“First Lamb To The Slaughter”

I can’t speak for the experience of every eldest daughter but here are three lessons I learned about myself from Taylor Swift’s new song “Eldest Daughter.”

Lyric:

I’m never gonna let you down, I’m never gonna leave you out. I’m never gonna break that vow. I’m never gonna leave you now.

Lesson:

As a first-born female I am, by nature, a fiercely loyal person. This is difficult to feel about myself since I have chosen to leave so many times, but it always took me So. Long. To. Leave. It was 17 years before I was ready to leave a mentally unwell mother—my first mirror. It took me 10 years to leave a ministry that was a first family. And it took me 8 years to leave a marriage that was a reprieve from domination. Let me be clear—I was in those systems for far longer. This is how long I spent trying to maneuver around abuse, gender inequity and neglect before I was convinced there was no way to stay. I know so many women who were, like me, overly responsible in our families growing up, who have left spaces, for the sake of those we love, where we overfunction. And it eats at our souls because we are, despite what the story may seem like on the surface, women who want to remain by your side.

Lyric:

Every eldest daughter was the first lamb to the slaughter, so we all dressed up as wolves and we looked fire. But I’m not a bad bitch and this isn’t savage.

Lesson:

Patriarchy requires that I, as a woman emotionally labor for others more than is humanly healthy. Growing up, this meant I learned to sacrifice myself. Eventually, I developed a fierceness to do what was right for my relationships over what was wanted from me, but it meant channeling an untamed (and honestly, sometimes, a bit unhinged) strength. I was a sheep in wolf’s clothing, but was experienced as overly adversarial. I spent so much time trying to explain my motivation in acts of protest and boycott but it left me looking defensive, as if I were an unloving force of destruction.

Even recently, I was in a situationship where I was generously handing the key to the front door of being a part of my life while also refusing any back door way around vulnerable desire. In a final email I was told, “You win.” I was angry for three hours and then deeply sad for three days. I didn’t want to win. This wasn’t, for me, a competition. I don’t enjoy a battle of wills. I was simply fighting for a long-term good, a potential future even if it wasn’t right now. It wasn’t a fight with, it was a fight for.

Lyric:

A beautiful, beautiful time lapse, ferris wheels, kisses and lilacs, that shimmers that innocent light back, like when were young.

Lesson:

My path forward as an eldest daughter isn’t to keep being responsible for the world but to learn a relaxed openness to joy that I’ve never known. This is how I will become a truer home, first for myself, but also for those who have felt unprotected by the wildly violent world we are all surviving.

Your next invitation? Listen to the infectiously light song “Opalite” that every overly burdened person is trying to dance deep into their psyche!

False Power: “Weaker Than They Look”

At the risk of being seen as promoting any one politician or their view of what is happening in our nation, I want to share an insightful video Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez released a two days ago. The value in this clip (time stamp 9:43-11:20) is her ability to articulate, expose and reframe false power. As a therapist, I so often help clients with younger experiences and stories when they legitimately lacked power in their family system. And yet that same sense of powerlessness can feel so real to them now even decades later.

A part of the journey towards exercising our intrinsic power is seeing the control others attempt to exercise as anemic. Understanding false power and how it’s unreal can feel impossible because we experience it as SOOOOOO true and big in our nervous systems. Though it can feel at the helm of the ship, injustice and oppression have power but they are not omnipotent, So, in the spirit of helping us all understand what false power is and how it can be actively controlling our lives now, I give you the insight and boldness of AOC.

WHO IS UNWELL?

We all are born with two innate, biological sets of instincts. Both driven by the need for safety, we have 1) an attachment instinct that drives us to stay close to those who care for us and we have 2) a defense instinct that tells us to move away from danger.

But what happens when our experience with a caregiver activates BOTH instincts at the same time? When a parent is both a source of need and fear?

This dilemma for childhood trauma survivors deeply impacts our sense of reality about ourselves, others and the world. Learning how we brilliantly coped as children can clarify the path forward towards a new sense of safety in our adult lives.

In this online seminar, we’ll look at writings from Judith Herman, Gabor Maté, Janina Fisher and Carl Jung that demonstrate the “choiceless choices” children have between the reality that something is wrong with their caregiver and the shame that something is wrong with them. Mapping out what these authors teach helps us see clearly the healing journey we’ll need to embark on to address the chronic shame we experience.

Date: Wed Oct 15th

Time: 5:30-7:30 PM MST (on zoom)

Cost: $125 per seminar per person

5 Things Sustaining My Soul

Empty Nesting Day 16: Most days there is a tsunami of emotion pulsing just under the surface and it takes all of my regulation skills to find a dose of equanimity. These five source of soul sustaining wisdom have become companions in this strenuous season of transition.

#1 Gail Honeyman’s book Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine: Told in the first person, this tender story of a trauma survivor battling agoraphobia, OCD and the voices of her cruel mother is inspiring and, in my clinical opinion, on point in mapping how we outgrow a small life constructed by woundedness and enter into a more spacious and honest way of moving through our relational world.

#2 Released in May, Thunderbolts, the latest film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is for anyone who has ever battled shame—which means it’s for ALL of us. Even for those not familiar with the characters, the wisdom, insight and vision of what it means for a group of people to communally battle shame on someone’s behalf reminds me why I’m a therapist.

#3 “Keep me from expecting more of myself than you expect of me.”

This one line from an opening prayer in Virginia Froehle’s guide Called Into Her Presence: Praying with Feminine Images of God, has helped me relax into the reality of not having the energy I expected in these weary weeks. Bekah Stewart, friend and author of Permission to Matter, turned me on to this gem that is becoming a lifeline in a season when being motherless is excruciating.

#4 I’m just 80 pages into Anthony Doerr’s novel All the Light We Cannot See, for which he won the Pulitzer in 2015, and I’m enamored! This short paragraph is anchoring me to the truth that the pain we are unaccustomed to does not control our lives.

“The despair doesn’t last. Marie-Laure is too young and her father is too patient. There are, he assures her, no such things as curses. There is luck, maybe, bad or good. A slight inclination of each day toward success or failure. But no curses.” (p. 28)

#5 In poignant chapters of life I often circle back to poetry. These closing lines from Mary Oliver’s poem Wild Geese help me imagine new ways of feeling connected to people even though I no longer belong to a school community.

“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, hard and exciting,

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.”