Jenn Turner
This episode may contain topics of conversation and themes sensitive to some individuals. It is our intention to talk about the impact of difficult or painful experiences, rather than the graphic details of what happened that being said, these topics may still very well be activating. Feel free to read the description or show notes for a time stamped list of potentially activating content discussed in this episode. Please care for yourself as you listen today, we're glad you're here with us.
Well, welcome to on trauma and power. I'm your host. Jenn Turner, co founder of the Center for trauma and embodiment. I'm so glad you're here with us. Each episode I sit down with different experts, educators, authors, survivors and practitioners sharing different trauma informed experiences across various fields, join us as we explore the complex intersections of trauma and power through embodied healing and diverse perspectives in both Our Personal and collective healing journeys. Let's dive on in.
Thank you so much for joining me, Peggy, I love our conversations always, and excited to invite in our listeners to join us in that. Just to give a frame for everyone, I'll share a bit about who you are, and then we'll get to know you more in this conversation. Peggy J Bowers is a scholar of media ethics and culture, passionate about exploring human and environmental connections through popular culture and the arts. Her award winning research published in journals like Journal of mass media, ethics and communication monographs, examines the intersection of ethics, visuality and culture with professional journalism experience. She holds a PhD in communication from Stanford and journalism degrees from Wichita State University. Peggy, this is always a pleasure to be with you, to improv with you as we go through these conversations. You're welcome. Thank
Speaker 1
you. Great to be here. Thanks for inviting me. Yeah. Do you have a
Jenn Turner
quote to start us out? Is that right? Yeah, I do you want to frame it a little or just dive on in? Well,
Speaker 1
this is, this is a quote by Margaret Atwood that I stumbled across in a book, actually by a philosopher. The book is called Love in the dark philosophy by another name, and I was really interested in looking at, you know, philosophical approaches to love, but this quote, really, to me, seemed like it was all about the process of healing from trauma. When you're in the middle of a story, it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion, a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all when you are telling it to yourself or someone else,
Jenn Turner
that's amazing. Can you, you know, share more about how it speaks to you or interpret that for us,
Speaker 1
sure? Well, I mean, it's, you know, I'm very interested, and have been for a long time, obviously, in in narrative and how people form narratives, what they make out of narratives, how they interpret, how language works. And I realized that, you know, when you're in the middle of the realization about the trauma, because it's it's not always something that just becomes part of you. Sometimes you sometimes you suppress it, or sometimes you completely forget about it, and it hits you all of a sudden, as it did me. And so you're kind of in the middle, and you're like, Oh, what happened here? And you try, you start trying to make a narrative to help it make sense. Because human beings, I would tell my students, right? Human beings, we say we're Homo sapiens, but we're really homo narans. We're the great sense makers. We have to make sense. We have to make sense. So we tell stories, we narrate our experience, we weave in details, and then we make the details have certain kinds of meaning. And so you end up in this place where you have something that you didn't want, right? Nobody wants this. And you try to make sense of it, but you can't. It's just a shambles. It's horrible. It, you know, you can't even un make it happen right? After, I knew I could never unsee it. Yeah. Yep, yep. And, you know, it doesn't mean that I ever see it all the time now, right? But that's a process. So you tell stories, but it's only when you start healing, right? And you do, you have to do significant healing before it really all of the jumbled up parts become a coherent narrative, and, you know, and you have to tell that story to yourself in order to go on. But you also, I think, have to tell your story to other people. This is a horrifying thing that just came out of my mouth, because once I knew what it was, I really didn't want anyone to ever know. I never wanted to tell my story at all. I just wanted to pretend to other people that it never happened, even if I couldn't to myself. But yet, I think that it's like, it's like grief. It is, it is a kind of grief. I mean, it's trauma and grief are swept up together, just like grief, it has to be shared in
Jenn Turner
that you can't do it alone, or that
Speaker 1
