Welcome to this healing blog. This site focuses on writing; the content related to my professional healing practice has its own space. Click here to enter that space.
I'm practice as a Feldenkrais teacher, TARA Approach practitioner, and counselor who is trained in EMDR. I'm a woman of color and the child of a war refugee. My own healing journey has flowed through developmental psychoanalysis, somatics, Karma Kagyu Buddhism, dance, and energy medicine. Essentially, I'm an indigenous American shaman, born and raised in Austin, Texas. My healing gifts developed along several pathways over the years, all of which flow together and interweave as the need arises.
I've been in the performing arts for 28 years; I dance with my friends Julie Nathanielsz and Heloise Gold. I'm creative director for my dear friend DD Dagger and recently joined a dance collective with my lovely friend and teacher Amae Amani.
I hope that your visit here finds you something to laugh about, something to think about, something to dream about.
You can subscribe to the blog through the boxes on the right.
Photo credit, Kirk Johnson.
Peace to all, and thanks for visiting.
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I walked up to the courtyard outside the intern office the other day and paused in front of my client, who was smoking a cigarette. We calmly contemplated each other through the drifting smoke. Finally I said, "Could I get you to consider giving that up as part of your therapeutic process?"
He sighed. "Not right now, for sure. I'll think about it. Just not now."
"Have you always smoked?" I asked sympathetically. He nodded.
It's a tough one, for sure. But I always ask. As a healer, moving my clients into a state of better overall health is what we're trying to do, so things like smoking have to be addressed. There is another, more practical reason to address self medicating behavior, which is that you often can't do effective trauma work when the emotions you're trying to treat are continually being medicated into a flatline. Make sense? I've experimented with doing EMDR with clients who were actively still smoking pot, or drinking, and it doesn't work--they are too numbed out and distanced from their emotions for the process to be effective. There pretty much has to be some period of abstinence for real trauma treatment to happen.
Smoking cigarettes is a bit different in that it doesn't make people high. However, smoking is directly related to medicating feelings of anger and depression. Cigarettes deliver little micro doses of antidepressants and stimulants so every time a person lights up they are truly giving themselves a dose of something. The effect of cigarettes seems to be particularly tied to reducing feelings of anger and hostility; in studies where people have quit with one group getting anger management and the other group not getting it, the group that got anger management stayed quit a lot more successfully. It's a common thing to say that people quitting smoking are angry and irritable because of the withdrawal, but what the research shows is that people who become addicted to smoking struggled more with feelings of anger, hostility and resentment BEFORE they started smoking and that this is part of why they became addicted to cigarettes in the first place.
So yea, anger. Anger is a very interesting topic. Most of us don't really know how to work well with it. But we can all learn. Anger has its positive aspects. It's a matter of directing the energy in a positive rather than a negative way.
They're written by the same author, Pia Mellody, and are aptly titled Facing Codependence and Facing Love Addiction. While there are lots of books on both topics out there, I chose these after a lot of research because it seems to me that Pia Mellody really knows her stuff, quite a bit more than most. It's also obvious when you read these books that she has walked the hard hard road of recovering from both of these situations herself.
Both codependence and love addiction are situations that are serious and require treatment. We are not talking about a normal range of being a nice/kind/good person, but a range of dysfunctional behaviors and thinking that involve a person giving up their self-care, dignity, hygiene, financial security, emotional and physical safety, basic needs, and values in order to pursue or try to maintain a relationship or relationships with unsuitable, inappropriate people. Codependence, from the outside, looks just as crazy and dysfunctional as any other addiction, but it seems to be a harder one to treat because a lot of people confuse codependence with ideas about romantic love or loyalty that don't help. Codependent people often end up losing friends and other supports in their lives due to their persistence in choosing unsuitable partners and friends and then subjecting everyone around them to the dramatic fallout of their choices. They then end up being alone at moments where they need support the most which is exactly what they fear. Not really fun stuff for anyone involved. Ya know?
What's challenging about treating codependence and love addiction is the amount of denial and rationalization that is sometimes involved. Someone who is using drugs or alcohol every day generally knows that this is not a good thing to be doing. However, someone who sacrifices themselves for others every day may well think that this is not only a good thing to be doing, but that it makes them a good person. So we have to go in and start sorting out the genuinely good stuff and intentionality from the stuff that's about manipulating other people through giving to them. This takes a while. It's not a black and white thing. There is pretty much always a mix of both genuine and inauthentic actions and thinking involved.
