ADVANCE PRAISE FOR GATHERING STARS
Gathering Stars offers what trauma recovery so often requires: wisdom in small doses, compassion without easy answers, and hope grounded in faith.
~Lori Erickson, author of The Soul of the Family Tree
BOOK RELEASE PARTY
Book sales by the Atlas Collective.
NEW SUBSTACK POST
Sometimes I like to rework old posts from a few years back which is what I did with this one. You may also follow me on Substack at https://jenniferohmanrodriguez.substack.com/
In a sterile hotel room I reread Harriet Lerner’s, The Dance of Anger. Passing the time while I wait for one of my beloved son’s to finish class or homework or something. Earlier this morning I found these pages of wisdom tucked into a shelf at the local bookstore down the street.
I first discovered Lerner’s classic book during my college years in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. The title spoke to me. Enough to buy a copy with my spare change. Its torn pages however lost in my disruptive twenties.
Recently I’ve been reflecting as I walk or journal on how we lose ourselves in crisis, grief, and trauma’s afterlife. Seized during this time by the past with future dissipating, crumbling, ceasing. Both in reality and in imagination. Induced in part by the de-selfing of traumatic experience caused by its infliction on our beings erupting and impacting ourselves and our relationships. Causing overfunctioning in stuck flight or fight or ongoing underfunctioning in overwhelm, dissociation, and freeze.
Our relationship to self and others controlled by what remains of our former selves. Spinning with trauma’s ongoing truths and lies feeding past’s patterns while thoughts evaporate. Fueling internal and external turbulence. Directed toward us with pain, sorrow, sadness. Leaving a wondering of how to stop this incorrigible dance pointing toward destruction within and around. Anger’s waltz keeping pain’s memory fed and alive but not forgiven. Each step of this dance minimizing our compassion for self. My compassion for me. My compassion for others.
Lerner writes of shifting anger’s you to me or I. Not because we are to blame for our traumas. Lerner is not a blame-the-victim clinician. But because when we project the entirety of our anger onto others we could be avoiding our own feelings and in doing so our own healing. Blame can be an unwillingness to feel what needs to be felt.
It’s all so tricky, this time after traumatic experience. But if our blame has become a part of our pain then it is our pain asking for healing. With love. Love leading to knowing where I begin and also end. You (the one or ones I so often blame) existing outside the boundary of me.
So, what if I said to myself and those I blame, “I want different music. I want a different dance?”
These thoughts cause my lips to lift upward. Bringing my cheeks along with them as held breath escapes from within. My body showing me in the simplicity of a smile that my internal direction gravitates once again toward healing and health. Creating a new step in this dance called my life. A new direction leading toward finding me in the midst of its steps.
Above Image courtesy of Pixabay.
FIRST COVER RECOMMENDATION
In August, I was asked for the first time to provide another author with a book cover recommendation. Dr. Frank Spinelli’s new book is well worth the read. Learn more about Dr. Frank Spinelli here.
UNTIL NEXT TIME
May you sit with your breath, befriend your deepest self, and know that you have the courage to heal.
~Jennifer
