Fifty Kindnesses

Recently, I have been thinking about the power of true kindness, and the profound impact it can have on us.  I’m talking about the real thing: kindness with no strings, no ego, no expectations, kindness for kindness’ sake, big kindnesses and seemingly small kindnesses, seemingly invisible kindnesses and blatantly visible ones.  I’ve been remembering all sorts of events where people have been kind to me and to others, and how those events inspired me and taught me to also be kind.

One of the first kindnesses that I remember happened when I was 5.  My family was flying to Germany, and it was my first time on an airplane.  We had a layover and you could get off the plane to stretch your legs, or you could stay on.  I chose to stay on while my family went to go stretch.  Then I changed my mind, but I guess it was too late, and they told me to return to my seat, where I sat feeling terrified that the plane would leave without my family and I’d have to fly to Germany by myself.  I spent all my energy privately trying not to cry.  While in this state of terror, a flight attendant came up to me and was kind enough to not try get me to talk about it; instead he asked with a twinkle in his eyes, “Would you like an ice cream with a cherry on top?”  I don’t know how he knew to do this sort of magic, but that question erased all of my fears, and transformed the entire flight from a fearful journey to an incredible adventure.  I think I probably would have been willing to fly to Germany by myself knowing that there was ice cream involved.  I still remember this moment and this person 45 years later, and I still feel grateful.

Kindness has such an impact because it breaks through all of our differences, defenses and stories and demonstrates on the giving end, that we see one another and that we care, and on the receiving end, that we are seen and we are cared for.  The more kindness is given, the more kindness there is to give. So, having said that, I’ll get to the main reason I’m writing about kindness to begin with.  I’m here to throw down a kindness challenge. I want us all to inspire each other with kindnesses that we’ve seen or done.  No cheating and looking online for lists of kindnesses!  Really try to think of times in your life where you’ve been the recipient of, the witness to, or the bearer of kindness. Then share them in the comments section.  I’ll demonstrate by sharing 50 of my own right here.  If you can think of 50 yourself, go for it.  Even one is enough.  If you want to take this further, commit 50 acts of kindness over a period of 50 days.  Why 50?  I’m turning 50 sometime this year and for my birthday, I want a kinder world.

Without further ado, here is my rambling list of 50 kindnesses, in no particular order, some simple and tangible, some more obscure:

