The Story Behind Our Boundaries

Often, discussing boundaries comes with discomfort. It is not uncommon for worries to accompany setting boundaries, especially if there is a story within us related to boundaries (or lack thereof) in our nervous system. 

What do I mean by this? Attachment behaviors form procedurally (interaction by interaction overtime). Our nervous system collects data from these interactions to make sense of relationships and creates what we refer to as a “working model.” Think of the working model as a script that tells the story of what to expect in a relationship. 

Even though research has found many benefits of boundaries within relationships, setting boundaries for ourselves is a layered experience. In fact, boundaries have been found to be associated with improved communication, decreases in conflict, and increases in self-esteem. Nonetheless, setting boundaries for ourselves often is a reflection of the attachment style we have with ourself. If our relationships in life have lacked boundaries, we can question if we deserve them, if they are rude, fear the other individual’s reaction, or even fear the ending of the relationship altogether! We are certainly a part of that story, but so are the other people we have experienced relationship with. If boundaries were never formed, encouraged, or respected-they can feel threatening, unsafe, and trigger feelings of rejection and/or abandonment. Depending on the attachment styles our nervous system has experienced, the story around boundaries can vary widely. 

This evening, I invite you to reflect on the story your boundaries tell. Not only with others, but within yourself. That’s it. I know I usually provide lots of reflection prompts, but as mentioned, this topic is layered. If it feels safe to do so, peel them back, take a look, and sit with your story. 

Be mindful, lead with love, & don’t forget to listen. 

Dr. C

What Would Happen If We Got Real With Grief?

For an experience that we all go through as humans on earth, I continuously find the available resources on grief insufficient. What do I mean by this? I often am left with a feeling of annoyance that grief support is always wrapped up in flowery undertones. I regularly say to myself “Has the person who created this actually experienced loss of a loved one?” I never feel like it’s raw and real enough to grasp what we actually go through living life with grief. There is a break in the system.

Am I alone in this?

To me, grief is fucking hard. It’s messy, scary, unfamiliar, confusing, and shitty. Why don’t we say that more? Grief is fucking hard and it’s shitty. It has no timeline and does what it is going to do. How are we suppose to process and regulate the intense emotions involved in grief, if we are bombarded by an unrealistic portrayal of them?

Now, before you come for me and this opinion-it is not lost on me why. I get that humans are uncomfortable with distress and we would prefer to be uncomfortable for the shortest amount of time possible-or avoid it altogether. The problem is, that isn’t grief. Grief isn’t comfortable. Grief doesn’t follow rules or fit nicely in a box. Grief is not a construct designed by Hallmark, it’s a real-ass tough life experience. When we find ourselves in the thick of grief, I think we are often angered by the lack of depth of the conversations and support we receive. 

Do you think these things are related? Do you think the continuous flowery undertones enable the cycle of insufficient support? Do you think that if we started actually realistically describing grief out loud and sharing our experiences that it would change what support looks like? This is a place mentally I go often. Pondering and wondering how in the safety of our meaningful relationships, we could change the narrative. Attachment is kind of my thing, I believe relationships are a crucial point in healing. I believe magic happens when we are willing to be uncomfortable (safely of course). 

Today I invite you to reflect on the conversations you’ve had in your life around grief and ponder with me on the following prompts:

How many conversations about grief have I had?

How would I describe my experience of grief?

What sentiments have brought me comfort in grief?

What do I wish more people knew about grief, based on my experience?

What needs to be said out loud more?

Be mindful, lead with love, and don’t forget to listen. 

Dr. C

How Are You at Listening?

Listening is a fascinating concept. So much so, if you search Google Scholar for studies on listening, millions of results are produced. While it is such a widely studied skill, it is something we take for granted every single day. As important as it is, we often fail at it. Not only that, we often don’t even have insight into how poorly we do it. The truth is, listening takes intentional and conscious effort. Listening is a skill, and like any other skill; listening requires practice and prioritization.

