Do you like olives?
[Author’s note: this blog post originally appeared in 2016 for And Sons Magazine.]
I have the most incredible book for you. It’s as though the author had you in mind when they wrote it. Each chapter is a mystery, full of twists and turns that you’ll never anticipate. It’s going to break your heart, but in the best of ways. You’re going to fall in love with the main character. They are so complex and you get to watch them grow from chapter to chapter. You’ll be so influenced by them that you’ll feel like you’re growing right alongside them, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you are. I would have given you this book sooner, but I didn’t think you were ready. I’m so excited for you. It’s going to change everything.
That’s what it felt like when my wife and I found out we were pregnant. For years we were terrified of the prospect. It felt like the death-knell of all our dreams. If we got pregnant, how would we travel to Japan? When would we get scuba certified and dive the great reefs of the world? Would we have to give up all those nights with a bottle of wine split between us, those early morning ascents of Colorado 14ers, our sleep in general?
But then something began shifting, internally, for the two of us, over the past year.
Maybe it’s been watching our parents grow older and knowing that someday we will wish our kids had had more time with them. Maybe it was seeing couples travel with their baby strapped to their backs, watching little ones with fishing poles in hand or running off with tent stakes, that has made us look forward to inviting our children into all the things we love. We began to see having a child not as the end of our story, but as the beautiful adventure of the next chapter.
We were making the internal shift from “pregnancy is bad and means we’ve lost our freedom” to “this is something amazing, something we want.” We knew that we couldn’t be totally prepared for all that this would mean, but for two strongly independent people even making that shift was life-changing.
I started thinking about what this would mean for me: a father. Suddenly the stakes got much higher on just about everything. I needed to be able to provide for my family in new ways. More intimidating still, I needed to be able to impart value on a developing mind. From being a good person, to being strong, inquisitive, loving, and grounded. I needed to come to terms with what I believe about faith and food and philosophy and storytelling in ways that I never had wrestled with before. As Jonathan Safran Foer wrote in his work Eating Animals, “Feeding my children is not like feeding myself: it matters more.”
I was coming to terms with the depths of what a father is, how I would take up the role, and I tried to anticipate much of what I needed to know as I strained to lift the fabric of time and catch glimpses of that undulating future.
And then early one morning in February my wife called me into our bathroom where she stood holding the positive result that changed our lives forever. We were going to be parents. No, we are parents. There, inside my beloved’s womb, is the growing body of my, of our, child. It couldn’t be denied. We believe that child has a soul, right now, a soul that lives outside of time. We believe that we each do, which means we are parents to that soul, long before we hold the child in our arms.
Two souls in one body. Two hearts. Two sets of hands and feet and eyes and lungs. In a moment we became parents, pregnant with new life, new possibilities, and the whole world felt like it had turned on its head. I knew what pregnancy was. I had no idea what pregnancy is.
I have the most incredible book for you.
We began to look at development photos that matched where our little one was, week to week. Vitamins, no alcohol, no caffeine, careful with which essential oils she used, what are we going to do about the office when we make it a nursery?
We shared in the joy with family and close friends, knowing that the first trimester is dangerous waters. We had a sense that we were going to have a son, and every day the miracle knit itself together. Finger nails, spinal cord, beating heart, we loved this little person and wondered what they would look like.
My son and I almost shared a birthday. Two and a half hours separate the day he entered the world from the day I celebrate mine. As I stood in our bathroom looking at his body in my wife’s hand it felt like my whole world had stopped. Except that while her body went into labor, this isn’t called “birth,” it is called “passing.” You need to be alive to have a birthday, and my son wasn’t alive; in fact he hadn’t been alive for the past week, but we had only learned this in the last 24 hours.
On March 30th, 2016, around 11 pm, my wife almost fainted during her shift at work and was sent to the Emergency Department. I got a ride over as soon as I heard. We feared what might be happening. Somewhere inside we might have told you that we knew. There were no tears when my wife saw the ultrasound, no tears when there was no heartbeat, no tears when we were informed we had had a missed miscarriage and that our son’s heart had stopped a week ago.
