by Heather Plett | Feb 25, 2016 | Uncategorized
This past weekend I went on a fun little road trip to Minneapolis with my three daughters. There were two moments from that trip that struck a cord with me:
1. I took my youngest daughter to see her favourite musician/Youtuber in concert. It wasn’t someone I had much interest in seeing, but she’s a little young to be in a music venue alone, so I bought an extra ticket and hung out at the fringes of the teenage crowd. Because this performer shared his coming out story quite publicly on his Youtube channel and now writes songs about that experience, he has developed a large following among GLBTQ youth. Probably at least half (maybe more) of the audience in the crowded room was from that community.
I was struck especially by three separate young men at the fringes of the room. They knew every word of every song and sang along with rapt attention. These were all young men who have probably spent much of their lives on the fringes – not finding a place of belonging because they don’t fit the stereotype of what a teenage boy is supposed to look like or who they’re supposed to fall in love with. And yet, in that room, they fit in and were accepted. They’d found a musician who was like them and therefore made them feel safe to be who they are. They belonged and they were witnessed.
It was a beautiful thing to witness – a space where teenagers who don’t normally fit in can find belonging. When the performer shared his coming out story from the stage, there was loud and prolonged applause. They were safe, they were affirmed, they weren’t the weirdos in the room.
2. My oldest daughter, a university art student, turned twenty while we were traveling, so in honour of her birthday, we spent much of Saturdayvisiting art galleries. In the Weisman Art Museum, there’s a unique interactive art installation that invites you through a doorway into the hallway of an apartment building. The hallway is silent until you lean on the apartment doors, and then you can hear what’s going on inside. There are six doors, and inside each one is a different soundscape. I was mesmerized and listened at every doorway.
Through one of the doors, the only sound is a woman weeping. That door was the most captivating to me and I could barely tear myself away. I was alone in the hallway for quite some time, so I stood leaning and listening. Though I knew it was only a recording on the other side of the door, I felt compelled to stand there and hold space for the woman’s tears, to bear witness to her grief even though she didn’t know I was there. Her tears represented so many of my own tears, so many of those times when I’ve cried alone behind a closed door.
Coming home with those two experiences reverberating in my heart, I am struck by the common threads that run through them…
There is inherent in all of us a longing for belonging, a longing to be witnessed.
Whether our stories are like those of the teenagers, seeking a space where they are not judged or ostracized, or like the woman (me) leaning on the door remembering her own lonely tears and how badly she wished someone had born witness to her in those dark moments, we long to be seen. We long to know we’re not alone, we’re not outsiders, we’re not locked away behind a door mopping up our own tears.
As I thought about those two moments, I was struck by another realization…
I have a responsibility to bear witness to others, to share my stories, and to let people know they are not alone. And you do too.
I am so grateful to that young performer who dared to speak his coming out story out loud. I am grateful that he found the courage to show those young people in the room that they are not alone in their fear, their isolation, and their “otherness”. I am grateful that, even in loud music venues, he is creating safety for young people to live authentic lives.
That’s the responsibility of each of us on this path to authenticity – to open our hearts to others, to bear witness to their pain, and to share the stories we feel called to share. Because when we share, we create safety for each other. We create belonging. We give them permission to be who they are.
Living authentically means living collectively. We make connections with each other through our shared stories and we find ways to heal together and create the more beautiful world our hearts are longing for.
Whether it’s the tears of grief and loneliness, or the fear of coming out, we all want to be seen.
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One of the best ways I know of to be intentional about bearing witness to other people’s stories is to sit in circle with them. If you want to learn more about The Circle Way, I invite you to come to Winnipeg in May to join us in the circle.
by Heather Plett | Feb 17, 2016 | connection, growth, holding space, Intuition, journey, practice
“But it hurts if I open it too much.”
That’s what I hear, in some form or another, every time I teach my Openhearted Writing Circle or host openhearted sharing circles.
People show up in those places hopeful and longing for openness, yet wounded and weary and unsure they have what it takes to follow through. They want to pour their hearts onto the page, to share their stories with openness and not fear, to live vulnerably and not guarded, and yet… they’re afraid. They’re afraid to be judged, to be shamed, to be told they’re not worthy, to be told they’re too big for their britches. They’ve been hurt before and they’re not sure they can face it again.
And every time, I tell them some variation of the following…
An open heart is not an unprotected heart.
You have a right, and even a responsibility, to protect yourself from being wounded. You have a right to heal your own wounds before you share them with anyone. You have a right to guard yourself from people who don’t have your best interests at heart. You have a right to keep what’s tender close to your heart.
Only you can choose how exposed you want to make your tender, open heart. Just because other people are doing it, doesn’t mean it’s the right thing for you.
Yes, I advocate openhearted living, because I believe that when we let ourselves be cracked open – when we risk being wounded – our lives will be bigger and more beautiful than when we remain forever guarded. As Brene Brown says, our vulnerability creates resilience.
