Being and Being Still

Written January 17, 2024

Photo by Adam Vradenburg on Unsplash

I was speaking to a dear friend recently and said, “You know how they say ‘idle hands does the devil’s work’? Well for me, an idle mind does the devil’s work. First of all, I have no idea how I learned that quote as it is has religious origins to a faith of which I do not follow. Secondly, what do I mean?

My mind is constantly active. Yes, I have tried meditation. The most consistent I’ve been with it was probably for a six month stint where I committed to daily meditation for at least two minutes. The two minutes often became longer and I did see a benefit to my life. I want to get back into this practice. But short of becoming a Buddhist monk, or becoming independently wealthy so that I don’t have to work for an income, I won’t be meditating for a majority of my daily hours.

Many people in my life know me as ‘busy’, want me to slow down, tell me I need to take a break, etc. But less than a compulsion to be busy, I have a compulsion to not be still. When I am still, feelings arise that are intense to experience and to regulate. And no, difficult feelings aren’t the problem and feeling them helps me heal. But there is a limit to how much I, or anyone, can sit with and process painful and difficult emotions.

Grief, rage, sorrow, hurt, irritation, disappointment, despair - all of the feelings that fall under the broad categories of sad and mad - those are the ones that are in abundance in my life. They aren’t the only feelings; but unfortunately, it is also the case for me that joyful and happy feelings often initate some of these challenging feelings as well.

I’ve been through enough in my life that I think I could cry and scream pretty much all day everyday about it. I have also experienced joys that some people can only wish for in their entire lives. How do I “have joy in my sorrows”, as my ex-therapist used to say?

And here is where it gets even more complicated - my ex-therapist, who helped me learn a lot about healing from childhood trauma, was also abusive to me and took some of the useful aspects of trauma recovery to a very unhelpful extreme. His method was to nearly always “feel your feelings.” The idea was that if you suppressed them, they would just come back. This is true. Few professionals would argue this. But my ex-therapist left little room for the reality that most people can’t just pause and process their feelings every time they came up and overwhelmed us throughout the day. In our modern society, holding down a ‘9-5’ job requires a level of compartmentalization (arguably unhealthy levels of it) and/or a high level of emotional regulation.

Emotional regulation is great. It’s necessary. No doubt about it. But when a person has survived trauma, the activation (triggering) of overwhelming feelings happens regularly, unpredictably, and often occurs in situations inconvenient for trauma processing. The regularity of activation is going to depend on the breadth and depth of someone’s triggers. In interpersonal trauma, survivors associate other human beings as sources of danger. This means that merely being in the presence of another human being is triggering. So on some level, some survivors are existing in a constant state of activation and doing a lot of work to exist in a society that has failed to protect them from harm.

Let’s say I am a survivor who has learned to calm my nervous system and trust there are mostly good people in the world. But I associate the smell of coffee, or office buildings, or people with beards, with danger. It is typically hard to avoid these triggers so I have to devise ways to cope with this. It could be picking a boss without a beard, who hates coffee, and I try to work at a school. Or, it could be that I numb my feelings all day by staying busy, comfort eating, and then when I get home, I have a few drinks to take the edge off but if I diverge from this delicate balance, it’s no good.

And if I were to take my ex-therapist’s advice and “feel the feelings”, and requested space from work to process the feelings of getting triggered by the smell of my colleague’s coffee, it might take up a better part of a work day, keep me from my responsibilities or at least delay my deliverables, and breed the perception in others that I am incapable of my job. So when I get triggered, I do what I can to get through the days, and maybe, if I’m lucky, I have an affordable therapist who is well trained in complex trauma, who in 50-60 minutes, can support me with trauma processing - not going too deep but not avoiding things either - and helps me get enough care that enables me to last another 7 days until the next therapy session. If I’m not one of the lucky ones with a therapist and I don’t have kids or don’t have to work a second job, then I might spend all my after work hours decompressing, reading self-help therapy books and doing workbooks, joining free online support groups, or curled up in bed crying my eyes out until I fall asleep, only to wake up to another day.

