you are not okay." 

Grief is not moving on. It is moving with. It is letting in. 

**** 

A passage from Toni Morrison's book Home.  

The protagonist Cee realizes she can no longer have children.

“Come on, girl. Don’t cry,” whispered Frank.

“Why not? I can be miserable if I want to. You don’t need to try and make it go away. It
shouldn’t go away. It’s just as sad as it ought to be and I’m not going to hide from what’s
true just because it hurts.” —Toni Morrison, Home (p. 178) 

***** 

The grief will always be with us but the color will change. 

Why are we so indoctrinated in the thought that we need to "Let go of grief." 

Our society does not give us bereavement time. There are often 3-4 days provided for grief. Grief is often considered negative and bad because it stops us from being productive. 

Grief is shrunken into a forced timeline because:

1) it was considered the one emotion that could lead the oppressed to revolt in anger at injustice, 

2) it was considered an inconvenience to the oppressor, and 

3) grief is a remembrance of what was lost, it is in itself a memory that we carry. 

We are going to carry those who have died. We can carry them in our memories, the way they loved us, all the difficult and hard things. We can make room for that inside of us.  

What are some of the phrases and ideas we have been taught about grief? Things that didn't help. Maybe in the midst of grief you can say to someone, "What was your dream? What dream died?"  

The Role of Grief and Sorrow in Healing from Trauma: Session #1

(I type this as I go so please excuse my mistakes.) 

I am attending Adam Young's monthly Saturday conference. This month the topic is "The Role of Grief and Sorrow in Healing From Trauma." The first session is: 

Session #1: What Grief Is and How to Respond to it in a Way that Brings Healing

Our world is one where grief and sorrow are unwelcome. Most of us do not feel that the people around us can bear the depth of our sorrow and grief. We do not feel welcome or that people around us are willing to be in it with us. As a result, we take our sorrows and sadness and try to push them out of awareness. In this way, we are declaring to our sorrow You are not welcome in my life. 

Because belonging is so important to us, we can't risk it by sharing our grief with others. We are afraid that if we bring our sorrow to our friends and loved ones, those sorrows would cause relational distance between us.  

Francis Weller: The Wild Edge of Sorrow is a book he's recommending and going to talk about a lot. We keep our sadness hidden so we are not "kicked out" of our groups. Sorrow or grief is defined as: "feeling of distress, pain, caused by losing something or by disappointment." If you lose your spouse, a job, the ability to do an activity that you love ... any of these things can cause grief and sorrow. 

Let's look at the word DISAPPOINTMENT. You will feel sorrow when you are disappointed. You don't only feel sorrow when you lose something. Disappointment can be one of the most painful feelings to tolerate. Disappointment causes us to feel the painful ache of sorrow. 

Dis -- appointment is a broken appointment. Do you let yourself feel sorrow about your disappointment? Most people will feel anger when they didn't get to do something with their spouse that they wanted to but they won't feel sorrow or disappointment. Your body's natural response is to hurt and ache and feel sorrow and grief. You cannot be an alive person without experiencing losses and disappointments in this world frequently.

If you allow yourself to WANT, you will feel DISAPPOINTMENT often. 

Weller identifies several types of grief: 

1. The loss of someone or something we love. This is the type of sorrow that most people are familiar with and this is the only type of sorrow that most of us are allowed to feel in this world. However, there are many other types of sorrow and grief. 

2. Maybe you need to feel loved in a particular moment and you were not. That is grief too! That is a loss. That is a type of grief, an ache, a sorrow. We carry grief in our bodies about those moments that we needed to be loved and we weren't. There are moments in your life in which you needed to be seen, soothed, cared for, and you weren't. That is a profound loss that needs to be grieved. 

3. Sorrow of not being welcome. This means the sorrow of not belonging anywhere. Not being able to find a community that welcomes you in the fullness of who you are. 

 “When we are born, we are designed to anticipate a certain quality of welcome
and engagement. In short, we expect what our ancestors experienced as their
birthright, namely, the container of the village.”  

God made you to be welcomed into a village. People who say "you belong here." You need people who are wiser than you, stronger than you, and deeply committed to your freedom and flourishing. This is what the elders of the village are supposed to be. And most American culture is lacking elders. The lack of the village is a deep source of our sorrow.  At the core of our grief is our longing to belong. We are not sure how we will be received if we feel our feelings in public or with another. 

Many of us have a vague sense that we are lacking something ... something is missing in our lives. “We are waiting for the village to appear so we can fully acknowledge our sorrows. At the
core of this grief is our longing to belong.”

The sorrow of not being welcomed. The sorrow of not belonging anywhere. Not having a
community that welcomes you and says “you belong here.”

“When we are born, we are designed to anticipate a certain quality of welcome
and engagement. In short, we expect what our ancestors experienced as their
birthright, namely, the container of the village.” Francis Weller

You were not designed for the individualism that plagues modern American culture.
You were designed to need the container of the village.

“We are waiting for the village to appear so we can fully acknowledge our sorrows. At the
core of this grief is our longing to belong.” Francis Weller

“Our profound feelings of lacking something are not a reflection of a personal failure, but
the reflection of a society that has failed to offer us what we were designed to expect."

GRIEF is not a problem to be solved. If you feel sorrow, it doesn't mean there is something wrong with you. It means that you are paying attention because the world is filled with injustice, heartbreaks, losses. Modern American culture is devoted to 

DENIAL

and

NUMBING!

Many of us are focused on GOING UP. Always. We want everything to be improving and getting better: THE ASCENT! This is so American that we don't even question this. When you are only looking at going up, it is difficult to look at emotions that cause you to DESCEND. Sorrow and grief will take you down. And since our culture is so focused on ascending, this feeling is very scary to us. And so, we DENY and we NUMB. 

Connection only occurs when someone is vulnerable. When we let people into our hearts, connection occurs. The cost to always ascending is ISOLATION and LONELINESS. 

Time does NOT heal all things. Those things will remain in the basement of your heart, waiting to be taken seriously and for care and support. Most of us do not welcome our sorrow and grief since we fear that others won't welcome or make a place for our sorrow and grief, you push them down and make them unwelcome.  

Sorrow and grief will FLOW and new things will emerge if you sit with the sorrow and grief.  

What are the conditions needed to allow our sorrow and grief to heal? 

# 1 We need to own that our sorrows and griefs matter and should be taken
seriously. Grief knows where to take us. It will take us where we need to go if we let it.

# 2 We need to gradually move from a posture of contempt toward our sorrow and grief to a posture of compassion and kindness and welcome. Be kind to yourself. I should be past this by now. I shouldn't feel this way anymore. If you feel this way, you have some measure of self-contempt for your wounds. When you are ashamed that you are still hurt about something from you past, you won't risk sharing it. You feel shame. 

