I used to think there was something wrong with me, deep down.
I didn’t spend any time trying to pinpoint what it was.
I just had this impulse to either fix or hide everything about myself. To perform.
If someone asks you, “How do you like Boulder?” and your first thought is, “What is normal to say right now?” —
Not going inside for an answer.
Not wondering about the person asking.
Going instead to that calculating third place – the PR desk. The middleman.
Making the assumption that if I don’t carefully craft my response, I will do or say something… strange? Unlikeable? Undeserving of love?
I will out myself for what I really am.
I will be cast out.
Like an alien playing human.
Sometimes I’d leave an interaction feeling like I’d just barely escaped death.
I think of this now as The Shame Stance.
Invalidation I
One of the most impactful books I’ve ever read was How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk.
It was written by mother-daughter parenting researchers Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish.
They say that kids are constantly told what they feel is wrong.
“You’re not hungry. You just ate.”
“It’s not cold in here. Stop whining.”
“You love your brother.”
When your inner signal is invalidated long and hard enough, you start to doubt it yourself.
You lose the ability to make determinations for yourself.
You become dependent – tethering your sense of what’s true to others.
“Is it cold in here?”
“I shouldn’t be hungry, right?”
“Can you read this text and tell me if I should be mad?”
It seems that others have a sense that you’re missing.
Invalidation II
Growing up in the church, I was told to tether my sense of what’s true to men.
Pastors and heads of households could only be men.
God’s voice sounded a lot like their own self-interested opinions.
When I was a teenager, our church had a booth at the local fall festival.
I was told that the devil wanted to stop us, and the devil was in my feelings.
I was told that if I felt uncomfortable with what I was doing or saying there, I was doing it right.
We got kicked out of the fall festival.
Later, I found the rationalists. And pop psychology. I read all the books.
They were all about bias.
Look at how dumb we are when we are left to our own devices!
You cannot trust yourself. You can only trust science.
Makes sense, okay. But I am trying to decide what to do with my life. Or how to be. Who to be. What is meaningf–
Are you meditating? Are you eating healthy? Are you–
Yes, I try so hard. I’m unhappy.
Therapy.
Yes, but the last one had me read that book about ACT, and I impressed her so much she didn’t have any more goals for me. This one is obsessed with me calling my mother. She just had a baby. That seems related, don’t you–
Anxiety/depression. Basically everyone has it.
But–
💊
Invalidation III
I got sick. Different ways in different years.
Every time, I did all the testing.
Every time, the tests came back negative.
Every time, they said, “It must be in your head.”
Every time, no one offered to do anything about my head.
Emotions I
Emotions are like smoke alarms.
Sometimes they chirp inconveniently.
There are false alarms.
But they won’t stop until you attend to them, apply curiosity, and troubleshoot.
Ignoring or shutting them off is 🔥dangerous🔥.
Emotions II
Defining my terms:
Emotional validation meaning: tuning into, being curious about, trying to understand, and/or expressing acceptance of a person’s emotional experience.
Emotional invalidation meaning: avoiding, ignoring, dismissing, denying, judging, or rejecting a person’s emotional experience.
Shame meaning: the feeling that you are wrong, bad, or defective, deep down.
Outlining my theory:
Emotional validation —> sense of safety inside oneself –> resilience and self-actualization —> emotionally validating of self and others
Emotional invalidation —> shame —> inner chaos or shutdown, desire for control —> emotionally invalidating of self and others
And so it goes, round and round.
Emotions III
Emotional invalidation is an attempt at control.
You want someone to do what you want.
But what if they say no?
Better to control what they think.
But to control what they think, you have to control what they feel.
Turn off their inner signal.
We do it to ourselves too.
It doesn’t make sense to be upset right now. Suck it up.
There’s no good reason to be so tired. Get your fucking sneakers on.
Tears, really? You’re embarrassing yourself.
Tune out the inner alarm. Tether to this thing outside yourself.
My Vision I
There was a Johns Hopkins study on magic mushrooms.
A participant said the experience was as transformative as the birth of their child.
I recreated the conditions at home.
My trip sitter told me I cried for several hours straight.
After a while, the vision started to repeat. I thought it over and over.
When I took off my eye mask and headphones, I wrote down the following (edited for brevity):
“Everyone screams for a mother. [redacted name], [redacted name], [redacted name], [redacted name]. We scream at each other to be our mother.
I use the understander. I practice saying. I try to get them to understand. I try to get good at screaming for mother.
[redacted name], [redacted name], [redacted name], [redacted name], [redacted name]. We were embarrassed because we were not cared for. We needed a mother.
When I was embarrassed there was harsh talking. The harsh talking was [redacted name]. Then the harsh talking was me – to [redacted name], to [redacted name]. The harsh talking is interchangeable. The sweet talking is mother.
There was a mother. She was real. [redacted name] holding my hand while I was crying about [redacted name]. She cares for me and I instantly change. Like sunshine. Before: embarrassed. After: the same but in sunlight, cared for.
I am mother (me in my bedroom mirror, no makeup, braid). Not in the bandaid, hold-it-together-for-other-people way. My older self for my younger self. It’s tender. It’s a rescue. It’s love.
Because mother is real. We do what she does. She regulates our nervous system. She puts her warm attention on us. She takes all the time it takes to care for our physical body. And for the full mother, she shows you how to be in touch with yourself.”
My Vision II
I got divorced and bought out of my startup at the same time.
I didn’t have to work again if I didn’t want to.
I was free. Like a leaf in the wind.
At first, I rejected everything from my Old Life. I said I hated tech. I said I wanted to make music, like when I was young.
In truth, all I did all day was analyze my marriage.
Like a puzzle.
Like a plane crash.
Like a crime scene.
All I could watch, listen, read, think about was relationships.
I got myself a ticket to the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas.
I got a music badge, thinking I’d marinate in art.
Instead I walked into a tech talk.
And I felt like I’d come back to life.
Like the existentialists Sartre and Nietzsche, I concluded that one makes their own meaning in life.
I ached for it.
Purpose.
I moved to California with plans to start another tech company.
There’s “social” apps, but what if they could address real social problems?
My Vision III
When I feel again like an alien playing at being human, I remember feet.
My feet are not so different from most people’s feet.
I belong here with the other feet-havers.
Really, feet or no feet, none of us are all that different, deep down.
I have a vision of eradicating The Shame Stance at scale.
Of creating the conditions for everyone to find safety in themselves.
To feel grounded and whole.
For couples, parents and children, landlords and tenants, managers and employees, cashiers and customers…-
To connect to themselves and another at the same time.
To negotiate wants and needs on the level of action, while allowing for everyone to maintain their own inner signal.
For allowing what is to be.
Emotions – our own, other people’s – don’t go down without a fight, anyway.
Apply curiosity.
Or go up in flames.