What I like about Pia Mellody's books is how clear she is about where these things go, and how bad it can really get, if you don't face them squarely and treat them. She is also really honest about the hard work and disappointment involved in becoming an emotional adult, that you have to give up childish fantasies about having other people take care of you all the time and get into the real world where it's not anyone else's job to do that. She knows it takes a lot, a lot more than reading one of her books. And I think she does a good job of outlining all the various aspects of recovery. I highly recommend.
I have friends who are polyamorous. Polyamory takes a LOT and I have a lot of respect for people who do it well. It involves a lot of communication skills, a lot of being able to manage multiple people's needs at the same time, and a lot of honesty. I think it helps if one is an extrovert too. Personally, I'm boring, just a plain old hetero-mono who struggles daily to be a more effective partner for just one man. My sweetie recently moved to a little Texas town and I think the abundance of home-and-hearth Man Stuff he likes to do (lawn mowing, furniture building, grilling, piddling and fixing things) is going to help our relationship because honestly, I'm not quite needy enough for him to have enough to do in our relationship and it frustrates him. That's another post, that whole thing about how there can be a downside to being too independent in relationships...another time.
Anyway. I remember with fondness that once I had this friend, let's call him Joe. Joe was a really sweet guy and he was enough person for about five women. Joe was extremely extroverted, talked nonstop, could process interpersonal stuff nonstop for hours and was smart, attractive and a lot of man in one place. I helped Joe write a personal ad to put on Craiglist because he was feeling lonely and wanted to date and hadn't done it in a while. I thought Joe had a lot to offer but I was kind of worried about how much Joe there was to work with, even though he was delightful.
Interestingly, Joe called me about a week after the ad went up. It turned out that he had gotten three responses from Craigslist, and that upon further investigation it turned out that all three women knew each other and were all part of the polyamory community. He asked me what I thought he should do. At first I was going to tell him to pass, because I knew he was looking for one girlfriend more or less, but I did a double take and thought about it. Finally I said, "You know, for whatever reason I'm kind of feeling that at least maybe you should meet these women and see what it's all about. You know I am fond of you but Joe, you are a lot of person, and honestly it might take about three women to handle you. I think it's worth a meet and greet anyway."
That began Joe's Summer of Polyamory. I understand that he was a huge hit and was quite popular. He had a really good time and met all kinds of people who he really enjoyed. It went on for a few months, during which I would get irregular updates--clearly, he was busy between all the processing and all the dates and all the conversations, and he loved it.
Finally, though, he called me one day and said, "Well, Elaine, this was great, I learned a lot about myself, I'm glad I did it. But I think I'm going back to being a mono."
"Any particular reason why?" I asked, intrigued.
"It's really difficult to remember who you've told what story to when you're dating four or five different people," he confessed. "I had to start a filing system with index cards and a Word document to record what I've said to who and and when and what I've talked about with different women. It takes a huge amount of time to manage my system and it's kind of wearing me out."
"Do you think it matters that much?" I asked, puzzled.
"I hate repeating myself," he said simply.
Old Joe. Still wonder what happened to him, and if he ever found his mono-gal.
I have wanted to write this post forever. I haven't because I know that my Dear Friend who I met in Regrettable Group Therapy reads my blog sometimes and that he is going to laugh and laugh at me for writing about this. That is OK. I am glad I went through the Regrettable Group Therapy Experience because I met my Dear Friend that way. Here is a nice picture of him and me from a few weeks ago.
So. Here is the story. As part of my coursework at Texas State, I had taken a class on Group Therapy. I also took a class in Psychodrama, which is another kind of group process that I actually like better. I got inspired about group therapy and decided to join a therapy group for a while to see what it was like to be in a group. I would have preferred to be in a psychodrama group, but there isn't one in Austin, or wasn't at the time.
It turned out that finding a group to go to on a grad student's budget was no easy task. In order to join a therapy group, you have to go through an interview process that feels a lot like applying for a job, as it turns out. I mean, I get that you don't want a really out to lunch person in a group because that would get weird for everyone else. So OK. It also turns out that group therapy is pretty expensive because you generally have to commit to X number of months and to agree to pay for it whether or not you attend. OK. I was game for that too. I was excited about it and wanted to find out for myself and I'd found a group with a good reputation and an alternative population that felt right to me. Here we go. Here Elaine goes to get her group therapy.
