“You are telling the truth.” A long pause. Then, spoken again, “You are telling the truth.”
My hand signals stop. My arm pushes away the message. “No,” I say aloud. I am startled by the certainty of my response. I was, after all, the one who identified these were precisely the words I longed to hear.
We are encouraged to stay in our bodies for this exercise, but my mind is racing and several memories surface:
I’m in South Texas with my paternal grandmother, maybe five years old. We are at a restaurant, and my father is teasing me about something. I start to cry. My grandmother tells me to lighten up. “He’s just joking.”
I leap ahead to my teen years, when I choose to take a social studies class focused on race and prejudice in the very conservative high school I begged to leave as a 16 year old. Maybe it’s then or when I’m in college, and first exposed to the writings of Karl Marx, Malcolm X, and Rigoberta Menchu, that I am called Commie Connie. I laugh at this label still. And yet…
I remember being a freshman in the fraternity house bedroom of an upperclass athlete at Stanford University. He demands that I make him orgasm. I refuse. He calls me a tease. With my hand on the doorknob, I tell him, “Call me when you start thinking with your other head.” Trembling, I flee. A partial victory at best as I feel that same trembling in my body years later, when Brock Turner makes the news and, soon after, Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing hits the airwaves.
A memory of coming out as queer in graduate school emerges. I hear, “You always did want to be the under dog.”
As an assistant professor, I risk telling a senior faculty member that he didn’t hear me during a meeting; that he gave credit for an idea I expressed to a male participant. He denies any of this happening and accuses me of something—probably being a victim.
More recently, I express anger at the systemic mistreatment of marginalized community members in the university where I am working. My boss says equanimity is welcome, my anger is not.
All of these memories form a channel in my brain. Intellectually, I understand that when I dared to disagree with the authority figures in my life or passionately challenged oppression, I frequently was told I was too sensitive or that I was out of line. The truth I carry is, "You are too much.” But this is all so cognitive, and I’m in a training that emphasizes coming back into my body and feeling my emotions.
I look out the window and gaze at a giant oak tree. The therapist across from me asks if I can begin to take in the message, “You are telling the truth,” from the tree. I can begin to absorb this message from the natural world, but the idea of taking it in from another human being seems impossible. I am a therapist, a partner, a mother, and I do not trust that anyone believes me. I weep.
Since that training, I have been experimenting with wholeheartedly believing my own experience before allowing in the abundant doubt. As Krista Tippett would say, “What we practice we become.”
I’m beginning to feel—rather than think—that my heart can soften when I see myself and believe her. I notice how often my defensiveness is a response to not being believed. After enough of these experiences, defensiveness becomes a way of managing a non-affirming world. Additional behaviors that are a reaction to being disbelieved include digging in my heels and getting rigid about my point of view, exerting heaps of energy trying to prove I have a legitimate perspective, and trying to get others to share my opinion. Once again, I’m intellectualizing an excruciating experience and, in so doing, minimizing it.
Since that training, I have been more directly and clearly saying to my clients, “I believe you.” “You are sane.” “Of course you had that response.” Frequently, they push these words away, just as I did. Grief also swells.
One client poignantly names the emotional truth she learned in her earliest years that burdens her adult life: “For me to feel safe in a close relationship, I need to hide my difficult emotions and perform whatever the other person wants.”
Me, age 2.
Six weeks later, I am attending the next module of this training and another memory keeps poking through. Because I have been practicing believing myself, I trust that this one is core to the fear I feel whenever I risk vulnerability in the presence of another.
I am four or five years old. I am asked a question. I genuinely do not know the answer to it, so I reply, “I don’t know.” The grown up above me becomes enraged. I don’t know what to do. I keep saying, “I don’t know.” I feel trapped. Helpless. He whips out his belt. I do not know if the terror in my eyes makes him stop, but the belt does not touch my skin. For that overwhelmed child who feels so alone, a strategy and belief are simultaneously born: Know as much as you can but understand that even with that knowledge, you won’t be believed.
I risk letting that young child be seen by the same therapist in the previous experience mentioned above. She holds the trembling with me, and I can let it be seen by another for a few seconds. For the first time in my 44-year-old life, I feel the wisdom of that small child’s terror. I am ready to stop gaslighting myself and name that experience for what it was: relational trauma. With an appropriate name, compassion for the significant impact of that experience and others begins to seep in. Such relief in this mercy I finally can offer myself as well as a reckoning with the truth that allowing that small child to be seen by trusted others is central to the deep healing I so crave.
This week, Zoe Fenson published the following words about the Trump impeachment trial:
Many of us have been engaging with news media only glancingly; others have been diving in deep, coming up exhausted and enraged. It's so much, we say. I'm so tired…When women speak about our experiences, the burden of proof is on us; when we fail to adequately convince an audience already disposed to disbelieve us, we are called snakes. And meanwhile, the men who violate our bodies and dismiss our minds are ensconced in positions of power all across the land.
Yes. And I feel some hope. Here is why: What we practice we become.
As I practice believing myself and others, my capacity keeps expanding. My refusal to explain, defend, and justify my experience is also becoming more resolute. These fragile systems and egos around us are collapsing or are on the verge of collapse. I do not know when they will fall apart and frankly I am sick and tired of putting my energy into trying to figure out their next move. And I recognize for many, hyper-vigilance is a necessity, not a choice.
I realize terror and distrust have motivated so much of my action on the outside world. The difference between defense—an act of war—and protection—an act of love—is also clear. I have spent my life trying to restore safety by frantically (re)acting and have resisted being, with myself and others, to assess just how much defense is necessary in this moment, right here right now. So I am practicing yielding—sitting back and observing, with both curiosity and a chair supporting my back. This position is much less exhausting and is helping me see clearly which people and systems are ready, who have the capacity, to meet me where I am and collaborate. Those are precisely the individuals and organizations toward whom I want to turn my attention and energy. They will welcome and protect a diverse group of people rather than dismiss or retaliate against them. And yielding is much more possible for those of us not currently in the throes of trauma. Those children being separated from their parents at the border? Neither the parents nor the children can afford to yield.
While writing this post, I had an experience with my own daughter that also gives me some hope for the future. A boy at her preschool has repeatedly hit her, and my partner and I have been advocating for her as well as collaborating with the school staff and leadership. First, I made it clear to the director that we believe our child. If there are distortions to her story, we will explore them after she feels adequately seen, heard, and valued. We also are actively practicing with her how to respond when someone violates her body. My partner role played this scenario with her and encouraged her to yell, “No! Stop touching my body!” Already at four, her first response to this course of action is to think she will get in trouble if she yells. She also thinks she needs to add a “Thank you” to her “No.” And her white body means she’s generally granted a lot more leniency if she shouts or ignores other rules of respectability. We will keep supporting a deepening into the practice that her body is not an apology. Affirmative consent—“Yes means yes”—is the intention rather than merely “No means no.” What we practice we become.