# 3 We need to find a few people who can be the village for us… this will allow us
to risk sharing our sorrow and grief with other people. You need a few people like this in your life. For many of us, our greatest sorrow was that we were left behind in our pain. It wasn't the loss of your dream. It was that we were alone in the wake of that betrayal or hard thing. Our body is designed to heal. However, when something bad happens to you, you need the attunement of other people in your community to heal from that wound. We are not designed to heal by ourselves. You need withness and comfort from other people pulses. Do you believe your sorrow is worth of care from others? If you have pain from your past (developmental trauma), it is almost for sure there is trauma stuck in your body that will need to come out. This is because you didn't feel safe to get that trauma out when you were growing up. 

YOU HAVE TO FEEL IT, TO HEAL IT NOT FAKE IT TO MAKE IT! 

# 4 We need to move our bodies in a way that allows for the integration and
release of our sorrow and grief. In other words, rituals. We need rituals to work
through our sorrow and grief. A ritual is a sequence of bodily movements and symbolic actions performed with emotion and intention for the purpose of healing and transformation. A funeral. An event that allows people to wail and get grief out. These are symbolic gestures. You have to be emotionally connected to do these. You can't just go through the motions. Many of us still feel a need to be held. That is not an abnormality. That doesn't mean something is wrong with you. It means your body has a very valid need. Sometimes we need to be held. Rituals are necessary to provide: (1) containment and (2) release. The witnesses create a container for the sorrowful person to feel their pain all the way down. They provide our bodies with the opportunity to express things that are deeper than words. 

There are things in our bodies that are too deep for words. The sorrows go down so deep -- even before we had words. We may need to release and engage these emotions bodily. 

God made human beings to heal through rituals with others. 

“I learned that sadness does not sink a person; it is the energy a person spends trying to avoid sadness that does that. When I stopped trying to block my sadness and let it move me instead, it led me to a bridge with people on the other side.” Barbara Brown Taylor 

#3 THE COMPLEXITIES OF PARENTING: HOW TO TRANSFORM YOUR PARENTING BY ENGAGING YOUR STORY with Dan Allender & Adam Young

This is the third session of a Saturday parenting conference with Adam Young and Dan Allender. This is session #3.

Session #3: When You Realize You've Hurt Your Children 

It's easy to get distracted from engaging your own story as you become focused on how you are harming your children. 

If you are feeling guilty because you are coming to see how you have harmed your children, there is something holy about that guilt.  

Why do we sometimes lose it and not be who we want to be? Most parenting failures are caused by dysergulation inside your body as the parent. Dysregulation in your body is from your past. Children actually raise their parents! Children allow us the opportunity to see the places in our own story that need tending to. 

When we feel dysregulated, we act emotionally, impulsively ... not like the parent we want to be. The question is: why? 

Answer: issues from your past are being activated. You are remembering something from your past, growing-up years. Your brain is calling something to mind from your past, but you don't have that sensation of recall. That's because it is an implicit memory not explicit memory. 

Suppose you were never allowed to cry as a child, and you have a seven-year-old who now cries often. And whenever that crying drags on for longer than you think is appropriate, something in your body begins to change. What's going on? Why does the crying of your child cause your body to become dysregulated? Perhaps, your unengaged heartache of not having space to cry when you were a child is playing a role. "I held it together when I was a kid so why can't they get it together?"

Have you named in your own story the reality of the requirement that you not cry. Have you grieved that? There are losses and costs and unfelt feelings that you have to acknowledge. You need to grieve your particular losses. Without the space for grief, it is very likely contributing to your diminished tolerance for your son's crying. You need to get this story engaged and integrated in your brain. 

Because if not, your son picks up on your dysregulation, and the process of generational wounding continues. 

So what do you do when you realize you have harmed your children? 

As you are engaging your story and doing your own work, it can be so difficult to simultaneously see the ways your parents harmed you AND the way you are harming your children. And it can be tempted to stop looking at your own story and instead start beating yourself up from harming your kids. 

But here is the truth: the single most important thing you can do if you are interested in becoming a more loving parent is to explore your own story. And if you've already started that, go deeper.  What makes a good parent? It isn't the parenting classes and books they've read or experienced. It's the degree to which they've made sense of their own story. Tend to your younger self so you can be a better parent to your children. 

"The best predictor of how our children will become attached to us is how well we have come to make sense of our lives, how well we tell a coherent story of our early life experiences." Dan Siegel 

“Moments of joining enable a child to feel felt, to feel that he or she exists within the mind
of the parent. When children experience an attuned connection from a responsive
empathetic adult they feel good about themselves because their emotions have been given
resonance and reflection.” Dan Siegel

Some important points:  

1. Explore your own story.

2. Make sure your child "feels felt." When they have big emotions, they need you to join them in their big emotions. They need you to be with them. This is almost always non-verbal communication. Empathy. 

ALL FAILURES CAN BE REPAIRED! THERE CAN BE MOVEMENT AND TRAJECTORY TOWARD HEALING AND REPAIR! 

We are talking about INTEGRATION. 

"The key to staying in connection with your child during times of discipline is to align yourself with your child's emotional state." Dan Siegel

Feeling felt is not about getting what you want. If they want ice cream right before dinner, it doesn't mean you give them ice cream. The magic is in the non-verbal communication of "Man, yeah, I would like to do that too, but we can't do that right now." 

Every parenting failure can become the opportunity for REPAIR. 

#2 THE COMPLEXITIES OF PARENTING: HOW TO TRANSFORM YOUR PARENTING BY ENGAGING YOUR STORY with Dan Allender & Adam Young

This is the second session of a Saturday parenting conference with Adam Young and Dan Allender. This is session #2.

Session #2: What Gets in the Way? Dan Allender

Parenting is a gift of giving our children a taste of who God is. (Psalm 63)

The very nature of delight comes from love. It comes from a heart that wants to bring goodness. We want to bring goodness to our children. We want them to know something of the goodness of the love of God. The Love of God is tender and full of delight. We are meant to be a taste of the presence of God through the way we love our children. 

Your children need the presence of your STRENGTH. Discipline is where we give our children a taste of strength. That strength is the discipline of the capacity to help them co-regulate. How can we offer something to our children that we refuse to offer to ourselves?

Is their mutuality and delight in your core relationships? Let's really focus on CORE RELATIONSHIPS as we listen today. 

Book suggestion: How Children Raise Parents

The child plays such a part of our facing our own story like no other relationship. 

Please remember: There is always the potentional for redemption. And it begins with YOU -- not with them.  

