This is an artistic rendition of the Michigan Theatre, a street downtown, and the University of Michigan Tower, created from I photo I took through an app called Prisma.
Tomorrow is my Ann Arboriversary, the annual marker of the date I moved to town. I think of this each year, but this time, if feels like an especially important occasion. I begin a new year tomorrow, meaning that I close another one out today. And this time, I hit ten years. As of today, I’ve lived here for an entire decade.
That is a lovely gift. These days, I think a lot about place — what it means to witness land and nature, what it means to have a place to explore, and most of all, what it means to be embedded in relationships with friends, neighbors, and coworkers. I’m grateful to have lived here ten years.
Additionally, I have beloved people who live all over the country, and more than ever, I find myself wanting to be with them as often as I can — still rooted here, but adventuring in a number of “theres” every time I can make it happen. I want the roots; I want to prioritize the connections.
I want an expansive vision of home.
This theme has been on my mind and heart all year. Home is place. Home is land. Home is rhythms. Home is a spiritual state of mind. Home is, above all, in my experience, people.
So Ann Arbor, thanks for being a part of that vision. I’m grateful to be rooted in a place and to continue to reflect on what home means.
Dear Subscribing Readers, after submitting this post, I am going to take a two-week break from writing on Smuggling Grace, but I will be back mid-September. As always, thanks for reading along!
Image Description: This image shares the four primary nervous system responses to trauma — fight, flight, freeze, and fawn — as well as symptoms for each and ways they are commonly mislabeled. I am sharing the image text throughout the blog post below. I found this image on @SELSpace on Facebook.
Over the last few years in this era of a pandemic, we’ve moved through a number of experiences that have been traumatic collectively. This may be important time to learn about trauma and the responses that our nervous systems often take in response. When we’re feeling overwhelmed, we can move into states of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. We might also vacillate between a couple of these.
In addition to these becoming activated due to present circumstances,
— some people have endured past traumas as well, and these can become reactivated in our nervous systems in these ways,
and/or
— some people have lived with dysregulated nervous systems throughout much their lives, not necessarily remembering large, traumatic events in childhood, but rather, growing up in households that felt stressful and overwhelming in a generalized way. In these households, it was difficult to have needs cared for and nurtured, or caregivers may have also had dysregulated nervous systems, making it difficult to co-regulate alongside them.
In both of these instances, people may live with symptoms of PTSD or CPTSD (the C stands for complex and means that the traumatic events or environment was long-lasting).
In a moment, I’m going to list symptoms of the 4F pathways of trauma. You may recognize some of these in yourself or your loved ones. Please know that these don’t have to remain stuck or static in the body, and we don’t have to stay stuck or static in these patterns. There is help. Therapy certainly helps, and it’s okay to seek that help. In fact, it can be transformative. There are a variety of somatic therapies that help to heal our bodies and these patterns. (As just one example, I’m a big cheerleader for EMDR. Check it out.)
These are the 4Fs of trauma and PTSD. Which pathways tend to be primary for you? I am typing out the text of the image above.
Fight
Self-preservation at all costs
Explosive temper and outbursts
Aggressive, angry behavior
Controls others
Bully
Can’t ‘hear’ other points of view
A pronounced sense of entitlement
Demands perfection from others
Dictatorial tendencies
Typically mis-labelled as – Narcissist – Sociopath – Conduct disorder
Flight
Obsessive and/or compulsive behavior
Feelings of panic and anxiety
Rushing around
Over-worrying
Workaholic
Can’t sit still, can’t relax
Tries to micromanage situations and other people
Always ‘on the go;’ busy doing things
Wants things to be perfect
Over-achiever
Typically mis-labelled as – OCD – Bipolar – ADHD – Panic disorder – Mood Disorder
Freeze
Spacing out
Feeling unreal
Hibernating
Isolating self from the outside world
Couch potato
Dissociates
Brain Fog
Difficulties making decisions, acting on decisions
Achievement-phobic
Wants to hide from the world
Feels ‘dead,’ lifeless
Typically mis-labelled as – Clinical depression – Schizophrenia – ADD – OCD
Fawn
People pleasing
Scared to say what they really think
Talks about ‘the other’ instead of themselves
Flatters others (to avoid conflict)
‘Angel of mercy’
Over-caring
Sucker
Can’t stand up for the self, say ‘no’
Easily exploited by others
Hugely concerned with social standing and acceptance, ‘fitting in’
‘Yes’ man (or woman…)
Typically mis-labelled as – Codependent – ‘Victim’
Do you recognize these patterns in yourself or your loved ones? They are natural and do truly discharge traumatic energy. Our bodies have them because we need them at times. But we don’t want to become stuck in them. That causes larger problems for us. These patterns may spin out, causing us pain, and impacting our relationships.
But we can heal these patterns, and we can do the work of healing the systems that cause so much trauma in the first place. I love how the word ‘heal’ is both passive and active at once. We receive healing and cultivate it over time, and we can act as healers for a world with less trauma.
Image Description: Black background and the word ‘family’ in white letters; the l has a tree growing out of it. Public domain image.
What if you could be gathered together in one place with a version of yourself from every year of your life? Like, from baby to current age of adulthood?
What if every age of yourself was present toward all the others, gathered together like a family reunion of sorts? What would that be like?
-Would certain ages pair together for care?
-Would certain ages avoid each other?
-Would certain ages wander off somewhere and find some space to voice their stories, or maybe do some reconciliation work?
-Would certain ages impart wisdom to the other ages?
What might the current you want to say to your younger selves? What might your younger selves want to say to the current you? Truth be told, our younger selves are always present in some way, embedded into the rest of our lives. We can access the various parts of ourselves, and in a sense, even be in relationship with ourselves.
I wonder what would happen in this family reunion?
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
Smuggling Grace 