Healing Through Connection

I want you to take a moment to reach back into your personal history. Think about how you were taught to connect to the world.

I grew up in a religious household, one where we read the Book of Mormon regularly. One verse in the Book of Mormon that was very much stressed went something like this: The natural man is an enemy to God. My family would talk about what the natural man was. The natural man was the part of ourselves that was connected to the flesh: our wants and our needs... wanting to be fed, wanting to be heard and praised, wanting to be loved. Anytime we wanted things for ourselves we were considered selfish. 

So for me, when I reach back to how I was taught to connect to the world, it was in a way where I was taught to deny myself things that I needed. Basic needs that everyone has.

Every night we would sit around and read the scriptures. Every Sunday we went to church and yes, we went to a public school. Our upbringing was on the East Coast, so it's not like we were in Utah. Because of this, it was very important that we were in the world but not of the world. 

The world was going to be an undue influence on us. It was going to be a bad influence. So the way I was taught to connect with the world was to think of myself as separate from it, disconnected. It was an us vs them mentality: us versus the world. Yet we were commanded to be a light unto the world. We were children of God. Literally, children of God. And we were given this task to transcend our physical needs, focusing instead on our spirituality as if it were outside ourselves. 

Our connection with God was treated as if it was outside of ourselves. 

That's important because it shaped the person I grew to be. I would like to read a poem I wrote. It's from Sorry So Sorry, the complete collection. Because it points to the way I thought of this. 

I had devoted my entire life to being submissive to other people--to my father and mother, to those leading the church, to my teachers, to the will of my siblings if they were put over me, and to my husband. There was always someone that I had to be submissive to, and the way I did this was to put myself down and to feel inferior, to feel guilty for everything I could not be. 

I was keenly aware of my faults, and I was cut off from my emotions, because it was the only way I could survive in this world view I'd grown up in. Here's another poem I wrote, also in the collection. It's important because it speaks to that disconnect between my emotions and my actions and how much I resented my emotions. I had a hard time getting in touch with them.

This one is called Why I Write.

So for me, growing up in this very religious environment where my emotions were the enemy and where my needs were the enemy: Submission and obedience were the one way to connect to God, and it was hard for me to transition from being a believing Mormon to someone who had lost their belief. I had to find some way to connect to the world. 

I wasn't going to throw everything out that I knew, so the very first thing I did was try to find a spiritual community.

I went to a Lutheran Church and the people were nice, but what I really connected to were the parts of the service where we talked about being sinners. Guilt and shame were my childhood language. It was so familiar to me, I felt comfortable in that.

Kneeling in the church and feeling like I was a sinner, and then giving my sins to God made me feel comforted. I felt like I was connecting to God. 

That lasted about a year. 

I tried really hard to conceptualize my connection to God as something outside of me that I could access inside a building. You know, inside a brick and mortar church. When the Lutheran Church no longer suited me, I started going to the Unitarian Universalist Church, which was a little bit more in line with my beliefs back then, but even as a UU I didn't always feel connected to this idea of a god outside myself. 

Prayer became less comforting. So I started going on nature walks.

I would walk by the Potomac River and sit down on a bench, feel the wind comb through my hair. I would listen to the wind rustle through the leaves of the trees, the squirrels jumping from branch to branch, and I would watch the dragonflies. They would mate as they were flying in midair. And I focused on the fast energy of their wings, on the waves of the river as it went around the rocks, and on the swaying of the trees.  

I could feel the energy in nature. I could see it, and I could feel it inside of me like I was part of nature. I felt connected to it--a different kind of connection than I had ever recognized before. It was a more healing kind of connection. 

Nature is all around us and we are part of it.

I grew up in this environment where I was taught God was outside myself. He was this person outside myself I had to be submissive to, to connect with through obedience. But what I found going out into nature was that I was part of this universal energy that went through the trees, the water, the insects, and the squirrels. I had energy. I was part of it.

If god was an energy, then god was also inside of me. So it makes logical sense that to connect to that energy, we need to connect to ourselves. 

This is where I started the journey.

I had to stop cutting myself off from my body by thinking of spiritual things as separate from physical ones. Perfectionism was the norm in the home where I grew up. I was a perfectionist, but not the kind of perfectionist that had all her books lined up in alphabetical order and her bed made completely straight. I was the kind of perfectionist who knew I was a failure at being perfect. So my room was usually messy, and I was very disorganized.

One reason organization was so difficult for me was because I knew I was going to fail. Why try when you’re going to fail? 