you can't do it alone. You can't do it alone, for sure, but also, I think there's, there's something that's healing about it, right? So, so I have, I have done a lot of thinking about grief, and grief has to be shared, because you have to have a community firm your loss. That's why, if you look at rituals all over the world, no matter what culture group you're looking at, there are always ways of dealing with grief. Some of them are healthy. Some of them, I think, are not like Americans. Don't know much about grief. We really come to that conclusion, we struggle, but, but we, but we do have rituals, right? So, so, but all the rituals involve other people. I mean, when my brother died, I mean, I was in a small rural community and, and I would say that, you know, within minutes or an hour of the news getting out on the media. People were coming with their with their pies and their casseroles and all the things I didn't feel like eating, right? But, but that's because that was part of the custom, right? It requires people, but when you express your grief and you work through it, you can also heal other people. I didn't really want to spring this story, or maybe even tell it at all, but which you don't have to, if you and it's okay, it's it's appropriate here, and it's not like us, big, deep, dark secret either, because I've told a lot of people, because I'm a big believer in poetry. So so when I speak about the power of poetry. Or when I teach about the power of poetry, which I have, one of the things that I talk about is the fact that I'd never really grieved my brother. He died when I was 10, and I never really grieved him until I was in my first year of doctoral studies. And that was an astonishing fact to me, because the person who told me that, I said, I think you're insane. I cried a river, an ocean, right? His memory is with me every day, versus said, No, you haven't really grieved your brother. And I think the way to start healing is to write a poem. And I said, Well, now you've really stepped in it, because I haven't written a poem since I was eight years old. He said, No, write a poem. I'll give you two weeks write the poem. So of course, I procrastinated for two weeks and and then I realized that I had an appointment to read a poem that I hadn't written yet, so I sat down, and I just thought, logically, I'm going to go back to the very beginning and and so I'm going to go to the day he died, and I'm going to start writing there, and then I just let myself write. And I was amazed by what came off on the page, you know, and the line, the line that really surprised me the most, because I stood at my brother's grave and I couldn't leave, like the Emily Bronte poem about, I couldn't, couldn't go, and I stood at my brother's grave after everybody else had gone. You know, my uncle graciously agreed to stay with me. But I thought, you know, the grave diggers were sitting there with their Bulldog. They were waiting, and I just wouldn't leave. I couldn't leave, you know, because I guess I thought, as long as I'm standing here, they can't bury you, and you're not really gone. Yes, of course. So yeah, I mean, I'm 10 years old, right? So, anyway, so the line that popped out. How can I let them put you there? Who will love you, who will love me, right? So that was shocking. Anyway, so I so I wrote this poem, and I said, whoo, okay, that's over. Yes, I'm starting on my healing journey, or whatever. And he said, No, I I. Yeah, you can't really start healing until the community affirms your loss. And I said, Well, no, he says, so. He said, so I want you to read your poem. You know, in a group, I'm like, how big a group? How big a group, it turns out to be hundreds of people. So I got up and and I told my just a brief little story about, you know, my brother dying and and then I read the poem, and when I finished, a woman came up to me, and she said, last year, my son dropped dead on the playground. He was eight years old, and his name was Tim. My brother's name was Tim. She said, I never knew how to think about or explain what I was feeling until I heard your poem, and I'm like, Whoa. Okay. I believe now, right? That this is the process that really works, you know? So after that, even, like when I taught, once, I was teaching a class, and I don't know, I had about 12 people who were, like, incredibly some of them were incredibly successful, major figures in the Bay Area, whatever, but I said, I want your assignment, which you don't have to do if you don't want to, but your assignment is to write a poem about a loss that you think you've never grieved. And this one woman wrote a poem she said, My brother was Mia in Vietnam, and I've never grieved him in all these years. But when I wrote this poem for him, I really felt like I started the process of healing. So I was like, okay, right with, this is the, this is the secret here. So that's so that's why I'm, you know, stopped to tell this story because I really didn't think that that was part of what you had to do with trauma was to ever share or ever try to speak to other people, but there are other people, and your your story affirms their loss. It affirms their experience. It affirms the the brokenness, the the horror, the regret, lots of things that we can talk about today, about what becomes sort of the defining traits of being traumatized, responses to it. Because I've thought a lot about responses to it too, and how they're different. I