Well. It lasted seven months, or maybe I should say I lasted seven months. As it turned out, I was deeply annoyed by one of the two therapists, who struck me as being profoundly fake and rather self-absorbed. There were hardly any people in the group, which actually made it a non-functional group in terms of the experience. However, being new to all this, I didn't know that. I didn't know it until, in the 7th month of this experience, my Dear Friend spoke up and confronted the two therapists about the fact that he and I and the two therapists were the only people in the room week after week, that the group had never been big enough to really work the whole time I'd been there, and that he was deeply unhappy. It was at that point that I learned that I had been being charged, week after week, for seven months for an experience that wasn't even functional, all on a graduate student's budget. This was not a pretty day for the two therapists, because I spoke my mind about it as you can imagine. I asked them what they thought they were doing and how it is they felt comfortable taking my money knowing that I was a graduate student and that they were not providing the service I was paying for after making me jump through circus hoops to be a part of it. I never did get answers to my questions; the group just suddenly ended a few weeks later.
I've learned that a lot of therapists have big, big issues about money. Even people I otherwise respect have issues about it. I didn't get any good therapy out of seven months of group therapy because it wasn't enough of a group for group therapy to happen. However, I did meet my fabulous friend who remains in my life and whose friendship and love are worth so much more than the money I paid to be in that stupid group. I have since then heard from other people who, like me, joined some kind of group process and then found that when it didn't work for them the therapist made it difficult for them to leave, usually by telling them that they had issues that they were needing to work on that were coming up and therefore they should stay in order to work through these issues. This may be true sometimes but I find it manipulative, generally speaking.
I get that there needs to be commitment to a process, but joining a group anything should not feel like checking into the Hotel California, y'all. Everyone is an adult and if something ain't working a person should be able to leave without having to pay for 18 more sessions of talking about why you need to leave. Of course this makes money for therapists but really, it can get culty and weird. Yes, you might be wanting to leave because that's how you dealt with your mother, but on the other hand, you really might find one of the therapists phenomenally unbearable, you might need money for other things, you might be a polite person who does not want to say to someone else, "Actually every time I come in here and we spend 45 minutes on you, I feel that I have completely lost 45 minutes of my life I will never get back." Etcetera.
I dunno, maybe it was just a one-off kinda thing, and if I tried again I'd feel different or enjoy it. I'm aware that my sample size for this experience is one, which is not big enough to make a determination about. Maybe I'll try again some day. But for now I think I'll just get my group fix by dancing with others, my favorite thing to do anyway. That's what my dear friend and I are doing. :)
Okay. This is an embarrassing story, but I'm telling it because it's true.
I went to Carl's office the other day to get some mentoring and consultation. For the over 10 years I've known him, he has always had a simple, plain waiting room with a water machine and a table with magazines. Straightforward, basic. However, the other day, when I walked in, I found myself awash in a giant sea of light jazz music accompanied by waterfall sounds. The waiting room had been stylishly darkened so that the only thing you could see about the stereo emitting this audible horror was the little blue light of the LED screen.
I had had a bad day and was in a mood anyway, and after two minutes of sitting there listening to loud light jazz waterfall music, I started to feel like I wanted to break windows. It was just that insanely bad, mediocre almost-Muzak music that makes anyone who loves or plays music want to chew their nails off while groaning, "Why?? Whyyyyy??". You know what I am talking about. You hear it in every doctor's office and in places where you have to sit waiting for people to do uncomfortable and anxiety provoking things to you. I guess it is supposed to relax you and make you feel better, but it has the opposite effect on me. The last thing I want to hear while waiting for another encounter with my mortality is bad jazzy waterfall music. There is something so wrong and debilitating about it. If I am going to wrangle this mortal coil I want to hear some Curtis Mayfield, or Bill Withers.
Anyway, I sat there for another two minutes, deliberating whether or not I would get into trouble, or what kind of trouble I would get into, if I found a way to meddle with the stereo or possibly just yank the cord out of the wall. I finally started digging in my bag, searching for a keychain flashlight that I knew I had since in order to find the controls I'd have to get on my hands and knees in the fashionable darkness and find the buttons. Which by this point I was both willing and prepared to do. Fortunately, just about then I heard his door open and he came to get me.
Once we got into his office, I said, "What is that? Out there. What is that? What happened? "
"You know the worst part?" he remarked. "It only plays five songs."
We stared at each other. Finally I said, "Please don't tell me you are going that way. Please don't be that therapist. I can't really handle the disappointment right now."
"I have nothing to do with it," he said firmly. "The other people leasing suites from me decided that that was what it needed to be. Look around. Is my furniture not the same furniture you have always sat on? Isn't this desk the same desk?"