  1. As mentioned above, being offered ice cream when I was sad and scared, in a way that kept my dignity intact was a kindness I never forgot.
  2. The simple act of making eye contact with people who feel invisible can be kind, whether they are on the fringes of society or nobody else takes them seriously.
  3. Shortly after returning from the hospital with my first newborn, people brought us meals.  I remember eating one that was so simple, but so healthy and so needed, I could feel my depleted self being refueled on multiple levels.
  4. When I was eighteen, I worked as a server in a restaurant where the abusive owners felt free to scream at us if we made mistakes, and everyone could hear it throughout the small restaurant.  After being screamed at for making a mistake once, I was desperately trying not to cry while bringing food out to the tables, and at one table, the patron looked at me and said, “That Tom (one of the owners) can be a real bear sometimes.  Don’t let him get to you.” It made such a difference to know that someone understood that it was not okay to be yelled at in that way.
  5. Once, when I lived alone, I cut my finger badly and was so tired already, and so overwhelmed, I didn’t want to deal with it, and I most definitely did not want to see all the blood.  I stuck a towel on it and knocked on my friend’s door downstairs, and asked if he could deal with it for me.  No questions asked, he took me by the wrist, washed it, dressed it, and sent me on my way.
  6. Years of kindness came from my friend and mentor, Mary, who I have written about extensively here.  I had other mentors, too, older people who took me seriously and guided me through my young adult life.  While we are on the topic of mentoring, let me say, mentoring anyone for any length of time is a really great kindness.
  7. When I was in my twenties, I would visit my friends in Seattle who seemed like real grownups to me at a time when I still felt like a lost child.  They had real furniture! One day, after sitting at their kitchen table, with my big boots with big buckles tucked under me, I noticed I’d scratched the nice kitchen chair with the boots.  These were pretty big scratches and I was mortified and scared, and pointed it out to my friend in an attempt to come clean.  My friend blamed their dog.  Years later, we talked about it.  She’d thrown her dog under the bus for me because she could see how awful I felt.
  8. When I worked at an art supply store, a woman with kids came in and told me how she was moving to Seattle and scared out of her mind about it.  I told her about how my friends lived up there and that they were raising a child and that they really loved it and that they found many kid-friendly things to do.  A few days later in my work cubby, I found an envelope with a handmade lapis necklace and a letter from this woman.  She’d left for Seattle and said that our conversation had made her feel so much better, she went straight home and made that necklace for me that day.  It fit me perfectly and I still have it, because it reminds me that kindness can happen anywhere between anyone.
  9. I had a friend who I met when he was dying of cancer at age 35.  He had no money and no insurance and there were many ways in which he was treated poorly, and there were also many acts of kindness in the community.  Some friends of his threw him a giant yard sale and several local businesses donated expensive items like brand new bikes and computers. Many people showed up to help him, and he was able to live out the very short amount of days he had left without losing his home or the little bit of comfort he had left.
  10. The same friend, once he knew he was going to die, decided he wanted to do as much art as he could until he couldn’t do it any more. He loved making art so much, but had always put off doing it.  One day, I introduced him to a friend who was also an artist and lived downstairs from me.  He dropped everything just so the two of them could talk about art.  My friend who was dying kept remembering that conversation because he’d never before connected with anyone else who felt the same way about art as he did. Sometimes kindness is as simple as making the time for a conversation.
  11. I used to take some of my work breaks at a local cemetery.  One day, I was just sitting there, when a small child, maybe about 4 years old, came up to me and started peppering me with questions. They wanted to know about the “frankensteins” that were under the ground, meaning the buried, then asked me about all sorts of details.  It felt important that I stay and answer these questions, and I did as best I could.  Then the child asked “Why do young people die?”  I was going by intuition at this point, so I gave an answer that a 4 year old might understand, which apparently was acceptable.  The mom, who’d watched silently throughout our whole conversation, thanked me and told me that their young nanny had just been killed in a car accident and they were all still reeling from it and they hadn’t figured out how to have this conversation with their child yet.  Sometimes, you don’t know the depth of a kindness you are offering until after the fact, but you offer it on instinct, anyway.
  12. There was a long-haired man in Eugene in the 90s who dressed like Jesus and walked around barefoot, everywhere.  If you were behind him in the grocery line, he’d tell the cashier he was buying your groceries, and would do so, and not take no for an answer.  I found this out because I was in line behind him, and at the time, I had very little money.
  13. At toll booths, my sister used to always pay for whoever was behind her.  She probably still does.
  14. I once read about someone who, once in a while, leaves a massive tip on top of the normal tip at a restaurant, then skedaddles before the server can see him.  This inspired me to do the same from time to time.
  15. For a while, I was the youngest kid in the neighborhood I grew up in.  One day, I wasn’t being included in something all the kids were playing, and my friend’s dad took me into the kitchen and told me that he had this feeling I had a sweet tooth, and that we should eat some ice cream together.  He somehow managed to make me feel like I was doing him a favor by eating this ice cream with him, and he didn’t say anything about me being excluded at all, and I completely forgot about it.  The ice cream erased it so well, that to this day, I have no recollection about what in particular was upsetting.  All I can remember is the kindness.
  16. I was a pretty chaotic and out of control person in my twenties.  One of the kindest things my friend and roommate did for me at the time was to tell me the truth about how my chaos was impacting her negatively.  She did not offer me a way out of that truth, and that changed my whole world, and helped me to grow up.  Sometimes, kindness is telling someone how to stop hurting you.
  17. I had a young black cat that got attacked by a pit bull.  The whole experience was awful, from trying to find him in the place he’d hidden, then taking him to the vet as he bled all over me, then making the decision to euthanize him because of the depth of his injuries.  I went home and was alone and in a stupor.  There was a knock at my door, and my coworker who was a very tall and quiet man, handed me the softest, stuffed leopard that I had been eying for months at work.  My coworkers had pooled together to buy it and my manager had sent him to give it to me.  He said nothing, just gave it to me and left.  I curled up with that leopard and felt deeply comforted, and I still have it today.
  18. When I was 22, just after graduating from college, I went on a bike trip across the US with my friend Andrew.  So many kindnesses came from strangers in every state we went through, and many strangers offered us water, food, advice, and places to stay.
  19. One day in southeastern Kentucky, we’d biked up and down a ton of mountains all through the day.  It was brutal.  We were exhausted and had hit a wall emotionally and just wanted to get to a campsite.  A local woman in a big pickup truck pulled over and informed us that there were many more mountains between us and the campsite.  She said in her thick southern accent, “Throw your bikes in the truck and I’ll drive you there.” She dropped us off, handed me a twenty dollar bill and said, “Get yourself a nice meal when you get to the West Coast,” and drove off before we could say anything.
  20. Our bike trip was in 1993, so we had no cell phones or any technology whatsoever.  We just had AAA maps, and we’d pick a route and go.  One day in Kansas, a man drove up to us and told us there was a tornado warning up ahead and to go no further.  We found a church and they let us stay in the basement.  We biked past the wreckage the following day, grateful for that man’s warning.
  21. This bike trip was a wonderful, glorious adventure, but every once in a while, it also was really difficult and scary and overwhelming.  By the time we were in the Redwoods, we were both pretty burnt out.  One day, my friend went into the grocery and I stayed outside because I was having a lot of feelings that I didn’t want him or anyone to see.  So, there I was, sitting and hoping my sunglasses were hiding the fact that I was crying, and waiting for the feelings to pass, when this woman gently asks me where we’d biked from.  In a shaky voice that betrayed my emotions, I answered.  She, like the flight attendant, didn’t try get me to talk about it.  She instead invited us to her family’s house for pizza and offered us a place to stay for the night.  We took her up on that, and all of us had a really good time together.  They sent us off the next day with snacks and good wishes.
  22. I’ve learned from so many experiences now, that feeding people is a great act of kindness.  Feed people when they are grieving, when they are sick, when they are sad, when they’ve just had a baby, when it is time to celebrate that person, when they live alone, when they are working too hard, or just because you feel like it.  It does not have to be elaborate.
  23. I have a sharing box outside of our house, right by the sidewalk.  Sometimes, I put puzzles in it, garden seeds, books, and for the last year, homemade masks.  Sometimes, people put things in it, too.  Once, someone put solar strand lights in there, and I got to decorate the outside of the box so that it lit up at night.  Another time a person put a thank you note and a big piece of quartz in it.  I keep that quartz where I can see it, to remind me that kindness breeds kindness.
  24. My dad died fairly recently after a very long battle with ALS.  I and my siblings helped my mom write thank you notes to all the people who have been there for them and now her. She’d send me emails saying what to thank people for, and I’d write the cards.  It was wild just how many big and little things people did for my parents while my dad was still alive, and then for my mom after his death.  Things like bringing food and meals, clearing her driveway after every snow, offering to drive her places, visiting my dad in the care facility, singing and praying with him, the list of things to thank people for was and is inspiring.  No single person did more than they could handle, but everyone put together did and still does so much.
  25. Once, when I was cashiering at a store, these 2 Japanese men came up to the counter.  They spoke very little English and I made a big effort to help them and understand them and connect with them.  They made a similar effort.  One of them pulled out these really cool wooden tops and started spinning them on the counter.  I was fascinated by the tops and we spent a pretty long time playing with them together and not talking.  Then, they went to leave and the one man pushed the tops toward me and pointed at me.  He wanted me to keep these really cool tops.  I still have them and sometimes my kids pull them out and play with them, and they know the story of the kindness of a stranger from a faraway place.
  26. When my husband and I were first dating, he had just gone through a divorce and I was in grad school.  Neither of us had much extra money at that moment, and he was being sent to Paris for a business trip.  Our friend, Sam, told my husband that Paris is just so much better when you have a partner with you, and he paid for my airline ticket so that I could come along, no strings attached.
  27. In Paris, we tried very hard to speak the little French we’d learned.  By the end of every day, we were mentally exhausted.  On one of those days, I went up to a postcard stand and I could not for the life of me figure out what coins to give the man at the stand.  I held out a hand full of coins and stared helplessly.  He gently and slowly picked through my assorted change and took the correct amount.  The kindness was in the look on his face and the slowing of the pace of our transaction: I could tell that he knew what was happening to me, that thinking in a different language all day had crushed my brain.  That experience made me feel how important it is to slow down and be patient and kind to people I meet here whose first language is not English.  They are working way harder than me to get through the day, every day.
  28. For a couple of years in my twenties, I was on food stamps.  I was not proud of this fact and I never knew what sort of judgment I’d be met with when I pulled them out to pay for my food.  More people were respectful than were not, and I felt kindness from those that did not offer judgment and who treated me like I was an equal human being.  It helped me get through a difficult time in my life.  Sometimes the biggest kindness is to just accept a person as they are in that moment in time, without judging or making up a story about them.
  29. When I was really little, I loved Henrietta the Cat from Mr. Rogers Enchanted Kingdom.  One day, I was standing with my mom while she was purchasing groceries and I was meowing away, channeling Henrietta in my little kid bubble.  Most cashiers never really noticed me, but this one, wow, she looked right at me and said, “Oh! You are Henrietta the Cat!”  I was blown away that she knew about Henrietta and that she bothered to talk to me, that she didn’t seem to want anything from me, and I proceeded to meow excitedly to her, and she listened!  Most busy adults tend to hardly notice kids just as they are, but guaranteed, the kids notice them.  I never forgot that moment of being seen and heard in that real, simple, but true way.
  30. In a similar vein, when I was about the same age, I had a huge crush on my brother’s friend, Eric Greenleaf, who was maybe 12 or 13.  I knew he was coming over one day, and I decided to pretend that I had a broken arm.  I wrapped toilet paper all up and down my arm.  I must have looked ridiculous.  But Eric Greenleaf didn’t bat an eye, even though he could have just looked at me and laughed.  Instead, he looked at me and said, “Oh, Ely, it looks like you broke your arm!” How this kid could have been so understanding and could see what the little girl in front of him needed at that moment, this still touches me today.  Choosing to take anyone seriously is a profound act of kindness.
  31. There is an older woman in my neighborhood named Maria.  I met her about 10 years ago, because she was picking up trash in a park where I would take my kids to play when they were babies, and she stopped to talk with me.  This park is used by all sorts of people, ranging from the unhoused to the local tech company employees on their breaks.  There is always trash to pick up.  She still does this, every week, just because.
