January 31, 2024
Dear Leland and Everett,
Trauma is arguably something of an overused word today, but I think for good reason. We are beginning to understand how our experiences sometimes leave lasting psychological and emotional wounds that impact our ability to function wholly and healthily for the rest of our lives.
When I first started meeting with therapists or even my coach, I felt trepidation they might identify some deep-seated psychological trauma that rendered me damaged and useless. This fear turned out to be mostly ill-founded and ill-informed, but it does touch on something real: we learn coping strategies as children, when we have incomplete tool kits for how to navigate ourselves and the world around us. Often these coping strategies are, as one might imagine, immature. And yet, precisely because we are so young, we forget that these strategies are learned.
The term I’ve adopted is ‘programming’. We develop programs for how we handle certain situations in childhood. As we mature into adulthood, those programs become anachronistic, relics of childhood not really suited for adulthood. Those programs cause or greatly contribute to most of the relationship conflict we experience in life. Whether at work, in my marriage, my friendships, or even when interacting with the two of you, I find that my conflicts are invariably sourced in my programming, and my inability to deviate from these learned behaviors.
What shocks me is how easily we can be traumatized. A good friend of mine claims he spent 40 years deeply wounded by his father telling him as a child, “it’s not good to be weird”. The words themselves are frankly pretty trivial. But my friend knew he was ‘weird’, and liked and appreciated being different from others. Partly he was taken aback by his father’s words. But I suspect it was more. We pick up on the emotional states of those around us, especially as kids and especially from our parents. I suspect my friend’s father uttered the wounding phrase from a state of fear, expressing the father’s wounds in a manner my friend intuitively felt. In the process of reconciling his father’s words with the fear my friend felt emanating from his father, my friend internalized the message that his father could not love nor accept this particular aspect of his son. After internalizing the idea that his father rejected this innate aspect of him, my friend broadened the rejection to mean his father fundamentally rejected he himself. Ultimately, unknowingly, my friend adopted the belief that he was unworthy and fundamentally unloveable. The story he was unloveable became part of my friend’s programming, all because his father projected fears in a misguided attempt to guide or protect.
Of course, my friend’s father had no desire to traumatize his child. He almost certainly just wanted to protect my friend from teasing, from ridicule, from a lifetime of rejection the father’s programming told him came along with being different. Of course, the father was projecting his own fears on my friend, with almost no comprehension of the damage his words and energy would cause.
To be very clear, I hold no judgement nor blame for the father. He was simply doing the best he could with the skills he had. When one possesses only a hammer, we cannot blame them for their inability to perform surgery. As I write this our primary emotional, psychological, and spiritual tools are hammers; I suspect they have been for centuries, or maybe even millennia. The story of Adam and Eve may well be the story of how humans adopted the hammer as the all-purpose tool to wield in the face of uncertainty.
As I learn to heal and unwind the no-longer-useful coping skills I developed in childhood, I watch us (your mother and I) do to you exactly what I am learning to undo to myself. We coach, chide, and scold you. Sometimes we channel far more negative energy than we recognize or admit. And because we are trained to think rationally, not emotionally nor energetically, we lack the practice or sometimes even the vocabulary to understand what it is we are doing. But I’m starting to appreciate that we are energetically channeling our fears into you. You are learning how and what to fear from us; evolutionarily that probably makes sense: if we were teaching you to fear lions, that would undoubtedly help keep you alive. But our nervous systems are designed for a much deadlier world than the one we inhabit, and so we react to more minor concerns as if they were potentially life-threatening. I’ve noticed military veterans tend to struggle adjusting to large corporate environments. Managers and especially executives tend to react to every unfinished task or unwelcome surprise as if lives are at stake; military veterans instinctively know better, having experienced real life-and-death scenarios.
Partly these letters are meant to teach you how to put down your hammers and adopt healthier healing tools. Every fear you can release and every sadness you can process will not only allow you to heal, but prevent you from passing along those wounds energetically to your children and other loved ones. As I alluded here, I have come to believe that our only real mission on earth is to heal ourselves. If we just heal ourselves, we become the invitation to others to heal. In your healing, you set off a chain reaction that can heal the world. You are that important!
How do you heal yourselves? Well that’s an answer with unlimited possibilities, depending on the specifics of your situation. What I can tell you is that 1) you have all the tools you need to heal; 2) if you set the intention to heal, the answers will find you; 3) healing will almost certainly require surrender: your ego will need to surrender the controls to your true self, the self that exists in connection to God and the universe and more intuitive forms of knowing; 4) when in doubt, search your body. Our bodies store memories and other wisdom in ways I cannot fathom, and that science has not yet even attempted to comprehend. I personally believe our bodies are the portal through which we communicate with God; even if my hypothesis is wrong (or too big a leap for you), what I can say with some confidence is that scanning your body invariably yields wisdom that you cannot fully explain, but you know to be true.
How does one access the wisdom contained in the body? Get still. Develop a meditation practice. In the early days, your mind will race incessantly, and you might be tempted to give up in frustration. But your mind racing is not only to be expected, becoming aware that the mind is racing is in fact the initial goal. Until you develop a mindfulness practice, your mind is always racing; it won’t know any other state. In the initial stages of meditation, you will merely develop an awareness of how wild, unpredictable, and unbridled your mind is. Think of an untamed horse: at first, it will merely run; the best solution is not to try to control or contain the horse, but merely to let the horse run itself out. Let your mind race; do not judge or resist, just observe. Note all the images, stories, and fears you see flashing across your awareness. Remind yourself that none of these images are real, or at least not urgent, and just notice what thoughts occupy your mind, fighting for attention. Periodically, as your mind slows, rein it in, thank it and pat it calmly, and enjoy a moment of peace and calm. Soon enough, your mind will start to race again, and you might be tempted to try and hold it in the state of calm; just allow it to race, and go back to noticing the thoughts that emerge. When your mind slows again, rein it in and enjoy another moment of peace.
In your early days, you may not find any moments of peace whatsoever. Soon enough, you will experience a few moments, even if it’s only 30-90 seconds out of a 15-minute meditation. After a year of daily practice (and periodic practice before the past year), I still rarely experience a meditation where my mind doesn’t start off racing. Most days I am able to let the mind race for a few moments before I am able to rein it in and get still; from there I can begin to scan my body. I notice which parts of my body carry tension or discomfort. If I sit with these sensations long enough, I generally find some form of wisdom available to me. Sometimes I explicitly ask the sensation what it wants me to know.
Some days my mind still takes a long time to get still. On these days I typically learn that some event from the day frustrates me more than perhaps I recognized. Now I see my mind racing for what it is: an invitation to recognize, accept, learn from, and appreciate an interaction creating resistance in my mind.
There are other ways to meditate, and other ways to access a deeper form of knowing. I encourage you to explore any and all that work for you. But your body knows more than you do, and your body connects to all the available wisdom and knowledge in the universe. So when in doubt, explore there. And in the process, heal the wounds you experienced in childhood, and witness the chain reaction of healing unfold around you.
I love you,
Dad
Letters to Leland 