I pondered. Finally I said, "Actually, I'm pretty sure you are wearing some of the same ties. Okay. I got scared for a minute there. I feel better now. I guess I would just feel that if you became that guy, I would have lost something really important, and I don't even know what it is."
He laughed. I said, "I'm never showing up early for another appointment. I can't deal with that. On time, or a couple of minutes late."
We shook on it.
I write this because so many of my clients are adult survivors of childhood abuse--in some cases, extreme abuse, the kind of stuff you see on the news or "Dateline." A lot of our work has to involve learning how to care for yourself, set boundaries, and find healthy ways of navigating relationships, deflecting manipulation, and dealing with control. It has been my experience that manipulative and abusive people usually "groom" their targets over a period of time and that teaching abuse survivors how to spot, confront and/or avoid such early grooming behaviors is the best protection they can have, for themselves and their kids. I worked a lot with teaching my LGBTQIA kids about this stuff, particularly when it came to dealing with much older kids or adults who were approaching them in inappropriate ways.
When a kid grows up with abuse, that kid, in order to survive, learns to accept the unacceptable: neglect, manipulation, physical/sexual/emotional/financial abuse (yes, parents financially abuse kids by stealing from them, identity theft, taking their money to buy drugs or stuff for themselves, etc.) and an overall climate of hostility, distrust, lack of love, and game playing. Then, when that kid grows into adulthood, unless they get help, they will often continue to accept such unacceptable behavior from others: partners, friends, employers, colleagues, to name a few. This adds to the original wounds.
Kids often don't have a choice about bending around an abuser because there isn't anywhere else for them to go a lot of the time. As part of that bending, they learn that you are supposed to be silent about abuse, not to tell anyone, to hide it all to protect the abuser. Again, this can repeat into adulthood, creating more harm. I certainly don't want my clients to become militants pinning others to the ground on every little mistake, that's not good either, but I generally find that in most cases it's better for a while that abuse survivors learn how to set and hold strong boundaries, practice and internalize that skill, rather than being too lax. For most abuse survivors these skills are new and take a fair amount of analysis and work to become their own. This takes a while. Then, after that structure has been built and is clear, we can go into how to relax, how to stop being hypervigilant, how to be less of a control freak, how to work with paranoia, etc. It's a tiered process--structure first, then learning how and when to let go, with the final stage being the development of the person's own individual story on a macro-level--you could call this spirituality but not everyone describes or experiences it this way.
What is so rewarding about working with abuse survivors is how motivated they are to not become like the people who abused them. They don't want to repeat the cycle and they're sick of accepting the unacceptable, for themselves, for their kids. They want something different, a life that holds the possibility of real love, real relationships, safety, friendship, creativity, security--all the things they never had. And they have every right to strive for those things, especially given that the first time round they didn't get a proper chance. I find that people who have reached this courageous point of change are often deeply inspiring others around them with their bravery even though they don't know it. Their willingness to heal helps others find their own willingness to heal. It's a ripple of powerful goodness that extends further than you can imagine.
It's simply true that treating your own traumas and vowing to stop the cycle has enormous benefits that extend way beyond yourself. Everyone benefits--your friends, kids, partners, you name it. You don't have to accept the unacceptable any more. It's over.
I actually have some time for me today. That never happens. I spend most days commuting between about 3 or 4 different locations. Not today. Awesome.
Because of this I am going to get my paws on either my lyra or my Gon Bops later today. I have gone through yet another cycle of building up callus on my hands and then having it peel off because I didn't have time to train. However, my neighbor came over with a tall ladder the other day and I finally got to fix the top of my rigging, which is a relief; there's only one more piece I need to make it right, which I ordered. I am very glad at this point that I decided to go with a home setup rather than spend the money on classes; classes are expensive and I can't truly benefit from them unless I train on my own for a while. If I'd bought classes I wouldn't have been able to go to half of them this spring and I'd be kicking myself. This way, even if I start over 1,000 times, I can work at my own pace and have fun with it.
Like I wrote yesterday, sometimes you have to start over a lot. When I was learning to run I had to start my running program over 11 times to get it right. Now I know how to run and can do it right straight out of the gate if I want to. But it took a lot of starting over and a lot of patience with myself. This is all related to the food stuff too, because as I learned, if you don't eat right, your training will be crap. You won't have energy or stamina and you won't feel good enough to push yourself to the next level. All the stuff around training and food is in a direct relationship and I have to deal with both at the same time; it's a two for one self improvement process. It's also the two paramitas of discipline and patience at the same time. They work together.
It's good to have time to cook brussel sprouts and find the lyra and the drums again. Doesn't happen often enough; maybe I need a regular "mental health aerial arts and percussion day"....
