Trauma-Informed Reframe for "close your eyes"

I got an email today that told me to close my eyes. It reminded me that many folks just don’t know that this can be re-traumatizing and an unsafe invitation. This is especially true when we are telling people: close your eyes. It sounds a bit commanding. Demanding. I don’t hear any choice in it. I don’t hear other options. I don’t hear that someone has the knowledge or awareness to know that this might not be a safe choice for me.

So today, I want to offer a reframe. There are so many ways to reframe this; this is just one option on one instagram square.

This phrasing can be more trauma-informed because it offers choice, options, and for the listener to tune in to their needs. It says: “if it feels right to you.” These words don’t assume that we know this person, their body, their nervous system, and their experiences better than they do. These words communicate: I trust your experience. I invite you to do what feels good and safe (or neutral) to you in this moment with your eyes and gaze. I invite you to check in with your own needs, desires and agency.

For some folx, closing their eyes can be relaxing and soothing. And that’s valid. For others, it can be re-traumatizing, panic inducing, and agitating. And that’s valid.

Here’s the thing: we don’t know, and we don’t always need or get to. But knowing what we might not know, we can offer options. Here’s to doing that.

Healing Can Be Destabilizing, Too

In the beginning, healing can be so destabilizing. It can exacerbate symptoms, heighten anxiety, make space for big overwhelming emotions.

So if you feel like you’re going backwards, know that this can be part of the process.

It can feel unfair to be met with shaky intensity when we’re trying to recover from a traumatic event that destabilized us. But healing can be cyclical, spiralic, a swirl of beginnings, middles, and ends that aren’t even ends. So the intensity isn’t strictly the stuff of beginnings.

You might periodically feel destabilized, sucker-punched by waves of grief that take the breath from your lungs and drop you to your creaky knees. These dips and rises might not change, but our ability to be with the dips and rises, our ability to be gentle with ourselves, to turn to our tools and ask for support - this might change, and can make a hard process a little easier.

Keep going. Keep resting. You’re doing great and it’s so normal to feel like you’re not.

jess

May We Not Fastforward

Often in our own healing, we want to fast forward to an easier part. So doesn’t it make sense that we also want to fast forward other people to an easier part?

Can we have a bit of self compassion for ourselves that it might be difficult to sit with pain? Our pain, other people’s pain, worldly systemic pain, so many kinds of pain.

And from this place of compassionate awareness, can we be open to learning the skills we need, both internal and relational, to expanding our capacity to be with and navigate the pain that comes with aliveness?

To show up for the world and for people and ourselves knowing that this means showing up for pain, too?

To not hold too tightly either to finding silver linings nor despair. To be with what is there, and gently holding as if cradling a small bird, the possibility of transformation and truth along with the heartbeat of hope?

May we deeply listen. May we press pause if we need to. But let us not fast forward.

⋒ For more support in compassionate listening, check out my virtual guide, It’s Not All Good! ⋒

Childhood, Caretaking, & Feelings

If you were a child who expressed feelings in proportion to those around you. If you contorted your emotions into the shape and size that could be held. If you disappeared and squeezed and repressed what couldn’t.

If your role as a young person was to take care of other people’s feelings, to hold them in your small hands, to weave them into the fabric of your family, to make the unokay acceptable.

You might struggle to believe your feelings are worthy of care. You might struggle to believe there is space for you. You might struggle to believe that your feelings get to exist, regardless of another’s capacity to hold them.

If this is your work, know that it is not yours alone. So many of us are untangling and re-working and weaving these old threads. We are wilting before we remember it’s safe now to bloom. We are foresaking our feelings as a precious survival strategy. We are flashbacking deep in our bones to other times our whole selves weren’t held.

And still. We are showing up in these news ways, trembling. Be gentle in your ferocity: this takes time.

I honor your survival

I honor your survival.
I believe your survival.
I am in awe of your survival.
I support your survival.
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I know that the word “survival” is past tense and sometimes you are still surviving.
I know there aren’t enough strong supports and soft places.
I know it can feel incredibly alone and too fucking hard and painfully endless.
I know it is tiring. So so tiring.
I see you keeping going.
I see you stopping to rest.
I see you itchy and struggling to pause, to receive rest.
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I honor and hold and bow to your experience. To the late nights and bitter resentment and fearful holding. To the adaptive coping mechanisms you needed and wish you didn’t need any longer. To the weariness that pulls on your heartsleeves. To feeling misunderstood and out of place, where is my place, where is my story’s place? To all it takes to survive, to keep surviving - I honor and hold and bow to all of that.

On Not Rushing Someone Through Their Grief

There can be so much comfort in another human witnessing our pain and grief. Witnessing where we are without trying to change it. Loving us through it without pushing us through it.
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Sometimes we don’t need the situation to be fixed. We don’t always want advice. It’s often not helpful (and can be hurtful) to be redirected to a silver lining when we are in a storm.
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Though there is a time and place for advice and positivity, not every time and place calls for this.
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So when a witness to the painful moment we are in is what we are needing. When a hand to hold through the storm is what we desire.
When companionable silence and taking our time with our story is our deepest wish.
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I wish these things for you.
I wish these things for me.
I wish these things for all of us.

⋒ For more support in compassionate listening, check out my virtual guide, It’s Not All Good! ⋒