The next 24 hours were more like flashes of color and emotion than anything like real life. Words seemed to have lost their meaning. There wasn’t space for concepts like loss, heartbreak, and labor. Our world became the size of a hospital room. Pain, cervix, saline, blue gloves, plastic wedges, morphine, tissue… I tried to help as she vomited everything she had, then dry heaved everything she didn’t. I remember calling and cancelling our dinner reservations, like my brain wanted something normal to do. There wasn’t space to understand or grieve.
The ER doctor tried to do a manual extraction of the “tissue.” Our nurse told us how she had had a miscarriage at the same time as us, and how the four natural births she had gone on to have were nothing near as physically painful as her miscarriage. Still, there were no tears. There were no categories for what was happening. We didn’t know to be grateful that the doctor couldn’t get the body out. We didn’t know that if they had we might not have been able to keep his body.
Back home the following night at 2:30am, my wife calls me into our bathroom. The same place we learned that we were pregnant not so long ago. A lifetime ago. The body of our son, in my wife’s hand. Perfect, human, broken.
It’s going to break your heart.
That world that had been turned upside down was ripped apart. Grief like I have not known came crashing down and smothered us, smothered me. There he was, that unknowable future, and gone already. My chest is ripped out and lying somewhere on the floor. I am four years old and not strong enough to hold up my world. I did not know what heartbreak was.
We placed his body in the world’s holiest matchbox, and held each other and wept.
A few days later we buried Patrick Samuel in the mountains behind my home. Surrounded by family we blessed his body, we spoke the broken words of broken hearts and prayed more for ourselves than for a soul whose fate we do not question. And then time betrayed us and refused to move like it should. Hours became days and weeks became minutes. Tides of loss and grief came in and out. As C.S. Lewis wrote in A Grief Observed:
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.
Others began to share their own stories of miscarriage with us, and it felt like nearly everyone we knew has been touched somehow. I want to fall at the feet of those friends who have shared their stories with me before, I did not understand. My wife is a nurse, so we know the statistics, that somewhere between 20 and 50 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage, with so many of them unnoticed. We know that it is often nature’s way of ending a non-viable development. That does nothing for what it really is.
It is a person. A promise. A new beginning. A life. A dream. And real, true, sometimes overwhelming grief.
It may sound strange, but I’ve become grateful our story went the way it did. So often men and women experience miscarriages in dramatically different ways. For the woman, there was life inside you, there was the physical experience of being pregnant, and the loss is palpable and real. I’ve heard stories of husbands who never saw a body, never had a tangible experience of presence and therefore never really experienced loss. The mind breaks and takes the brunt in ways the heart cannot. It’s traumatizing in entirely different ways.
I’m so grateful I got to see him.
I’ve found myself asking impossible questions lately. I want to know answers to things that can never be. I want to sit my son in my lap and ask him what he thinks about the feel of a cold stream moving around his feet. I want to know his favorite time of day; do you wake full of life and excitement like your mother, or do you stay up late into the night and look up at the stars like your father? Do you have a cowlick like me?
Do you hate the smell of mushrooms cooking? Where do you spend your time? What kind of stories do you like? Do you chase dragonflies or do they scare you as they dip and dive? What is your favorite color, your favorite season, your favorite dinosaur? Do you like olives?
Did you feel pain?
Do you miss us?
Do you think me silly for asking you questions that you can’t answer, for shedding tears when you are well and whole? I want to flesh out the person that I anticipated knowing on this side. I want glimpses of the story. Of the book that was promised to me, when all I got was a book full of empty pages.
All of those things we thought we were giving up: the alcohol and caffeine, the travel and adventure, the personal freedom, we know meant nothing. I would give them all up for one more day with my son.
Then slowly, gently, we found ourselves wanting to say “yes” to life again. It won’t replace what we have lost. It won’t change our story. But we don’t want death, or the fear of another death, or of another after that, to be the final word. We will hope and open ourselves up to whoever was next, and whatever story that might bring.
It’s going to change everything.
Roller Skates
The carpet is black, with little figures of lightning bolts, roller skates, the outline of hearts, and random geometric shapes in an assortment of different colors of neon thread. Two disco balls spin at opposite ends of the rink, separated by a dozen other globe lights that cycle from pink to red to orange to yellow to green to blue to purple on an endless loop.
The smell of mediocre pizza has probably worked its way permanently into the walls. Music from a handful of arcade games competes to lure guests over, drowned out by the pop coming from the skating rink. For a moment I can’t tell if it's 1997 or 2025.