OK. This post is really about something I'm working on for myself--and a fair number of my clients are working on. It's about emotions and food.
As I've often written about, I have some chronic health issues--related to past trauma and excessive stress for many years--that are slowly getting better with Chinese medicine and managing my diet. However, I also have issues that show up around either not eating enough or not eating well. I decided a couple of months ago to investigate more deeply what was going on with that and thought I would share it in case it helps anyone. My acupuncturist told me that I MUST reduce my stress level and MUST do better with my diet in order to get well and stay well, and I am listening to him. He really put his foot down, and that was good for me to hear.
For myself, what I've figured out is that the two big triggers for not eating or not eating well are feeling sad, and mad. When I'm sad or depressed, I don't eat. When I'm angry, I tend to want to eat bad stuff--i.e. unhealthy snacks or things I know I'm not supposed to eat that make me feel bad. In order to make these observations, what I had to do was set up a strict commitment to honoring a good diet for a while and then see when it was I would try to get out of that commitment. I don't know if this would have worked or really taught me anything if I hadn't created that structure. It's a similar logic to abstaining from alcohol or other addictive substances or behaviors in order to see what the emotions are that are driving the behavior.
So--sad and mad--and, given that I'm still in the internship process and still poor and still driving around all the time to work, and all of the usual offenders--I do get into states when I get sad or mad and then I notice my eating habits quickly slide. The unfortunate part is that when you slide out of what's good for you, that in and of itself creates more feelings of anger and sadness. So it can become a vicious cycle, like that. This is where knowing how to do something like meditate comes in, because meditation teaches you a lot about being patient with yourself, seeing what's going on, working on it a little at a time, and being kind with yourself. Hence the role of meditating in working with all kinds of dysfunctional behaviors. It also helps if you have something you want that means something to you to focus on. I want to be more in shape and athletic than I am, and the biggest reason I don't get there is that I don't eat well enough to support that next level of achievment. So part of taking care of ourselves has to do with the things in life that we really want longer term.
Today, then, I decided to buy all of my favorite foods at the grocery store. It's so strange to me that I ever eat as badly as I sometimes do, because all of my favorite foods are pretty healthy: brussel sprouts, sweet potatoes, lemon and honey, berries, avocado, a bit of good cheese, rice, tuna fish...in looking at my choices, I can see that eating badly is more than a triggered response--it's actually a self destructive behavior, an expression of anger toward myself, maybe because I think I should be doing better, or should have planned better, or know better...whatever it is.
I have a strong interest in not getting into that place, for a lot of reasons. So I'm trying out having all of my real favorites on hand, preparing things in advance, and generally being more conscious about early warning signs of emotional states that put me into Bad-Food-Land. I'll let you know how it goes.
Yeah--that's what I want my office to be--a climate of unusual frankness, deep healing, and love. By the way, it does turn out that you can purchase yurts from people who make them. But I don't think I could find a place to pitch one along a bus line. It'd be so noisy. Happily I am supposed to get new, functional climate control this week, maybe even today. Between that and these new shelves--she really put thought and effort into the way she made these which I appreciate every single time I look at them--I'm feeling happy and hopeful about finally being able to settle into my own healing space soon.
Somehow this space feels different than the last one--better. I don't know what it is but it's definitely a positive change. It promotes a climate of unusual frankness, deep healing, and love. One of my new meditation students remarked that our meditation group is a bit rowdy. I said that a really good practitioner group should have that underlying rowdy, fun, humorous energy to it. Otherwise everyone is trying to be nice, or being fake, or not being authentic, or they're not getting happier which is kind of the point, over time. It's a good thing.
I've been appreciating, too, the frank feedback that my students and clients provide on every level, from how our sessions are going to how my hair looks that day. One of my Feldy students remarked that my hair looked unusually good one day and we had a discussion about products and how I sometimes get lucky in their application and then can't remember what I did later on. I welcome all of this because it's part of the climate of unusual frankness and love. It amuses me. I learn a lot. I hope they do too.
I think that healing has to be authentic, as does teaching, and if the healer or teacher is too stiff, too precious, it puts a glass wall around the process that ultimately isn't that helpful. I know that my clients and students know that I'm deeply invested in their process and bringing everything I have to it. There is no "phoning it in" in my business. I could certainly make more money, a lot more money, doing it that way but I don't want to. Three hair products is enough. I don't need more. Even if I have reached the age where I'm being bombarded with ads for $200 face creams on a daily basis.