I looked at my fashion and the way I presented myself in much the same way growing up. There were the girls that were beautiful that knew how to do makeup. They had stylish earrings and fashionable clothes, fashionable hair. These girls spent hours in the morning getting ready, and everyone thought these girls were just so pretty.

All the boys wanted to date them. They were popular. 

I didn't even try to be one of those girls, because I knew I would fail. When I grew up in the late 80s and early 90s, big butts were not in. Thick thighs were not in. I had kind of a big butt and big thighs despite being skinny. I'm just built that way. I'm a pear. I wasn't the ideal shape for the time and I let the body shaming get to me. 

There was no point in trying to dress myself up in fancy stylish clothes when I was just going to fail anyway. I was so incredibly self-conscious in high school that I would go from class to class with my head down and my eyes on the floor. Guilt and shame were my first language. My imperfection in a home where the standard was impossible for me to reach was always in the back of my mind. So it only makes sense that my marriage had the same dynamic. 

I wanted to please my husband, but he wanted me to be someone else. He expected things from me I could not deliver, and so again I was constantly living with feelings of guilt and shame. Inadequacy.  I was never good enough. 

When I came out of the religion and out of the marriage, I had to find a way to connect with something. I had lost my community practically overnight and had to find a way to retain some form of identity, some connection with myself. And this truly began in nature and with energy. I began to look at my body less as something to find problems with. 

I could list off all the issues with how I looked. I could tell you I had fine hair, that my eyes were too narrow and small, that I was easily sunburned, my skin pasty and pale. I could tell you about my wide hips and my cellulite, that my boobs used to be a lot perkier before I had children. These are all normal changes that women go through, but I felt so ashamed of them. Ashamed of my body. I wasn't able to come out of this until I could connect with my body and appreciate it more, to better accept who I was. 

I am a music educator.

One of the most profound experiences I have ever had was when I took a dance workshop at a local college. We were forced to get into groups and to use our bodies to express emotion. It was extremely challenging, because I didn't want to move my body in any unfamiliar ways that would call attention to my butt and my thighs. I didn't want anyone to notice my lack of grace, and I became extremely self-conscious. 

I felt fat.

A lot of people in the class were thinner than I was, a lot of them were younger, and I felt like they were more lithe and graceful. This got in the way of my being able to experiment with motion and to really use my body in an artful way. But over the course of about 2 weeks, I was forced to toss aside these inhibitions. I had to move in ways that I have never moved before.

I learned if you're dancing in a way that's happy, you want to be light on your feet and higher in the air. If you're moving in a way that's sad, you're going to be moving slower and probably lower to the ground. And I learned to use the different planes--the higher plane, the lower plane--to move fast and then to move slow, to not be embarrassed about moving my hips or sticking out my bum or my stomach, and to not obsess about how others were looking at me. 

It took almost two weeks for me to get there, but what I found is we have that energy inside us. That god-like energy is gonna come out no matter what your body type is when you're dancing and expressing emotion. When you’re feeling the meaning behind the dance, people are going to be more concerned about what you're expressing than how you look. 

Unless they're assholes. 

Haters are gonna be haters. 

At the end of the day, you can't let them stop you from expressing the energy inside of you. We hold ourselves back by being self-critical and self-conscience in lieu of connecting with our bodies. So let me go back for a moment and sum up the gist of this episode. The way I learned to connect with the world as a child was to not connect with myself at all. I learned connection was something you did within a community and with a God outside yourself. As I got older and I left my religion, I realized this model did not work for me. In order to connect with the world on a deeper level, I had to connect with myself, with my needs, with my body, and with nature.

I found that I could connect with nature and the energy in nature by being in a peaceful outdoor ecosystem. By connecting with nature, I was able to recognize the energy and the potential within myself. Through dance and stretching, exercise and walking, along with experimenting in ways I could move my body, I could let go of perfectionism and self-consciousness. This allowed me to connect with myself and appreciate what my body could do.

It was at this point that I was ready to connect to a community. 

Listeners, if you have been following this podcast for awhile, you know that this is the last episode in Season 2 where we have talked primarily about mobbing. 

Mobbing is a phenomenon much like scapegoating where a person is ganged up on by their co-workers. They are basically driven out of their job. Mobbing can happen in religious systems, that's why we have “apostates” and excommunication. It can happen in schools and also in families. I have come to be wary of groups. I think they can be dangerous.

There are a lot of groups that are toxic that can poison your mental health. If you find yourself in one of these groups, it's best if you just get out. But there are also groups that are healthy and can help you heal. It’s important when you go out into the world and connect with new groups of people to already be connected with yourself, to know who you are, and to respect the energy in yourself.