When it comes to listening, I can only speak from my cultural lens as someone raised in the United States. In the US, we are not (or very rarely) praised or encouraged for our listening abilities. Rather, we are socialized to focus on OURSELVES. What WE think, what WE want, what WE believe. There is an imbalance in fostering a love for curiosity, learning, and understanding of OTHERS. This is one of the many reasons I am a proponent of citizens of the United States engaging in talk therapy as a way of life-simply because we have very few spaces dedicated to and prioritizing listening. Going back to listening being a skill, how can we perfect a skill we are never exposed to?

You know me, I love a reflective exercise. I’d like for you to take a moment and think about the loved ones in your life. Think about the meaningful relationships in your village. How would you say you do when it comes to truly listening to each of them? Better yet, how would each of them assess you on your ability to listen? 

Now, certainly there are very real life stressors and neurological conditions that can influence our ability to listen. ADHD, concussions, and exhaustion are just a few examples. And while we can acknowledge the things that can make listening harder, do we also hold ourselves accountable for things we implement to make listening a conscious priority that we practice? Do we also identify things that make listening easier for us?

Listening is a regulator in our relationships. It serves as a critical factor in feeling understood, acknowledged, and respected by others. In a society that overly pushes hyperindependence and the stroking of the individual ego, we NEED to WORK to counteract those messages. And, it’s not just good for the other person-LISTENING IS GOOD FOR THE LISTENER. It improves empathy, provides clarity, and can increase productivity to name just a few positive outcomes. 

Below you will find an exercise I do with my clients, I refer to it as a listening assessment. Take a look and see how you are doing. I encourage you to acknowledge if this is an area that doesn’t come naturally, that is OK! I encourage you to again think about your relationships and how your friends and family would answer the questions on your behalf. Most importantly, I hope that you are encouraged to do the work to place listening as a priority in your meaningful relationships. 

What does listening look like? How do I know if I am effectively listening?

Would I consider myself a good listener?

What does it feel like when I am being listened to?

What does it feel like when I am not being listened to?

What helps me focus and be an effective listener?

What gets in the way of me listening?

Do I often interrupt others?

How much of my conversations with friends and family are focused solely on me?

How often do I take control of the conversations I am in?

Be mindful, lead with love, & don’t forget to listen. 

Dr. C

Is Mental Health in Your Vocabulary?

Think for a moment of the meaningful relationships in your life. Think about each individual person, what they mean to you, how much you cherish the relationship you have with them, and the purpose they serve in your life. Think about who they are and what you know about them.

How often do you ask them about their mental health?

Time and time again, clients, friends, and family members tell me how infrequent conversations about mental health are in their lives. I could retire if I had a dollar for each time I was told, “Dr. C, you are the only person in my life that asks about these things.” Ok, I couldn’t actually retire but you get my drift here. 

Now, of course I understand that not everyone is a therapist, that people aren’t always sure what to say, and that socialized constructs add to the stigma around mental health. In understanding all of those influential factors, I’m left with curiosity as to what to do about it. How do we begin to change this? As with any growth point in life, developing this skill requires us to be willing to be uncomfortable, not have all the exact answers, and open to learning.

That being willing to be uncomfortable part seems to really get in our way, doesn’t it? So much so, we will come up with lots of self-protecting excuses. Yes, they are excuses. Some of them may sound familiar: “I wasn’t raised like that.”, “I don’t want to be nosey.”, or how about this one, “Oh me and so & so don’t talk like that”. Those are all examples of stories we tell ourselves to avoid being uncomfortable. 

It’s ironic right? That we can logically and emotionally truly care for someone, yet never ask certain questions or talk about certain topics-simply because they are uncomfortable. Today I urge you to consider the enormous value on the other side of that discomfort. On the other side of that discomfort is the smashing of social and societal stigmas. On the other side of that discomfort is a new level of knowing your loved ones. On the other side of that discomfort are relationships that involve real life shit. On the other side of that discomfort is the difference between someone suffering in silence and someone having a safe place to say the inside stuff out loud. 

Our mental health is who we are. How can we claim to have meaningful and loving relationships if mental health isn’t even in our vocabulary?

Be mindful, lead with love, & don’t forget to listen. 