Jenn Turner
think so much of what you're saying too resonates with me around oftentimes we don't have a witness to what we have been through because sometimes trauma happens in isolation, I think often it can, but also because the way that it impacts us is so deeply personal, people can't be kind of inside of our experience. And writing is one way to share that right, and being able to do that in an sort of illustrative way, or in prose or poem. I think what is coming up for me, though, as we're talking is also like you and I met in a very wordless situation, right? So you and I met and started working together in the yoga sessions years ago that where we don't talk about trauma at all, but we are there for trauma, and so I'm sort of wondering what that was like for you. And if you might share a little bit about how yoga you sort of you found your way to yoga, or how it's impacted your healing. And maybe there is a connection to finding words or language through being wordless. I don't know, no
Speaker 1
Well, when I when I talk about language, I define language much more broadly than just words. Language is a very broad, expressive entity. It's a part of it's so much a part of the human experience that we don't really even know what we think until we've thought it through somehow in words, like stories, etc. But getting back to the to the word less word, right? So telling your story or or coming into contact with your with your trauma, and trying to sort through it doesn't just involve your mind where the words come. It also involves your body. And that I was completely unaware of up to that point. I did not know that my body also held on to trauma, even if my words in my mind, by that point, had already started thinking through how to tell my narrative to get myself to heal, and I thought that was the whole process. Then my therapist said, in her understated wisdom, I think you should go to yoga. You. And I said, yeah, no, thanks. And you know, she didn't push. And just every once in a while, she would raise the issue, and I would say, because I just thought yoga was like a bunch of people in tights with special color coordinated props, and they didn't look sweaty, and they just looked kind of Frou, Frou. And I was like, that's totally not me, and I'm not going there because I don't understand anything about how that's going to help anything. But then I got there, and the beauty of that experience was never thinking about my trauma. I carried it into that room, but I never was in there thinking I'm here for trauma, or how can I fix my trauma, or what's going to happen to my trauma now? Or does my trauma seem to be getting better? I was completely removed from any kind of thing like that. I went in there. It took a couple times, right? Because the first time, you know, I was very self conscious. I just thought, you know, can the teacher really be that flexible? Am I ever gonna Am I Am I like, what's wrong with my body? Am I ever gonna work like that? And, you know, and is anybody else looking at me? Which, of course, they weren't. But I got to a place where I realized only by keeping a journal, right? I kept a little journal of the beginning, and I every week, you know, I would realize that I was feeling more connected, more myself, like my body was not the enemy anymore. My right, because I always thought of my body as the enemy. The body was the place that, the place where the trauma entered my being, yes, and, and so it was the first, let's call it the first line of defense. And, and there was no defense, of course, because there's no defense for trauma. So my body, I thought of my body as like something that was an impediment, impediment to my to my goals, impediment to my, you know, because it has limitations, right? The body has limitations and, and so, yeah, I and it was a vet like as a vessel and what and whatever I am, I thought was just sort of housed there, right? My Essence, right? Some people would call it your spirit or your soul or whatever. I sometimes call it my spirit or my soul. I mean, I vary between the two, right? But for me, but it's a real essence. So whatever you think your essence is, whatever makes you I just thought that was a thing that was basically being held prisoner in this container of flesh that had all these limitations, and it was frustrating to me, you know. And so how can I overcome having a body right by using my mind and making, you know, life a very intellectual experience. How
Jenn Turner
did that change? Yeah, I'm curious. It
Speaker 1
