Resistance

what's healing me lately

I did not want to come to San Francisco this year.

For the first time ever, setting foot in the most beautiful city in the world filled with so many people and places I love and I know love me back, filled me with deep dread I almost cancelled the trip entirely, but settled on “just” shortening it by a week.

How could I possibly enjoy my time there when I knew my protective parts would be on high alert for running into my ex and my vulnerable parts would be peeping through my psyche over and over and over again as I passed cafes and walked down streets and remembered her everywhere. The woman who I was convinced, at the time, was my “soulmate.” A belief that originated from an astrology app that labeled our “bond” as such, and oh how quickly did my conditionings around soulmates add fuel to the fire that would soon consume me. The person who I discovered so much of myself with, such as being a proud bigender lesbian. The person who I believed I would be with “forever.” How could I possibly bear to confront all the unprocessed pain still dolling out what the fuck’s? in my mind, and fuck you’s outloud, alone.

“8 months is long enough” my therapist tells me when my protector part swoops in to minimize my experience.

“Even people with secure attachments can become insecure from a narcissistic relationship.”

I’m not good at leaving things that are bad for me. I always try to just work harder.

That’s what happened with my first boyfriend, first girlfriend and most relationships in between. Until the Tower came crashing down and clearing it out for me.

That is how that card operates after all.

The 16th card in the Major Arcana Fool’s Journey of the Tarot. The one of a great big medieval tower collapsing from a lightning strike with fire pumping out of windows and people falling from its height. The Tower will move things along for you in a sometimes soft, in this case brutal, way when you are stuck in your resistance or ambivalence or denial about a situation or belief.

2024 was literally my Tower card year. Meaning, when you add up my birth month, day and the current year (then 2024) it equals 16 - The Tower. I knew something was going to fall in my 34th year of living, but I didn’t think it would be that relationship and the painful realizations after its dissolution, or what I often refer to as: “being discarded” when speaking about “the breakup.”

It happened a week after the election and a week before flying to Scotland to work on my book and have my long awaited ancestral pilgrimage. Needless to say the sudden change in life circumstance destroyed me. I felt shattered. Disillusioned. Broken. I felt as though the air was being sucked out of the back of me through a hole in deep dry heaves as if a dementor was pulling the soul out of me, leaving me with no breath, dignity or hope. I had never experienced anything so physically and psychologically painful. I felt “crazy.”

After eight months, I was already covered in a thousand papercuts I pretended weren’t there, so the final killing blow made me a shell of a person.

I had lost significant weight without trying. I was compulsively using cannabis. My sleeping was disrupted and my eating was barely there. Worst of all, I couldn’t feel anything. At first I wondered if this was the “emptiness” I had heard so many folks talk about over the years that I never felt. But I couldn’t even feel an emptiness. I was numb. Period.

The mountains staring back at me across the loch didn’t enliven and expand my cells in awe. The fog didn’t soothe me, the sun didn’t warm me, the rain didn’t calm me, the wind didn’t wake me up. I couldn’t feel on the outside or the inside. When I tried to connect with my inner self - the one who I trusted. The one who I thought could safely guide me. The one who I thought told me this would work out. That she was “the one”. That this was a soul connection. Was no where to be found. It wouldn’t emerge because I was blended with my protector part who said “how can I ever trust you again?” “How can we ever trust anyone else?” And my vulnerable part echoing incessantly “how will I ever love again?” And “who would ever love me?” It’s feelings of betrayal, confusion, anger, grief and numbness cycled through my Mind-Body-Spirit as old unhealed beliefs showcasing my total lack of self esteem said thing to me like,

“You will never experience a love like that ever again.”

“Everything is downhill from here.”

“No one will ever love you again.”

I truly and deeply believed this.

For about two weeks.

The shift back to wholeness, back to feeling, back to myself, back to love, came after a deep - some might say compulsive, research dive into narcissistic relationships with the help of Dr. Ramani’s Youtube channel, Reddit communities for narcissistic abuse recovery, and my therapist I luckily began seeing a week before the discard. The fact there was a name for almost everything I had experienced was not something I could ignore. Though, I did and still do, have a part of me that can’t accept this and continues to blame myself or minimize the pain and crazy making that just became the water I swam in and drank up without questioning. Instead I consistently rationalized myself into staying. Into making it work. Into not giving up because my exile still held my most wounded belief: I am unlovable, so take the love that’s given.

The spell she cast was finally broken the moment I had a name for what had “happened to me” (the part of me again that doesn’t want to be “a victim” and doesn’t want to diagnose someone has to put that phrase in quotation marks). All my fantasies about getting back together, all the negative beliefs about myself, all the confusion I had felt and made to mean something about me began to fade away and create space again for Me.

But of course…true healing doesn’t happen at the turn of a dime. It happens in stages. And this was just the beginning of a process I am honestly still in though making my way out of…finally.

I had made it through the stage of bargaining and denial those first few days post breakup. I was just entering the stage of grief and rage as the plane landed in Edinburgh at sunrise.