Core things to discuss: 

1. Most marriages get in the way of good parenting. The differences between you and your spouse show up in the way you parent. You are going to come into parenting in different ways.  By the age of 4 a child can read your face and know when you are not telling the truth. By age 4, they can even articulate the motives behind your deceit. They are reading your marriage. They are reading the tensions. They are reading when you need them to fill your emptiness because you feel so lonely with your spouse. Make sure you adequately engage the relationships that are central in your life. Where we grow as a parent is with our spouse, friends, therapist, etc. Remember, our parents are all sinners and broken people. 

2. Unaddressed wounds of parents' childhood. Your childhood impacts what you do as a parent. Most of us in regard to our own childhood wounds, have made a vow, "I will never allow my children to suffer the way I did." This is actually noble and honorable and kind. Can you allow yourself to hear how broken that is? In my case, I am working to heal myself while I am parenting my children. It's beautiful but broken. What are the themes that have resulted from the way you've been parented? Knowing where we are from, indeed helps us know where we are meant to go. This is why capturing where we are from is so important. 

3. Over-addressed capital "T" Trauma. Trauma where there has been a very significant violation of integrity or goodness. These people have known betrayal. Powerlessness. Shame. We then have a hard time trusting others. There is no way you can keep your children (in this world) from being sexually harmed. You want to look at your own idolatry and anger in how things play out with your children. Underneath our rage at our children is almost always SHAME. And then we just SHAME our SHAME. 

 Where are you triggered by each of your children? They are replicating something of the trauma history (small or large T trauma) that comes from our own story, often unaddressed. Unaddressed triggers inevitably move toward resentment. Every child is learning through testing. A shame-based parent is almost a self-righteous parent. 

 

 

#1 THE COMPLEXITIES OF PARENTING: HOW TO TRANSFORM YOUR PARENTING BY ENGAGING YOUR STORY with Dan Allender & Adam Young

This is the first session of a Saturday parenting conference with Adam Young and Dan Allender. This is session #1.

Session #1: What Children Need 

Adam Young

Delight is the NORTH star of parenting

You should be in awe of your child. You should delight in them. Our longings for our children come from gaps in our own stories. We have to be aware of how our own desires affect our children. Children need to be delighted in for who they actually are -- not who we want them to be.

You want to have a sense of joy that this child is the greatest creation ever! What do I need as a a parent to restore a sense of delight in my son or daughter. 

There are things that block our delight in our children. We will talk about that later. But for now, let's just ponder: What do you absolutely love about your son or your daughter?  

Two book suggestions: 

A General Theory of Love

Parenting From the Inside Out 

Limic Resonance

Whenever your child feels fear or sorrow or joy or surprise or anger, their limbic brain is all lit up.

Your child has a limbic brain. Only mammals have limbic systems. Mammals have developed the ability to attune to one another. 

Your ability to attune to the inner emotional state of your child or children. Your state can leap between your own mind and that of your child (or a friend/spouse). Your thoughts can't leap. But your feeling can. And they do. This is why watching a movie in a theater is a different experience than watching at home by yourself. 

Secure attachment is a result of limbic resonance. Another world for that is attunement. Securely attached children aren't hugged the most. They are hugged when they want to be hugged. They are put down when they want to be put down. 

The first superpower you have as a parent is the ability to resonate with your child's emotional states. You should be trying to intuit what they are feeling and what they are needing. Participating in this process of reading your child, no matter how clumsily you do it, allows your child's brain to develop in a very healthy way. It gives the child the physiological experience of, "My emotions matter to my caregivers. I will be responded to in a meaningful way." The child feels pursued about someone who cares about them on the inside. There are few greater gifts that you can give to a child then this.  

Limbic Regulation

Your second superpower is interactive/ regulation. A young child can't regulate their emotions. You provide this to their brain when they are dysregulated and needs support and care. The way children develop the brain structures to self-regulate their emotions is by having their emotions interactively regulated by caring, supportive caretakers. 

This is why one of the greatest gifts you can give to your child is to provide interactive regulation to their emotions when that child is struggling. Emotional steadiness and resilience comes from interactive regulation by nearby attachment figures. 

The brain is a very social organ. Our brains and our children's brains require a source of stabilization that is outside of ourselves. We can't always be emotionally stable on our own. We need others to help interactively regulate us at times. Emotional states are contagious. Skin is not as thick of a barrier as we tend to think of it as being. You have the ability to provide emotional regulation for your child. 

Your children need you to learn what they are feeling in the first place. We don't come out of the womb being able to identify our feelings. A child can't know themselves emotionally until they are known themselves by another caring adult. 

Your children are different from you. They need different things than you needed at their age. To grow in your parenting is to cultivate a capacity for wonder, a capacity to discover the utter uniqueness of your child. 

None of our children are who we want them to be. 

No Drama Discipline by Dan Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson 

Your child has an upstairs brain (prefrontal cortex) and a downstairs brain (limbic system). Your child can enter a reactive mode instead of a responsive mode. It is important to understand that when you are upset with your child, they are probably in a downstairs/reactive state that is unconscious in how they respond.

When our child is already dysregulated, they don't need anger and instruction. They need connection, attunement, and comforting touch. Your child cannot process your words when they are in that state. When they are in a reactive downstairs brain state they don't have the option of calmly listening to what you are saying. They need quiet, soothing, physical touch. That will help the move from their downstairs brain to their upstairs brain. This helps them strengthen their upstairs brain. 

The goal is to grow descending neural networks in our children so that they develop the capacity to develop self-soothing when they are dysregulated and upset. The way you grow these descending networks is by emotionally and physically connecting BEFORE you give instruction or redirection. 

When you physically touch your child, their upstairs brain comes back online and they learn to come back online. You want to connect with your child and offer some measure of connection with them. Even if you are exasperated with them. This begins to change the trajectory of the interaction. 

Why are emotional interaction and comfort so important to your child? Because it shifts from the reactive downstairs brain limbic state to a state where the upstairs brain is back online. They can then process what you are saying. 

Most misbehavior is a child having a hard time dealing with what is going on inside of the child. There are big feelings inside of them that they don't know how to deal with. Misbehavior is a cue that the child is overwhelmed and that the child needs support and care. Misbehavior is a bid for attachment from your child. 

Emotional connection is the dimmer switch that keeps emotions from getting too big. When you connect with the child, you are turning it down a bit. Don't underestimate the helpfulness of physical touch. It releases oxycotin that is very helpful. 

"Connection should be our first response in virtually any discipline situation." 

The prefrontal cortex has descending neural networks that go down and connect with the limbic brain. 

When your child becomes emotionally dysregulated, connection is the modulator that keeps the feelings from getting too big. Do not ignore them during these times either. This is the opposite of connecting with them. This results in some measure of isolation for the child in the very moment that their nervous system most needs connection with you. 

