My body betrayed me. The arc of a human life is usually to start by being embodied, sensing the world around you and feeling your responses to it, then to gain wisdom & perspective as you age, learning to keep sensations in a more thoughtful context, growing your mind and your story. For me, though, … Continue reading Body Break
Who would I be without the burdens that I have learned to carry? How the hell should I know? Part of the whole construct/deconstruct/rebuild ethos of rebirth is looking deeply at the ideas you carry, at the expectations and beliefs that are contained in your stories, and discarding those that you can. To become new … Continue reading Carry That Weight
I am in favour of stoicism. Learning how to think rather than just feel, to make choices based on balance & priorities rather than just impulse & reaction saved my life. I believe that as we age, learning to be more stoic helps us be more effective in the role of the parent, the role … Continue reading Stow Ick
If you are not willing to be playful, you are not able to grow, to heal or to form resilient and deep connections with other people. Kids build identity by play exploration, so why don’t earnest and resistant understand and engage that process? Being playful demands leaving the comfort of your own rigid expectations, assumptions, … Continue reading Play Resistant
This came through on my podcast feed recently and I started to listen. I have talked about Dr. van der Kolk and his book, “The Body Keeps The Score” before. Now, though, scraping bottom, I realize how fundamental my experience of trauma is, how it forms the flinty bedrock of who I am. For good … Continue reading Flinty Trauma
I often do the exercise of imagining what I might say if I got a chance to speak to a specific audience, so I was just spit balling a presentation for Connecticut Trans Advocacy Coalition’s Transgender Lives Conference which focuses on clinical professionals and transpeople. Trans-Empowerment: Believing In Yes Trans people grow up being taught … Continue reading Trans-Empowerment: Believing In Yes
Every transperson has experienced moments when the ground seems to fall away beneath them, when they start to be swallowed up, dropping into hole which puts them below other people, a hole that feels difficult to climb out of. That hole shows up when we feel dismissed or marginalized or dehumanized or devalued, when someone … Continue reading Me & My Hole
I was listening to the On Being With Krista Trippett episode where Bessel van der Kolk talks about his experience treating trauma. People who get over trauma rewrite the stories, van der Kolk says, making them foundational and positive. Those who are stuck keep the story intact, becoming a “living memorial” to those moments. The … Continue reading Rewriting Trauma
“Did you hear that?” TBB asked me. “Did you hear that?” “Yes,” I assured her. “I heard.” “My mother said you look beautiful. That’s high praise. Believe me, she speaks her mind, and if she didn’t believe it, she wouldn’t say it.” “I heard her.” “You know that she has amazing fashion sense, right? She … Continue reading Realigning Mirrors
Nobody really cares about me, and that’s fine. I was very young when I had to come to peace with that idea. My parents lived in their own worlds, asserting their own needs, and were not able to come into mine. I never saw this as evil or nasty, even if I found it frustrating … Continue reading Stop Being Invisible
Once you are trans and emerged, no longer struggling to fit into your assigned box, it’s easy to look back and ponder what might have been if things had been different. What might have happened if you didn’t have to hide, instead feeling safe to show yourself? What would you have learned by going through … Continue reading Might Have Been
The devil you know is the devil you own. There is a reason you cling to what you have now, even if it is not serving you. Change is change, away from the familiar and into the unknown. That’s why Reinhold Niebuhr’s original “Serenity Prayer” asks for the courage to change and not for the … Continue reading Courage To Change
I knew what I needed to hear. I needed permission, needed someone else to say out loud that what I wanted, what I needed, was not sick or crackpot or disgusting, but was a legitimate, authentic and even beautiful expression of how some people are in the world. When I ended up at Southern Comfort … Continue reading Vital Permission
Very early, I came to the realization that with my bones, I could never pass for having gone through puberty as a female. I was living with a born female woman who is 6′ 3″ and has size 13 feet when I first came out as trans, understanding how different her female-bodied experience was from … Continue reading Actualization Overload
No one works in a vacuum. My characters would never be the way they are if I didn’t work with my fellow performer characters. That’s when one finds a character, when one plays off another character. If I was just alone, I would be lost. I couldn’t create a character as lasting. — Frank Oz … Continue reading Alone, I would be lost.
While my struggle to be seen, heard, affirmed, validated and accurately mirrored may seem from the outside to be an intellectual quest, it most assuredly is not. It comes from somewhere much, much deeper, somewhere much more potent and tender, somewhere in my heart. I’m sure that Dr. van der Kolk, as a psychiatrist, would … Continue reading Body and Words
Accurate mirroring gives you permission to feel what you feel and know what you know — one of the essential foundations of recovery. — Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score You can no more see your own soul than you can see the back of your head. ‘ The only way to … Continue reading Mirror Shards
I had never heard a death rattle before, but when that sound started to emerge from my mother, lying in her recliner, I knew what it was. The hospice nurse hadn’t believed me when I told her my mother’s intentions. “If people could choose when to go,” she told me, “my mother would have stayed … Continue reading Actively Dying
The fact that you can stand up and speak rationally about your emotions, that your left brain can report on what your right brain is feeling, does not mean that those emotions inside you are not real, powerful and crippling. The body keeps the score. I know that most counselors believe their job is … Continue reading Real, Real, Real, Real
To get through the effects of trauma, it is useful to go back to a time when you felt safe and loved in the world, a time when you were a shark, powerful and cared for. What happens, though, when you don’t have a memory of that time when people looked at you with adoration, … Continue reading Furious Structures
Callan 