Dr. C

Defending protects & blinds us from our wounds

How often do you take feedback from others? 

What are you willing to admit you need to work on in your relationships?

How aware are you of people’s experience of you in relationships?

Are there things that are patterns across relationships that others have told you?

Are there specific relationships that seem to be the only spaces where you have difficulty?

These are just a few examples of reflective self-work prompts. As we develop and grow, we don’t always take the time to reflect on our relationship data. We often take the time to think about our own experiences, but what about how others receive and experience us? 

From both a trauma-informed and attachment-based lens, this is important data. How others experience us is intimate and important information. Now, to be clear-this is not a recommendation to live your life according to others or to be a people pleaser or to be hyper focused on being what other people want. Not at all. This is a recommendation to consider how the people in our lives that we love dearly experience us. This is a conversation to apply to safe and trusted relationships in our lives.

How others experience us is often different from how we see ourselves. As humans, we are used to who we think we are and the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Read that sentence again. Sometimes, as a result of trauma or strained attachment relationships, our perspective can get skewed and we can even find ourselves in denial about how we come across to others. Experiences related to trauma, grief, and attachment involve very intense emotions. Our nervous system will seek ways of being in relationship that feel or give the illusion of feeling protection, even if those behaviors cause strain in our relationships. Take example anger. Boy oh boy, will we defend our righteousness to be angry. We will give a whole speech about why we are right and why that anger was warranted- often without ever stepping into a space of reflection to understand truly what is bothering us. And then we will double down when a loved one brings it to our attention-completely losing out on a moment to acknowledge what is happening inside the relationship and someone else’s experience of us. Another one is control. Anyone willing to admit this is a space they cling onto with the jaws of life? Control is a natural response to trauma. It also gives us the illusion of safety. While it may provide that illusion, it makes our relationships tough. 

When we are so focused on defending ourselves, we often are not available to receive feedback. **Again-this is within the context of safe, meaningful, and loving relationships.** When we are not available to receive feedback, we are contributing to the strain in our relationships. We are communicating back to the relationship that we aren’t safe and need to self-protect through defending. By deciding defending ourselves is the most important thing, we also rob ourselves of safe but difficult conversations. Working through receiving feedback in safe spaces not only helps us better understand where our wounds are, it also validates that the relationship truly is a safe place. Not only that, it allows for personal growth. That’s the thing about safety, it lowers the need for self-protection-if we will let it. 

I encourage you to return to the questions above and spend some time. 

Be mindful, lead with love, and don’t forget to listen. 

Dr. C

When Life Keeps Going For Everyone Else, Trauma & Grief Completely Halts Your Own

If you know anything about me, it’s hard for me to have a conversation about what I do without acknowledging both gratitude and privilege. In my private practice, I specialize in trauma, grief, and attachment-all extremely intimate areas of life to be invited into. These privileged relationships I have with clients are often started in the thick of unimaginable, terrible, indescribable life circumstances. These privileged relationships originate in the midst of experiences such as the loss of a loved one, a chronic and/or terminal illness, or becoming a parent to a medically complex child.

In the thick of things and in the immediate time afterward, it is not uncommon for social support systems to be active. This is the time that people tend to jump in-checking in frequently via texts/phone calls, setting up fundraisers, offering help with transportation, and  volunteering to provide meals. These acts of service are important and vital in the midst of the unimaginable, terrible, and indescribable. The reality is, more is often needed.

Slowly but surely, social support systems find themselves back to business as usual. Everyone else’s life continues on, despite trauma and grief being anything but over for those experiencing it. Not only do social support systems return back to baseline, the rest of the world also continues to go on. It is not uncommon for the texts/phone calls to slow down, the fundraisers to diminish, offers for rides to stop, and meals to no longer show up at the door. And of course those things happen, because life goes on. The problem is, trauma and grief don’t follow that tight of a timeline. Trauma and grief aren’t just present in the moment of the event, they linger for much much longer, sometimes indefinitely.

