I have a special affection for leopards. As I love to say, “you know the old adage ‘A leopard can’t change its spots?’ Well, I can. And I change my spots every chance I get.” Healing is all about that. The “Decade of the Brain” and neuroimaging technology taught us that “Neurogenesis” is possible, that we can grow new neurons. Before that we believed we were born with our life’s quota of neurons, and that was that. We now know that with neurofeedback, psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, somatic therapies, mindfulness practice, and yes even the old fashioned “talking cure,” we can generate not only connections, ie networks, but molecules. This is wonderful news for all of us, both with respect to our own brains and our clients’ brains if we are practitioners of some kind. So why do spots have such a bad rap?
I remember when I used to drink alcohol, I had to either stop wearing white, or switch from red to white wine. All my pretty white blouses were speckled with unsightly red spots. Oy vey, I always was a sloppy drinker. As an adolescent, ugly facial spots, we called them “zits,” were referred to in commercials for acne products as “blemishes.” Spots were blights on the skin, and on faces that in so many cases already housed shame and self-doubt, or self hatred. Spots were like nature’s “mistakes.” But nature, for the most part, does not make mistakes. If left to itself, it has a brilliant unshakeable plan. Occasionally there is an aberration or mutation, as with the Corona Virus for example, but perhaps we will ultimately come to discover what the ecological (or existencial) intention of that was to be. Most likely it is human intervention that produces disasters of nature, or so is my jaundiced and not-research-based speculation.
Once I had the privilege to visit Milan, Italy. I admit, in my love for pretty things of many kinds, I love clothes. Milan is a wonderland as the fashion hub of the world. Of course, we had to visit the Armani showrooms, a veritable museum of haute couture, clothes I could and really never would buy, but love to look at like I love looking at art. I was struck by a theme, that in every window in a long seeming small city of windows, each of the numerous masterpiece garments, whether on a mannequin or a hanger, had a conspicuos wrinkle in the way it was hung or draped. It was striking. I wondered, “what is he trying to say?” My husband did not notice until I pointed it out. Was he trying to teach us something about “mistakes?”
Once in a training with the somatic therapy genius Peter Levine, we were instructed to make four “mistakes” in every practice session. It was an intentional part of the assignment. The idea was to integrate the idea that mistakes are inevitable in this work. And to develop the humility to tolerate and learn from them. And then to learn to repair them. So many of us who grow up with trauma and neglect, come to learn that mistakes can be life threatening, or have the “hubris” to strive to be “perfect,” blameless or safe from retribution; or worthy of love. A futile aspiration.
In relationship, “mistakes” are an inevitable ingredient in development. The attachment researchers teach us, that even in the ideal secure attachment, where the attunement of primary caregiver and infant is “good enough,” the optimal percentage of accurate attunement, the best we could hope for is 30%. 30%!! That means that the other 70 percent of the time is the delicate dance of rupture and repair, rupture and repair. That is how we learn about relationship, and really about being. How sad that in the world of trauma and neglect, these skills are rarely learned, so the inevitable ruptures are terrifying, even life threatening. And relationship comes to in effect be an icon for suffering, however much it is longed for.
Much like Peter, the attachment research people teach us that the “mistakes” of rupture are invaluable, and much better training than smooth sailing without rupture. As my husband exclaimed many years ago when we emerged from the nightmare of chronic cycles of triggering and reactivity, “Wow, knowing how to recover when we disconnect is such a relief! I don’t have to worry so much about screwing up, because I know we can get back together if I do. I don’t feel so chronically unsafe and fearful around you anymore!” What a blessing!
As long-time serious bicyclist, my nemesis became potholes. I have only had two serious crashes in my in my 50 plus year cycling life, and in both cases I lost consciousness, so I don’t really know all of what happened. I admit, that I am grateful to have had those two traumatic events so I could experience different trauma modalities on those sorts of “one-time” incident traumas. What I did know was that I came out of the accidents with anxiety about bad road surface, and a veritable phobia of potholes.