When your child is having a meltdown, cortisol is moving through their body. And that causes suffering. What they need is comfort and connection from you.  

A helpful three-step process to keep in mind when your child is dysregulated and misbehaving: 

Step 1 -- Turn down the Shark Music: When our child loses it, we become filled with fear. Just notice it playing. Notice what is happening inside of your body. 

Step 2 -- Curiosity: What would it look like to bring to some curiosity to the situation by asking yourself, "I wonder why my son is doing this right now? I wonder what is going on in their body?"

Step 3 -- When you speak to your child, focus on your nonverbal communication rather than your words: How you say something, tone of voice, facial expression, is way more important to your child's limbic brain than the actual words you speak.

Delight and Wonder 

Do you have a sense of delight at the mysteriousness of who this amazing kid is. Whether they are 3 or 33. Is it because they aren't who you wished them to be? What might God be inviting you to ponder about the mismatch for you desire for your child and who they really are. Our longings often come from our own longings from our own childhoods in our stories. Are you aware of how your grief from your growing up years is playing out in how you are parenting your children? 

Regret -- Conclusion

Don't forget Romans 8. "There is no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus." We have a hunger for goodness for ourselves and for others. Worry is anticipated regret with regards to the future. 

Don't forget that discipline if used as punishment -- that is just trauma -- and creates division between you and the child. Discipline has to be a form of coregulation.  

The illusion of control

There's a new layer coming off of me. 

I thought the layers were done. 

They are not. 

(And that sucks.)

(I mean, it doesn't suck, because it's good I'm growing. But it does suck because that growth hurts A LOT.) 

This one is people-pleasing. 

And it isn't just people-pleasing, but the idea that somehow, I am capable of controlling people. 

If I hustle hard enough, they'll like me. 

If I repair hard enough, they'll forgive me. 

If I keep my mouth shut and never speak truth, then I can't say anything wrong. 

If I don't tell them what I really think, we will be okay. 

I've lived my life this way. With an intimate few I've dove in. I've given them access to my truth thoughts and spoke without edits. 

But if you aren't in that intimate circle? 

If you are one step removed? 

Then I've lived in PANIC. 

And honestly, I've done a pretty good job keeping everyone liking me. 

There are a few people I've lost. A few relationships I couldn't salvage. But our military/moving lifestyle allowed me to remove myself from it. And I medicated the feelings away with an anti-depressant. 

And that worked. 

Until it didn't. 

I canNOT keep everyone happy.

Someone will, no matter what I do, get mad at me. 

The control I thought I had is fake. It doesn't exist. 

I must, instead, find my worth in Jesus alone. He must be enough. Sure, I can also entrust my heart to some very close humans that I don't think will hurt me. But even those humans are ... human. And pain could ensue. 

That reality has smacked me upside the face. God is FORCING me to look this in the face and finally, after 48-years, put it behind me. 

He's asking me: "Wendi, will you continue to fear man to such a degree that you don't speak words of truth? Or will you speak the words and trust the outcome to me? Trust that I am God."

He's saying: "Wendi, you are a human. You will make mistakes. It is inevitable. Someone will not like you. Are you okay letting that someone's opinion just float away and instead live for me?"

The answer is: I am not. 

I currently am willing ... but my body can't follow suit. 

And so, I'm tearing it apart. Layer by layer. 

In 2024 I spent six months battling my past and my hurts and I survived. I, naively, thought that all of that was behind me. I did it! I'm victorious! I'll never feel that way again. 

Ummm ....

Here I am. 

I am not as low. But I am low. It was something Kim told me would happen. It's how healing worked. I thought the rings of healing were what I was traveling through in the eight months of depression I faced in 2024. But, alas, that was ONE RING of the journey. I'm now on ring two. 

Egads ...

I want Wendi back. I miss the Wendi of the end of 2024 and first half of 2025 that was healing but getting it and sort of frolicking in her freedom. 

She'll be back. 

But the only way through is through. 

THROUGH ... is so, so hard.  

The Marriage Conference: How to Understand What's Happening in Your Marriage #6

 Rupture and Repair: The greatest longing of your partner's heart and how to get there 

Adam Young

Tune in later for notes on this one :)

The Marriage Conference: How to Understand What's Happening in Your Marriage #5

 Decriminalizing Action Tendencies

Adam Young

In the dance of our marriage, we tend to either be the Pursuer or the Withdrawer. These tendencies to either pursue or withdraw are called action tendencies. The action tendencies that each of you do need to be decriminalized. Your task is to get a PhD in your spouse's wounding. 

Your partner gets mad because YOU are the most important person in the world to them.  When your partner withdraws, you must remind yourself that they are acting with FEAR. They are afraid. 

If my partner is afraid, why don't they just stop yelling at me? Well, because of their wounds. And your brain is wounded very differently than your spouse's wounds. We have to an inflow of compassionate understanding for why we do what we do and why your spouse does what they do.  

How do you dance differently?  

1. Bless your neediness. You have to understand compassionately why you feel needy the way that you do. You name is as good, reasonable, understandable, even holy. 

2. Bless your partner's attachment style and action tendencies, as well as your own. Call it good. Even if it has negative consequences for relationships, it is very good that it developed because it allowed you to neurobiologically make it. 

3. Risk sharing primary emotion. You have to bless your neediness. How would your life look different if you stopped hating how needy you are. What if you called it GOOD the way you need your partner emotionally. Most of us believe that a "healthy adult" is not supposed to need emotional connection and soothing from your spouse. And even if you don't cognitively agree with that, it is the sense inside of like "I shouldn't need this much from him. I should be more independent. I should be more self-reliant." Can you turn to your spouse and say, "I really need you to hold me right now? I really need you to comfort me right now?" Many feel they can't do that because you shouldn't need that. Are you still at war with the way God made you? Sometimes we need another person to regulate you and soothe you. If we hate our own frailty, then we can't reach out to our partner and let them know what we need. 

If you are an avoidantly attached withdrawer, do you understand why your spouse gets frustrated/angry and can you bless why they do that? What would it look like if you validated your spouse's anger. "I know your anger tells me something important here that you need me to know." Just a version of that to your partner will help regulate them. That is ATTUNEMENT. 

For the spouse of an avoider: do you understand what it is like for your partner when there is a conflict? They probably have no idea what they are feeling because no one ever cared what they felt. This will change the dynamic of the interaction. "You probably want to leave the room right now because I'm so big and amped up. That would make sense to me if you want to leave." You must risk reaching. "Anytime we finally talk it's because I reached out and brought something out." That is packaged longing within an anger sandwich.  

As you leave here, I hope your goal is not, "I want to be a better spouse." Rather, I hope the goal is: "I want to repair more often." 

