Rising from the Rubble — 3 Timely Reminders about Trauma

Hello Friend,

Today’s post is one I’ve had a difficult time writing for two weeks now.  The horrific blow of last Sunday’s shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas has left me pretty numb in the way that this type of fear-generated evil does.  I hate it. 

I don’t know how you’ve processed it, yet if you are like me, layers and layers of hateful behavior tend to leave me feeling helpless, and often as a result, apathetic. 

How can I help?  

Is our world going to hell in a handbasket? 

What next? 

The grim reality sets in and my callouses begin to peek through.  

Wait a minute though, that’s me responding to fear with fear…  or even worse, apathy!  

This is perhaps the greatest danger possible: that fear would settle into apathy, and we might surrender to a new normal of acquiescence and cynicism.  

Fear, in the very least, elicits some reaction.  Apathy does nothing.

After a week of wallowing, I feel a healthy dose of righteous anger rising up and simply can’t back down.  

I’m grateful not to have lost anyone in the tragic attack. However, I’ve witnessed several who have been directly affected, unexpectedly saying goodbye to loved ones and life partners as well as having a branded traumatic experience filed away on a cellular level.  I cannot begin to comprehend that depth of sorrow, and I sincerely pray for comfort in their desperate time of need.  

How are you doing in light of all of this?  

Do you find yourself in the throws of pain and powerlessness despite not being directly affected by the shooting?  I’ve found that highly creative people also tend to be highly sensitive to what is happening around them.  You fall in this category.  

You are drawn to the interior journey towards wholeness and integration which is something not everyone signs up for.  Your willingness to connect is in and of itself intrinsically a creative, out-of-the-box endeavor.  

Here are a couple of reminders regarding trauma as we assess the damage, lean into the conversation, and rise from the rubble:

1) Trauma is trauma no matter how you slice it. 

I like the definition of trauma that says it is anything unwanted or unnatural that happens to you.  Just because you weren’t there in that open amphitheater in Vegas does NOT mean you aren’t suffering secondary or tertiary trauma.  

Simply being victim to 24-hour news coverage of the terror can be enough to blanket you in a thick layer of indirect trauma.  Knowing our limits to information and “breaking news” is a good thing. 

We’ve all been affected on different levels, and no one is comparing trauma to trauma: it's all relative, and we’re all in this together as different parts of the collective body.  

2) Grinning and bearing it is old news and going the “stoic” route won’t cut it.  

Inevitably, when we try to stuff our trauma or any emotion for that matter, it will eventually come out somehow and not in the loveliest of fashions.  

Any time we experience loss, we must grieve it.  What I’m learning about grief is it MUST be witnessed by safe people in our court whether it be a family member, a trusted friend, and/or a therapist/spiritual director.  We cannot grieve in a void.  

3) Find a creative outlet.

For me, this is writing.  I’ve damn near filled up two journals in the past month boiling over with unfiltered and unapologetic responses to natural disasters, political conundrums, and most definitely, the recent shooting in Vegas.  (I may as well be committed if anyone were to read said journal entries.) 

I devoted several pages to Tom Petty in there as well— he was surely a brave and gifted soul, iconic and irreplaceable on every level.  

What is your outlet?  Painting, baking, sculpting, guitar, yoga, or dance?  Whatever it is, pour your heart into it.  Emotional energy must be expressed, not repressed.  Repression and avoidance are siren songs that allure numbing agents like booze, food, drugs, work, and the like to make their seductive pitches.  We’ve got to get out in front of them by tapping into our inherent creative essence.

I’ve got more resources coming to you here very soon, but for now, here’s the invitation for you and me: we all have our own work to do in keeping our interior landscapes clean so as not to fall asleep in a stagnant pool of apathy.  

If you or someone you know is currently experiencing a fall-out from recent tragedies, reach out.  Don’t let lack of resources, fear of judgement, or perhaps the unknown, hold you back.  Nashville is fighting back from a place of love and accountability.  Join me on this path to connection, integration, and courage as we bridge the gap for the broken and openly talk about our wounds.

Take heart, my friend—you are not alone.  We are all inexplicably in this together.  That is the invaluable, stunning nature of the human spirit in its purest form: our pain joins us together and binds us into a beautifully broken patchwork that heals us over time.  Let this be your anchor as chaos and loss sweep heavily over our hearts.  It has surely been mine.

Love & Gratitude,

Katie

xoxo

Legacy & A Broken Hallelujah

Please think about your legacy, because you’re writing it every day.

-Gary Vaynerchuck

I have a confession to make.

Despite years of deep south steeping growing up in Mobile, AL,  I have never been a huge fan of country music.  In fact, I always felt like the odd man out during those fragile years of middle school when the cool kids where discovering the likes of Alan Jackson, The Judds, John Michael Montgomery, and most curiously to me, Billy Ray Cyrus.  I was totally stumped, yet went along with it as my awkward stage lasted painfully longer than everyone else’s and I had just switched to a preppy new school.  The part of me that wanted to be liked was much bigger than the part that couldn’t be bothered.

So I succumbed to country music peer pressure and owned all the cds to prove it.  Looking back, I stand by the fact that it didn’t make sense to me then and it still doesn’t now, not even “Old Country.”  There, I said it. Hilariously, I now live in the country music mecca of Nashville,  and am married to a man who works in that industry.  God truly has an impeccable sense of humor.