  32. Our son has had some multi-day stays at Childrens Hospital for some scary reasons.  His sister wasn’t allowed on the ward, so friends stepped up to let her stay with them for several days each time so that we could both be with our son. Knowing that she was okay and with people that we trusted meant so much to us.
  33. While staying at Childrens, we really got to witness the kindness of the volunteers there, and felt their absence when they were not.  Without the volunteers, the kids can’t have access to the playrooms on each ward, and when you are there for several days, or weeks, or months, or even years, you want to be able to use those playrooms, and you want to know that people who aren’t just there for their jobs, actually care about you and everyone who is stuck there.  There’s also this TV studio in the hospital that Ryan Seacrest donated to Children’s.  Kids who are able to leave their rooms can come down to play bingo or be part of the broadcast that goes to all the rooms in the hospital, so that the kids who can’t leave their rooms can play bingo through the broadcast.  We were so moved by this addition to the hospital and all the volunteers who were making it happen.  It was clear that the kids who have to be there much more than our son had to, got so much out of it, and were even able to connect with each other through it.
  34. My son had 4 surgeries in one year when he was second grade.  After two of the surgeries, he was not supposed to run or jump for six weeks.  There were kids who kindly understood this and chose to play chess or checkers with him during his lunch recess, even on the beautiful, sunny days where everyone wanted to run around.  I don’t think he once, during those six weeks, spent a recess alone.
  35. When I was in college, I lived off campus with a group of friends.  The man across the street from us really did not like college students and posted “No trespassing” signs all over his property.  We felt a bit unwelcome and assumed all the locals on our street felt the same way he did about us.  One day after injuring my knee pretty badly, I was hobbling down the street in a brace, and there was this old couple who lived next to the “No trespassing” guy who stood and stared at me, and then said something.  I stopped, bracing myself, ready for whatever unwelcoming thing they were going to say, and instead, the man said, “How did you hurt yourself?”  He was actually concerned.  Over the next couple of years, we got to know each other.  He had this massive rose garden and loved to bring me roses.  She was a quilter and loved to show me all the amazing quilts she had done.
  36. When I was 16, I silkscreened two matching tee-shirts: one for me and one for my best friend for her birthday.  I made a very simple cartoon moose on the shirts, because she loved the animal.  I was embarrassed by how simplistic the design was and said something about how it wasn’t great art in front of her grandmother who was a professional artist.  She got really serious and told me that good artists can add personality to the simplest of things, and that I had done that successfully, that my little moose had a lot of personality.  I never forgot that life-changing moment where this older woman took me and my art seriously, which opened me up to doing the sort of art I went on to do when I later became an art major in college.
  37. Once, an old boyfriend and I were on a walk and waiting for the crosswalk sign to change.  A man walked up to us who seemed mentally ill and possibly unhoused and definitely rough and tumble.  He looked at us and said, “It’s all good,” then proceeded to accompany us for a few blocks, talking to us about all sorts of topics that to us seemed unrelated, but to him made sense.  We weren’t in a rush, and we just listened, partly because we didn’t really know what else to do in that situation.  He eventually wound down, let us know that he needed to go take his anti-psychotics, because he was overdue for his dose, and went on his merry way.  Before he left, he told us, “When I first saw you, I thought you were a gay couple, so I told you it was all good because I wanted you to know that I was all right with that.”  He’d been reaching out from his place on the fringe of society to us, who he’d perceived as being on a different sort of fringe, to let us know he accepted us as we were.
  38. In the first year I lived in Boulder, I was hospitalized for 5 days with complicated appendicitis.  I didn’t know many people here very well yet, but my roommate at the time had a tight knit community of friends. He told his friends that were still just acquaintances to me, to visit me in the hospital.  Also, some people who I was still getting to know from my school and work came to visit.  My then-boyfriend-now-husband, who I was also still getting to know, came and read to me every day.  It made all the difference in the world to have visitors.  Nobody did anything fancy, they just came and sat with me from the beginning when I was barely able to notice them, through to the end when I had enough energy to laugh with them because the medicine made me loopy.
  39. While I was hospitalized for the appendicitis, I did not have insurance, was living off of my student loans and a part-time job, and I received many medical bills.  I had to pay each medical professional thousands of dollars from out of my empty pocket.  Trying to figure out how to pay these bills after not being able to work and while trying to recover from this huge medical event was overwhelming.  I called each medical office, and there were many, to ask if I could have a discount.  Only one office refused to give me a discount or even to allow me to set up installments, but the rest gave me varying discounts, some let me pay in installments over time, and this helped so much.  But even more impactful were the times I was treated like a fellow human being by the people arranging the payment plans.
  40. The short time in my life in which I struggled financially really exposed to me just how badly people with no money can be treated.  I had a few experiences with doctors who made assumptions about me based on my appearance and financial situation, one in particular who assumed that I was looking to score painkillers when I came to the ER, and felt that I was pretending to have the severe back spasms that were taking my breath away.  (I actually hate being on painkillers).  He did not treat me kindly.  This experience with unkindness made me truly appreciate that the simple act of treating people like they are humans equal to you makes a powerful difference.  I always felt deeply moved by the kindness of the doctors who, during this time, treated me exactly the same as I imagined they treated their rich patients.
  41. There is a marshy kind of area on a bike path not far from us.  It seemed flooded, so my son and I stopped to look. A man came up to us and asked us if we’d seen the beaver dam that was causing the flooding, then told us where to find it and the beaver home nearby.  He also pointed out a muskrat swimming in the water.  We visit this pond all the time now, and have watched as more beaver homes show up.  We might never have noticed if that man hadn’t taken the time to stop and share.
  42. Our first child ate like a linebacker during her first year of life, and then suddenly lost interest in food for a while.  As a first-time parent, I freaked out.  As my husband and I were walking with her to the grocery store, I ranted about how she was going to starve and be malnourished and I didn’t know what to do about it.  I mean, I was truly a wreck.  At the grocery store, we met a woman whose 11 year old son thought our baby girl was adorable.  He played with her, he carried her around while we got into a conversation with this woman.  We got talking about food.  She told me that when her own, now very strong and vibrant 11 year old was little, he also did not eat. She passed on to us something that someone told her at the time: “Kids live on the idea of food until they are at least 9.”  She also said that for a while, they’d joke that one day of the week was “eating day,” because that was about how often her son had an appetite.  The kindness in sharing her experience with me changed everything, and sure enough, our daughter did not starve or get malnourished, and we felt much less alone as parents of a child who lived on the idea of food for a while.
  43. Back in the 90s, I had a temp job working at a ravioli company.  I got in a conversation with the dish washer, who was from Sri Lanka, had 3 other jobs and was attending college, and was shockingly cheerful about it.  He described a childhood of civil wars, loss of friends and family members to the strife, and friendships that went really deep.  He told me he got to the US because a group of friends decided that he should come here for school.  Without his knowledge, they pooled together money, and it sounds like they also applied to college for him, and sent him off the US so he could get a degree.
  44. My job for two summers was cleaning dorms.  It was me, who was a hippie college student, and the regular yearlong crew, which was a group of southern women who lived up in the hollers and whose accents were so thick that it took me weeks to understand what they were saying.  We couldn’t be more different than each other, but we tried to connect anyway.  One of the ways that I entertained myself while cleaning the empty dorm rooms all summer was to collect the change I’d find on the floor.  At the end of the last summer, just before I moved across the country, the women wanted to give me a going away gift.  They told me that they couldn’t figure out what to get me, since I didn’t wear makeup or perfume, and I didn’t seem to be into anything they were into.  They gave me a giant jar of change, and told me, “Well, we know for a fact that you like collecting change, so we’ve had this jar of all the coins we’ve collected in the past few years, and we want you to have it.”  Best workplace gift ever.
  45. I went to the same school from 1st through 8th grade.  By 8th grade, some kids had become popular, some had not.  I had most definitely not.  It was confusing for me: most of us had all been in the same school for 8 years, and I didn’t understand what made some kids popular and some not.  It was also painful for me.  I felt pretty ugly and like an outcast from a place I had once been a part of.  My classmates had lobbied the school to have a dance, and we all went.  I felt awkward in my incredibly unstylish dress and I didn’t think anyone would want to dance with me, except maybe some other outcasts. Out of the blue, Peter Garvey who’d managed to become good-looking and popular, asked me to dance.  I had a feeling he did it to be kind, but he did it in such a way that I didn’t feel bad, I felt cared for and for a moment I felt like I was part of the community we all used to be part of.  If I could find him today, I’d thank him for that dance.
  46. I also used to shoplift when I was in 8th grade.  I had a friend who was into that and I wanted to impress her, because I was desperate for her approval.  At the same time, I had a friend who was most definitely not into shoplifting.  One day, I noticed that she had been distancing herself from me so I asked her what was going on.  She told me that it really bothered her that I shoplifted and it scared her to go out with me because what if I shoplifted when I was with her and she got associated with it and got in trouble too?  She then told me that she couldn’t be my friend anymore if I continued to shoplift.  I never did it again.  Her kindness was directed toward herself and respecting her own truth, and this spilled over into my world.  She wasn’t trying to change me, she was telling me truthfully that she had a boundary and if I couldn’t respect it, she couldn’t be my friend.  I never shoplifted again, and our friendship lasted a long time after that.  Sometimes, saying something truthful that feels unkind is actually the kindest thing a person can do.
  47. One of my first jobs after college was coaching Special Olympics basketball and track, plus doing specialized recreation.  Having spent the last four years as a hippie art major and the last couple of months living on my bike on the road, I was rather feral in my approach to hygiene.  My boss somehow managed to tell me, kindly but firmly, what no one else had told me before:  I smelled bad and I needed to shower more frequently, and on top of that, I couldn’t show up to work wearing tie-dyed boxers as if they were shorts.  I came home and channeled my embarrassment into indignation, and ranted to my boyfriend at the time about it.  I think I expected him to tell me how rude my boss had been, but instead, he eagerly gave me advice about what worked for him to keep himself from smelling bad.  Then another friend of mine shared his own fragrance techniques.  In this whole experience, I felt completely accepted as a fellow human who just needed a little hygiene guidance.  It can be kind to tell people what their impact is on others, even the smelly stuff.
  48. In the same conversation with my boss, she told me that I was letting all of the kids on the team run all over me, and that I had to be more assertive and enforce the rules more, and that she couldn’t keep me on as a coach if I didn’t act like one.  She was right- I spent many practices not saying anything while the kids went wild.  Many of these kids had behavioral disorders, some came from incredibly unstable homes, many had ADHD, and they needed structure and a leader.  My boss told me that I needed to be more firm and confident, that I needed to lead, I needed to enforce rules, I needed to coach.   I didn’t know it at the time, but she was teaching me the difference between being aggressive and being assertive.  I was so afraid of being seen as an “aggressive woman” at that time, I completely had gone limp.  When I learned to be an assertive coach, I discovered that these kids were hungry for good leadership, rules that made sense, and structured boundaries that they couldn’t trample.  By telling me about this, my boss modeled assertiveness, leadership, rule enforcement and structured boundaries. It turned out, I needed these things as much as the kids did.
  49. We have a little patch of grass and weeds that we cut with a handpowered reel mower.  One rainy spring, the grass grew tall enough to make this job a bit of a struggle.  I was doing battle with it when a man pulled up in his landscaping truck.  “Ma’am, please let me get my ride-on mower out and do this for you!”  It took him less than five minutes.  I tried paying him.  He refused and said if his mother were ever out struggling like he saw me struggling, he would want someone to help her.  It made me laugh, only because he was probably about 10 years younger than me, but the sentiment was kind, and I was grateful.
  50. I used to cashier at a grocery store.  Every week, a woman in her eighties came through my line on the same day.  She told me that this was her day to buy groceries for her friend who was too old to get them for herself, and I could tell that it made her happy to be able to do this for her friend.  It can feel just as good to give kindness as it feels to receive it, and you are never too old to be kind.