The Marriage Conference: How to Understand What's Happening in Your Marriage #4

 Owning Your Story: Navigating our Attachment Wounds (middle age)

Pascale Wright 

"Along with our ability to feel our own pain go our best hopes for healing, dignity, and love. What seems non-adaptive and self-harming in the present was, at some point in our lives, an adaptation to help us endure what we then had to go through." -- Gabor Mate, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction 

Let's talk about mid-life and marriage right now. Kids are gone. Now what? The connection they desire feels insufficient to calm them. If we are not connected to our primary emotions, what we will do is we will demand that our wives soothe our secondary emotions. And that becomes overwhelming to your partner. Because what they begin to sus out in mid-life is something greater is going on. 

1. The places where attunement and attachment got us is good. We needed to enter marriage and have a re-do of sorts. We needed to be cared for in the hands of our partner. The younger self needed something of that to help us grow. But there is something in you that needs to be soothed yourself before you can reattach from your partner. Somewhere in mid-life, we have to connect with our vulnerability and ourself apart from our partner's soothing on our own. Yes with our partner by our side but primarily with ourselves. 

To be continued ....  

The Marriage Conference: How to Understand What's Happening in Your Marriage #3

How attachment styles play out in your marriage

One reason that you are having so much trouble in your marriage is because of how important you are to each other. Most of the dance moves you and your spouse make are variations on the theme of "Pursue/Withdraw." Anxiously attached people tend to do more of the pursuing.  Ambivalently attached people tend to do more of the withdrawing. Let's look at an exchange: 

Alex: "I was hurt by what you said last night." 

Bethany: "Okay." (Getting quiet, with an expressionless look on her face. She's withdrawing.)

Alex: "Do you have anything to say about how hurtful your words were? Did you even hear what I just said?" 

Bethany: (Turns her head slightly down toward the floor.) "Yes, I heard you."  

Some notes: 

Bethany is responding to his facial expression and tone of voice FIRST.  And if in phone or via text, you are imagining it even more. You respond to tone of voice in 1/10 of a second. You aren't even hearing words yet. She is afraid. Does she know she is afraid? No, because the portions of her brain that say "you are afraid right now," have not yet come online. She's avoidantly attached so she goes to her typical response which is to withdraw.

Is Bethany really unmoved? No. But on the outside it looks like she is unmoved. Her inside experience is "I'm on high alert, and I'm working very hard to get smaller so this is not worse." She is hyper-aroused, but she is withdrawing so she doesn't make it worse. So why is her face without expression? Because her nervous system is freaking out. The way her brain has learned to respond to hyperarousal is by withdrawing. She knows if she says anything, the conflict is going to get worse. Alex is already upset. So she has to not make anything worse. 

Ultimately, Bethany's amygdalia is afraid that Alex will leave. That's what her amygdalia's job is to do. You may think that they aren't afraid of that. But they are afraid of that! They have experiences of disconnection when they needed someone. Your partner's amygdalia is on the lookout for relational disconnection or abandonment. 

We are attachment creatures thru-and-thru. The deepest need we have is to know that the person we are married to is going to be there for me when I need them. Your left brain may say that you are afraid of that. But your right brain is afraid of that. 

Bethany looks like she is shut-down but she is going nuts inside. They are responding this way because you are super important to them. 

The way your spouse responds to you may not be because they are indifferent.

The pursuer often feels to their partner like they are an attacker. 

Secondary emotions like anger are an attempt to cope with the primary emotion.  

The emotional part of your brain comes online before the thinking part of your brain. 

We keep fighting about the same thing over and over again because we aren't really getting at the primary emotion of fear, sorrow, alone. We are dealing in the secondary emotion. Why. not? Why don't we just say THIS IS WHAT I AM FEELING. Because ... feeling primary emotions like fear connects you to very young and wounded parts of yourself. 

1. DYSREGULATION caused by connecting to parts of yourself that are very young and very wounded.

2. MISINTERPRETING what's going on inside your spouse. Misinterpreting their response to you. 

3. REFUSING TO SHARE PRIMARY EMOTION -- i.e. not eltting yoru partner know what is actually happening internally.

The greatest gift a man can give his wife is SELF-AWARENESS. More self-aware and less defensive especially as we reach mid-life. Women spend the bulk of their years attuning and raising their children. We've done so much work to attune and be responsive to our children. And we get to mid-life and there is a gap with a lot of men where that same growth point hasn't been reached yet. For most men, this ability has atrophied. 

The single greatest gift for your marriage is SELF-AWARENESS. You can't have a candid discussion with another person if they aren't candid and vulnerable with you.  

The Marriage Conference: How to Understand What's Happening in Your Marriage #2

 Attachment: the Foundation for Romantic Relationships

Adam Young

You are relational at your very core. Marriage is the adult relationship. It is about the emotional connection. It is about the perception that your partner is not there for you emotionally. Most marital fights are protests over emotional disconnection. 

 Underneath the content of the fight, you are asking your spouse: Can I count on you? Are you there for me? Do I matter to you? 

[Book suggestion: Hold me tight]

The strength of emotional connection: 

1. Your spouse's attunement to your needs and desires.  

2. Their responsiveness to your needs and desires.

3. Their engagement to your needs and desires. 

We have an innate need to be seen, taken seriously, and responded to. Do you feel like your spouse sees you? Do you feel that they knows about your needs and desires and wants to respond to them? 

If they aren't available, you are going to feel aloneness and helplessness. The AMYGDALIA fires when emotional connection with your partner is lost. 

Why do marriages fail? It is NOT because of conflict. It is because of decreasing emotional responsiveness.  

Attachment is a BIG Deal in marriages: 

1. Avoidant Attachment: When your caregiver is often unavailable, dismissive, or rejecting of you. You were forced to calm yourself and regulate your own emotions despite being unable to do it. The child's needs are frequently not met and communicating their needs will have no effect on caregiver. This is terrible for a child. Children need interactive regulation. They need comfort. Child becomes deeply self-reliant. They don't need anyone. Others aren't available. This child does not avoid closeness. It is not a menu item for them. There is no one there for them. "If I don't ask for help, they can't reject me. If I don't ask for help, it will go better." Since his needs and wants rarely seem to need, he soon stops even expressing his needs and wants. So, in marriage ...

1. More comfortable with emotional distance than connectedness. 

2. Their bodies have been trained to not need a human to regulate them. 

3. They tend to feel needed but not wanted. True mutuality is foreign to them.  

2. Anxious Attachment: A child will develop this attachment when caregiver is inconsistent or intrusive. Caregiver may or may not be available. Sometimes mom is there. But often they are to into their own issues. Never knowing what to expect, this girl develops a sense of anxiety, uncertainty, about whether she can depend upon mom or not. This develops an uncertainty of all other people being safe for me. For a child, inconsistency is absolute terror because children are utterly dependent upon their caregivers. 

