It’s true. I’m a bit of an addict. Wiring for gratitude was quite effortful for me in the beginning, but I’m so glad I did this work B.I. (Before the identity) because when it hit my house–the identity, I mean–I was thrust into a hellscape beyond what I had ever experienced or imagined possible.
Rewiring for gratitude was just a practice, a practice that took conscious effort to develop. As a beginner, I practiced mostly while walking. When I started we lived in a beautiful city with a river running through it. As I’d stroll along the Greenbelt, things would enter my mind that were current annoyances. I’d practice reframing them, determined to find a reason to be grateful. Eventually it started to come more naturally. What this did for the quality of my Life cannot be understated. That said, I had the darkest of times still ahead.
When my daughter’s struggles began in middle school, I was on a bit of a wayward path. I’d been distracted from my fledgling coaching business, where I’d grown impatient as a beginner, and allowed myself to be seduced into someone else’s business. This someone else was a charismatic mess, and I was fascinated by her. She invited me into her seemingly magical world, and I spent many hours a week shadowing her as she moved through life beating to the rhythm of her own drum. Her coercive tactics bothered me, and I didn’t use them myself, but I remained enchanted by her unusual lifestyle. This would be one of those businesses where you “had to spend money to make money” so I was also irresponsibly wracking up expenses. My guy was not thrilled with my business decisions (or my new “best friend” and business mentor) and the two of us were rapidly growing apart, inhabiting different worlds that seemed incompatible. I was convinced my husband was stuck and anchoring me to a life I was no longer interested in. (Yes, this new business was a bit culty.) Looking back, I can see I was unconsciously in a bit of an all-consuming, downward spiral.
Then my daughter snapped me out of it. Suddenly she was claiming mental health challenges, and I was able to see how my family was coming unraveled while I was chasing impossible dreams that weren’t even my own. Yes, I’d joined a “group” as Patrick Ryan would say. And while I like to think it would have happened eventually, my daughter hastened my exodus and ensured I was one of the 90% that left it. I shifted my focus back to my family and did some pretty extreme things with the intention of bonding us back together.
I have gratitude for it all. I’ve experienced what it’s like to have unmet needs for belonging and transcendence that made me vulnerable to culty messages. I know what it’s like to carry that cognitive dissonance and deny my own logic in desperation to believe in a fix that was doomed to fail. I can relate to what my daughter is currently experiencing, and I’m grateful that she snapped me out of my own delusion with hers. I have no hard feelings toward that former business mentor; she gave me a clear model of someone I don’t want to be, and as a result of that little life detour, I can totally recognize and have compassion for my daughter’s current experience.
Even as I moved away from the pull of that alluring group, other hardships began to rear their ugly heads. My excessive business spending caught up to me and had to be dealt with. It was scary to pull my head out of the sand here too, but I’ve almost completely recovered from what seemed like an unmitigated disaster with the added benefit of getting really good at tracking our household income and spending. Now I enjoy it and can see how our finances just needed my loving attention.
My marriage was barely hanging on by a thread and offered me little comfort for the rage and impotence I felt about my daughter’s unconscious choice to convert to gender ideology. I was faced with the choice of giving up and ending our marital union or figuring out what remained in my power to save it. I decided on the latter option and embarked on an intensive, self-driven crashcourse in healthy relationships. I redirected my abstract intensity and focused my skill development here (though, like most moms in this situation, I also earned my phD equivalent in gender ideology. At this point though, I’ve given up my “new religion” studies–a conscious and successful choice to help elevate my quality of life.)
This circumstance provided the opportunity to clarify my values. According to the Theory of Positive Disintegration (TPD), disintegration is certainly not guaranteed to be positive. If one doesn’t “perceive a higher path” and tap into the courage to go against the cultural grain and follow that path, disintegration can be unhelpful at best, and downright dangerous for those who feel they can’t return to their old ways of doing things with their new understanding of how the world works–or doesn’t work for them. Being able to envision a higher path becomes crucial; we must believe there’s a better way and then do the work to climb up out of the (our) darkness and walk that path. This is that work that gets us back (or maybe for the first time) on solid ground. When we recognize we can no longer just go along with, as Jung might call it, the collective unconscious–because now we’re conscious of it and must deal with the destabilization this causes. This is inner work. That “curriculum of the soul.” Or back to Jung, I believe he’d call this the work of individuation or of “divesting oneself of false wrappings.”
So, that gratitude practice? Exercising it in the darkest of times is what I believe kept me hanging on as I stumbled along, desperate for that higher path to reveal itself. Did I find that path? I believe I did. I can tell you I’m in a very different place than I was even B.I. (before the identity). Is it a better place? I prefer to say richer. For awhile there, I really hated being asked that question that’s meant to be polite, “How are you?” I don’t lie well, not even for politeness. I can’t say, “I’m fine,” when I’m not. I also don’t like to complain. So for a while there, this question became a regular, annoying reminder of the depth of darkness I was experiencing that always left me floundering for an authentic response.