Your energy and your personality is a gift to the world, so any new community that you connect with: Go in knowing who you are. Be authentic. 

If you go in and you try to connect with a community knowing who you are and being authentic, you are less likely to be driven by an unhealthy group’s agenda, to go along with groupthink, and to find yourself behaving in a mob doing something objectionable to an innocent person because you've lost track of who you are. 

It is essential when we connect to groups of people that we go slowly and carefully. We need to pay attention to what's around us and take our time. The most healing group that I've ever been part of was a writer’s group I joined after I left the church and left my marriage. I was aching for community at the time and started going to this writer's group every other week when I didn't have the children.

I began bringing my very personal poetry to the group. In my case, I was super lucky because I was putting my heart and soul on the table with that poetry. I was not hiding who I was or putting on airs at all. Looking back, that could have ended badly if I had been in the wrong group, but this group of writers was authentic. They wanted to help me improve my writing and they were honest about who they were. 

They saw me. I saw them.

And because I opened up and was authentic about my personal struggles, several of them were able to come to me and open up about their personal struggles. Each of us opened up more about the things in our lives that were not perfect or ideal, and the more personal we got, the deeper those connections became. 

It was in that writer’s group where I met my current boyfriend. He read my heart-wrenching, traumatic poetry and he did not think less of me. Instead he saw me. He got to know me through my writing, and after getting to know me for several months through my writing, we started seeing each other more. Being in this group was tremendously healing because I knew that I was safe. I could talk about something personal and I wasn't judged. 

It's hard to connect to people over the internet and feel safe.

If we weren't in a pandemic where we all had to be 6 feet apart, I would talk more about how to connect with people face-to-face, but I think given our circumstances I need to spend a little extra time on connecting with people online and the dangers of that.  

Since this podcast episode is about healing through connection and that healing primarily comes from connecting with yourself and with others who actually see you, I do not recommend using the internet to connect with people you don’t know in a healing capacity. Studies have been done which show there are a lot of narcissists online. 

Twitter has lots of narcissists. 

Facebook and Instagram have lots of narcissists.

These are platforms where you're encouraged to put your best foot forward: a fake foot. Let's be honest. You get better responses if you post pictures where you're smiling all the time that show you have the perfect family and that you're cooking the perfect meals. You're taking pictures of your beautiful perfect house and your beautiful perfect flowers. 

This is not real life.

The internet is a dangerous place. 

It is not a safe place to connect to people you do not already know. If you already know someone, that's different. If you've met them in real life and you've been friends for years that's great, but I would not be joining online support groups just generally, especially on Facebook. If you break an unwritten rule in an online support group on Facebook, you will get driven out on a rail. It will be just another terrible experience to recover from.

In the counseling world when you have support groups in real life, they generally have a small number of people in one room. Facebook support groups tend to be hundreds of people, so you don't necessarily know who's looking at what you've written. You can't see them and they can't see you, which defeats the whole point of a support group. So if you're going to join an online group, my suggestion is to make it a hobby group--something like a music group or a writing group, or a group of people who garden, but don't talk about the personal stuff in those groups. There's no way to know everybody is safe.

Something I would recommend for connection in this time of crisis, which I have found healing is corresponding longhand via letter with someone that you are close to. 

Write a letter to a friend.

My daughter has a friend right now who's in a mental hospital and they've been corresponding with letters that have personal information in them. This has been healing for my daughter. Write poetry or letters to your lover, or your husband or wife. If you're living with them, you probably don't need to write longhand letters, but if not, writing letters can allow you to process information more effectively, to reflect and to be honest with your thoughts. It’s the kind of communication where if the other person is reciprocating, it's going to deepen your bond. So that's one effective way to increase connection in a time when we cannot touch or be close together. I would not go to an instant platform like Instagram or Facebook or Twitter thinking that you're going to find a deep connection. You may luck out, but those aren't platforms where it's going to be an easy thing to find.

I'm going to wrap up this podcast now.

The third season of The Gaslighting Effect is going to be devoted to my father. 

Him and I are estranged. There's a lot that has gone into that decision. I want to get into the dynamics of that relationship. It was like having a warm sweater that you thought was good for you and then realizing it's hot outside and you need to take the sweater off because if you don’t, you’re going to get heatstroke.   

So I'm going to go over the threads of what made that sweater suffocating, what made it not fit right. I'm going to start that next week with perfectionism, which will be the theme for the very first episode of Season 3. I hope you have enjoyed this season. Thank you for listening.