I have really enjoyed writing about these fifty kindnesses, and I hope you have some to share, too.  Please feel free to use the comment section to share kindnesses you have seen, done, had done for you.

The Shooter Came to Our Town

Now it is our turn. A shooter came to our town. He killed 10 people in a grocery store we have all been to. The first I heard about it was just that there was an active shooter in Boulder, and my heart dropped because my daughter was out in an exposed public place at that moment. Then I found out it was elsewhere in town. Never during this whole experience did I feel surprised. Oh, I guess it’s our turn now was my main thought that day.

The next day was the day it actually hit me that this had happened in our town, not just some other town. That brought the pain. I also went into blame mode for much of the day, as if I actually know why these things happen, and who is at fault. I do not know why these things happen, I do not know who is at fault, and I don’t know how to fix it. I have some opinions, I have some ideas that might actually be helpful, and I think that every single one of us has some piece of the solution, but we can’t seem to come together to put all those pieces on the table. It is so hard to listen to each other. And listening is unbelievably crucial. But instead we talk. The media talks. The politicians talk. Everyone on social media talks. Meanwhile, this keeps happening, and if it hasn’t come to your town yet, you probably know that your town is not immune, and you could be next.

I already know this, about needing to listen, but regardless, that day I went straight into the blaming stage. I had ideas of why this keeps happening and a I had a full story, and I went there. But the blaming stage cut me off from even barely grasping the enormity of this and kept me from seeing any of the many layers of the tragedy, and separated me from thinking about those who are grieving. It felt like action, but it was not. To be clear, the blaming stage is not the same as the problem-solving stage. In the blaming stage, you try skip over whatever feelings senseless violence brings up for you: anger, sadness, helplessness, frustration, shock, fear, something else. Those feelings are hard to feel, so instead, you then tell a story about the shooter, about the politicians, about the laws, or the lack of funding for mental health, and throw all of these feelings that need your attention, at whoever or whatever you want to take them out on. But in that moment, those feelings need to be listened to, not thrown at someone else. The blaming stage cannot replace the listening stage, but shooting after shooting keeps happening, and the listening stage gets trampled on every time.  That day, I had to move beyond the blaming stage, and I started to listen. I’m still absorbing this, I’m still trying to figure out how I can listen to my grief and that of others, I’m still in the feeling and listening stage.

The next thing I discovered is what it is like to try to feel while others who mean well and want to be supportive are in the blaming stage, or even in the very important problem-solving stage. I am not the person you should be talking to if you want to blame or problem-solve right now. You think it’s the guns? You think we need more support for mental health? You think it is the media? If you have listened enough, really listened, take action.  Please call your elected officials and talk to them. That is someone you should be talking to. And then do something. Step away from social media, tear yourself from the compelling conversations and DO SOMETHING! Join the movement, send money, talk to the people in front of you, not just online. Then go back online if you feel like you have to, tell everyone what you did, and inspire them to do it too.

The next step was telling our young kids. Because we sure as hell didn’t want them hearing about it from their friends, especially in the form of gossip. This is not the first time I’ve lived in a town with a mass shooting, but it is the first time I’ve lived in one while being a parent. This voice in my head really truly wanted say to them, “But it won’t happen to you.” Except we do not lie to our kids. I can’t promise them that a shooter won’t show up at their school, a movie theater, a grocery store, anywhere. And this isn’t the first mass killing they have been told about, because this is their world that they are growing up in. We explained to them about mass shooters when all the area schools were shut down one day because a mentally ill Columbine massacre fangirl came to Colorado with an automatic weapon and had plans to recreate Columbine, and she was on the loose. Then, too, we did not want them to find out from gossiping classmates. That’s when our kids learned that people shoot up schools. And this week we had the task of telling them that now our town, the town that they are growing up in, is the latest recipient of a mass shooter’s rage. They took in as much as they could, then they clearly needed to stop taking it in. And we respected that, because, as our daughter then told me, “Mom, it’s the kids’ job to just survive, it’s the parents’ job to worry about us.” I’m still taking that moment in.

Another aspect of being in the town where tragedy hits is that for the first few days at least, you are aware of the media whether you want to be or not.  There was a vigil downtown.  We did not attend, but the entire time, we heard many helicopters flying over that vigil.  Imagine trying to grieve, or trying to connect with others with that amount of noise.  Imagine some uninvited, heavily made-up stranger with a camera person and a microphone asking you how you are feeling while you are still trying to understand something of this magnitude.  I share this, because when it doesn’t happen in your town, or in a town where you know someone, you learn about it through the media, and you only hear the bits that make good viewing.  But the most powerful bits do not make good viewing, and there are layers and layers of them, and this is why I’m writing from my experience, to give you the tiniest bit of perspective from the outer layers of this enormous event’s impact on our town.

You might know someone who was affected far more deeply by this or any other senseless act of violence: someone who has actually lost a loved one, or someone who was there and is now traumatized. You might wonder how to support that person. And I am not an expert on this and, unless it has happened to you personally, neither are you, no matter how much training you might have. The person you are trying to support is the only expert on how they feel about tragedy befalling them, and they did not ask for that job. Grief can last for decades, so don’t offer something you don’t have the stamina to see through.

There is no one-size-fits all thing a person in grief or trauma needs at any given time. Some people want to talk about it, others do not. Some people want to be around others, some people want to be alone. Some people do not know what they want, and only find out what they want by getting what they don’t want. I have my own sorting process, both as a therapist and as someone who has seen a lot of friends through grief. The first thing I have to remind myself is that this is not about me. It is not about my need to feel like I am taking action, it is not about my need to get it right, it is not about my need to feel immune from tragedy, or about my need to feel good about myself, or about my desire to stop the suffering. This is about the person in front of me who is in pain. Can I just be with them and their pain and suffering without trying to take it away or make it make sense? If the answer is no, then I cannot help in that moment, and I alone need to address and meet the needs mentioned above until the answer is yes.  When the answer is yes, then the question I need to ask them is, “What do you need right now?” Sometimes that question is too open-ended, so sometimes it is helpful to offer examples, “Do you want to talk about it right now, or would it be more helpful to take your mind off of it?” “Can I bring you food?” “Do you need someone to clean your dishes?” That is where I start. And when the talking does happen, I try to listen. And I try to listen when I’m told that I said the wrong thing. It is a simple thing, and one of the hardest things to do, and I am not always great at it. Being great is not the goal, though. Being there is.

If you would like to help Boulder with a donation, go here.

If you want to help Atlanta, go here.

If you are trying to figure out how someone could commit such an atrocity, or if you are tempted to blame the shooter’s family, you may want to read this interview with sister of Kip Kinkel, who was the high school shooter where I lived in 1998.

If you would like to use this space to talk about how you are feeling, please feel welcome to do so but if you want to express your opinions or your ideas of why this happened, or what needs to be done, or if you want to debate, this is not the forum.

Someone Truly Great

There’s a song by LCD Soundsystem called “Someone Great,” about the feelings that come when someone important to you dies. In the last half of the song, he sings “When someone great is gone,” over and over, enough times that it feels like a chant.  This part of the song has been repeating in my head ever since I found out that my own someone great was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, one that recently took her away from this world.  This Someone was named Mary Dwan, a fantastic person who was my mentor, good friend, and stood in as a mother to me when I was in my twenties and early thirties.  I credit her with guiding me through my transformation from child to grownup; from  self-loathing to self-loving; from directionless floater to a woman with purpose.  She also guided me into becoming the therapist that I am.  My clients, friends, children and spouse directly benefit from her words of wisdom, which I still rely on to this day.

As Mary struggled with cancer during the last 7 months of her life, she continued to inspire and teach.  Sometimes daily, she posted on Caring Bridge, sharing truthful and real feelings about her process.  When she no longer spoke, her family shared what was happening until she took her last breath.  I was lucky to attend the most incredible three-plus hour Zoom memorial that her family created and lovingly facilitated.  Over 70 people attended and most of us shared how she’d touched us in her time on Earth.  During her memorial, it became clear that Mary impacted a vast number of people more profoundly than seems possible for one person to do in one lifetime, and I left with a feeling of awe.  I share her impact here because so many more can still benefit from her wisdom, and selfishly I hope to keep her spirit alive even longer.  Trying to coherently distill the experiences, lessons, trials and tribulations of Mary’s life into this blog post has proven to be a tough challenge.  I could write a book detailing just my limited view of Mary’s life, and if everyone who knew her were to do the same, there would be volumes to say.

I met Mary when I was 25 and she was 55.  I was in my rudderless, directionless twenties, not sure what I was doing with my life, completely broke, stuck in an on-again, off-again esteem-eroding relationship, and struggling with feelings of inadequacy and self-dislike, while also healing from childhood wounds and at the same time gloriously exploring my creativity and spirituality.  She was in the latter part of her very successful therapy career, proud of her waiting-list-only private practice, and equally proud of her family of three sons and husband who was clearly her equal.  When I met her, she was enthusiastically exploring and engaging her creative side, which she saw as an adventurous shift in her life, a shift to a path she explored until the day she died.  I was teaching bookbinding classes at an art store and Mary took one of those classes.  After the class, Mary wanted more, so she came to my apartment for private lessons.  She showed up in a car with a bumper sticker that said something like “Enjoy life now, this is not a dress rehearsal!” This message suited her to a tee.

As she learned to make books, Mary embraced the lessons with joie de vivre, and her mistakes did not faze her or curb her enthusiasm. This might be the first thing to understand about Mary- she was not perfect and she made mistakes, but her mistakes and those of others did not interrupt her flow or her ability to love herself and others.  She told me that, at the beginning of her creative explorations, she’d taken a beadmaking class, where a bead she’d made turned out ugly.  She’d looked at it and said, “This is ugly, but I don’t care, I’m having fun.”  This approach was novel to me, because I grew up in a family where mistakes were met with ridicule and shame, and I put a lot of focus on making sure my mistakes were well hidden. In contrast, Mary did not hide her mistakes, nor was she ashamed of them, nor did she bend the truth to minimize them. In our relationship she taught me the importance of both owning my mistakes when they hurt others and calling others out when their mistakes hurt me.  Her guidance gave me the courage to confront someone powerful whose mistakes hurt me, and she also confronted me with the utmost dignity when I made a mistake that hurt her.  In the past year, I shared her wisdom in this area with my daughter who used it to confront someone powerful, too, which was transformative for her as a child and for myself as a parent.  These occasions caused me and others to grow exponentially.