changed. It changed because when I got in there, of course, nobody was really asking me to do anything with my mind. I was focused on the body and but I was but I wasn't doing anything that seemed all that threatening either. I was just breathing, right? I was moving, and as I breathed and moved, I became more conscious that that my body was there as a part of me, and that I was connected, and I felt more connected progressively as I got through diff more sessions, right? And I think I've said this to you before, I didn't realize that, you know, I got through, like, about session 10. By that point, I just was ready to give up. I was just like, Huh? You know, this is terrible. I can't do that. And you said, Yeah, that's what the research says. But then if you just give it another session or two, just give it one or two more. And I did, and suddenly it was like a breakthrough. I felt like I'm here and my body is not I'm not thinking about my body's limitations anymore. I'm just thinking about my body as part of me, a part of me that I should feel compassion for. And when I started to feel compassion for my body, I started to feel compassion for myself, which was something that was really hard and I had not effectively done ever before, that
Jenn Turner
what a transformation right to go from the body or my body is a thing to overcome to I am, it's part of me to I have compassion for my body, and therefore me, because I am my body, or my body is part of me,
Speaker 1
yeah. I mean, my body was always the place where, if I if I was angry, that's the part I took it out on. Yeah. It. It was there to just basically, you know, for me to to be mad at, to to punish, right? So if there was something that was going but I saw them as, I saw them as separate, you know, it'd be like, Oh, I'm mad at myself because I, I was a real perfectionist, supremely perfectionistic and, and, of course, nobody's perfect. So that was a constant source of anger for me. You know, a goal, right? Because you can always work to be more perfect, right? It's like an infinite number, right? It's always, it's going to go on and on. There's you're never going to reach the end of the number of places you can have in an infinite number. So I'm thinking, I'm just going to keep making progress. I'm just going to work and work and work. And work and work, but I failed, right? There would be some failure, some little thing, right? It's still with me. For example, when I do like, a New York Times, you know, and it and they start giving you the statistics about, like, like, your 99% of the time you score. Here's a perfect score on this. And here I have 100 different ways to measure myself for that, and then I get mad, right? And sometimes I don't do a crossword puzzle fast enough, and I say, you suck, right? But that's, that's, those are the vestiges that are left. But I mean, in the beginning of my life, when I didn't even realize I had trauma, right? I would just be like, if you didn't study hard enough for this if you didn't do this, if you didn't do X, Y or Z, if you made a mistake here, if you hurt someone's feeling right, a million different ways that you could make a mistake. Then I took it out on my body, and at one point even it was I said, Well, you know, what does the body need? The body needs food. I withhold food as a punishment, and that was, that was a, an enormous quagmire, you know, and when I finally got over that, and I did stop using that as a coping mechanism, it doesn't mean that I that I did so because I suddenly loved My body, right? Because I always thought my body is just kind of, you know, it's not shaped the right way, and, you know, it's not athletic enough, and it's not, you know, whatever. There were all kinds of things that I could find. Well, there's always, you know, as the song goes, there's always some reason to feel not good enough. And so I did, you know. So it was only at that point when I began to realize that my body was a team, and that my body had its own hurts, that it was holding on to, and that that was actually where I my mind sent all of my experiences that I couldn't deal with. I didn't want to deal with them. I didn't want to think about that. I didn't want to think about, you know, I just wanted to hope that I could go on and just leave that behind and pretend it never happened. It wasn't something that occurred to me that I needed to heal. So I would send all of that stuff, all of that energy, all of that into my body, and my body was holding it, and I and I got so used to my body holding it, I never understood that it was holding it. And suddenly, for example, I learned that I was doing something called armoring. Some people call it armoring, but it was really I would feel like I was perfectly relaxed, but I wasn't all of my muscles were constantly whether I was sleeping or awake or enjoying a movie or reading a book, my body was tight like this. You know, somebody even pointed out to me once, when I was just eating a meal, that I was eating a meal with my fist clenched like this, Yep, yeah. And I didn't even realize that I was doing that. Okay? So I had all of these places where my body was, you know, and I suddenly, through the yoga, for example, I felt my body let go. What
Jenn Turner
was that like? Because one of the things you talk about in other conversations we've had is the experience of what is it like to feel or be vulnerable without feeling threatened? And yes, to me, the unclenching or the softening of our body, is that like, potentially there could be like, a backlash from that? You know, internally, it's like, this is my homeostasis, and that's how I have this sense of safety. What is it like to unclench? What is it like to soften?