Then my eight-year-old daughter gives me the nod that it’s time to get out on the rink and we push out for another lap.
Where did almost 30 years go? The thing is, when I drove my daughter to the birthday party at the local skating rink, I had every intention of putting on some soundcanceling headphones and getting some progress on the audiobook I’ve been listening to. That or bringing my laptop in and hammering out a little work. So when she asked me if I was going to skate with her my first answer was: I’m not sure, sweetie.
It was a lie. I was pretty nearly sure that she would have more fun without me and that I could use the time “productively.” I’ve been noticing this for some time now, but there is a part of me that refuses to let me stay in the present moment. Oh, I am familiar with anxiety and with hypervigilance and this isn’t quite that. Those oftentimes present as a way of anticipating some threat in the near future… a way of peering around the next several corners to keep ourselves safe.
This part of me seems more focused on momentum. I recently explained it as the sensation of knowing that I’ve got a 100 mile race to do, and rather than wait for the starting gun at 6 am tomorrow I’m going to go ahead and get started on those miles now. There’s work to be done, so let’s get to it.
You probably hear how this isn’t all bad, and that’s important. On the one hand this part helps me to be a good provider, to be proactive, to use my time wisely. Yet on the other hand, the usefulness of this part is also the hook that lets it stick into my jaw the way a dry fly hooks an aggressive brown trout.
Roller skating with my daughter brought me back to actually living my life, not just making sure there is future work and taxes paid and food on the table. All important things, but not the moments that I will hold onto in the years to come. It makes me think of the second and fifth most common regrets of the dying: I wish I hadn’t worked so much and I wish I had let myself be happier.
Something that Bill Lokey told me once was that “the first step towards happiness is being willing to cease our loyalty to our unhappiness.” So, I risked a pair of broken wrists (it turns out the floor has gotten further away over these past 30 years… and my bones are less durable) and set the part of me that is obsessed with the never-ending endurance race. What did I get in exchange? My daughter's laughter and smile and twinkling eyes with the lights of the disco ball.
In other words: everything.
Heartblind
Several years ago I had the pleasure of interviewing Hank Shaw, an American outdoorsman, foraging expert, and chef. Hank has spent his life straddling his love of the wild and his love of preparing excellent food, whereas I have spent my life hoping that a private chef would wander into my home and take over my kitchen.
We talked about land management, his favorite salt, and beginner tips for foraging (things like, any berry that grows in clusters like a blackberry or raspberry is safe to eat, whereas berries that are singular in shape like a blueberry can often be deadly).
During our conversation, Hank described a phenomenon that I had not heard of before: the condition of being Greenblind. Greenblind describes the experience of being in the woods and not being able to differentiate between all the different trees, grasses, bushes, and plants. Instead of seeing a dozen different species we see, well… green.
He was describing me, unfortunately.
Thankfully being Greenblind isn’t a moral failing, but more a reflection of ignorance, a lack of study, or perhaps just being a beginner in the space. In the years since, I have made some increased effort to notice the different types of wildflowers that grow here in Colorado, and I have experienced an increase in joy and presence when I am out for a walk with my family and we comment on the way the Juniper has grown, the intensity of the Indian Paintbrush, the red of the Dogwood, or the contrast of the Columbine.
Since then I have wondered if this condition exists in other areas of life and I think that the answer is obviously, yes. Put me in an auto-parts store and I am Metalblind. As my wife can attest, I am also more than a little Tonedeaf. When I find myself in a group of guys talking about the Super Bowl I begin to wonder if we can dub a term, Sportsblind.
One that I am particularly curious about is something I’ve started calling: Heartblind. This would be the condition of feeling disconnected from our internal world, our emotions, and the story of our heart.
Let me give you an example. Just the other day I was driving home with my family from a vespers service in the evening. The time had been peaceful and my wife and children were calm while we were there, but as soon as we got into our car to drive home something changed and the kids began fighting with each other, yelling, and generally ignoring their parents' attempts to calm them down. As the noise built I felt something inside snap and all I felt was anger. Anger at the noise. Anger at the lack of being listened to. Anger at my own anger… which is a really fun merry-go-round.
I knew in the moment what I was feeling, but it seemed disproportionate and I could not have put words to why I was feeling so strongly. Whatever is hysterical is historical.
