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
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
Sometimes, when I mess up, my blood sugar drops very low, down into the 50s or even high 40s. I can feel the effect in my body, as I sweat, become unstable and feel weak. I take a reading and have a slice of toast and the event passes. My doctor is rightly concerned … Continue reading Trauma 1, Trans Body 0
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
I know how to take a hit. I learned that very, very early. In a meeting with a flack, my big boss told her that my boss was being promoted. She was surprised, asking “Who knew?” He assured her that nobody knew, but she had seen my stoic reaction and was puzzled. “They … Continue reading Lizard Strongbox
I can’t go on like this. I am burnt-out and exhausted. This, I have read, is common in autistic people, particularly those who have struggled for years to ‘pass’. It is called the cost of passing. It is essentially exhaustion brought on by the extra strain of pretending to be something one is not. Tony … Continue reading The Cost Of Adaptive Behaviour
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
Once you learn to keep moving while parts of you are killed off, you can face anything. I am like a space probe set into hibernation without any thought or plan for reactivation. Shutting down was required, but the damage incurred by system decay, by negligence was just never considered. How do you re-awaken something … Continue reading Out Of Hibernation
“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
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
Humans, you may have discovered, can run hot and cold. They get all passionate, energized, and they get all distanced, shutting down and isolating themselves. Once they get out of their norms, their standard operating temperatures, you can’t easily predict which way the heat will go, full on or full off. Visible transpeople often take … Continue reading Borosilicate
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 