Riding in Cuba, was like a dream come true. Just going there was a bucket list item of many years. I could not believe it when we were riding through the beautiful scenic countryside, carefully dodging chickens and navigating around horse drawn buggies carrying crates of fresh eggs. Coming around a bend to the base of a hill on our first long riding day, I happened upon the most colossal potholes in the known world. Of course, after six decades of being suffocated and strangled by the world political economy, the Cubans certainly had not had resources for infrastructure, especially as they used the meager resources they had, to first take care of people. The roads were tragically un-maintained. I gasped. It was only our first day of riding!
Embarking on that pothole scarred road, out of nowhere I was visited by a flashbulb image. Back before the pandemic when I drove to the office every day, I was routinely stopped by a traffic light, just as I was getting off the freeway. At that street corner was a little skateboarding venue, a little “park” of concrete, fitted out with sharp hills and walls, obstacles and vaults to jump, slalom type circles. Groups of adolescent boys (I never once saw a girl!) in baggy hoodies wildly flying round and round, jumping, crashing, rolling up the steep sidewalls, clearly having a blast. From the large graffiti on the walls, it appeared they referred to themselves as “punks.” As I waited for the long red light to change, I loved to watch them, always thinking “You wouldn’t catch me doing that!” Never!
Well suddenly that day in Cuba, the “light changed.” Was it a neurofeedback “moment?” I don’t know…Suddenly the Cuban potholes reminded me of those kids, who intentionally sought out the bumpiness, the vertical crashing and landing on their wheels upright, the slalom curving and dodging and missing each other, they do this for fun! Suddenly I imagined myself one of the ”punks,” having fun with the Cuban potholes. For the rest of that trip, I made a game of pothole dodging and jumping. Missing infrastructure, and prior trauma became my game: joy, fun and triumph!
Another symbol of transformation that I love, are butterflies. However, I‘ve never been fond of caterpillars. I even have a terrifying childhood memory from when I was three or four, of a park in New York where there were so many squiggling caterpillars that I literally could not put my little feet anywhere without stepping on them. All I remember is just wailing “Daddy, Daddy carry me!” I don’t remember if he did, just the terror. Anyway, those unsavory little creatures somehow become butterflies. Which are beautiful and I love them!
Interestingly, we call nervous excitement “butterflies” in our stomachs. I remember Peter Levine’s reminder that in the body, excitement and fear feel very similar. The Cuban word for potholes is “paches.” Que Vivan los Paches!
When I was barely more than a toddler, living in Manhattan, I learned a very big word: restitution. My parents, both survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, had not lived in this country too long. It was 1959. We lived in a large, old brick apartment building, where all our neighbors seemed to have numbers on their arms. I easily imagined that to be the norm, true of all people. One day, my parents received a letter in the mail. It said we would be receiving a small check each month: restitution. The German government was attempting to compensate Jews for the pillaging of possessions they had suffered. Of course they could not replace the 6 million murdered, but it was a gesture of reconciliation. It was the first I had learned of such a concept, attempting to repair broken trust or damage perpetrated. Although it was small consolation for my profoundly traumatized parents, it was still somehow gratifying and certainly much needed.
It was hard to believe when I heard on the news that it was the anniversary of the brutal murder of George Floyd. How has that time passed already? As an attachment theory-oriented therapist, I am still haunted by his cries for his mother in those last nine minutes of his life. “Mama, Mama…” As a somatic therapist who is regularly teaching clients about breath and a the calming power of intentional breathing, the words “I can’t breathe…” the same words gasped by Eric Garner in a similar police murder in 2014, have gained a whole new traumatic meaning. What have we learned in this ensuing time since Floyd’s tragic death? Does anyone remember Eric Garner? Will anything be significantly different for the poor, disenfranchised and of color in our country and the world, or will this be just one more episode, like a traumatic flashback, that recurs and persists and continues to perpetuate pain and enduring dysregulation and dysfunction?