Only a few days later did I have the time and the space to begin exploring what the history might be around my over-the-top reaction, and thus seek to cure some of my heartblindness. Without taking the time to be curious about my internal world and the story of my heart, my reactions and emotions will always be a mystery.
If I went foraging before my conversation with Hank, I would probably not have risked much… assuming that every mushroom, berry, and root is poisonous. I needed a guide to help me cure some of my Greenblindedness, and the same has gone for my Heartblindedness. In both, embracing a posture of curiosity, courage, and compassion have been necessary to take the first steps.
Speed covers a lack of skill
“Speed covers a lack of skill.” Coming from the gruff voice of our off-road motorcycle instructor, the statement was delivered the same way someone pronounces a philosophical truth. This was not up for discussion, this was a fact.
This moment happened years ago and I can still remember it freshly in my mind. I don’t remember the instructor's name, so let’s call him something fitting like… Chip or Curly or Sarge. He stood in front of us in a dust-covered jumpsuit with deep pockets sewn into the thighs to hold his gloves and goggles, each peeking out of a different side, respectively.
Sarge had watched us lay down expensive adventure motorcycles for the better part of a morning, and he was calling us out for our inexperience. Riding a motorcycle off-road is nervewracking the first few times. The dirt here in Colorado is fine, almost powdery, which lets the loose gravel and larger stones work their way to the surface and then coats them so that your tire slips right off them.
The experience is such that the bike feels almost always out of control, at first. When we came to a particularly tricky patch of gravel the urge to “get it over with” came on and we would try to move through it as quickly as possible.
What this translated to was that the bike was barely under control, and that if a rider laid the bike down (aka crashed) they would end up doing more damage to themselves and to the bike than if they had been going slower. A skilled rider goes slowly, picking their way through the terrain with control and calm. Anyone can try to rev their way through. Only those willing to take the time and intention can consistently handle the unknown and sometimes treacherous terrain around the next bend.
—
This all calls to mind another story: that of the resurrection of Lazarus. In the Gospel of John, Christ has walked to the town of Bethany in the wake of Lazarus’s death, in order to wake him up from his sleep. To everyone else’s experience, Lazarus is not asleep… he is dead. And yet here is a moment where Jesus knows what he is walking to do, but what has not yet come to pass.
On the way to the tomb Jesus encounters Mary, the sister of Lazarus, in her grief. The Gospel tells us that Jesus was “deeply moved in spirit” and that he “wept” (NIV).
He knows the ending that he is moving towards: the resurrection of his friend, and yet he does not bypass or skip the process in front of him. He moves slowly and lets himself feel and express the grief and loss. Only then does he bring Lazarus back to tears of joy.
—
I have noticed that this plays out in my internal world as well. My desire to move quickly to the right answer or to the healing or the solution is more a reflection of my inability to hold the tension. My desire for speed through difficulty reveals my lack of skill with handling suffering.
There is another way, which demands time and intention and the development of skill. Going slowly through my own suffering and the unsolved pain can feel like I am making it worse or that I may never find my way out.
But the alternative has left me dissociated from my own heart and at other times it has caused me even more pain when the denial of the high stakes came crashing down.
The truth is that the pain does not last. The fastest way through, paradoxically, is to move slowly with skill and presence.
The Last Time
There is an idea in the world of mindfulness of “the last time.” Let me explain how it works. One day, there was “the last time” we carried our eldest to bed, because now she walks by herself. I could not have told you exactly when it would happen, and for the many nights beforehand I had no idea that the last time was even approaching. It took me by surprise.
Then there was the last time I went snowboarding, because life got busy and I’m no longer interested in risking a tear to my ACL. I had no idea when I worked my way down the powdery slope on Copper Mountain that these were some of my last moments.
There was the last time I clocked in to my shift as a bartender at Lake & Irving before moving out of state. The last time I spoke to my classmate Daniel before he was killed in a car accident.
This concept can be orienting, if we’ll agree to view this as seen from this side of eternity. When our second child was potty training I was convinced that he would never get it, and that lack of perspective drove me to frustration at times. Ok, most of the time. I actually believed that I was going to be wiping him down and cleaning up messes forever. Forever. And then one day he got it, and all of a sudden there was the last time I cleaned my little boy (who is now quite skilled at creating other messes of greater proportion… I feel that will never end either).