1. She is a 40-year-old woman who experiences franticness when there is relational distress.  

2. And then they have great difficulty regulating that franticness and anxiety. 

3. They believe that unless they dramatically express their pain, it is unlikely their partner will respond. 

4. They are plagued by a deep fear that they are going to be abandoned. 

5. They habitually ask for proof / reassurance that they are connected. 

6. Anxiously attached adults anticipate relational failure. THEY ARE ALLERGIC TO HOPE. 

7. Anxiously attached adults feel too needy. They don't deserved to be loved the way they want. 

8. They often make misapraisals of partner's feelings and intentions. 

EVERYTHING CONNECTS BACK TO YOUR FAMILY OF ORIGIN! The limbic brain registers harm more deeply than everything else. How do you know what you got? Look at the BIG 6! (And remember: parents only had/have to get it right 33% of the time to get a secure attachment.)

Where you miss those six things is where you are going to struggle with your spouse!!! Whatever is missing above creates a HUGE HOLE in them and now they are desperately looking for that from their husband. 

If you couldn't say OUCH with your parent, can you say it with your OUCH with your spouse! You need repeated experiences of repair to feel secure.   

The Marriage Conference: How to Understand What's Happening in Your Marriage #1

 

How the past brought us together and the present can heal it

Pascale Wright 

"All relationships begin and end in separation." -- James Hollis, The Eden Project 

We come into the world looking for someone looking for us. We are ejected from the womb and then, if we are given "good enough" connection by our parents, we can handle these minor rejections. If we grow up in a home, however, that is not "good enough" with connection, we begin a journey of protecting our vulnerability. 

Most of us emerge into adulthood making a decision a long time ago to never be vulnerable again. Before we met our partner, we decided "I will not be vulnerable again." You vow to never ask for what you need, never open up your heart fully, never trust fully, and never be totally present. 

The trouble is: that decision, the defense, is running your life today with vigilance. When you reach for your partner, you wake up thinking you are in danger and it puts a stop to it. You are scared to be hurt. 

Think about the stories in your life that set in motion this protection. Where were you meant to be seen and attuned to and it wasn't available to you? What feeling of terror did it illicit in you a long time ago that you are protecting yourself from?  Did you make a specific vow or was it not intuitive? 

It happens in micro ways! Just him missing something you need can make you react. Maybe a season in your life, you are tired and your wife is critical and you have nothing more to give and you feel inadequate. But you guard against inadequacies because part of you was cursed as a child, even in micro-ways. So you avoid this. This keeps us disconnected in not offering us the most vulnerable parts of each other. 

In your marriage and your disconnection, there are usually two terrified younger selves that inhabit the bodies of you and your partner. And they are both terrified of being hurt. And this pre-dates your marriage. This idea that there are younger selves in pain, is not a way to excuse the fact that your partner has inflicted wounds in you and that you have also done the same. 

Yes you hurt one another. But we need to go back in time! You will never stop hurting your partner. But can we offer more vulnerable parts of ourselves to withstand that rupture? 

Think of the last argument you had with your partner. You are frustrated, angry, or numb. Those are not the truest parts of you. And because of that, they are not available for connection. The truest part of you is the part that feels alone and inadequate or incompetent. Those are the parts that have the greatest ability to connect the two of you. 

1. You have to know the identify feelings that live within you. What is the bigger feeling you are protecting? You need to do the hard work of slowing down and connecting with the more vulnerable feelings inside you. And guess which ones you need to focus on? Your triggers! They point you back to what is triggered inside you.

2. There has to be a place to share this with your partner. Your partner has to know the words that trigger your defense and the stories that trigger that defense. Most of us have THREE vulnerable feelings that trigger something that takes us off-line. You don't have to locate every story and every feeling in your body. There are three. And knowing those stories is so important. They will often come up with a very guarded defense structure. STORY allows softness to be present within you. You have to know your vulnerable words that trigger your defense and offer them to your partner. Most people don't know what they are feeling at any given moment OR more importantly, these words are so vulnerable and the person doesn't feel safe bringing them. If your story is used against you, you won't want to bring vulnerable stories to your partner. 

Safety:

1. Is my partner accessible at this moment to hear this story? Can they be present at this moment? If it is not the case, then find another time. 

2. When I bring a vulnerable thing, can I trust you to respond to me emotionally? 

3. Will you stay close to me? Or will you withdraw or get big? 

Vulnerability is the capacity to be wounded. It is not the risk of being wounded. It takes a level of strength that will wound me but won't take me off my feet! This is the only method toward growth. Growth requires that you are wounded. 

We often expect our marriage partner to be what our parent wasn't. And inevitably, we will recreate what we didn't have from our parents. 

We are on an epic journey for connection. All relationships begin and end in a state of separation. We are meant to grow through that. Marriage, apart from finding your partner, is designed to develop our wholeness through vulnerability through the process of pain and repair.  

This epic journey begins with our parents, it moves to our partners, and it is meant to culminate in us connecting deeper to ourselves. Experiencing pain, moving through the pain, and being able to connect and grow into wholeness is the goal. And that is hard to unpack! 

PRIMARY EMOTION: When you are talking about sharing vulnerability with your partner, that is an invitation to share primary emotion. That means it happens first neurobiologically, but we don't even have access to it. We have access to a secondary emotion. Like anger.  

We have to know our stories of harm that are getting re-inacted in your marriage: "triggered." Do you know the stories from your growing up years where those big feelings were also at play. There is no way to tease apart the past from the present. You need to get a PhD in how your spouse is wounded. Do you know some of your partner's stories of wounding? 

Vulnerability comes from the Latin VULNERO: to wound. Growth requires at some level that we are wounded ... woah. We are all in the process of becoming whole. And we lose sight of that. Our relationship and connection to partner becomes so large. We lose sight of the idea that the journey we are on is toward healing fragmentation and becoming whole. Becoming what we were meant to be from the Garden. It requires the pain of going back into spaces where you begin to diverge from who you were meant to be and to feel the pain of those experiences in order to integrate them without them ruling your life. There is nothing like pain to be able to facilitate that. 

Thank God that we get triggered! It is meant to lead us back to the explosive parts of us that were formed in childhood. The trigger that happened isn't your partner's fault. If there wasn't something that was explosive inside of you, you can't be triggered. You have to go back to the pain from a long time ago and tolerate it and move through it. 

Although your young self lives in you, your young self has you as a guide and you are stronger than you think to be able to tolerate pain today. Can I go back and reconnect to that part and tolerate that pain? There is an order to things and we are meant to grow in that order. 

