Equipping for the Long Haul

Once I knew what had happened, I started trying different approaches to find out what worked. It took a while to find dancing again, this time Lindy Hop, and reboot some semblance of a social life. I started working as a support tech for Windows 95 — hey, that emotional labor thing? alive and well in tech support! Turns out I was good at it too, even if it was kind of draining. So good that in five months I was mentoring my team, which was a lot more fun than being on the phones.

I don’t recall exactly what I did in 1998 or 1999 to further this adventure along. Maybe part of it was simply recovering from the shock of what had happened, and coming to grips with how it impacted my life. It’s not like it’s a topic you can bring up in casual conversation: “hey, I just woke up the other day with the sensation I’d been sexually abused as a baby. Wha — “ and they’ve already tuned out three words ago.

What is clear is that sometime around 2000, I started seeing a myofacial release therapist. Man if that isn’t one way to get emotions to move! I will credit that work as having helped me to get very familiar with my body: where I hold stuff, where I get sore, and what patterns require attention. Through her I found a Hakomi practitioner in Seattle, Leah Gardner. I saw her once a week on Thursdays. I’d see her on Thursday, and by Sunday (or so) I’d have a breakthrough, a new understanding — and I’d want to talk about it, but I’d have to wait until Thursday again (ugh!). After a while I noticed she kept asking me about my feelings. There was something to that, for sure, because it was working.

Sometime in 2002, I wandered my way into a used bookstore — Twice Told Tales in the U-district, which used to be where the light rail station is now — and one book practically jumped off the shelf and tackled me. I pulled it open to a random page, and read two paragraphs. In those two paragraphs, I learned more useful, practical stuff about anger than I had in my entire past up to that point. And I had experienced a front-row seat to “what not to do when angry” for most of my childhood and early-mid teens. This book was coming home with me. Best $7 I ever spent.

It was the precursor to Karla McLaren’s Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You. In it, Karla McLaren reframes emotions and allows a bridge to form between thinking world and feeling world, allowing my mind and my heart to form an alliance, instead of fighting each other like they had so much in the past. It was like water to a parched soul.

I no longer had to wait for days on the edge of a breakthrough — now I could get there myself. This focus became my work. I had a job — its purpose was clear: to keep a roof over my head and food on my table, along with gas in my car and admission fees into dance events. My job — a new one I had started in October 2000 with the promise of “we are not a sweat shop” — had become one during the dot-com crash, and I left in May of 2003 with a bunch of stock I had purchased from an employee stock purchase plan. I lived off that for the remainder of 2003 and early 2004 while I dove deep into the emotional framework laid out by Karla McLaren.

And let me tell you there was a lot to unpack. Rage, hatred, anger, sadness, grief, depression, fear, shock, terror, panic, suicide urge — it was all there. I spent a whole year processing emotions. The stock, had I kept it, would have been worth a heckofalot today; I look at it as an investment. One that I would make again. And again. And I have. Because commitment. That year I mastered emotional skills that have served me incredibly well ever since.

I used to experience debilitating constant second-guessing myself, particularly in social situations. Navigating computer techy stuff was easy by comparison; there was always a reason things happened the way they did, and I’ve always been a gifted troubleshooter. The same precision and reliability that computers offered was not at that time present anywhere to be found in the world of people, and the consequences of failure were excruciatingly painful. I still notice that pattern somewhat today, though now it’s more of a constant tension between protecting the people around me, advancing my own desires & goals, and being sensitive to the limits others can tolerate. It’s a rare treat when I get to set that down, and usually involves pushing those edges, or at least having the freedom to. Like this writing.

So when I say, “this is my life’s work,” I am, as my mom puts it, “typically understated.”

So when I say, “this is my life’s work,” I am, as my mom puts it, “typically understated.” The buck stops here. Period.

In 2003, a partner I was seeing introduced me to Family Constellations. It’s a way of looking at how the flow of love gets blocked from generation to generation, and allows us to give back what we’ve been carrying for our ancestors so that we can make new choices and still belong to our family system. In my constellation, I saw the pattern of incest in my father’s line stretch back 8 generations. A pattern of poverty stretched back 15 or 16 generations. It was enough to chew on that I didn’t do much more with constellation work until much later, around 2010 when another partner I was seeing was learning how to facilitate, and I participated in her practice groups. In 2013 I participated in a yearlong learning circle, both to further my own growth and to learn to become a facilitator. I repeated in 2014.

In 2007, I discovered, very serendipitously, Acutonics. It’s a combination of sounds generated from tuning forks used to stimulate the points & meridians in Chinese Acupuncture. Since neglected emotional issues often eventually show up as physical symptoms, I now had a toolset to access those directly as well.

These three things, along with some bits of NLP and paying attention to language patterns, form the backbone of my practice.

Next up: Wet Laundry, Knives and Warmth