As a relationship therapist, I am constantly trying to teach clients and often couples the power and magic of apology. Most do not really know how, having never heard a meaningful apology for harm done to themselves, and also living as we do, in a culture of blame. Many even view apology as an admission of defeat, so it is a humiliation to take responsibility for relationship repair. If made at all, apology is tinged with a self-canceling defensiveness, and so have no impact at all. In a memorable episode of the long discontinued television program, Sopranos, when one character, Christopher, while under the influence of heroin, sat on and suffocated his girlfriend’s beloved little dog to death. He shrugged his shoulders dramatically and exclaimed to his devastated girlfriend “Hey! I’m sorry!” Of course this had no meaning to the bereft young woman.
Eve Ensler, now known as “V” published a profound book that appeared in 2019: The Apology. Before that, I had found little literature of use on this crucial subject. For some years I have been gestating a book on the subject, which I still intend to write. But V’s view on the subject was the closest to my own that I have encountered yet. In it, more than 30 years after his death, she writes the letter of apology from her viciously abusive father that she had always hoped and longed to receive from him, but never had. It is written in his imagined voice, and in chilling detail he recounts and owns what he did to her over decades. Without defending it, he also tells the story of is own trauma, which does not excuse the harm he perpetrated, but somehow makes sense of it for her. Oh yes: the intergenerational transmission of trauma. The book affected me so deeply, that I bought dozens of copies to give to friends, in my quest to spread the word.
Again, most of my clients, survivors of trauma and neglect, have never heard an apology for what they endured. And clients ask me, “Wasn’t she doing terrible wrong? I am so angry! And I feel guilty that I am so angry. Could she just not help it? Was she just doing the best she could?” Both are true. But more importantly, how do we interrupt this insidious legacy? Restitution is a noble symbolic gesture, and certainly moves in the right direction, but it does not go deep enough. Or it is effective but not sufficient. As Janis Spring Abrams, who writes eloquently about the trauma of infidelity, “cheap forgiveness” skips the depth of pain and rage, and fails to restore or create true, reparative intimacy. We need to fully experience the unsavory emotions for the apology/forgiveness to “work,” and have impact.
I believe the way forward, besides transforming dysregulated brains with neurofeedback, and every way we can, is teaching the elusive practice of authentic empathy. A relatively recent concept, empathy only first appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary in the Nineteenth Century. It is still poorly understood. And it stands in contrast to the simpler, more familiar concept of sympathy. Sympathy is feeling compassionate and assumably understanding emotion on the other’s behalf, but still squarely from one’s own point of view. It is drawing on one’s own reservoir of experience to imagine the feeling of the other, attempting to speak from that. One can still remain lodged in one’s own narcissism, and even feel superior. Empathy however, is stepping if momentarily into the other’s world, and working at truly feeling how it is for them. Not to agree or “give them a pass” so to speak, but rather to make sense of how this could have happened. V’s father was the product of a horrific and unprocessed history. That by no means excuses wrong perpetrated! But rather makes sense of what is otherwise incomprehensible and unforgiveable. And forgiveness benefits, more than anyone else, the forgiver. V felt tremendous relief. It did not retrieve lost years, and the protracted storm of agony, or the thousands of helpful and unhelpful therapy dollars, but provided a sea change of direction. Granted, these perpetrators never chose to do their own work, which is part of what makes the questions complex unanswerable.
In cheese-making, the essential first ingredient is the starter culture, an interesting and unintended double entendre. The culture is an organic compound that stimulates or catalyzes the milk to “ripen” changing its chemistry to make it receptive to the agent of transformation, which miraculously transforms the milk from liquid to delicious solid. A certain amount of time is required for this magic to transpire, for the cheese to “mature.” For the cheese-maker, patience is more than a virtue. I believe that empathy and the teaching of empathy, better yet, a culture of empathy, is an essential first step in breaking chains, of both oppression and intergenerational transmission of trauma and neglect. And of course continuing to stir the vat!
My course with Quantum Way is now available for registration!