Before I go further into my relationship with Mary, I’d like to share a bit about who she was. When I was in grad school, I had an assignment to interview someone older than me and write their life story in the context of the stages of adult development, so I interviewed Mary.  Before talking about her adult life, she wanted me to know about an experience she had at age thirteen, because it colored her approach to life from then on.  At thirteen, she and her family moved to Israel for a year from Ohio, and up to that point, she’d lived her life as a “midwestern girl.”  While in Israel, she was exposed to a large diversity of people and experiences.  She gave the example that Israeli girl scouts were learning to shoot guns while girl scouts in the U.S. were selling cookies door to door.  She said that this exposure to other cultures caused her to see that everything is relative, and that in an unfamiliar environment, she was forced to define who she was from the inside, because conformity was not an option for her.  This internal frame of reference, like a good GPS, guided her and remained powerful throughout her entire life.  Mary taught me how to find and trust my own internal GPS after years of looking outside of myself for one.

Mary often expressed astonishment at the insights I already had in my twenties about life, as messy as mine was at the time, and I always told her that I wouldn’t know those things had she not bushwhacked a path for me and my peers when she was in her twenties and thirties. Mary’s twenties and thirties spanned the 1960s and 70s while mine spanned the 1990s and 2000s.  She started her twenties not expecting to have a career and believing that she was meant to be “a hostess to a man” (her words), and that is how things started out, but definitely not how things ended.  Because of Mary’s and others’ experiences before me, I started out my twenties unrushed, expecting that I could choose any career I wanted when I felt like it, if I felt like it, and that I did not need a man to define me.  During her twenties, Mary started on the expected trajectory of her time, but life redirected her, and her response to the redirection helped to knock down all those limited expectations of women so that by the time I got there, the options were way more diverse.  She was a frontrunner in the movement of women shattering these limited expectations, which gave me the freedom to use my twenties as a time of emotional healing and exploration, an insightful time that she did not get to have when she’d been my age.  She met me during a period of her life when she was free to explore the same creative things that I was exploring.  I always saw her as my teacher, but when I told her this while she was dying, she said she felt the same way about me as I did about her, and called us “soul peers.”  She treated me as an equal, which meant the world to me because I had and still have so much admiration for her.

Mary started out her twenties married, and joyously had sons whom she adored.  She loved parenting.  She then become the first divorced single parent that she knew of, during a time when there were no support groups, articles or books on the subject.  Then she became a remarried parent in a blended family during a time when the subject of stepfamilies was considered “too avant-garde” to even be written about seriously.  She also stumbled upon her career of counseling after trying her hand at teaching and publishing and even selling rings at a flea market in San Francisco when money was tight.  But when I say “trying her hand,” I do not mean a little dabble here and there: when she was teaching, she founded the first integrated cooperative nursery school in San Francisco; while selling rings for the short time she did, she was grateful rather than resentful for the exposure this gave her to people from an income bracket she’d not been exposed to before.  All this diverse exposure primed her to become the great therapist that she was.

When she finally found counseling as her career, she embraced it and loved it deeply.  She showed me that it is truly possible for a woman to not only succeed professionally, but do so in a career that feeds her emotionally.  While I knew this in theory,  Mary showed me this in true life.  The fact that she could find this for herself when she started out not even knowing such possibilities existed for her still blows my mind.  When she hit what seemed like nothing, whether it was a lack of integration in nursery schools, or zero information on stepfamilies or what have you, she created something, then taught it to others.  It’s like she started her early adulthood looking at the Tardis from the outside, happily expecting to reside and occupy a phone-box-sized existence, then found herself delighted, scared and surprised to discover that, upon opening up the door, she’d stumbled into an infinite vastness of possibility.  Between her twenties and mine, the door that she helped open never closed for women, and I entered my early adulthood taking that vastness for granted as mine to explore.

Even as Mary was discovering and developing her career, she also developed and deepened her relationship with her second husband, Rob, while growing and nurturing their family together.  Mary and Rob were an example to me of what an honest, real relationship between equals looks like. When I met them, I hadn’t seen many truthful relationships in which both partners were simply themselves with each other, warts and all.  I had no idea it was possible. They were very open and welcomed me into their home for dinners and holidays, treating me as one of their own family.  To be a mostly single, childless woman in my twenties and to be brought into the life of older people with a real family was inspiring and enlightening. I got an inside view of life that most of my peers didn’t get to see, since we all were just hanging out with people whose lives were just like ours: young, exploring, no kids.  I credit Mary and her family for giving me a good frame of reference for what to look for in a partner, and how real humans parent.  I knew I wanted a more satisfying relationship than the ones I was in and out of at the time, but I didn’t have a great example of what was out there for me to look for until then.  Mary and Rob’s example helped me to strive for the honesty and equality that shone through their relationship.  Because I had a good model of what real looks like in a relationship, I recognized it when I met my husband.  And we parent like real humans.

In addition to teaching about good relationships by example, Mary also taught me directly.  In fact, the terrible relationship I was in when I met Mary was the catalyst that flipped our teacher/student roles over.  Mary came for a bookbinding lesson right after I’d ended an emotionally fraught phone conversation with my then boyfriend.  I had not wiped off the emotional residue from that call when she walked in.  I made a brave attempt to teach whatever I was teaching her that day, when to my complete embarrassment, I burst into tears. Unfazed, Mary jumped right into the teacher role, assessed the situation and then come up with an intervention immediately.  Not once did she behave as if it was weird that her bookbinding teacher melted down into a puddle right before her eyes.  In fact, she acted like it was the most normal thing in the world, which did wonders for preserving my dignity.  When I was calm enough to listen to logic, she asked me, “Elyn, have you ever asked yourself what you want in a relationship?  I want you to write down your 10 requirements for a healthy relationship.” It wasn’t enough to write them down, she coached me to describe the actions and qualities of a partner who would fulfill those requirements.  I’d never before thought of myself as someone allowed to have actual, tangible standards.   Prior to that moment, the confusing advice I’d gotten from friends who didn’t know any more than I did was along the lines of, “Dump the lemon,” “You should be with a man who worships you,” and “You deserve better.”  None of this was as clear and sensible as Mary’s advice.  In that moment, we both consciously agreed that we wanted to have a friendship with each other that went deep: I wanted a mentor and Mary wanted to be one.  That day, we set the intention to do so.

Our friendship was active for the rest of my twenties and into my thirties, and there were so many lessons that Mary taught me, which I hope to describe in more detail in further blog posts.  When I became a mother myself, my second child had many medical issues over a period of several years and I became quite myopic and absorbed in this world.  Mary and I fell out of physical touch, but her lessons and influence caused me to think of her as if she were present.  She too, confronted one of her children’s medical issues in early parenthood.  I drew upon what she shared about her experiences to help me through ours.  As I mentioned before, I used her wisdom to coach my daughter through her own struggles with confronting a person in power.  My clients hear Mary quotes on a regular basis.  My husband knows deeply just how much Mary’s influence played into me being able to recognize him as the person who I could have such a real and truthful relationship with.  Even the seemingly insignificant things Mary introduced me to bring me joy.  The first time I made marinara from garden tomatoes, it was seemingly a disaster and I was about to chuck the whole thing, but I called Mary and she made the correct guess about what I needed to do (just be patient and wait until you’ve cooked down all the extra liquid), and the result blew my mind.  I think of her every time I make marinara from fresh tomatoes.  I’m also eternally grateful that she taught me how to make olive tapenade, and I hold dear the memory of the moment she introduced me to Cambozola cheese with the most excitement I’d ever seen anyone show about cheese or any food.  Mary’s infectious enthusiasm did not discriminate: the big things and the little things that she loved all lit her up with the same amount of joy.

As I struggle to wind this blog post up, or to go back and make it more linear or well-packaged, I realize that this might have to go out into the world in its imperfect form. I can’t tie this up in a neat bow because I don’t want this to be a one-sided treatise on Mary or Anyone Great.  I would like this to be the beginning of a conversation.  I also hope to write more posts about the lessons Mary taught me.  I truly believe that if we can share our memories of those special ones that have died, we keep something of them alive.  I want to leave this open enough that if anyone reading this wants to share about Mary or about their own Someone Great in the comments, you can.  Whether you can think of Someone Great or just someone who left you with a Great Moment, please feel free to write about it here.  Maybe they changed your whole life, or just introduced you to some incredible cheese, but something they did mattered enough to lodge itself in your memory.  I hope you can share it here.  Now, if you are thinking of someone who is still alive, don’t just share here, go tell them all about their impact.  Don’t wait too long!

