Suffering safely while others suffer greatly...

We're wading through a lot of unconscious material both personal and from the collective right now, so before I write today’s post I just want to acknowledge it and ask “Are you all doing alright?”

Leaning into trusted friends and family, even kind strangers, can sometimes give us the very thing we need to keep going.

These days I’ve been finding grounding and release in movement; for me there’s nothing like an immediate conversation with one’s body to restore balance and perspective.

I hope you're all finding resources where you need them. That’s the prayer and blessing for today.

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These days I’ve been thinking a lot about suffering, and how easily women take on the suffering of others.

Now, I fully believe this particular moment calls for each of us to truly  “yoke together" if there’s to be continuing and true transformation. And that means experiencing others’ pain.

And let me say up front that I believe in this particular kind of suffering, and have seen its transformational power up close and in my own clinical work over twenty years.

But that's not what’s been at me.

What won’t quite leave me alone is this other and companion reality, which is that women can be quick to assume the pain of others. We do this. And we do this well, and often without ever pausing to consider what's going on with us and if we even have the room to take on more.

This willingness to yoke ourselves so readily can lead women into overwhelm. And as the overwhelm continues, can lead us further into a real disconnect with ourselves: with our bodies, our resilience and even our hearts.

Many of us know this merging of experience because to one degree or another we live it daily.

We can step in. We’ve proven this over and over. The question then becomes, can we step back out?

When we can’t get back out, when we get stuck in overwhelm there’s often a reason why. Well, there are often many reasons why, but there’s one in particular I want to mention today. And it has to do with how we make contact with our own pain through the experience of others’ pain.

Getting into other people’s business can be an indirect way for us to confront our own leftover pain.

In being with, but just outside, others’ suffering, we get to experience a semblance of control over that suffering. Mastery over suffering and injustice out there can  somehow take the edge off of unresolved suffering “in here.”

But this is an indirect path to freedom that will never get you the personal freedom you long for. Because you cannot heal your history but through your own history.

And there’s another important element of this I want to point out. When we try to heal our own residual pain through the experience of others’ pain we can make ourselves unreliable allies.

Because despite our fervor, our choice of the indirect path reveals our timidity around true suffering and will always mandate we stay just outside the real suffering that needs doing.

I deeply honor women’s willingness to align with the suffering of others. It is necessary, and it is necessary now. The world is held together through such sacrifice.

But may this willingness to suffer with others not be an unconscious effort to avoid the primacy and call of your own suffering to be healed.

Staying open to our own wounding as we work to help triage the wounding of others can compound our understanding, and help reveal the shared path to true resolution. May we each be strong enough to bear witness to each.