Trauma, shame, and being enough | Patti Ashley | TEDxCU

Transcriber: Natalie Reviewer: Michael Nystrom A few years ago, I was having lunch with some colleagues and mentioned the research I had been doing on

shame

. I told him, "It all seems to come down to one thing:

being

enough

." One of the therapists said, “Are you a Nuff? “I didn’t know you were from Nuff.” That inspired this cute character (Laughs) that I have on my desk and I give to my clients; a reminder that we are all a Nuff. (Laughs) I am

enough

. You are enough. They are enough. If that is true, what prevents us from believing it?

I wish I could give you a detailed answer to that question, but I can't. What I can do is explain some things I have discovered in my 40+ years as a mother, educator, therapist, and author. In the 1990s, I was a mother of four young children and a parent educator at a large pediatric practice in Virginia Beach, Virginia. I was well equipped with the best parenting information I had learned in my early childhood graduate program. However, behind closed doors, I often heard people, including myself, say things like, "I can't do it right." "What's wrong with me?" "Everyone else seems to have it all together." The more parenting books people read, the worse they felt.

I decided to pursue a PhD. in psychology to be able to fix this insufficiency once and for all. My thesis question was: “What is the lived experience of mothers who feel well enough?” Attachment theorist Donald Winnicott coined the term "good enough mother" in 1953 to renounce maternal guilt. My research revealed that Winnicott did not help. (laughs) “Pretty good” became another unattainable standard. Insufficiency cannot be calculated, reasoned with, or solved. Live in the shadow of perfectionism or what researcher Brené Brown calls

shame

. That painful feeling of

being

tragically imperfect and unworthy of love and belonging. Psychologist Carl Jung defined the shadow as the parts of ourselves that we hide because we fear they are bad.

When we don't recognize our shadow, we tend to act in ways we don't consciously understand. So what is hidden behind this shadow of chronic insufficiency? Let's start two years ago, a moment we all remember very well, but I know we would like to forget it. Then, a month after the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, there was an 891% increase in calls to the National Mental Health Hotline. The pause in our busy routines was a wake-up call for our mental health. There was no longer any place to run and hide from our shadow, we had to go in, not out.

Raven, a 20-year-old college student, contacted me with anxiety and depression, and shared this journal entry: “I worry about debt, college success, Dad's health, Mom's emotions, whether I will ever be loved or Yes, I am loved.” Ella, 52, made a therapy appointment for the first time 17 years after suffering a debilitating stroke. She told me: “It seems like my whole life I have put my emotions in boxes on a shelf. And the shelf has become too heavy and now the boxes have fallen to the floor and I can no longer ignore them.” It's like we've created a culture that thrives on not being good enough.

Media images reflect unrealistic expectations. Success is measured by graduating from the best universities and having large bank accounts. Children are encouraged to compete, regardless of how much anxiety occurs. Employers demand perfection over well-being. Implicit bias dismisses and ignores race, gender, and diversity. And even our mental health system feeds not enough, but stigma, diagnoses and practical solutions that often lead to more failures. What the hell has happened to us? Well, let's go back, a long time ago, to infancy and childhood. In the first three years of life, the nonverbal sensation right brain develops before the verbal analytical left brain.

You are not born ordering a Starbucks. (Laughter) Instead, you cry out for the feeling of being comforted, loved, seen, and nurtured. Caregivers who accommodate our early needs help us develop neural connections that support feelings of love and belonging. However, misalignments eliminate these neural connections, much like cutting branches from a tree, leaving us with a broken compass to feel good enough in the first place. Now let's go back even further, to our ancestors. Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller studied child-rearing practices in the 18th century. She called them “poisonous pedagogies” because they encouraged parents to deny love and affection, insult, ridicule, humiliate, and literally beat up a two-year-old child who was having a tantrum.

The ultimate goal of parenting was to break the child's will before he was old enough to remember. Now let's move on to the lens of neuroscience and

trauma

. Tests that measure electrical activity in the brain show that before the age of seven, the brain operates primarily with lower-level theta brain waves. So everything in the first 6 years of life is absorbed by your subconscious mind, much like a hypnotic trance. So you grow up under a kind of spell. A shame-inducing spell, perhaps? Doctor Gabor Maté defined

trauma

as an emotional wound that induces fear and interferes with the ability to grow and develop.

We have all experienced trauma to varying degrees, including secondary trauma simply from watching television, news, and social media. Regardless of the degree, trauma affects the brain and nervous system's ability to feel safe. By seeking emotional security, children begin to develop adaptive responses that continue into adulthood: people-pleasing, anger, avoidance, eating disorders, perfectionism, overcontrol, and even addiction, just to name a few. When we don't look our shadow of shame squarely in the eye and eliminate it, we end up tearing ourselves down and others with us. COVID made us look... (Laughter) The last two years of uncertainty and fear have activated many traumas.