Speaker 1
Well, I mean, that's a very that's a that's broad. There are many different facets to that, because there's the actual acceptance of my body's vulnerability and feeling like I can, my body can relax and not always feel like, if I relax, you know, then like a truck is going to hit me from behind, and I there's no way that I can. I. Lose my guard, so my body was on guard, and when I felt my body not on guard, it was new, but I was conscious of it, because my body felt free. It felt free in a way that I can hardly describe it. You know, I'm thinking about it even, you know, even now, I'm still puzzling through what it feels like because it's There's nothing. There's no perfect description of it. I know I read a novel once, and it was a novel of someone's idea of of what it would be like to be to live in, like a perfect world, right where the air is perfect and the environment is perfect. And they're, you know, you're perfectly safe all the time. And they had this sort of open ocean. I love the ocean, so that was really attractive to me, but it was like this. And the water was was a perfect temperature, so you could hardly feel it, but it was just supporting your body, and there was no way you could ever drown. And you were just in this ocean that felt so wonderful, and you could just you were free to do whatever motion and and suddenly I felt like, Oh, this is really different, because I always thought I was relaxed before, like, when you wake up in the morning after a good night's sleep. I was like, Yeah, this is relaxation. But no, it wasn't. Because there was a whole nother level where my body just said, all my muscles are not holding on anymore to whatever it was, whatever, whatever was going the, you know, the trauma, whatever. And I felt my my muscles relaxed to such a place that it just felt like a complete exhale of all of my muscles. But then you know that because, because I realized that the body and the mind are connected, then I started to see that this kind of vulnerability was also I was holding on to things in my inner life, so I thought I was being open and loving with people. I would never let myself get to a point where I felt completely vulnerable. I would never show my vulnerabilities to people, because even by accident, right, they might just plow into you, yes, and hurt you, right? And so, so you could never completely be open. You could never completely be honest, right? Because I just thought if people really knew me, then they wouldn't love me, right? If they love me now, right? It's only because they just don't know, and I can't show that part, and I and again, just like my body, I was holding on to those vulnerabilities so tightly I didn't even realize that's what I was doing. It
Jenn Turner
becomes a way of survival, though, also, right? When you're bracing for impact or bracing for loss or harm, it becomes a way of being in the world to keep yourself safe. We don't even realize, oftentimes we're doing those things that then ultimately end up inflicting harm on ourselves, but really come out of survival and protection, self protection,
Speaker 1
exactly, exactly. So, yeah, so I mean, I I had developed so many coping strategies for protecting myself, keeping all those every fault that I thought I had, which, of course, there were a multitude, because your self image takes a huge blow when you're traumatized the self loathing you live in a world where fears in the background, paralysis for a lot of people like me, was something that you struggle against, and then you're always excessively vigilant, even when you're not consciously aware of being vigilant, you just have all of these protections in place about how to read other people. I mean, it's a good thing to learn how to read other people, right? Because you need to know what threats are out there. But, boy, I'm good at it. And, you know, so So learning all about, you know, and my so I had this sort of, again, undercurrent, what like I had in my body, but with my self, my inner self, where I was constantly vigilant under threat, looking for, you know, outs, ways of protection, protecting certain treasures, if you will, like things that I thought were either because they're so bad you can't look at them or or just things that I don't want have hurt like, I don't want you to plow over this part of me, because this part of me, I think is, is pretty okay. So I don't want you
Jenn Turner
to it or, yep, yep, yeah.
Speaker 1
So right, and so and so. You know, I didn't even realize that people, people who tried to get close to me. Me, there was a point at which they could never get past, and that was very frustrating, perfectly wonderful people, and, you know, and it was, it was very nice, I thought, and very compassionate, and very, you know, I was always trying to be compassionate, but I had ways of pushing people away from me and and I even stopped realizing that I was doing that. And I can't imagine what that feels like from the other side. You know, do
Jenn Turner
you feel like as your relationship to your body shifted or developed even right, some of that changed for you, that capacity with others, like vulnerability with yourself, is one piece, but then vulnerability with others. How did that change? Or has it changed?