Honestly, I often find myself drifting into a kind of tunnel vision that goes something like, this is my life now. This is forever. I’m going to be at the DMV, forever.
I am going to be in this grief forever.
I am going to try and control others' opinion of me, forever.
I am going to battle with anger, forever.
My tunnel vision not only reveals the undercurrent of fear and hopelessness, but the lack of perspective.
There was a time when the grief of losing my friend brought me to my knees. And then one day, gradually, the ache faded to acceptance and expectation. My friend joined an ever-increasing group of people that I hope to see again one day. The idea of the last time can orient me, it can make me live with more intention.
There will be a last time I hear the voice of a friend or a loved one. There will be a last time that I go for a walk through my favorite grove of trees.
A last time we couldn’t tell our story without physically shutting down. A last time we felt that no one understood our pain. A last time suffered at the hands of an abuser. A last time our children drove us to the brink of patience, and beyond.
May the idea of the last time cause me to live with more presence for the good things, more patience for the trying, and more hope for the seemingly unbearable.
The Whippoorwill
Author’s note: the client, Timmy, has agreed to share his story. This courageous act is meant to draw others into their own stories, as vulnerability responds to vulnerability and hope responds to hope. Some identifying information including name, gender, age, and locations may have been changed to give a measure of protection.
In early August, 2024, it’s cold up on the summit of the Grand Teton. But then, at just under 14,000 feet above sea level (13,775 to be exact) it never really gets warm. Just… less cold, here at the height of summer. The view is a rare one, shared by only the very few who are either addicted to the sport of alpine ascents, the fit bucket list climbers, or the lucky underprepared optimists who thought to themselves, I bet I could climb that mountain.
Timmy falls somewhere between those last two categories. Being here on the summit, looking over Jackson Lake and the miles of forest leading North and East up to Yellowstone and Westward to the rolling mountains and winding hint of the Snake River as it slides in Idaho, has been a dream he thought would never be possible.
That his climbing team would include his wife, a woman from his childhood that he recently reunited with, and her new husband would have been beyond comprehension only a few short months ago.
Bzzz bzzz. A text message slips into Timmy’s phone during the few short minutes spent taking in the view. That reception is possible in such isolated and holy places is a crime of its own, but this text was divine timing, it read: “Gents, happy one year since our epic endurance ruck together. Hope you all are well.”
It just so happened that the very morning of his summit of the Grand was one year to the day when Timmy and a handful of other men completed a 24-hour endurance ruck in Georgia. One year since he heard the whippoorwill’s call.
—
When Timmy first reached out to me to begin work together he explained that he had a sexual past that he had never worked through and that he was learning about the effect trauma can have on the present. We jumped on a call to meet virtually, since Timmy’s skill set enables him to work a variety of jobs, all of which seem to involve heavy machinery of some sort and almost always in remote areas.
I felt curious before our first meeting. The details in the enquiry email were vague enough to not be condemning if someone else received it, which left plenty of room for me to speculate.
Something I tell my clients came to my mind: be vulnerable and honest when sharing about yourself, or else others will make up a story about you… and it will likely be the wrong one. I proved my wrongness once again.
Timmy has an easy smile and bright eyes. Over our many months of working together, he would rotate through a limited number of flannel shirts worn over a graphic tee of some kind. In his mid-30’s, he was leaner than I expected considering his sedentary work. I would later ascribe this to his large family of origin and large family of his own with his wife. He looks like a cowboy, the kind who is likely to pay for a cup of coffee for you in the early hours at the local diner, and you wouldn’t know that he needed those four dollars for gas for the drive home.
Oh, and his sexual trauma that he needed someone to help him walk through? It was the story of the many girls that he abused in his youth.
Now, before you stop reading here I’ll add one more piece of data that wouldn’t come to light until weeks later: Timmy’s first memory was of the birth of his younger brother. Or rather, the body of his newborn brother locked on the other side of the porch door, while he wept and asked to see him. I hope I have paused your vilifying of him, for a moment.
—
When working with clients I eventually take us back into the family of origin in search of a few things: what was their first memory? What was the attachment and attunement like in their home? Were mom and dad both there? Siblings?
Was abuse present, drugs, divorce, violence… or was their’s a story of neglect and abandonment, either physically or emotionally?
