Getting cozy with discomfort

I love my people. In the very first session after I launched my new website, the person I was meeting offered me an incredible gift. After congratulations and chatting about the new shape of my practice, she asked if I was open to a piece of constructive feedback, and then shared that, if she had looked at my new website when she was first finding me, the framing I was using of "if these questions make you uncomfortable, I might not be the person for you" would have closed her off from a very important relationship and approach to this work.

She went on to remind me that my approach and my questions often make her uncomfortable, because I'm asking her to (re)learn a language that her system hasn't spoken in decades. When I ask her to slow down, to suspend urgency and activation, and to notice what is happening in her body, with her energy, what the tactile reflections or analogs of her experience is in that moment, it's like asking her to communicate in words that she has only recently started to (re)attend to.

(I insist on including the potential that this is a return, rather than an entirely new process, because, in my experience, most young children are fluent in the language of sensation and experience and often delight to share it with those who can join.)

In those moments, she is presented with an active and aware choice: she can stretch into something uncomfortable and unpracticed or stay in the space of the familiar. I am continually in awe in our sessions, as she chooses to stretch again and again (sometimes after giving me a look out of the corner of her eye). I'm also continually impressed with the shifts that she is making in how she relates to herself, her work, and others, which are partly due to her increased ability to stay present and slow(er) in those moments of tension and discomfort.

In somatics, we talk about "stretch, not stress," and this person's feedback about my website was a beautiful reminder of how important it is to create opportunities to lean into stretch. Part of the work of co-creating a healing space is nurturing both the space AND the capacity to discern between the two and to choose that stretch. (I'm going to write more about that discernment next week, because if I try to fit it all in here, it's going to become a novel!).

There are so many things that light me up about what my person offered, but a huge piece is the clarity that this healing work, finding that stretch, sometimes necessitates discomfort, bumping up against the edges of shame, pain, activation, what have you....

In order to create meaningful, sustained shifts in how our system experiences and responds to those spaces of discomfort, we need to cozy up against them, observing how we respond in the face of those and helping ourselves learn (with repetition over time) that those discomforts don't equate to current danger. This often involves dropping beneath cognitions and the stories we tell in order to observe our somatic and energetic experience -- what happens in our body, how does our energy shift, do we experience certain images or a sense of place? What happens as we attend to those as data that allows us to contextualize and ground as we are beside that discomfort? In my experience, the more we can attend to those questions, the less overwhelming the discomfort becomes and the more we can see ourselves as resourced and resourceful in the face of the things that have been challenges or barriers in the past.

Each time we bring ourselves into contact with those spaces of stretch in a grounded, intentional, courageous way, it allows us to build yet another datapoint in which we are able to face that discomfort without being overcome. Just like at the gym, each time we are able to challenge ourselves without going too far, we become a bit more capable and stronger.

And this is the insight that my person was reminding me of--healing sometimes involves discomfort. The work of therapy is sometimes to intentionally do the uncomfortable thing, knowingly and courageously. The more we can practice that skill (and knowing when to not), the more we build our capacity to move through the world with presence and self-efficacy and to face obstacles or activation with equanimity.

To come back to that line about discernment, each time we find more proof of our capacity to be with/in discomfort, we also become a bit more skilled at finding the line between stretch (discomfort) and strain (too much). More on that next week!