It overtook me my three days in Glasgow despite my noble attempts of hitting the gay bars and trying to go on some dates. I am polyamorous after all. I can still have fun with a broken heart (is what my mind told me). Fast forward to being on a date, going to the bathroom to cry, come back and tell her

“I’m so sorry. I’m just out of a relationship and realizing I’m not actually ready to date yet.”

Then off to the west coast I went. The main reason I was in Scotland. For a three week writing residency to focus on finishing the first draft of my book - What I Did For Love.

I am so grateful to my past self (and Chani Nicholas’ Year Ahead Reading) for setting up such a healing container for myself. I had that trip planned and booked before even meeting my ex. The residency - the land, the people, the space, the mercury retrograde, was the perfect setup to land into, transform my pain through writing, and quite literally recover.

It quite felt like an Intensive Outpatient Program whose main modalities are expressive arts and ecotherapy. Similar but different than the last time I was in treatment in a little wood paneled room in Hayes Valley for folks recovering from disordered eating 10 years earlier. Only this time I was in a eco-friendly shipping container transformed into a writer’s residency unit on a pond facing oak trees and gorse bushes and a blue heron that visited most mornings on my ancestral lands.

I was surrounded by other artists doing their version of recovery work. Recovery of their stories, their energy, their creative inspiration, their connection to themself. One was working on her memoir, like me, about losing her soulmate to a freak skiing accident and her father to illness, all while preparing for her wedding in the Spring. She taught me nothing lasts forever, even soulmates, and that’s normal and okay and devastating and unanswerable. It just is.

During that time I wrote about 35,000 words. The most I have written in my life, let alone three weeks.

Since then, I have only written three times for my book. Once after meeting my now partner during my last week in Scotland in Edinburgh - my Scottish Angel. Once while in the Highlands with her during February vacation - when I returned. And once on my return trip to San Francisco this past May - the one I was giving myself grief over booking in the first place.

I’m so glad I did.

I have missed writing here. To you. I’m happy to be back sharing even if the thing that was keeping me from sharing is so deeply scary to share. The shame of being a clinically trained therapist specialized in relationships and trauma who was in complete denial of what was happening, and “even worse”, totally essentially uneducated on narcissism, narcissistic relationships and narcissistic personality disorder, and it’s felt…well…embarrassing. Logically I know therapist are just human like everyone else, but “shouldn’t” I know better?

No wonder I’ve had such a fierce protective part making it nearly impossible to focus on my writing, let alone share it publicly.

Facing resistance is hard, but it often leads to its dissolution, which leads to a break through.

I have so many clients who share fears about not being able to handle things if they change how they automatically respond. Fears about not being able to handle things if they reconnect to their body. Fears of suicidality if they begin to expand their resources and shift away from “tried and true” survival ones.

The thing is, we’re not supposed to just push past resistance. At least that’s my training. We’re supposed to meet the resistance. Work with it. Talk about it. And often in talking about it, rather than pushing it to the side or pretending it doesn’t exist, the resistance begins to soften. The persons Self Energy increases - their courage, their clarity, their calm, their compassion for this protector part that so understandably has some concerns about doing things differently, really helps it to let go.

If we want to unburden our parts, we need to hear them out. We need to help them understand they don’t need to do that anymore. We have to build trust with ourselves and trust comes with time and consistently showing up.

This shift from defensiveness, resistance, self protection and into Self leadership, vulnerability (which is power) and creative expression is supported by neuroscience.

When our MindBody is activated in a threat response, otherwise known as “triggered”, our Autonomic Nervous System flies into the sympathetic nervous system (Fight, Flight) or parasympathetic nervous system (freeze, collapse) - otherwise known as “dorsal vagal immobilization”. When our MindBody feels safe enough, playful, or able to rest and digest and connect, we are in the “Social Engagement” part of these two different parts of the Autonomic Nervous System, otherwise known as “Ventral Vagal.”

The good news is only one of these systems can be engaged at once. Meaning, to get out of Dorsal Vagal (collapse, freeze) or Sympathetic Mobilization (fight, flight), we gotta activate the Ventral Vagus system, which is done in a variety of ways (breathing, movement, orienting to the space, etc.). Each of these ways stimulates the Vagus Nerve, which means “The Wandering Nerve.” When it’s stimulated, the survival threat response shifts into the social engagement response.

Until just now, I have been stuck in my sympathetic (avoidance, run away from) and dorsal vagal (lack of motivation, freeze) response anytime I thought about returning to my book project or writing this newsletter.

Isn’t it wild how at the start of this piece I simply named my resistance and then ended up telling you about this deep wound, hard experience, and shame I was keeping a secret? That was not my plan when I started writing about resistance and returning to San Francisco.

It just came out organically because I was finally ready.

Well, ready enough.

What are you ready enough for?

With love,

Lucky

p.s. Do you wanna read a piece from my book project? Drop YES in the comments and I might be brave enough to start sharing some :)

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