Speaker 1
Yeah, no, it has changed. Um, I hope, I mean, I think it's a work in progress. I'm not the person to be able to tell, obviously, from from what I just told you about people noticing how not vulnerable I could be, but I I do feel that I'm making a more conscious effort. I do feel that I mean this conversation with you. Mean a conversation with you is not risky and threatening, but a conversation with you that's a podcast, is, yeah, is is really vulnerable, risky and threatening, because if I say something that I think is really gonna that could resonate with someone that might even, dare I say, help someone right? That's my hope, as I said at the beginning with my poem, story, right, right? The best thing in the world is to know that something that was so horrible for you can actually be a source of encouragement and healing for someone else, because you share it. And so trying to make myself more vulnerable, and just trying to make myself, you know, be more interactive with with people and I, and I always tried to be a very compassionate person, but now I'm really thinking through the importance and the centrality of compassion and all of the places that that can show itself. And I try to to be that way every day in the world, especially with people or creatures or anything that I don't know, right? So, I mean, I'm always looking for for animals, and I see animals, and if I see an animal who's scared or suffering or or just even needs some attention, I stop a lot and and pet dogs. And you know, for example, and sometimes the owners say, Yeah, you know, 10 people pass by, and my dog wants every one of them to pet him, but nobody will. And so thank you, because my dog really thrives on having attention, but nobody pays attention when we're walking. They need community too, right? They need community. They really need community, because they're packs, right? They're pack psychology. So, so just just saying, what is it? What can I do in the world today? And maybe I know it's something I can do, and maybe I just do it by accident, but I have to walk through the world with a kind of gentleness and a kind of openness with eyes that see and compassion, even if you just smile at someone, right? Or even if you just say to someone, you know, I don't know. Like, it's sometimes maybe people don't know how to read me, but like, I don't know. One day I just said something to someone. Once in a while, I'll just say to someone in passing who's passing somewhere, you know, it's obvious I'm not trying to start a conversation. And I'll just say how dapper you look today, or what a fashionable hat or whatever. And just something, right? Because people just go through life and they don't notice each other, you know, and in a big city, it's fascinating to watch how people can be around so many other people and have absolutely nothing to do with any of them, not even a look, you know, not even a gesture, not even an expression of gratitude. People love gratitude,
Jenn Turner
no, and it's, it is. It's so powerful what you're talking about, and it's making me think about even the experience of moving our bodies in some of the yoga work that we've done in community, again, right? Like we're not talking to one another in the moment, but we're moving together. I might be like sort of guiding the way, but there's something I think that is so relational and so human about that, and so much of what you're talking about too, the ways that we have to wall ourselves off from one another, and so then in turn, ourselves, our own humanity, when we don't see each other, are we somehow not allowing ourselves to be seen as well, and how vulnerable it is to be seen and. Witnessed, whether that's moving around in space on our yoga mats together, or walking through the streets and making eye contact with one another, or witnessing one another. Sort of powerful themes that you're kind of tugging on,
Speaker 1
it is powerful, you. I mean, you feel it right. So, yeah, so I'm actually, I actually treasure being able to move through the world. But you were asking me earlier about, you know, how that happened? And I think that partly happened because in the healing process with trauma, you have to forgive yourself. I never, I guess. I just whatever parts of me I thought I had so much self loathing for I just thought they were completely unforgivable, and nobody could tell me otherwise, and I it wasn't even something that I could just be conscious of. It was like part of me. It became a part of me, right? There's this part, and it's so horrible, right? And I, especially as a perfectionist, hate that part. That just made me think of my favorite Dostoevsky quote that I used to use at the I would put it at the top of my ethics syllabus, if only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and all we had to do was to remove them from the rest of us. But the line between good and evil runs through every human heart, and who is willing to cut out a piece of his own heart, you know? And so it's like, right? So, so I was very, very, I had all this self loathing, right? And, and so, of course, I know now, in a way that I've, I've not known that unless you can forgive yourself, you're never really going to be completely forgiving and compassionate with other people. If there's, it's just, it's a, it's a barrier, it's a, it's a block, right? It does. It starts with yourself. So if you want to love other people, right? Really, for a long time, if somebody had said, if you want to love other people, you have to love yourself. I would have just thought to myself, some not very generous term for excrement. And I, you know, and I would have thought, oh, man, I've never heard anything so such treacle. But now, you know, what I understand is that the sources of strength, the sources of power, those are all the things that some part of the world considers weak, that real strength, right? So in I think I was showing you earlier about this book that I love, the the boy, the mole, the fox and the
