Now, Next, and Healing Trauma
I took a little rest a few mornings ago, after venturing out for some breakfast. As I was drifting, I had this vision of a ticket-taker for a highly anticipated event.
The focus is all on getting into the room. Getting to what's next. Without that threshold, without the encounter with the ticket-taker, without that exchange, there is no entrance. And yet we hurry past, eager to get to the main event, missing the moment.
Now gets short shrift.
Now gets overlooked.
Now gets dismissed.
Now gets diminished.
Now gets neglected.
Now gets minimized.
Now gets criticized.
Next gets glorified.
Next gets exalted.
Next gets first dibs.
Next gets elevated.
Next gets emphasized.
Next gets picked first for the team, leaving some of us who are a little slower sitting alone on a bench, feeling unwanted.
All of the beauty of thinking of "next" in terms of possibility and potential gets usurped when the relationship to it has me constantly tripping over my own feet rather than standing solidly where I am right now in every way.
I read an incredible article this week that a friend sent to me about intergenerational trauma. Therapist and intuitive healer Jo Kent Katz writes:
What does ancestral Jewish trauma look like in particular?
Moving quickly. Thinking fast. Using humor. Demanding the truth. Staying on the move. Remaining hypervigilant to perceived potential threats. Defending ourselves. Focusing on mistakes. Judging each other. Assuming. Dismissing. Distrusting. Controlling. Originally, these behaviors were brilliantly adaptive responses; acute, refined, definitive attempts at securing the survival of our people. But taken out of their original context, patterns Jewish people once relied on for survival can now work against us, degrading our sense of worth and desirability, undermining our sense of agency and connection, dispossessing our sense of belonging, and uprooting our trust in anyone we perceive as “other.”
Reading this, something "clicked" for me.
The fast-ness I often feel internally that can sometimes propel me to be extremely efficient and productive, even creative, has a shadow side. It does not know how to rest easily. It does not turn down or off when it would, by all rights, be safe and appropriate to do so. The upshot is that I can be anxious, even jumpy (ask my wife what happens if the phone rings or someone knocks on our door when I'm in a deep sleep). This impacts my wellbeing and my overall ability to be present, truly present to whatever is happening. It can at times rob me of simple joys and pleasures, or send me into "solution" mode when faced with challenges or conflict.
With coaching, there can be a lot of emphasis on the "nexts," i.e. what you're moving towards, what your "dream" is, what you're ready for, what you're envisioning. And while there's nothing inherently bad or wrong there, what can get lost or lessened is the potency of what's already here, who you already are, and what you're already up to.
I think the real power lives somewhere between -- in being more at ease with "now," knowing that what's "next" is always, invariably, immutably emerging from that. When I see it this way, when I attune my body to this relationship to the two, something happens. I can relax. I can access something in my physical being, my body generally but even more specific than that, something almost cellular feeling, that I can only call trust.
When my focus is overly trained on where I'm trying to go, I can lose touch with trust.
It's like Trust and I get separated in the crowd, and suddenly I feel child-like, lost, frightened, small, vulnerable, orphaned. I need my now the way I need my mother, my father, my wife, my children, my feet on the earth, a sky, water, something sweet on my tongue, music, the fragrance of jasmine and lilac, the faces of strangers each carrying so many deep stories.
Now is where all of this lives out there in the world and also in there, in me.
Without it, next is nothing but an endless, exhausting striving. It is a reenactment of trauma, needing to hurry, needing to check things off the list, needing to get somewhere safer, better, more stable.
Now calls on me to tap into my inner stability. This feels so healing. It's both the hardest and the easiest thing. It is undoubtedly at the heart of my life's work. And I can only pray that that work is accomplishing something healing not only for me personally, but for my lineage in both directions, backwards into the past, forward into the future.