Today’s message is a message of acknowledgement and remembering. Acknowledgement that as people, we can often be so great in the moment of crisis, and struggle to uphold what the situation truly calls for long-term. The length of an individual’s/family’s world halting is unique and does not fit into a nice structured timeline. This is an especially important message for those of us that live in the United States, a country that pushes hyperindependence and convenience. Trauma and grief are not convenient and serving those in our lives experiencing them is also not always convenient. Today’s message is also about remembering. Inviting us to hold the trauma and grief of the people in our lives in mind and not to forget simply because life goes on. There is power in remembering. Why? Because while the rest of the world returns to baseline and business as usual, it feels like everyone has forgotten. It’s a specific set of emotions that comes with feeling like you are the only one that remembers. Isolation, pain, and anger to name a few. So, today is about acknowledging and remembering. Choosing to do an inconvenient act of service is choosing to remember and acknowledge, rather than to treat life as normal. Because, life after trauma and grief is not normal. I invite you today to take some time and think about your people and community while reflecting on the prompts below.

 Who are the people in your life that could use some acts of service?

When in life have you been a social support system toward someone going through a tough time?

What indicates to you when a friend/family could use an act of service?

What does acknowledging and remembering look like to you in your relationships?

Be mindful, lead with love, & don’t forget to listen.

Dr. Cunningham

Anger: Protection at the risk of collateral damage

Set the stage with me. We’ve all been there. When what we had in mind for a conversation, well; the exact opposite happened. Although there was every intention to keep our cool, stay level-headed, and communicate the way we practiced in our head…..the interaction brought out something entirely different.

As frustrating and disappointing as this is when it happens, it’s human. Interactions that involve tension, aggression, and intensity can make it difficult to stay regulated. Not to mention if the relationship has preexisting trauma within it. If that’s the case, anger can be sitting right beneath the surface, on-call, and ready to jump in at a moment’s notice. Our nervous system works so hard to take care of us. Even if it is at the risk of damaging our relationships. How exactly does our nervous system protect us in these difficult interactions? Anger. And don’t get me wrong- you may be thinking to yourself “Well, don’t I deserve to get angry?” or “Dr. C if you knew what they did you’d be mad too!” Of course you deserve to feel anger. Today’s conversation isn’t about that empowering anger that fuels us to stand up for ourselves-no, no, no-today we are talking about the anger that gets the best of us and results in hurting the people we love.

It all happens so fast. The calm and collected version of ourselves is so quickly replaced by yelling, rudeness, and overall defensiveness. This is the part where I repeat, we’ve all been there-to remind both myself and you that this happens. I know I need the reminder because it can feel icky to acknowledge that part of myself.

So what flips the switch? How can something go so differently than how we intended it to go? Typically the answer is anger. Anger is interesting…..fascinating really. It’s an expressive emotion-it takes up space and is accompanied by notable behaviors. Take a moment here to think about how you display your anger. Does it show up in your tone? Body language? Criticism? The thing is though, when it comes to anger-what we see on the outside is often covering up what is happening on the inside. Anger you see, is referred to as a secondary emotion. Secondary emotions show up as a result of feeling something else first (the ones that come first are called primary emotions). Now remember, I said this all happens so fast. When we get angry-we just feel angry-we don’t always realize that it’s coming out because we are first internally feeling something more vulnerable.

What are some of the more vulnerable emotions that anger comes to protect? I’m glad you asked: sadness, worry, fear, disappointment, loss, and discouragement to name a few. All of these emotions, by the way, can and do occur in our meaningful relationships with the people we love.  Today also isn’t about solving it. We will tackle that in a later blog. Mostly because we cannot tackle something we don’t know or recognize. So, today is about getting to know the anger that shows up with your loved ones.

If it feels safe enough to do so, return back to that stage you set at the start of this. Here are some starter reflections to support you getting to know your anger. With increased awareness and understanding-we can then start to problem-solve how to allow that anger to be felt while minimizing collateral damage to those we love.

In what relationships does my anger come out?

Can I identify the underlying (primary) emotions involved (remember-things like fear, sadness, disappointment, loss)?

How do I show my anger toward others?

What is my own comfort with feeling vulnerable?

 Be mindful, lead with love, and don’t forget to listen.

 Dr. Cunningham