Jenn Turner
horse, and we'll all these things too for folks, so they can check it out. Yeah,
Speaker 1
because this is, this is the book for you. So it's, yeah, but there's so they go through a lot of different discussions about and if you really look at them in this book, you see a very sort of simple and vulnerable admission of a lot of the features, without naming them, that are part of trauma. So every one of these characters, the boy, the mall, the fox and the horse, they're all traumatized in a different way, and they have to not only be able to express that, but to see the different traumas in the other characters, and to know how to help them. And by helping them, they help themselves. And by loving them, they love themselves, and they learn to accept the parts of themselves that they don't maybe like so much. They learn to be more fully themselves, you know. But there is this one line. And of course, I didn't mark the page because I didn't know I would be talking about it. So here's kind of the voice of it. So okay, so the boy and the mole are talking together, and what do you think success is ask the boy to love said the mole, but there's But, but. But probably when I picked this book up for the first time, the line that hit me the most strongly, except for, of course, what I shared with you about, I can fly, but I stopped because it made the other horses jealous. But besides that line, what the line that made that drew me to the trauma part of myself was, what is true strength, something, I mean, I can't quote it exactly, what was true. What is true strength? It's being able to ask for help. That's the most, that's the strongest, most courageous thing that you can do is to ask for help. Because, you know, when I first, when I first, even before I was in therapy for trauma, I started thinking about how to deal with, how to try to get out of this place where I was, where I realized that I wasn't being vulnerable, but I didn't know really what was wrong with me, and I didn't know how to fix it, and I didn't have any help with fixing it, and but I was attracted to this, um. Um song as part of a Broadway musical. It was a Broadway musical called waitress and that. And there's this epiphanal moment sort of near the end, when Sarah Barelas has written this beautiful song and about called she used to be mine, right? Like, what happened to myself? What happened to this person that I think I used to be in my youth, but there's this little section right where she sings. She is hard on herself. She is broken and won't ask for help. She is messy, but she's kind. She's lonely most of the time, she is all of this mixed up and baked in a beautiful pie. She's gone, but she used to be mine. And I thought, Well, I mean, I know one time I was riding a train from like Boston to New York, okay, and I just had that on continuous repeat, and not the Acela train either. So, you know, for people on the East Coast who know that is a long ride and and I just kept listening to it over and over, and I would be like, yes, that's That's right. It was like a grieving process, right? It was the beginning. Was to grieve, was to admit that there was this loss. I realized later, of course, that she's not gone for good. She's always there. She's always been there. She just has so many things cluttering up to protect her, but she's still there, and she can heal, and she can actually heal and be stronger than she was before, like the Japanese concept of when something is broken, and you right? And they take the threads of gold and they glue it back together. Becomes more beautiful than it was before it was broken, that kind of thing. Or, you know, Leonard Cohen, there's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. You know, once I those kind of things began to mean more to me, and I began to understand them more when I looked at being vulnerable with people as not a threat anymore, but as a gift that I could just extra appreciate someone express my gratitude to a stranger. Look at the elderly person in line behind me in a very long line at CVS who had a cart full of things and I had like toothpaste, and say, why don't you go ahead of me, or to just stop if somebody's struggling on the street, and say, Do you need help? And most of the time, even if they do need help, they'll say, No, I don't. Thanks, you know, but that was me, because, to your
Jenn Turner
point, it is vulnerable. It is so vulnerable to ask for help, and so strong to ask for help. And I think, as a provider, it is so important for us to remember that how big of a leap it is for someone to reach out and say, I need help. I can't do this alone. I don't know what I need. Can you help me figure out what I need, and how tender those moments are, when someone is is reaching out, and it sounds like you have made it a practice to then also reach out to others to extend that, whether that's someone that you know or someone that you don't know at All, and it's such a beautiful practice that you're describing, and I think it's a it's a beautiful way to to celebrate or to see our humanity together.