The nervous systems are raw. My clients say, "I'm broken," "I'm a mess," "I'm broken," "I'm falling apart." What I tell them is: “Sometimes things have to come apart to come together in another way.” As the poet Rumi says: "You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens." I may have painted a bleak picture here, but the good news is that you can rewire neural connections and change your DNA, but you can't do it from the neck up. I started tonight with this slide, not to make fun of the fact that many of us don't feel good enough, but to give you and me a split second to feel good without analyzing or judging whether you believe it or not.

How many of you sighed or exhaled when you saw this? How many of you laughed or giggled? That split second may have contributed to positive changes in his brain, known as neuroplasticity. So let's go down to your heart. Your heart is a regulatory organ that detects and responds to security threats, not your brain. You have 40,000 sensory neurites in your heart valves, also known as your cardiac brain. When trauma stresses the nervous system, it disconnects the head from the heart. That is why you cannot find security in your logical mind. Let me repeat that. You cannot find security in your logical mind.

Feel-good experiences are what you need to generate coherent heart rhythms and reconnect emotional safety. And I'm not talking about the bottle of wine, the Ben & Jerry's, or the loot. (Laughter) Setting the compass in the present moment regulates the heart. Worries about the future and regrets about the past take you out of the present moment and reactivate the trauma. Jon Kabat-Zinn, a pioneer of relaxation meditation, defines mindfulness as “nonjudgmental moment-to-moment awareness.” Poet Mary Oliver wrote: “If we stop for a moment, even for something as inconsequential as the song of a few birds, we might find unexpected joy.” It doesn't help to go back and blame or criticize someone for what happened to you.

Instead, recognize your ability to change your neural connections now and commit to being better for yourself. Do you remember my client Ella? Let me tell you what was in her boxes. One box contained the trauma she experienced from not being able to communicate with her caregivers after her stroke. Another of her claimed her guilt because her husband blames her for her arthritis, having to lift a conveyor. Another has criticism from her mother-in-law and another has feelings of failure as a mother because she couldn't do the things other mothers could do. And in another box was Rufus, a children's book he started before his stroke and which he never returned to until February of this year.

Knowing that creativity helps develop neuroplasticity, I encouraged Ella to start writing. It took her many months, but now she has started to let Rufus talk. She found freedom by emptying her boxes and releasing her pain. Rufus is helping her continue to express herself and maybe one day her children's book will help others do the same. Demystifying chronic insufficiency requires telling the truth. If you look closely at the word "familiar," you might see two words: "family" and "liar." Much of what we learn growing up is lies. Now let me shamelessly share some of mine. I was a mistake.

I was "Fat Patti." In sixth grade, I was told to be glad when my father died because he was in heaven. My high school guidance counselor told me that he wasn't smart enough to be a psychologist. My ex-husband told me not to sing to our children because he could make them deaf. Fortunately, gratefully, through the years, many years of brutal inner space work, I have discovered, or am discovering, the truest things. I am a blessing. I have beautiful curves. (Applause) (Applause) My God. It is essential to cry when you lose a loved one, especially my father.

I got that PhD. in psychology. (Applause) (Applause) And I just sang in my first vocal freedom solo performance with Rebecca Folsom on January 14th. (Applause) Demystifying chronic failure also requires the will and tenacity to keep going, even if you don't know where it's going or how long it will take. Metaphysician Deepak Chopra said that some people think that shadow is the opposite of love and, in reality, it is the way to love. The average number of uncomfortable feelings my clients can identify is three: frustration, anger and sadness. Growing up, we often learn sentimental words from adults who simultaneously shame us for them. “Don't be angry,” “You're okay,” “Stop crying before I give you something to cry about,” “Get over it,” “It's just an ice cream cone.” Then we begin to believe that our feelings are bad and we suppress them for fear of being bad.

So where do you think they're going? The shadow. I offer my clients a 50-word feeling list to help them identify the shadow. They begin to excavate deeper emotions like abandonment, not love, betrayal, invisibility. These deeper feelings help them identify that original shame story so they can write a new narrative. For example, if you feel abandoned, ask how you can stay with yourself a little longer. And finally, a very important way to break the spell of shame is to use the magic of imagination. Amazement, wonder, and curiosity overpower shame. Give yourself permission to play and be like a child.

Sing. Dance. Laugh. Create. Use your senses to identify things that feel, taste, smell, look, and sound good, like your favorite song, petting your cat, the sun shining, flowers blooming, lavender, hot tea. Imagine the gratitude, even in the midst of devastation. And of course, imagine how it would feel if you were enough. (Applause) (Applause)