In Timmy’s case, his story began with a tearing loss of the very thing he longed for most: a younger brother. As the youngest of several kids, Timmy remembers praying for the arrival of his brother during his mother’s pregnancy. What followed was a traumatic and complicated delivery that ended not with the brothers embracing, but with his brother dying.
The loss left a hole in Timmy, and over his childhood years he would experience a family culture that was more interested in putting in an honest day’s work than in noticing their youngest son and his need for connection.
Timmy was eager to press into the hard parts of his story, and over time he began to feel the fruit of the healing balm of tears, of words to his younger self, and of putting perspective to the void he felt within him. Eventually, he began to reach out to some of the women that he had perpetrated against.
This was handled very delicately and always involved third parties. On several occasions Timmy found himself in a room with the father or the mother, and sometimes the survivor. Sometimes he was asked to listen, to hear about his effect on their story, and offer his repentance. Sometimes his story was asked, and the boy who felt alone and filthy was seen and understood for a moment.
Sometimes forgiveness was offered. Sometimes it wasn’t.
—
A year ago Timmy signed up for an endurance ruck in Georgia. From what I have been led to believe, a ruck is when adult men pretend to do the boring parts of being in the military: lacing up combat boots, loading a pack with significant weight, and not-quite-walk-not-quite-jog their
way forward. This event was kept very small with simple rules: begin moving at sunrise and don’t stop moving for 24 hours.
So much of endurance events are about the battle of the mind, and this event was no different. Our bodies are wired for survival, which is why our brains light up when we eat food with lots of sugar, salt, or fat. Pushing really hard physically puts us at risk of going beyond our caloric reserves, which our body doesn’t like, so our minds begin to give us all sorts of emergency signs when we exert ourselves.
Learning to push through those signs takes time. It takes courage. And it’s eerily similar to the way our mind reacts to pushing into the hard parts of our trauma. Don’t go there, you will die. You can’t handle this. Better to stop, to do something else, to sit on the couch and numb with a bag of potato chips and a show.
Every time that voice pops into our heads we have a choice: agree with it and pull back, or push through into uncharted territory. As a therapist, I would hope that when we choose to push forward it is with kindness and resources, but even with those at our aid it can still feel like being asked to jump from an airplane without a parachute. After all, our bodies have an impossible time differentiating physical pain and emotional pain.
—
Back on the Grand, Timmy watched his wife work her way down the trail with his childhood friend as company for conversation. The night before had been a profound experience. Lying in the saddle of the mountain, watching the stars pass overhead, Timmy had felt a closeness with the Father heart of God. He felt called to that mountain, he knew love, deeply, for himself and for those in his world like never before. Still not quite to the summit, Timmy took a moment to imagine the two women passing the miles on the trail in each other’s company.
The friend was one of the survivors of Timmy’s actions twenty years ago.
She was one who had reached out to him, who had been willing to sit in a room and offer her story. She had heard his account and witnessed his tears of regret. She had offered her forgiveness. Not her acceptance of what had been done, to her or to him. But she had forgiven the boy who had harmed her.
A few months later she had asked to be introduced to one of his friends, and they ended up getting married.
We have no idea what stories we walk by on the trail.
—
After rucking through the Georgian wilderness for what seemed like hours that would not end, Timmy and his merry band of fellow endurance-aspiring friends were led up a long hill. The night was dark and no one had a watch, save the leader. The mind games were taking their toll.
That it is darkest before the dawn is of little consolation for someone living those hours. Each step forward required everything of Timmy, and upon reaching the top their guide turned them around and started marching them back down the hill. That’s it, I’m done. If he tries to make me walk a step further once we reach the bottom I am out of this. I can’t take it.
It took around two hours to reach the bottom of the hill, all the while Timmy battled with the voice. He told it to shut up. He told himself that he was going to continue to complete the mission that he had set out to. He clung to hope that he had more to himself than the voice believed.
They reached the bottom of the hill and continued walking. They crossed a creek, and continued walking. Then, out of the dark, the whippoorwill cried out.
The trifold trill, heralding the coming of dawn mere minutes away. Timmy had made it through the night.
—
One year later, on the summit of the Grand Teton, he read the text on his phone: Gents happy one year… Hope you are well. And Timmy was. He was in holy company, smiling as the whippoorwill sounded again.