Speaker 1
I mean, I'm not perfect. I don't know if I'm even trying for perfect anymore, but I am trying to be better. I also used to really scoff at the expression, you know, the old adage that was something like, don't let the perfect get in the way of the good, you know, which I thought was utter nonsense. What are you talking right? But the perfect is right, what the good is like, what you settle for, right? Perfect. Come on. Perfect never gets in the way of anything. That was the way I that was the way I used to think, you know, because I just right, but it's about, it's kind of about letting go and and people think when they let go, they're losing. That was the harder. That was a hard, hard metaphor for me, because I just thought, when you let go, you lose. It's why, when I was grieving my brother, I couldn't, you know, I just kept grieving because I couldn't let go. I thought if I let go, I really let go, and then I lose him, yes, yes, but I don't lose him. I don't lose him by not living in that place of grief, right? But I just couldn't let go. Freeing seems scary, yes, freeing is too much possibility, right? Someone who has to make the perfect decision and grieving the perfect way, even, and grieve in the perfect way, right? And grieving in the perfect way means that you never, ever forget. But I didn't realize that you can remember and not grieve. That was a those two things could not be separated for me for a long time. Time, so, you know, but this is all by way of saying that, putting my mind and my body or my I say my mind, but I mean my whole essence, right? Because, yes, my whole essence and my body together as a team, right? And saying neither one of us is perfect, but, you know, we're going through this together. We're getting better, and we're not going to do this by ourselves. We're going to try to find other people that we can, you know, share with and be vulnerable, and maybe sometimes, yeah, those people bite and then you then you have to go out and move back and say, okay, not so good there. But you know, I'm not going to beat myself up for having tried, and then I'm just going to move, move on. You know, not everybody wants you to ask them if they need help, but some people do, you know, and then you have those, I thou, moments, those moments when you're meeting someone else at this level of total vulnerability and encouraging them. And it's, you know, it's you're not gonna have any kind of relationship with them or but in that moment, there's all of that naked honesty that I'm bringing to you who I am, and you're bringing to me who you are, and somehow, in this encounter, we're going to help each other. It may just be that you need something for the moment.
Jenn Turner
You know, I mean, we you've done it again. Peggy, I learned so much when I talk with you. I I'm and I'm sure that our community will too. I appreciate the ways that you delve into the layers of healing and complexity of trauma and grief. So thank you so much for joining me and for joining us and for being in community with me. We will have links in the notes to some of the books you quoted and the sources, so that folks can check it out if they're interested in more. But thank you so much. Can I
Unknown Speaker
just like
Jenn Turner
I was hoping you would Okay.
Speaker 1
Well, first of all, I would be remiss if I didn't say maybe as a little teaser for people who would ever who are coming to this, and they're, they're like, you know, wow, I'm not in that place. Well, okay, I'm not in a place where I want to be yet either. But the dynamism of it, right, as a little teaser, I'll say one thing, and that is, as I became more connected for my mind and my essence and my and my body, my sense of play came back, because that part of me that I call little me was safe. You know, children only play when they're safe. So so that sense of of safety, but so let me just end with this little probably the most important metaphor to get me through this whole process, which I'm still on, is the journey from for Dante in his Inferno, right? So the famous Inferno, and because Encanto one, he begins with the thing that just really struck my heart, Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark for the straightforward pathway had been lost. And what happens at the end of Kento one, he meets Virgil, the greatest Roman poet. So don't do this by yourself, because Virgil will change your life. Virgil will change your life. Yeah, anyway, thank you, Peggy. Well, thank you. It was a pleasure talking to you. As always.
Jenn Turner
Appreciate you so much.
Thank you so much for being with us today to find out more about today's guest, head to heal with cfte.org/podcast follow us on Instagram at on trauma and power, to stay up to date on future episodes and be sure to like and Subscribe to on trauma and power. Wherever you listen to your podcast, we'll see you next time take care you.