A lot of Christians are taught that to be connected to ourselves is unholy. We were created to be human -- not to be spiritual. Our Creator decided we should be human. Why don't we embrace the humanity instead of the spirituality? Not connecting to the self actually produces selfishness.  

 

Trauma, Fragmentation, and the Soothing Certainty of Dogmatism

 

These notes are for Episode #127 from the podcast The Place We find Ourselves. This particular episode is called "Trauma, Fragmentation, and the Soothing Certainty of Dogmatism."  

I put this episode off because the title scared me, but it has been one of the most powerful episodes I have heard Adam Young do. I encourage you whole-heartedly to please consider listening to this episode if YOU are someone who gets incredibly opinionated or hard-headed about your political or religious opinions or if you know or love someone who is like that. 

I also want to preface these notes by saying that I am a very devout Christian, and so is Adam. Breaking down the dogmatism of religiosity is not saying people should not follow Christ whatsoever so please do not begin your listen thinking I am coming from that place. 

Here we go ...

Adam is going to explore how trauma leads to fragmentation in the brain and then he will explain what our brain does in response to the terror of fragmentation. 

What is trauma? 

Just a reminder of what trauma is so you will understand what it means when it is referred to in this podcast.

1. Helplessness (that ability to move your body or use your voice to make the awful thing stop happening).

2. Abandonment by potentially protective caregivers

What is fragmentation and how does trauma cause fragmentation? 

When you experience something, your brain records memory in five ways. There are more, but these will help us as we get started in understanding this:

1. Thoughts you had during the experience

2. Feelings you had during the experience

3. Physical sensations you had during the experience

4. Bodily inclinations you felt in the midst of the experience

5. Visual images of what you saw during the experience

Suppose when you are seven-years-old, you are having fun playing at a park when a dog rushes at you and bites you. Your mother can't get to you in time to protect you from the dog. 

1. Thoughts: "A scary dog is coming at me." That is stored in a certain part of your brain.

2. Feelings: At the same time, you feel the emotion of fear as the dog is charging at you. That emotion gets stored in a different part of the brain. 

3. Physical sensations: You feel a tightening in your chest and increase in your heart rate. The memory of those physical sensations, get stored in a different part of your brain. 

4. Bodily inclinations: Your body also has an inclination to want to run. That memory of wanting to turn away and run is stored in another part of your brain.

5. Visual images: As the dog gets close, you see an image of the dog's angry face. That image is stored in an entirely different part of your brain. 

They are all stored in your brain at the same time but in different brain locations. In a non-threatening experience, all of these different kinds of memory would connect with one another. The neurons would be sufficiently connected. That is called integration.

However, in a threatening experience, these five kinds of memories do not sufficiently connect and that is called fragmentation. Those five aspects of your memory remain largely separated from one another. All the various aspects of the memory become separated. In other words, in trauma, your emotions about the event, do not get connected with your thoughts about the event which do not get connected with the physical sensation. 

Bessel van der Kolk in The Body Keeps the Score explains that "When we experience something traumatic, the overwhelming experience becomes fragmented so that the emotions, sounds, images, thoughts and physical sensations related to the trauma take on a life of their own."

When neurons are not sufficiently connected to other neurons, that is what we mean by fragmentation. It is another way of saying separation. Disconnection. 

In the aftermath of trauma, your brain will become more fragmented which is to say less integrated. 

Dan Siegel's primary contribution to our understanding of trauma is that brain health is a function of integration. In other words, the more connection between parts of your brain, the healthier your brain. 

Disconnected, fragmented brain = traumatized brain

Connected, integrated brain = healed brain

Here is really important information about POSSIBLE TRAUMA. That dog biting event? It does NOT have to be stored in your body as trauma. An example from my own life is a scuba diving incident I witnessed as a new mom. A woman in our group died, and I was one of the last people to speak to her before she died. However, at the time, I was in some counseling and had a group of people who processed the event together and a husband who took me out onto the water again after it happened. I therefore do not believe that event was stored as trauma in my brain. 

Not all harmful events traumatize the brain. 

If, in the case of the dog bite, your mother runs over to you and gets the dog away from you and comforts you in the midst of the fear and talks to you about what happened, then mom's attunement and comfort and care allows your brain to link up those disconnected aspects of your memory. By receiving sufficient care in the wake of a traumatic event, your brain is able to connect/integrate the fragmented recordings of the memory. 

If a memory is recorded as trauma, it was not recorded in a healthy, coherent, integrated way. That is what good care does. It allows the fragmented recordings in disparate parts of your brain to connect with one another and become integrated. 

Developmental Trauma

Now, the event that Adam just shared was a one-time isolated incident. But what if the bad event is not an isolated incident? What if the bad thing happening, happens with some frequency? And what if it happens at home with Mom or Dad instead of in a park with a dog. In that case, you are in the realm of developmental trauma.  

Consider the brain of a little girl who watches her dad hit her mom and then they have a terrible divorce and then a step-father comes in and abuses her. What happens in her brain? Fragmented memory after fragmented memory after fragmented memory. Lots and lots of fragmentation in her brain. She becomes an adult and she has unintegrated jumble of thoughts, feelings, emotions, and physical sensations. She has a very fragmented brain.

Instability

When you have high-levels of fragmented memory in your brain due to trauma, your brain and your body will feel unstable. The ground beneath you does not feel solid. You feel a sense of instability. The world does not feel safe. Lots of fragmented memory means that you will go through your day that the world is not quite safe and something bad might happen soon. 

You are NOT going to be aware of that as a 14-year-old girl or even a 20-year-old man because it is just the way it is for you. It's been normal for so long. But the reason you feel a little unstable inside is because there are so many access points in your daily life for your trauma to be activated. 

What if it is isn't just the snarling dog? It is also someone's facial expression that reminds you of your dad's before he hit your mother. Or a particular thought or emotion inside. All of these reminders/memories can activate the not-safe system in your brain. And when the system is activated, you will experience intense reactions that may seem wildly out of proportion to the present circumstance. The felt sense of chaos is because there is not enough integration in your brain. 

Complexity Theory states that the most stable systems are the ones with high levels of differentiation and high levels of connection. Both! The most stable brains are the ones where they brains where the thoughts and feelings are differentiated from one another but also connected to one another. Deep, thick fibers of connection. This translates to a sense that the word is safe and the ground under your feet is solid. 

Certainty

When your brain is fragmented and you feel chaotic inside (as a result of fragmentation due to trauma), you will feel a tremendous pull to certainty. Certainty means "I know what is happening in the world, but my perspective on all the important issues in the world is right and people who disagree with me about those things are wrong." Certainty is the conviction that you know the truth with a capital T. Certainty reduces the felt experience of chaos and fragmentation in your brain. 

