When you understand every opinion is a vision loaded with personal history, you will start to understand that all judgment is a confession.
—Nikola Tesla
Recently I found myself back on the massage therapy table after an unfortunate glute strain (less formally known as a pulled butt cheek) during a fierce pickleball match. As the therapist explored what was happening in the rest of my body, he nearly exclaimed, “Do you feel that!?” He moved my hand to the place on my abdomen he had been touching. He continued, “Your psoas muscle is so engaged that if you were to do sit ups right now you’d likely injure yourself.” He next moved his hands up my back and invited me to feel how tight those muscles were, too. This very intuitive healer asserted, “It’s time to stop fighting for self-respect.” Damn.
This simple statement illuminated so much for me about my life to date. I historically have prided myself on being an advocate for those who are the most vulnerable, my clients, and those closest to me, especially my 7-year-old daughter. More recently, I have spent a lot of time and energy learning how to self-advocate. The two months preceding my injury, in particular, had involved intense, explicit boundary setting in some of my most intimate relationships.
The costs have been high to my body, as this advocacy has been enacted in a fighter’s stance—braced, constricted, and hyper-focused. With the massage therapist’s words, I realized I had not yet been able to embody surrender. He wisely reminded me that my body will let go when she feels safe enough to do so and not a moment beforehand. Alas, my numerous ways of applying effort were not going to make relaxation happen and, in fact, would send the opposite message to my nervous system, which most needed to hear: “It’s okay to be tight. That makes sense.”
Eventually, I want to be a person who does not try to make people see me. In particular, I want to give up the fight to be understood by those who regularly deal with their own internal strife by undermining and destabilizing me (aka gaslighting). If letting go on that massage table was not yet possible, I could still have the intention to let be whatever was happening in any given moment. My body was holding on to dear life for a reason, and I could validate that.
As we talked about recent life events during the rest of that massage therapy session, I remembered my favorite definition of dignity—our inherent value and worth—and wondered what conditions would allow me to rest in rather than fight for it. I also remembered the Tesla quote above, which stopped me in my tracks when I first read it.
My journey has taught me that what judgment often confesses is a perceived need to defend. Said differently, judgment acts as part of an intricate defense system, frequently developed in an earlier, scary environment. Judgment pushes right out of awareness that which we do not want to face. If I judge you as bad and wrong, I do not have to reflect on my own contribution to whatever has happened between us and, potentially, feel the shame there if I have caused you harm. I can spin a yarn of powerlessness that moves me away from self-responsibility and toward a constricted view of the universe as an always unfriendly place full of two-dimensional victims and offenders. If there’s one thing I regularly push against, it is a victim mindset. And if there is one thing I regularly have not allowed, it is the possibility that when someone I love projects an offender role onto me, they are inhabiting that victim stance.
Turns out, there is such a thing as healthy shame. It is true that we only need a drop of it, as this emotion, when not tied to past relational trauma, powerfully alerts us to when our behavior has threatened our belonging to a group and/or connection with others. As Chris Germer teaches, avoiding shame is the issue, not the shame itself. Shame wants to be addressed and transformed. If my behavior has hurt you, a speck of shame lets me know that repair is needed. I do not need to believe its stories, which are never true, that I am unworthy of love and respect. And, in fact, restoring connection and rebuilding trust through a skillful repair process challenges the shame-based story that I am bad. However, if someone has little to no investment in tuning in and turning toward their shame, avoiding it will very likely land us in the gaslighting scene described above, possibly with some DARVO sauce ladled on top (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender).
In contrast, if I turn that judgment on myself and determine I am bad and wrong, not only have I potentially internalized the harsh voices of those with whom I have been in relationship, but I also can avoid feeling the pain of how I have been inadequately loved in important relationships—an unfortunately familiar experience for many of us. That unprocessed pain, like healthy shame, has important lessons for us about dysfunctional relational patterns and can help us relearn how to be in relationships with ourselves and others that uplift more than they diminish us. For example, and as Eleni Stephanides so beautifully articulates, if we leave unexamined the pattern of seeking out emotionally unavailable people, “the breadcrumby path” to their hearts takes us far from the integrity of our own.
On that massage table, I realized my body had been fighting others’ judgments of me rather than detaching from their life histories and accompanying confessions. While a very young me was rightly terrified of feeling powerless since powerlessness was associated with physical and emotional danger in early childhood, my 47-year-old body was being invited to consider how embracing the powerlessness to change other people’s perceptions of and behaviors toward me—especially those who do not have the willingness to change those perceptions and behaviors—could be radically liberating.