My daughter’s identity was not the only tragedy that entered my life in the year, 2019. One of my BILs died of cancer that summer, widowing my baby sister and leaving his four young children without their father. One of my five brothers finally succumbed to admittance into a nursing home; his limbs had stopped working due to the M.S. that was rapidly ravaging his nervous system. Even in his quadraplegic state, though, he remained an example of one who chooses to Live, charming the staff who worked with him and leaving a quiet wave of inspiration, rippling out and touching more lives than one might think possible from that bed in the nursing home, before passing away in 2020.
So, I knew I needed a better answer than “fine” when people asked me how I was doing. I took up saying, “Life is rich.” The universal human experience of pain seemed all around me, and I could compare my little nuclear family’s experience to these tragic losses in my extended family and, yes, find gratitude. I became immensely thankful for my own health, my own imperfect body through which I experience this rich world.
My daughter’s identity became a mirror, reflecting all the things in myself that needed healing. I like to think she invited me to the profound individuation work that Jung encourages. Would I have done it otherwise? It’s hard to say. Something tells me I needed a midlife disintegration to overcome. And who can inspire more intense pain and destabilization than our own children?
We’ll be traveling for Thanksgiving. My little (but whole) family of four will be making our way, roadtripping to spend time with friends who, pre-Covid, we visited annually for this holiday meant to center around gratitude. It could get very interesting since the last time my daughter saw them (these friends who’ve known her her whole life) was Thanksgiving 2019. Our family was in a weird way that holiday season, our bonds more fragile, our interaction more strained. We were careful what we said while there, and these friends remained unaware for another year or more of what was at the core of the delicate dynamic that had emerged in our little family. My daughter doesn’t know they know. Could get interesting.
It’s been a long, exhausting road, but while there is still deep pain, I feel no resentment. I have only gratitude for the knowledge that pain is an integral part of the human experience. That when something hurts bad enough it often inspires us to change things that needed changed anyway. Things feel both lighter and more solid for me now than they did B.I. Life is certainly not problem-free, and I wouldn’t want it to be. It would seem humans need problems to solve, obstacles to overcome. Tragedy is often the thing that breaks our hearts open, and exposes our vulnerability. Because we learn it doesn’t matter how much we shield our hearts, the pain still finds us. We learn that if we can find a way to allow the pain, Life provides an irresistible richness that we don’t want to numb. That richness enlivens us and everything becomes, well, more. And also less. Less struggle. Less effort. Allowing becomes the new normal. And we get to fall in love all of it–Life in all it’s richness.
I recently released the first episode of helpful concepts along the way: The Obstacle is the Way. It’s meant to inspire you (if you haven’t been already) to “perceive a higher path” and then to take a good hard look at the work you need to do to climb out of the darkness and get on that path toward a vision for your individuated self. Who is that person? What would be different about her? Would she be more compassionate? More grounded and confident? More open-hearted? Would she be healthier? In what ways?
There are two ways to access the hcaw lessons. You can tackle it self-study style by upgrading to the “monthly” or “annual plan” or you can join a community of growth-oriented, non-affirming moms who are joining hands and supporting each other in this work. Our next live meeting will be December 11, (2022) at 8a Pacific/11a Eastern. In the meantime, if you joined, you could jump into our private online forum, introduce yourself to the community, and dig into the assignments. (Click here for more info.)
Future lessons will dive into how we can update the stories we tell ourselves so we can take charge of the quality of the experience we’re having. We’ll practice reframing and focusing our attention on what’s working so we can enjoy what’s going well instead of being depressed about what’s not. There will be lots of talk about modeling and being the change we wish to see in the world. We’ll also spend time on needs-based communication and disarming techniques, and of course, on the life-changing magic of…
yes, you guessed it,
gratitude.
So, we head out in the morning. Unless some crazy inspiration hits, I don’t expect you’ll hear from me til we’re on the other side of Thanksgiving 2022. I hope you get lots of opportunity to practice gratitude—to reframe whatever is going on in your life and look for what you can appreciate—because that’s what gratitude is: a practice. And it’s addicting. For real.
Beautiful. I haven't had the chance yet to listen to your inspirational talk - I'm looking forward to it. I think what you're doing is important. Having read The Wisdom of Insecurity and The Power of Now, I think we as a society need some reminding about how to enjoy life, how to live in the moment, how to let go of our egos, whatever you want to call it, and I think that's a lot of what you're talking about. Being grateful is an essential element. In my opinion, if more people lived in the moment, the current scene - the whole mess of "gender ideology" - couldn't survive. Plus, we'd just be happier, less war, less anxiety, less conflict, etc. Keep up the good work!