 

Own It, Feel It, and Heal It

I like to go walking with my friend who has a dog. We hike on a trail that allows dogs off leash after a certain point, and so we meet tons of off leash dogs on these hikes.  It is off leash dog central.  Usually, we can tell which dogs don’t want to interact with my friend’s dog, and sometimes people tell us that their dog has had prior bad experiences. Recently, something very different happened. A man showed up at the trailhead at the same time as us, and commanded my friend to keep her dog on a leash. She responded that she would do so until the unleashing area. He then demanded that she keep her dog back while he got ahead on the trail, and off he stalked. His hostile manner was off-putting.  Later, as we hiked, we encountered him again. He was coming back down, and from a great distance, he yelled at my friend to leash her dog. Now, this was in the area where dogs are permitted to be off leash, but she leashed her dog at his request. Then he commanded that she step to the far side of the path from him, which she did. As he got closer, he said in an angry voice, “My dogs have been attacked, badly.” I’ve had a similar experience, myself, so I said to him, “Maybe you could lead with that before telling people what to do. Then we would understand.” My friend added something about how these hikes should be enjoyable, not stressful. He refused to look at us, and marched off angrily without acknowledging that we’d spoken to him.  This man did not want understanding; by coming here, he was looking for something else.

My first thought was that, while I don’t subscribe to the belief that we create our own reality, I do believe that we create our own interpersonal dynamics. This man was creating a hostile environment all around him. I assume that he treated all of the many off leash dog owners on the trail in the same manner that he treated us: expecting all of us to obey his commands while treating all dogs and dog owners as if they were culpable for one dog’s behavior from his past. Instead of walking his leashed, traumatized dogs somewhere where dogs are not allowed off leash, he went to the most high traffic place for dogs who are allowed to go off leash and then expected people to put leashes on their dogs to accommodate him.  There was something provocative in this man’s manner that had me thinking.  It seemed as if he was seeking out a negative experience by coming to this place and ordering people around from the moment he started his hike.

Years ago, my husband and I had a troubled dog who always needed to be leashed when out on walks, and who panicked when an unleashed dog or a fast-moving human approached us.  We never considered taking her any place frequented by off leash dogs.  It would have been hell. What I witnessed in this man was a self-created hell that he spread around to others under the guise of protecting his dogs.  In reality, he was exposing his dogs to a traumatic environment so that he could take his rage out on others under the official mantle of defending his dogs. The likelihood of him recreating the original situation he was claiming to try avoid was high.  Nobody on that trail is required to leash their dogs, and at some point he will cross someone who will refuse to obey his surly commands.

Sometimes people get attached to their hell, and rather than doing the painful work of feeling it and healing it, they throw it around at people, hoping to see their inner hell reflected on the faces of the people around them.  This man reminded me of people who do this. On my own journey, I have been like this man, and perhaps you have too.  One sign that you are creating your own hell and throwing it around is that you find yourself in the same situation over and over again, whether with an abusive boss, a certain kind of friend, or a romantic partner.  You’ll generally be able to find a recurrent “them” theme in these situations that makes you feel a certain way.  Using the example of this man on the trail, I imagine that he sees himself as the only one out there who keeps his dogs on leash and the trail is a dangerous place where everyone else feels like an out of control threat to his victimized dogs; a threat that he alone needs to control by shouting out his demands.

So, what can you do if you discover that you are throwing your hell at others rather than feeling and healing it?  The first step is opening to the possibility that what you believe about others might not be the whole truth.  It is one thing to have a bad experience with one person, or even a few, but if it seems like everybody is wrong, you might be not be perceiving the situation correctly.  Next, identify the theme that comes with every situation that creates the hellish feeling, every situation that triggers you to strike out at others.  Let’s say the angry dog walker hits the theme that everyone out there is out of control, disrespectful, unruly, unsafe and he has to make them behave to protect his dogs.  With help, he can learn to sit with those out of control feelings, and learn to tolerate actually feeling them rather than throwing them away.  This kind of owning is not a simple or easy process and I don’t recommend going it alone, but with guidance and support, the feeling will lead to the healing.  That need to control others dissipates when you realize that those others aren’t the source of your unsafe feelings.  When you find the source, you are in control of the fix.

 

Siblings in an Abusive Family

One day, my husband and I were snuggling on the couch. Something smelled awful, and I confess that I assumed it was him. Much later in the day, I discovered a dead mouse on the floor right under the couch where he’d been sitting. I’d attributed the stench of mouse corpse to my husband, and he had every reason to assume that it was actually me causing the stench.

This stench-blaming is similar to what can happen among siblings who grow up together in an abusive household. The abuser is like a person who has been carrying around a stinking dead corpse because his or her parent(s) handed it to them, because their parents handed it to them, and so on. It’s just what’s been done for generations. Now the person with the corpse hands it down to their children. It stinks. At first, the children might know that the parent brought the stink, but any child who confronts an abusive parent is going to get smacked down, have the blame turned on them, or meet up with complete denial that there is anything but the most lovely of fragrances in the room.

The problem of the stink remains, so now the choices are: blame yourself or blame someone else other than the abusive parent. Some children blame themselves, some blame their siblings. Now where there could have been a supportive relationship, there is animosity. There are countless combinations that can occur and here is a sampling: one child who blames him or herself and tries to fix the problem might have one or more siblings who also blame him or her. Any number of siblings might blame each other. Sometimes the abuser picks a sibling to side with in blaming another sibling; sometimes that same parent switches sides. Everyone has their own theory about what is causing the stink and everyone has their own idea of how to deal with it. Meanwhile the person who brought the stink gets none of the blame, and is likely to exploit the conflicts among the family members, to throw everyone off from the source of the scent and to keep the siblings from forming any sort of coalition.

The abuse continues, the stink remains, the infighting solves nothing but makes everyone feel like they are doing something.  Everyone takes a role in the family dynamic.  Each child leaves the household and enters adulthood with a template for relationships based on the relationship dynamics they had not only with their parents but also with their siblings.  (There are templates from beyond the family, too, but today I am focusing on siblings). Your relationships with friends, roommates, coworkers, lovers are all shaped by the sibling template. And whenever something arises in your relationships that resembles the stink, you follow the template, especially if there is a power dynamic involved.  Maybe you work in an inequitable workplace with a boss who is not compensating people fairly. If you have your sibling template in place, you might feel hostility festering in the direction of a coworker rather than toward the unfair boss.  Perhaps you are vying with another for your own lover’s attention.  Your sibling template will have you put your focus on the competition while not seeing your lover exploiting the conflict between you and the person vying for your lover.  Maybe you have a best friend who keeps letting you down, but who you keep trusting.  Perhaps you are involved in a hazing ritual with “brothers” or “sisters” who violate you.  Whatever the form, a sibling template will drive relationships until it can be brought to the light of your consciousness, and many of these relationships, since they resemble family, feel like relationships you cannot leave no matter what.

Once you focus beyond the fact that you were on the receiving end of abuse from your parent, and you start to also examine your sibling relationships, things gets murkier. Your sibling(s) might have done some awful things to you, but it is also possible that you did some awful things to them.  This can be hard to admit.  It is also likely that you survived your abusive household by nurturing the belief that you were the victim and your sibling was on the side of the perpetrator; you might have grown to believe that you were the good child and another sibling was the bad one; it’s possible you expressed all the rage of the household while another sibling demonstrated all the emotional control. It can be difficult to admit that your sibling(s) were also being abused, and that what they did to you was not the source of the stink, but the result of the stink. This doesn’t mean your sibling is not accountable for their actions, or you for yours.  It does open up a more complex conversation that moves beyond the binary one where one side holds all the blame and the other all the victimhood.   Once you get to this understanding, you can start doing some good work in your relationships whether with your sibling or with anyone whose relationship with you was formed by the sibling template.

While I would like to end this post by wrapping it up in a neat package of suggestions as to how to start the healing work, I am instead leaving it open-ended, with questions to consider for yourself or discuss in the comments section.  If you had sibling(s) and trauma or abuse in your family, what is your relationship with your sibling(s) like today?  Do you have a sibling template that forms and informs your relationships?  What does it look like? In what arena do you have the most trouble with your sibling template?  Is it at work?  Team sports?  Friends of the same gender or different gender?  People in your cultural group? People in another cultural group? If you have children, how do you react when they are in conflict with friends and/or siblings or even with you?  Feel free to explore and share your answers here!

Reclaiming and Embracing Your True Self

Recently, I witnessed the start of a dog fight that turned into a human fight. A large dog and a small dog met each other on a busy sidewalk. The large dog aggressively jumped on and pinned the small dog who was terrified, as were its owners.  After the dogs’ owners separated them, they started to yell at each other.  Instead of apologizing, the owner of the large dog yelled angrily that her dog is the friendliest dog in the world and has never bitten anyone, ever.  She could not accept that her dog was the aggressor in this situation, because that went against her perception of her dog as friendly, so she lashed out at the people who reacted to her dog as unfriendly.  They were like the mirror telling the evil stepmother that she wasn’t the fairest of them all, so she attacked them for holding up the mirror.

In a similar way, many people are blind to the parts of themselves that don’t fit their idea of who they are.  The more attached a person gets to being a certain type of human, the more threatening any evidence to the contrary can feel.  A person who is overly attached to the idea that they are kind might lash out at someone who tells them that their behavior has been hurtful.  Someone who sees themselves as the smartest one in the room feels threatened when someone points out their lack of knowledge on a subject they believe they are the expert on.  A person whose morals are their identity can’t accept the possibility that their behavior or urges are less than moral.