As I have been actively decolonizing my mind from others’ judgments of me and unlearning the ways I have reinforced them via self-judgment, I have been imagining possibilities for my life that were previously hidden from view. So as not to bright-side this process, I also want to acknowledge that through it, I have come into contact with a lot of suppressed anger and unprocessed grief. If we have been buying hook, line, and sinker the stories told to us about ourselves by others, we very likely have not contacted the truth of our own experience. It is excruciating to face how small we have made ourselves to keep peace with an outside world that is threatened by our authentic selves. And infuriating.
Gabor Mate powerfully reminds us that without the ability to feel healthy anger—the kind that doesn’t hurt others or ourselves—we cannot have an effective boundary system. And without an effective boundary system protecting us from external toxicities, our bodies will say no in all kinds of ways. As he wrote, “Sometimes the biggest impetus to healing can come from jump-starting the immune system with a burst of long-suppressed anger.”
One of my favorite ways to express suppressed anger without aiming it at someone else or myself is to imagine the response of the adolescent part in me to whatever harmful thing happened or is currently happening. Since I’m a gen x’er, I envision her wearing a Violent Femmes t-shirt, jeans ripped at the knee, Doc Martens, and some sparkly coral eye shadow to boot. Since my imagination is not constrained by the actual chronology of events, she’s also listening to Taylor Swift’s “I Forgot That You Existed.” This teen is self-righteous and impulsively declares the brutal truth without considering how it might impact others. A practitioner of wise speech she is not. I encourage her to tell adult me all the things she is pissed about, and she is outraged about so much. When I listen—and believe her—I have yet to hear her inaccurately identify mistreatment or injustice. Her harsh methods of reacting to those harmful behaviors, however, are not what I want to support as someone who agrees with Pema Chodron when she says,
Honesty without kindness, humor, and goodheartedness can be just mean...pointing to our own hearts to discover what is true isn’t just a matter of honesty but also of compassion and respect for what we see.
So I let her know that I’ve heard what she has said and will take it into consideration when I confront whatever issue is on my plate. Because she’s not an emotionally mature adult, I encourage her to let me handle the issue and go make some mix tapes or get an Orange Julius with her friends. Through this process, suppressed anger gets expressed (often in hilarious ways), and I give that adolescent part of myself the missing experience of having an adult present who has her back rather than burdens her with more adult responsibilities and expectations. The necessity of going into that fighter stance no longer exists.
As for unprocessed grief, I am learning to lie down on the floor and let it move through, mindful of the ground supporting me in the present as I feel that grief. My therapist recently clarified for me that this is precisely what yielding with, rather than pushing against, entails. When I do this, I do not feel collapsed, which has been a fear I have held (i.e. “I will never get up!!!”). In fact, I feel more peace and less constriction. Earlier this week, my client shared a poignant story of a woman and a cactus that captured this part of the healing process.
For 40 years, a couple took care of this cactus. When they could no longer care for it, @theplant_rescuer took the cactus and paid close attention to how it grew. The cactus wanted to keep leaning toward the ground. Instead of propping it up with some kind of brace, she got curious. She realized through observation and study that some cacti best grow horizontally, along the ground. So she created a set up for this plant that supported its lean. A year later, the cactus flowered.
What if those of us who have fought our whole lives finally flourish when we lay down? What if the process of unwinding the harmful conditioning that has blocked the path to liberation looks less like a fight and more like the cactus that has received support to follow its own line of growth? If animals rather than plants are your thing in the natural world, maybe freedom looks like the bald eagle I recently saw, soaring downward in slow, large loops. This majestic movement reminded me of the spaciousness, slowness, and gentleness that have best supported my own healing. I am not sure when my body will finally feel safe enough to let go of the tension it has held for decades, but my confidence is growing each day that attuning to my immediate experience with curiosity and kindness feels so much more peaceful than fighting for that experience to matter. One of the previously unimaginable possibilities for my life that is taking root is that I can consistently, reliably walk through the world with a calm nervous system that actually feels—rather than only intellectually believes—the universe can be a friendly place. Maybe that explains why I woke up to this Bonnie Myotai Treace quote in my inbox yesterday morning:
Intense times call for intense practice. But intensity does not mean straining or pushing; rather, it is a willingness to begin fresh.