Phantasia
I am thinking of a fantasy of mine: I leave the world behind that I currently work in and become a captain of a scuba diving boat. The divers have just gone under the water and I can see their bubbles disrupting the surface all around me. It’s calm and sunny, with turquoise water of different shades all around me. It smells of salt and soft music plays over the handheld radio taped to a railing.
The boat rocks from side to side and I breathe in slowly. For the next hour I will let the boat drift along with the current, keeping a lazy eye out for the buoys that the divers will eventually send up during the end of their dive. Peace. Solitude.
Clients often share their fantasies, eventually. First we have to work through the connotations of the word itself: fantasy. It seems imbued with sexuality and immorality, and for many that is exactly where their imagination goes. But the root of the word is from an old French word: fantasie, which goes back even further to the Greek phantasia, meaning “imagination” or appearance”.
Now we are getting somewhere. Imagination and appearance. The gap between what seems to be and what could be. That sentence alone is the shoreline of many a heartache.
So why talk about fantasies in sessions? There are plenty of reasons, and I’m sure that Freud would go about it slightly differently, but the one that I am interested in is that our fantasies reveal our pain, if we are willing to look closer.
The client who fantasized about the kind woman at his daughter's gymnastics class. They imagined not a sexual moment, but a calm one: where he sat on the couch and watched a game of Sunday football while the sunlight warmed the room and the kind woman sat at his side, content and present.
Another imagined a fire burning down her office building to the last scrap of a 2x4, somehow including all digital data as well, so there was nothing to use to rebuild the company. She’d be free at last to buy the trailer, load up her dog, and drive to Glacier.
A veteran client imagined being back on base in Bagram, Afghanistan. He’d hear the warning sirens sound that a missile strike was underway and need to take shelter at his post. “I would rather face down a rocket than my own family, anyday” he admitted to me.
Perhaps another story comes to mind: the temptations of Christ in his 40 days in the wilderness. At the end of his fast he is presented with three separate invitations, three separate fantasies, to tempt him. Stones into bread, safety from harm, and conditional rule of the earth. In this case the fantasies are presented as temptations from outside himself, and it is worth considering that this may also the case for us, at times.
I would guess that you are already seeing it: that the phantasia is not about the thing itself, but acts as a trailhead to the current pain. The first is longing for kindness and peace in his own marriage, the second feels trapped and has lost the ability to see a way to change through their own means, the third longs to feel capable and clear in their responsibilities, and little kids make us all feel out of our depth at times.
My own phantasia is an invitation to be curious about why I feel unable to rest in my regular life, why solitude sounds relieving, and perhaps why I might benefit from some gentle rocking (which is healing for trauma).
May you be curious about your own images of relief. When you picture what could be instead of what is, ask the second question: what pain is this exposing that I have been ignoring?
The Price of Connection
Author’s note: names, gender, age, and identifying information may have been changed to protect the privacy of any clients mentioned.
Christopher is a bright young man in his late 20’s. He constantly drops fantasy and film references into his speech, testing to see if I will catch him when he pivots from using Star Wars as a reference to ET with that sly grin creeping in at the corner of his mouth. Sessions with Christopher often feel like an invitation to verbally play a game of cat and mouse, and the only real stakes are me looking like I missed out on more time in front of a TV in my childhood. So, pretty high.
Behind the banter and the sly grins is a looming pattern: Christopher is trapped by perfectionism, people pleasing, and profound self-criticism.
Of course, that isn’t what led him into my office, instead we began with all the symptoms: migraines, anxiety, small panic attacks, lethargy, simmering depression, and burnout. Like many clients, we needed to be curious about the source of all of these day-to-day experiences before we could begin to attach more clear labels to them. What began as a cry for help with difficulty sleeping due to anxious thoughts eventually became a clearer picture: Christopher believed at his core that it was his job to perform, to put his needs last, to stifle his emotions for the sake of connection with others.
Feel like I am describing you? I certainly related to his story, and would think to myself at times: we should probably switch places… there are parts of my inner world that still need care here.
Each of us paid a price for connection — what was yours?
As children we are wired for connection. Our very survival depends on it. In their work Born for Love: Why Empathy is Essential and Endangered, authors Bruce Perry and Maia Szalavitz cite a study done on infant mortality. They found that when newborns are not held, when they are not met with eye contact and human interaction but are instead left to lie in a cradle until their next feeding, they die. The medical world calls it “failure to thrive.”