The more a person is attached to an identity based on a value, the more threatened they feel when someone holds up the mirror that reflects that they also embody the opposite of that value and everything in between.  Like the woman with the “friendly” dog, they might lash out.  The “kind” person might attack someone who has pointed out their hurtful behavior: making excuses, blaming the person who they’ve hurt, or saying something along the lines of “I’m a good person.”  The person who identifies as smart might attack their perceived opponent’s intelligence, or double-down in defending a false premise, just to win the argument so that their self-image stays intact.  The person who identifies with their morals might change the subject or blame the person they’ve sinned against, while their own behavior becomes more unconscious and extreme.

All of this might seem obvious to someone whose own sense of self is intact and who doesn’t rely on someone outside of themselves for validation of their identity.  To a child, a person like this is dangerous, whether it is a parent, adult relative, teacher, religious leader, babysitter, or any adult they look to for guidance.  Imagine the dog owner who is so attached to the idea that her dog is harmless and friendly that she ignores any behavior that doesn’t fit this image.  She lashes out at anyone who points out her dog’s aggressive tendencies, and the aggression goes unchecked because she refuses to see it.  Now, imagine that a small child comes rushing up to pet this “friendly” dog, who is startled by the child and attacks.  The child gets injured, and this dog’s owner, who still can’t accept that her dog is aggressive, lashes out and blames the child for running up to her dog.  Not only is this child bleeding and in pain, but is now being told that they brought this injury onto themselves and that they should be ashamed for forcing this friendly dog to bite them.

Now picture a person who is attached to their own image in this extreme way, and imagine what happens when a child enter their lives.  They’ve already lashed out at and cut off the adults who’ve pointed out their blind spots, so the behaviors they are blind to continue to run rampant and unchecked.  What happens if someone like this becomes a parent,  teacher, religious leader, or any sort of caregiver to children?  Children don’t begin life swallowing their feelings or ignoring injustices or pretending that something that is true is false.  They come into this world as raw creatures holding big, bullshit-free mirrors.  To the person who has been manipulating the outside world to reflect to them what they want to believe about themselves, a child’s true self feels like a dangerous threat.  Instead of accepting that child’s raw truth, this person is going to attack that child any time their truthful self holds up the mirror.  The “kind” parent blames their child for any unkind behavior this child complains about; the “smart” teacher humiliates the child who points out their error; the “moral” leader condemns the child who triggers their immoral urges that they can’t accept as their own.  The child in all these scenarios learns that their pain is their own fault, that being their true self is dangerous, so then they warp themselves into whoever their adult figures need them to be.  This child might grow up so attached to their own warped self-image that got them through childhood intact, that they now lash out at anyone who threatens that image, and the vicious cycle continues.

Anyone who grew up in this way learned that being their true self was dangerous or threatening to an adult in charge.  If this sounds like you, then you learned to bury your true self to suit the needs of the grown-ups’ fragile self-images.  This woman with the dog might have survived childhood by being the friendly girl who wouldn’t hurt a fly, and now she’s broadened this self-image to include her dog.  Maybe you are the person who demeans people as unintelligent because you were taught that being smart was more important than being loved.  Perhaps you are the person who can’t accept that you have urges that go against your morals, and maybe you were violated by someone who blamed you when they acted on you with their own urges they were blind to.  As an adult, you can break the cycle.

The first step in breaking the cycle is to become aware that you are trapped in a cycle to begin with.  You might notice that many of your relationships seem to end in the same way, because something in yourself feels unchangeable.  You might notice that you viciously judge certain behaviors in others that you can’t imagine doing yourself.  It’s possible that you know exactly what it is you were expected to be as a child but you just can’t seem to muster up the courage to be anything else.  This awareness is the beginning.  Know that changing this pattern might be terrifying, and understand that you can’t do this work alone.  Start to build your resources before you dive in.  A good therapist whose self-image is intact is worth their weight in gold.  Friends and or family who accept themselves, warts and all, are vital allies because they are more likely to accept your warts, too.  Support groups and communities built around common healthy interests can be incredible.  Literature is abundant in this topic, so reading up can shed immense light on the work you do to heal.  Keeping a journal that no one can see helps you express unadulterated thoughts and explore parts of yourself without the threat of judgment or punishment.  Add these all together and you are ready to escape the cycle that keeps you locked in place, and begin to walk the path to freedom.

Do You Really Have to Love Yourself in Order to Be Loved?

In my twenties, I was involved in an off-again, on-again relationship that I am certain made all who witnessed it feel bewildered and frustrated with me. This person and I broke up and got back together so many times over a period of three and a half years, I lost count. One day, I was finally done and I officially broke off the relationship, for real this time. I am not proud of this, but knowing that this decision was not mutual and was causing unhappiness, I heard myself saying, “Years from now you’ll look back on this and see that this was good for you, too,” or something like that. I wanted to break up and be told by the person I dumped that I was a good person doing a good thing. I wanted to be thanked for ending the relationship, and I didn’t quite want to let go of their good opinion. Not surprisingly, my ex-to-be was not on board with this idea. The response was something along the lines of “I can’t see any scenario where this is a good thing.” A year, even a day prior to that moment, that response would have crumbled my resolve and I would not have followed through with the break up. This time, things were different. I now had something in me that had previously been missing; something that helped me know I could survive this person’s disappointment in me, even if it turned into hatred.

I didn’t know this at the time, but that day I ended something bigger than an unhealthy, unworkable relationship. I broke something else that had power over me until that moment: I broke my need to be seen as good and lovable by someone other than myself. During the three and a half years of break up and make up, I had slowly been learning to love myself, to accept myself as good from the inside. I didn’t start this relationship with that self-love, with that acceptance. The day the relationship began was the first day anyone I adored had ever looked at me with equal adoration, and then said that they wanted to be with me. I was so hungry for that feeling of adoration, that I was hooked from that very moment, and willing to overlook just about everything else including the fact that we were incompatible, we didn’t have enough in common to even connect as friends, and that we wanted entirely different things in a relationship. I wanted that feeling of love and acceptance and adoration that I felt in that first moment, and I spent the next few years trying to recreate that feeling.

In the frustration and pain that I felt in this relationship, I reached out for help, thinking I might learn to make this relationship work. I went to therapy. My lover had addiction issues, so I went to Al-anon to seek help from people who also were in relationships with addicts. I reached out to and leaned on friends, some of which had all sorts of impressive patience with my relationship and all the break ups. I joined a spiritual community. I journaled constantly, pouring my frustrations and pain into journal after journal. Over time, my therapist’s nonjudgmental acceptance of me made me start to accept myself. From Al-anon meetings, I felt connected with people who shared in similar frustrations and helped me feel that I was not crazy or alone. My friends’ support taught me that I was lovable no matter how many stupid choices I made. My spiritual community showed me that, by pursuing this relationship, I was trying to fill a hole that no human can fill for another. In my journals, I saw that I had my own wisdom, that my own counsel was valuable, too. All of this accumulated slowly into something solid. One day, it hit me that I loved myself. It also hit me that I enjoyed my own company. I didn’t march out and break up with this person that day; I tried to make the relationship work for probably another year. Over time, I saw the lack of connection, respect, and love in the relationship was in such sharp contrast to the connection, respect, and love I had for myself and my community had for me. It was no longer tolerable, and when I didn’t get thanked or adored for ending the relationship, but left anyway, that need for adoration no longer controlled me, even if it did tug at me a little bit.

So, where am I going with this story? It’s pretty common to hear that you can’t be loved by another unless you love yourself, as if you get a relationship as a prize for loving yourself. What I’ve experienced and what I’ve seen is that you can be in a relationship whether you love or respect yourself or not. You can even be loved deeply by someone whether you love or respect yourself or not. But if you depend on someone else to make you feel lovable and wanted, then love always seems to be in the hands of that person, which gives them great power over you. If instead, you already love and respect yourself, then you walk into love with another and the love itself is the fertile ground you stand on and get nourishment from together: always solid, always available, even after the person you love is gone.

Leaving the Rut of the Familiar and the Comfortable

A little over a year ago, I stepped out of a rut that I didn’t realize I was in to begin with. I am only now seeing it for what it was, and I am not sure I have a name for the rut yet. What pushed me to take this step was the US presidential election. I started with a a strong feeling that social media contributed to the mess that the United States had gotten into.  It felt to me that polarized citizens were talking about each other in front of each other in that hateful way that social media allows for. Without eye contact, without physical presence, the dialogue becomes dehumanized, often disrespectful and sometimes outright violent. I wanted no part of it anymore. I wanted to connect with fellow humans in a real way, not in a virtual way, and not just the humans who think like me or look like me. I wanted to connect, even in the smallest way, with everyone I came across.

I started small on the day after the election. I decided to make eye contact with everyone I saw while I was out and about. This was not easy that day, because like so many of my like-minded friends, I felt shattered. As I was walking down my street, I saw a man who I made assumptions about, based on how he was dressed, what his car looked like, the music he was playing from his car, and so on. My assumption was that he’d voted for Trump and was about to gloat after sizing me up the way I’d sized him up. What happened instead took me by surprise. He looked tenderly into my eyes and asked gently, “How are you doing?” I felt as if he actually cared about my well-being. All discombobulated, I said, “I’m okay,” and walked on. Things weren’t what I’d assumed, no matter who this man had voted for, and this changed things for me. In that moment, this stranger and I had unexpectedly connected to each other with our humanity.