So many survivors of trauma are in a rock and a hard place. If we can qualify for formal disability status, we can request legally entitled accommodations. And the world is fundamentally ableist and capitalist so that what we can acheive on disability accomodations rarely meets standard timelines or standards for excellence. Or if we can qualify for permanent disability, we aren’t allowed to work because the welfare state needs you to prove yourself to be fully incapacitated. Disability allowances are often not enough to live on, and often relegate people to poverty. I haven’t even touched on the stigma and discrimination against people with disabilities.

And for those who don’t qualify for formal disability status, or don’t want to apply because of the discrimination, or have proven that we can produce (regardless of the negative impact to our health and our lives), then we have to find ways to maintain the level of production that is deemed adequate. This often means shutting down healing processes or doing our best juggling act to (pretend to) fit it into nice and neat hours that don’t infringe on the work place.

What does all this have to do with me and “idle minds”?

I recently had surgery the week between Christmas and New Year’s and the doctor estimated it would take four weeks for my body to physically recover sufficiently to work. Because I was already going to take vacation for the week between Christmas and New Year’s, I’m officially off work for 5 weeks total. I’m in week 3. My recovery in weeks 1 and 2 weren’t the kind where I was asleep all day, nor did I have to take meds that made me groggy. I am supposed to rest my body, but I have a fully functioning mind that is back to its usual business. With all this time off, and the inability to engage my coping mechanism of staying busy, I had to confront some feelings that I’d been suppressing. This isn’t a problem for me and in fact, I am grateful for it. When I can move through the feelings, make sense of it, and give it a story, I do feel better.

Yet here is the thing. I am one of those lucky ones I referred to above. I have a decent and affordable therapist who is well trained on the impact of trauma. I am also lucky to have gained some decent emotional regulation skills from my previous therapists (including the abusive one), so that I’m not white-knuckling it between my weekly sessions. I also have developed a wide network of friends and chosen family who can support me when I really need to talk to someone and can’t, or don’t want to, hold it until my next therapy session.

Despite all of this, I cannot be in my feelings all the time. This is not because I’m avoiding my feelings or I need to expand my window of tolerance. Anyone who knows me knows that my window of tolerance is maybe too wide open.

Rest for me does not look like what you think rest should look like for me, or what rest looks like for you. Writing this is rest. Reading philosophy and psychology and history is rest. Creating and crafting and binge watching tv is also rest.

I had a therapist (not the abusive one) who had a motto that I’ve adopted: “When doing comes from being.”

The problem for me isn’t always about doing too much (yes, that’s there). The problem for me is when doing is coming from a survival mode that I no longer need to be in. I have an extreme level of privilege to be able to both identify that I don’t need to be in survival mode anymore and also have an external reality that supports this. I have a job that enables me to take this time off and be paid. Part of how I got there was to fit into the ableist world and produce and achieve “like others”. But I don’t want to work at that pace anymore. The cost is too high. I want to find a way where my doing comes from being, and I want to create a world where that can be true for others. If the external world is structured for most people to live in survival mode, unless you are economically privileged, then there is going to be little ability to heal the memories of living in the type of survival mode that people must live in when going through trauma. Yes, there is a difference between the survival mode we feel when in the midst of active violence versus the survival mode of existing in a capitalistic economy. They are different, but one is inevitably going to trigger the other.

This gets to the heart of why I trained in the discipline of social welfare. What is the point of helping people to heal if they have to ‘go out’ and exist in the same world that caused that injury? We must change the world that causes the constant injury.

Hardly anyone can truly “heal” before going back to work. My doctors can estimate four weeks for physical recovery. That’s for my incision wounds to close up, the pain significantly decreases or disappears entirely, and my ability to do basic daily functions is restored.

What is our estimate for how long it takes to emotionally recover from years of physical, sexual, emotional, and spiritual abuse? Tack on the wounds of racism, sexism, ableism and many other traumas and we’re talking lifetimes.

For me, this means that my lifetime needs to prioritize healing, while also doing what it takes to survive in the social structures and economy as it is laid before me. Often, what I need to do to heal is in direct conflict with what it takes to survive in this ‘modern society.’ For now, what feels right to me is to earn an income through jobs that seek to transform our social structures and economy. To find ways where our society is genuinely trauma-informed and centered on healing justice. Where GDP is not the marker of success and where people like me, for whom being and being still means confronting a lot of pain, are able to do so with dignity and respect, and without fearing for our livelihoods.

Thank you to those (you know who you are) who have enabled me to have this time off.