Because connection is so vital for our survival we will do whatever it takes to ensure that we get it. As children we begin to build our pattern without ever thinking about it. Daddy sees me and smiles when I do well in sports? Mom shuts down when I am too loud or too needy? The other kids notice my dirty shoes instead of my laugh?
There are so many ways that this plays out, but for Christopher it was simple: the family is barely staying together as it is, so don’t you dare add any extra pressure to it.
Play this out over time and migraines make a whole lot of sense.
Alice Miller, author of The Drama of the Gifted Child, puts it this way, “A child can experience her feelings only when there is somebody there who accepts her fully, understands her, and supports her. If that person is missing, if the child must risk losing the mother's love of her substitute in order to feel, then she will repress emotions.”
The journey back to experiencing a full range of emotions and a balanced sense of connection is there. But not until we are able to name what we have come to believe is the price of connection, grieve what was learned, and begin to practice curiosity for what our true self looks like.
The Bit and the Hackamore
Here’s a question that I doubt you have thought of: how is stress serving you?
Have I been using a bit or a hackamore on myself? I wonder if you might find a kinder, more connected, pace.
“I feel stressed. I am responsible for everything, and I can barely stay focused or present in the room” a client recently told me, imagining the week that he was headed in to. For the sake of his privacy (and so my clients don’t get the idea that I cherry pick their stories to make teaching points – I absolutely do) I have removed this clients identifying information. The reality is, it could have been any one of them or any number of my friends. I’ve said that same phrase myself.
The idea here is that stress feels unavoidable, perhaps even responsible. There is so much that needs to be done: that project we are a part of at work isn’t moving along as fast as it was supposed to, we need to go grocery shopping and things don’t cost what they used to, the kids have soccer practice and school starting back up, my partner is fried from their week and we need to help alleviate their load…
The world of stress management is a profitable business. Pray. Meditate. Exercise. Eat well. Sleep better. Think positive. Keep that blood pressure down. Nothing quite caused my blood pressure to go up like hearing that it was too high and I needed to “relax immediately or it will get worse.”
Here’s a question that I doubt you have thought of: how is stress serving you?
It’s a jarring question. One that I would guess most of us would initially shrug off with, “it’s not serving me, I’m trying to get rid of it.” But the deeper reality is that some part of us is choosing the heightened state of stress, consciously or unconsciously.
At some point we learned that the only way to take care of ourselves is to be hyper aware of all the tasks we need to do. We need to anticipate the future to better handle it. We need to use the hot burning fuel of stress and performance to get everything done.
Being aware is one thing, keeping our engines running at 7,000 rpm in the name of responsibility is another.
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In the world of horsemanship, of which I am far from being an expert, it is common to use a bit to control a horse. The bit is the metal part that goes into a horse's mouth, sliding behind the teeth, which connects to the leather straps that run back over the head. These lines are then held and tugged to the right or left to turn the horse.
If you have been around horses at all this is almost certainly the tool that was being used. The metal bit dates all the way back to somewhere around 1300 BC, but it isn’t the only way to control a horse. Illustrations dating back another hundred years indicate that bitless bridles were used first, for the first two thousand years of domesticated horsemanship, and are being used again.
One is called the Hackamore, and is a rope that fits around the nose of the horse, using knots to give pressure for the horse, rather than cold metal on warm tongue.
It’s a kinder way to guide the animal, but it also surrenders some immediate control. The Hackamore demands a higher level of connection between the horse and the rider. It requires time and skill. The more work that the rider has put into training the horse, to connecting with it through repetition and focus, the less pressure the rider needs with even the hackamore.
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If you are tracking with me you likely know where I am going: the metal bit is the fuel of stress, fear, and anticipation. It works. But it’s painful and damaging and sacrifices the slow work of connection for the quick outcome.
In this metaphor we are both the horse and the rider. One part of us has the reigns and feels responsible for our productivity and performance, the other part acts under the guidance. I am all for the support of prayer, movement, silence, sleep, nutrition, mindfulness, and counseling to mitigate stress. But if you asked yourself today, how is stress serving me? Have I been using a bit or a hackamore on myself? I wonder if you might find a kinder, more connected, pace.