Since that day, I continue to try to make eye contact with everyone, and that has led to conversations and new friendships with people who previously had never crossed my radar. In our community, there are many people who are from other countries around the world, and there are many native Spanish speakers who have to work a lot harder than me to have a conversation in English. I’d love to learn all the languages, but I decided to try to learn Spanish. In doing so, the rut that I spoke of earlier was revealed even more. Learning a new language as an adult is painfully difficult for me. Trying to speak that new language with another person is even more so. As a native English speaker, I have never been anywhere where people don’t speak at least a little bit of English, so I never had to try to get by in a different language. I grew up learning German, but as a child when I went to visit my mom’s tiny farm town in Germany, everyone wanted to practice their English. As an adult I’ve been to a few other countries, and everyone in those countries has spoken enough English for me not to have to push past my language comfort zone. Yet here in the US, the people I’ve met from other countries have to constantly try to speak a second language in order to do anything.

While it has been a convenient privilege for me to navigate in a world that caters to my language and culture, this convenience has deepened the rut I’m talking about. This rut keeps me locked in the familiar, and keeps me from pushing myself to connect with others in a deep and satisfying way. My rut was comfortable and functional, but I could not stretch past its confines, nor could I truly see anyone but the others who are in the same rut. To step out of this rut is to go into a vast, unfamiliar world full of new people, new rules, and endless potential.  It is to see a world that was once two-dimensional transform into one that is multi-dimensional. It isn’t familiar and in order to navigate this new world, I have to be willing to have my ignorance and blind spots revealed. Sometimes, I look and feel silly when I try to speak Spanish, or try to connect with anyone who is much different than who I used to connect with. I am sure I sound like a two year old. I know that in my attempts to reach out, I might say things that seem inappropriate, or sound stupid. I am sure that my ignorance, once hidden in my own depths, has bubbled up to the surface for all to see. It is a vulnerable place to be. But I feel something like muscles developing every time I try to go beyond what I know. I also feel a thrill when what was once invisible to me becomes visible and visceral. When I connect with others’ humanity, there is a shared sense of joy and understanding that is released into a world that desperately needs it.

What this has led to is a deep feeling that I know very little of all that there is to know, and an equally deep hunger to learn and learn more, to connect more and more. It has been difficult to think of what to write about on this blog, because up until now, I have written here as if I know something and that I am here to share that knowledge. I am no longer comfortable writing in this way. We all have pieces of a puzzle, and every single one of us has something to share. I wish that social media always reflected this, because there is great potential for it to be a place where everyone could share their perspective and build a true picture of the world, revealing to each of us just what it is we can still learn. Instead, for me anyway, social media tended to keep me in a rut where it felt like I was connecting with others, but in reality I was not stretching myself or even connecting because the others I was connecting with all had the same views as I did, spoken in my language.

If I continue to write on this blog, it will be more as an exploration. If I still have any readers, I invite all of you to share in the comment section whatever this or any post inspires, what your perspective is, even if it is in opposition to, or very different from mine.  For this particular post, I have questions.  What is your rut that keeps you from stretching past what you know? What keeps you in that rut? What is it like in your rut?  What do you imagine is beyond it? What keeps you from connecting to others who might help you out of the rut?  For those of you who have gotten out of a rut of any sort, what did you do to get out of it? What did you discover when you got out of your comfort zone? What was it like for the world to see you trying to learn something you did not know? While the rut I spoke of here involves connection and humanity, there are other ruts to dig out of and other ways to discover and reach full potential. It seems that if you pick just one, you activate the others. What do you choose?

Words Don’t Make the Whole Picture

We live in a world that values words over most other things, and many powerful moments get drowned in the constantly verbal torrent.  Sometimes, it’s hard to believe that there is any way to make an impact without using lots of words, and it is hard to understand the impact that can be had in wordless moments.  I hesitate to use the word “silence” here because wordless moments aren’t just silent moments.  They can be quite loud if we listen for something other than words.

This morning, the nonverbal part of me sent me out to the garden for no particular reason.  No words, I just felt a strong urge to go into the garden.  I was greeted with signs of life that I would have missed had I not slowed down enough to see them, had I not listened to that silent but powerful part of me.  Seeing the first sprouts of the seeds I’d planted made the back strain from digging a bed for them worth it, and I got very excited about the upcoming season of eating greens from the garden.  Seeing that the asparagus is coming back after a dry winter, I was filled with this feeling of wonder, as if something impossible is happening right before my eyes.  Smelling the violets filled me with this sense of luxury.  These tiny little weed flowers pack a massive, deep scent.  They taste good, too!  Hearing the birds chattering and chirping gave me a feeling that there is a ton of life all around me. I was in the garden for a total of maybe 10 minutes, and all of these things happened without a single word being spoken.

I would like to invite you to join me in a challenge. Take a moment (or more) of your day when you would normally gratuitously talk or look at a screen or anything with words, and stop.  Ask yourself if words are necessary in that moment.  If you are with someone, invite them to join you in this challenge.  Agree not to speak for a designated amount of time.  Allow yourself to take in the wordless things or beings around you and just be with them. Notice how they make their presence known to you and allow them to impact you. Notice your mind trying to put words on them and let that go. See how this makes you feel.  Are you restless?  Bored?  Feeling under assault by a torrent of word thoughts?  People who aren’t talkers feel this way much of the time.  Even if you are able to give attention to the wordless for just a short second, you have changed something.  Keep practicing this, and you will open up a new world in small, powerful increments.

violets in hand asparagus

The Difference Between Hard Work and Struggle in Relationship

I was once involved with someone who was quite lovely, and who wanted a much different sort of relationship than I did.  Our conflicting desires made the relationship unsustainable and rather painful. Unfortunately, we did not communicate to each other what we wanted our relationship to be until we were both too deeply hooked by the usual things that lure people into relationships, including doomed ones: attraction, sex, fireworks, and big feelings. If we’d spoken about our opposing relationship intentions from the beginning, it might have ended there. We were too attracted to each other to take the risk of losing a chance to be together, so we dove in without saying anything to each other about it.  The sex and fireworks acted as a sort of crazy glue, bonding us two unlikely beings quite firmly together. Once we both were hooked, some truths came out about our completely mismatched intentions in the relationship, but by then, neither of us wanted to let go. It felt like there was too much to lose at this point, so we forged on in this struggle to keep each other.

Eventually, I realized that the struggle was the only thing we had together. There was no real relationship, just that struggle. I remember having a picture in my mind of the two of us trying to carry a heavy treasure chest, each holding one handle and not getting anywhere because we were pulling it in different directions. I pictured one of us trying to carry it downhill toward a path to the ocean, and one of us trying to take it uphill toward the path to a mountain peak.  We couldn’t even get that chest onto either path and we were stuck in the crossroads pulling opposite sides of it, then getting hurt from the struggle; talking about how we felt hurt; discussing strategies that did not factor in the fact that we were going in opposite directions; trying again and getting stuck in that same cycle, over and over again.  I had to admit to myself that I could not move any treasure chest with this particular person, ever, and I had to leave the relationship behind in order to take the path I wanted to take.

That experience gave me a visceral understanding of the difference between struggle and hard work in relationships. A struggle is all-consuming and even feels like hard work, but it is work that takes you nowhere. You bust your ass, but you have no impact. In a struggle, you are controlled by that which you are struggling with. If you are struggling financially, your life is controlled by money, the lack thereof and the means you have to use to try make money. If you are struggling physically with someone who is much stronger than you, you are controlled by that person. If you are struggling with your unsatisfying job, your life feels controlled by that job. If you are struggling with a difficult relationship, you feel controlled by that relationship. When something is controlling you, you have little to no energy, space, bandwidth for anything else. That thing is the main focus of your reality, yet you have no real impact on it. That is what it is like to struggle.

In a good relationship, hard work feels different than struggle does.  A healthy relationship takes hard work, but it does not consume and control your life. A healthy relationship requires you and yours to understand that you can survive the loss of that relationship; that you do not need that relationship in order to survive. When you know this deeply, you are free to state your intention at the beginning of the relationship, knowing that you and who you are interested in are both free to walk away if your intentions are incompatible.  If you decide to build a relationship together, you know that you share common goals and that nobody is sacrificing their values or freedom to be in this relationship, and you start out carrying the relationship on an agreed path. You are choosing each other rather than falling into each other. This feels dignified rather than desperate. Your hard work has an impact. Your hard work gets you somewhere, because you are working together on something that you agreed to work on.  You are on the same page; you are not at odds with each other.  When you disagree about things, you aren’t disagreeing about the entire focus and direction of the relationship.

If you would like to leave the struggle and get to the hard work in a relationship, you are going to have to make changes that might feel scary.  First, you need to find out if this is a relationship that can be fixed: do you have common goals but are just having a hard time figuring out how to work together?  If this is the case, then a good relationship counselor might be able to help you find out how to let go of the struggle and focus on the work.  The work will have you looking at what draws you to the struggle in the relationship and how can you change your focus from the struggle to the hard work.  If on the other hand, you discover that you are in a relationship that can’t be salvaged, you will be focused on ending the relationship.  Your work will have you examining what draws you to a relationship that consumes you but that you can’t have an impact on.  Your work will have you exploring what impact you do want to have.  Once you untangle yourself from the struggle, you will be free to use your energy and hard work to build a satisfying life, with or without a partner.  The hard work is always worth it.

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