Storytellers

What I am a fan of are the rich stories those often simple songs have told over time and the legends who did the telling.  You know the stories: about family, hard work, love, tradition, heartache, and a good time.  From what I’ve learned, the largest radio format in the world is that of country music and has been for quite some time.  My uneducated guess as to why is that these songs and stories are more widely accessible for most people.  They tell normal, relatable  stories and in that normalcy, provide a familiar  and welcoming place to visit.  I’m clearly no expert, it’s just a hunch.

A league of their own

My appreciation of this genre hiked up a few notches on Sunday night as I got to tag along with Daniel for an induction ceremony at the Country Music Hall of Fame. Three icons were to be honored: the legendary songwriter, producer, and founder of Monument Records, Fred Foster (think Dolly Parton and Roy Orbison), Charlie Daniels, and Randy Travis.  I felt completely honored to be there and stepped into a totally next level cool kids club upon arrival…way out of my league.   Dolly sang, and in my estimation, definitely still has it.  She could give Adele a run for her money at age 70!  The tiny but mighty Brenda Lee presented as did the likes of Garth Brooks and Vince Gill, (personal crush since forever and the one exception to my apathy for country music).

I mention all of this for one reason: the three icons inducted into the Hall of Fame on Sunday night were honored because of their unique gift and contribution to their fans and the world at large through music.  These three great men were honored for their Legacy.  Merriam-Webster defines legacy this way:

Full Definition of legacy

plural legacies

1:  a gift by will especially of money or other personal property :  bequest

2:  something transmitted by or received from an ancestor or predecessor or from the past <the legacy of the ancient philosophers>

Shrink

I define legacy with a vivid memory.  I was sitting in a psychiatrists office around age twenty-four and in the throes of some pretty rocking anxiety and depression to the point where I hated to be alone and had tons of trouble sleeping.  Four hours a night was success.  This psychiatrist was unlike most who focus mainly on medication prescription and maintenance (which greatly helped me at the time).  The touchy feel-y talk stuff typically didn’t show up in these types of offices all that often.  My doctor, however, would always spend the extra time asking insightful open-ended questions and practicing the kind of active listening that would make Oprah squirm.

The Big Question

This particular day I was feeling pretty frail.  Upon my impasse of despair, he looked at me with eyes full of compassion as asked, “Katie, what kind of legacy do you want to leave behind?”  Mic drop.  Are you kidding me? I thought to myself.  I’m in tons of excruciating emotional pain and confusion over here and you are asking me to tell you what I want my grandkids to say about me when I’m gone?  That is just cruel and unusual punishment.

Ansel Adams

He didn’t flinch.  Dammit, I had to dig deep for this one.   As I sat there, something shifted inside.  It was like a massive wide-lens movie camera zoomed out and captured my life in an epic, Ansel Adams kind of way.  I saw vast nuances instead of harsh details and gentle peaks and valleys instead of the unflattering flatlined monotony of my current reality.  It was as if someone took a soft, forgiving filter and appropriated it to my life.  It was that good lighting on a first date kind of luck, you know?  There was a spike of hope that arose in my soul.  My heart perked up like the ears of a bored dog who just heard the garage door open.

Desire

I didn’t have a grand, clever answer for him.  I actually can’t even remember what I said.  I do, however remember the gravity of that perspective shift.  The truth was, all I could see and feel in that moment was the intense barrage of my current emotions.  I was landlocked in that sense, but I wanted so much more.

I wanted the freedom of an ocean so I could look back 10 years from then and see a gift I gave along the way to others who may have felt a similar sadness.  I wanted to give so much, do so much, be so much! I wanted to write songs, write books, have a family, love wildly, throw dinner parties, travel the world, run for public office (it was just a phase), own at least one pair of Jimmy Choo’s, you know…the important stuff!  In that moment, I got angry at my sadness.  That anger felt really good.

This highly annoying legacy question gave me the nudge I needed to start making future-based decisions that didn’t always reflect the way I felt in the moment.  

Serendipity

What I later discovered in our work together was that my psychiatrist went to med school at the University of South Alabama and did his cardiac rotation under the instruction of my Grandfather, a talented and respected heart surgeon in Mobile at the time.  All those years later in Nashville, I held in my needy hands the gift of hope and tangled proof of a beautiful legacy.  My own Grandfather paid it forward for me in that moment, unbeknownst to him.  If that isn’t serendipity, I don’t know what is.  I’m reminded of that story every time I want to give up.

I guarantee if Fred Foster, Charlie Daniels, and Randy Travis would have listened to the discouragement and naysayers along the way, caving into popular demands instead of following their heart as crazy as it seemed against the great odds of their humble beginnings,  there would not have been a big ceremony on Sunday night.  Well, I suppose there would, yet faces and stories belonging to a different cast of characters.

Amazing Grace

The night ended as it should, with a song.  Not just any song though: an imperfect and a capella Amazing Grace, led by Randy Travis. His words were barely understood due to a severely paralyzing stroke he suffered in 2013.  His velvety baritone still shone through the cracks though.  A tear soaked audience sang along, humbly, lovingly.  A man who had made his mark with that undeniably iconic voice stood at the helm of the night  inviting us to something greater.  He lost control of the masterful, tangible gift we know so well, however, legacy runs deeper than just a pretty voice and a knock out career.  His legacy is the gift of a life well-lived, full of peaks and valleys:  the character of oak and heart of gold that inspires us to keep showing up, one broken hallelujah at a time.  So, my friends, you knew I’d ask:

What will your legacy be?

Love,

katie