Why? 

Because certainty gives you a sense of "the ground beneath my feet is stable and solid." 

Adam gives a personal example. He said that his anxiety was given certainty through what he heard in church and his Christian books. The pastor offered him certainty in regards to why the world is broken, the God of the Bible is in control, Jesus has rescued the world from sin, if I trust and obey God, I can experience healing from my pain and Abundant Life. When I die, I'll go to heaven and be free from all fear and sorrow. 

It was incredibly comforting to Adam to hear these things because everyone in his community was certain about those things. Certainty makes your chaotic brain feel more certain. Dan Allender says "The more certain you become, the less fragmented you feel." 

Belief Systems

Think about someone with a lot of fragmentation in their brain as a result of trauma. That person is going to crave certainty. That is, you will be attracted to belief systems that help your brain feel more orderly, safe, stable, secure, less chaotic. 

If that little girl that we talked about earlier in the story starts attending church as an adult. As the pastor shares certainty to her fragmented brain, the pastor's words will be incredibly soothing for her fragmented brain. The pastor is offering certainty to a brain that feels uncertain and confused. This will feel like the shaky ground beneath her feet is not as shaky anymore. 

Certainty makes traumatized people feel safer in the world. Certainty soothes fragmented brains. 

When your brain is in a chaotic state, there is IMMENSE pressure to figure out a way to figure out a way to make order out of the chaos inside. Any theological system reduces chaos by offering certainty. 

Dan Allender was a guest speaker on a podcast entitled The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill which discussed the loss of a Megachurch in Seattle. Dan said that one of the reasons people are attracted to churches like this is because they "offered highly traumatized people a place that they could be at rest." 

Why were so many people drawn to a deeply narcissistic and abusive pastor? Because traumatized people have a high-degree of fragmentation in their brains which makes them feel chaotic and unstable and all of that discomfort is soothed by theological certainty. They can finally begin to experience rest when they are offered certainty. 

PLEASE NOTE: Adam is not saying that Christianity is wrong at all! He is proud that his faith developed in high school and college through his trauma. However, he does think that the reason he found it so appealing was because the theological certainty was very calming for his fragmented and unstable brain. It gave him rest. That's why he read books and had so many quiet times. It was an attempt at self-regulation. 

For people with a history of trauma, we tend to think that we use reason and logic to choose our theological beliefs. But, in fact, what is really driving us is desperation to find rest from the fragmentation and chaos inside. Ahhhh, there is some solid ground!

He is NOT saying that this is true for securely attached people or people who have not experienced developmental trauma. But, for those of us who have fragmented, traumatized brains, we naturally gravitate toward belief systems that offer certainty. It regulates our dysregulated bodies by offering certainty about the world. "The most certain you become, the less fragmented you feel."

This does not mean your theology is wrong.  It just means that some part of your embrace of that theology is because it calms your insides -- not because you have broken it down using reason and logic. We all have hidden persuaders. 

Dogmatism

When you are driven by fragmentation to embrace theological certainty as a means of soothing, you will invariably become a dogmatic person.  

In other words: the fragmentation in your traumatized brain is soothed by certainty and there is no way you will allow anyone to take away that certainty. Thus, you become dogmatic about your beliefs. 

Dogmatism = to whole-heartedly embrace a belief system as TRUE. To think that the opinions you are hold are actually non-arguable facts.  

Someone who is dogmatic believes that whatever they think is right and that those who disagree with them are wrong. 

Dogmatism is not driven by analytic left-brained logical thinking. It is driven by a fragmented, chaotic right brain that needs certainty to calm itself down. 

For a chaotic brain, it matters less what you believe. What matters more of the certainty of which you believe it. 

Dogmatic People You Know 

Think of the people in your world who are very rigid and dogmatic and certain of their theological convictions. What if these people simply have a high-level of fragmentation in their brains due to trauma. And what if their theological certainty is an attempt to soothe that fragmentation? 

This is why it is so difficult for these people to ever consider viewpoints (political or religious usually) that are different from their own. They are trying to prevent their brains from fragmenting. They are trying to prevent themselves from feeling chaotic inside. 

No one arrives at their theological and political beliefs solely by objectively weighing the merits of various theological or political positions. No one! You come to these in response to your story. 

Have you ever truly considered the words of someone who disagreed with you about something that is really important to you? If you have ever considered their viewpoints, do you remember inside your body when you tried on what they were saying? "What if they are right and I am actually wrong about this issue?" Adam said that whenever he does this, he actually feels some fear and disorder inside his body. It feels shaky inside. Suddenly he feels less certain about his position and that sends him back to the chaotic feeling of fragmentation. 

Adam said, "I am not advocating relativism!" Relativism says it doesn't matter what you believe. All faith statements are equally valid. He explains that the opposite of dogmatism is NOT relativism. The opposite of dogmatism is the openness to the stories of others. 

Compassion for others

Can you find compassion for your dogmatic friends and family members? You do not need to agree with them or stop arguing them. But how might your posture toward them change if Jesus were to say to you, "You know that person who disagrees with you and is so theologically certain? They are simply trying to soothe the fragmentation in their brains." How would your posture toward that person changed if you realized that their dogmatism was actually ad desperate attempt to feel safe in the world.  

Compassion for yourself

Maybe you are a dogmatic person. What if your absolute certainty about issues is not so much driven by reason and logic but at your attempt to reduce the chaos and fragmentation in your brain? The more you heal from trauma, the less you will need to be certain about everything. This doesn't mean you will not have strong theological or political positions. But you will be free and open to the stories of those you disagree with. 

When someone's disagreement with you no longer threatens your peace, you can open yourself to them while remaining stable and grounded. You will understand what is really driving what is really driving these people that disagree with you so vehemently.

Points for today

1. Unprocessed trauma leads to fragmentation. 

2. When you have high-levels of fragmented memory in your brain due to trauma, your brain and your body will feel unstable. 

3. When your brain is fragmented and you feel chaotic inside (as a result of fragmentation due to trauma), you will feel a tremendous pull toward theologies and worldviews that offer certainty. 

4. When you are driven by fragmentation to embrace theological certainty as a means of soothing, you will invariably become a dogmatic person.

Pastoral Note

"Christianity is the difference between I HOLD and I AM HELD."

The more you grow in Christ, the more you will realize that it doesn't matter so much what faith claims you hold, what matters ultimately is that you are held by God. It is far less about you and and far more about God.

For those of us with a history of trauma, we can become very dogmatic unless the fragmentation in our brains is soothed not by certainty but by the deep knowing that we are held by God. 

Even if we are wrong on some important point, we are held by God.  

May it be so.