HOWEVER, that doesn’t mean that we throw caution to the wind and expose ourselves unnecessarily to wounding.
Our open hearts need protection.
Our vulnerability needs to be paired with intentionality.
We, and we alone, can decide who is worthy of our vulnerability.
We choose to live with an open heart only in those relationships that help us keep our hearts open. Some people – coming from a place of their own fear, weakness, jealousy, insecurity, projection, woundedness, etc. – cannot handle our vulnerability and so they will take it upon themselves to close our hearts or wound them or hide from them. They are not the right people. They are the people we choose to protect ourselves from.
Each of us needs to choose our own circles of trust. Here’s what that looks like:
In the inner circle, closest to our tender hearts, are those people who are worthy of high intimacy and trust. These are the select few – those who have proven themselves to be supportive enough, emotionally mature enough, and strong enough to hold our most intimate secrets. They do not back down from woundedness. They do not judge us or try to fix us. They understand what it means to hold space for us.
In the second circle, a little further from our tender hearts, are those people who are only worthy of moderate intimacy and trust. These are the people who are important to us, but who haven’t fully proven themselves worthy of our deepest vulnerability. Sometimes these are our family members – we love them and want to share our lives with them, but they may be afraid of how we’re changing or how we’ve been wounded and so they try to fix us or they judge us. We trust them with some things, but not that which is most tender.
In the third circle are those who have earned only low levels of intimacy and trust. These are our acquaintances, the people we work with or rub shoulders with regularly and who we have reasonably good relationships with, but who haven’t earned a place closer to our hearts. We can choose to be friendly with these people, but we don’t let them into the inner circles.
On the outside are those people who have earned no intimacy or trust. They may be there because we just don’t know them yet, or they may be there because we don’t feel safe with them. These are the people we protect ourselves from, particularly when we’re feeling raw and wounded.
People can move in and out of these circles of trust, but it is US and ONLY us who can choose where they belong. WE decide what boundaries to erect and who to protect ourselves from. WE decide when to allow them a little closer in or when to move them further out.
How do we make these decisions? We learn to trust our own intuition. If someone doesn’t feel safe, we ask ourselves why and we trust that gut feeling. Sometimes we’ll get it wrong, and sometimes people will let us down, but with time and experience, we get better at discerning who is safe and who is not.
We also have to decide what to share in each level of the circle, but that’s a longer discussion for another blog post. For now I’ll simply say…
Trust your intuition. Don’t share what is vulnerable in a situation that feels unsafe. Erect the boundaries you need to erect to keep your tender heart safe. Let people in who have your best interest at heart.
This article has been voluntarily translated into Farsi.
If you want to explore your own open heart, you’re welcome to join an Openhearted Writing Circle, or consider booking a coaching session. For a self-guided journey to your own heart, consider The Spiral Path, which remains open until the end of February.
Interested in more articles like this? Add your name to my email list and you’ll receive a free ebook, A Path to Connection and my weekly reflections.
by Heather Plett | Feb 11, 2016 | Uncategorized
Last week, I bought a new journal. I am mostly a rush-in-buy-rush-out kind of shopper, but with journals it’s different. I take journal shopping very seriously, because a journal isn’t just a blank book – it’s an intimate partner that will see me through a lot of joy and sorrow, pain and pleasure. I need to like how it feels in my hands, like the texture of the paper, and like how it lies open in front of me. And I prefer a little variety – I never buy the same journal twice. This time I went with soft vintage leather that wraps around and keeps its contents cozy.
The first thing I entrusted my new journal with is this:
Today I resolve that I will only take responsibility for the baggage that belongs to me. I will work on whatever is mine to work on. I will not take responsibility for anyone else’s anger, fear, grief, joy, success, etc.
I wrote that because by the end of my last journal, it had become more and more clear to me that I needed to address my pattern of taking on what is not mine to take on.
Even though I’ve learned so much about what it means to hold space for people, and I spend quite a bit of time talking about listening without judging, walking alongside without trying to fix, empowering without trying to control, and guiding without inserting our own egos, I still get stuck in a decades-old pattern of taking responsibility for baggage that is not my own.
Not sure what I’m talking about? Consider the following scenarios and ask yourself whether any of these reflect your own patterns:
- Your teenage daughter doesn’t hand in an assignment and instead of recognizing that she is old enough to take responsibility for her own mistakes, you fret about how you have failed to teach her good organization skills. Or maybe you defend her to the teacher, giving an excuse for why it couldn’t be finished in time.
- You apologized for forgetting to pick up something for your partner, but he/she won’t let go of the anger, so you apologize several times, rush out to pick it up (even though it’s late and you’re tired), or over-compensate by making his/her favourite meal for dinner – anything to try to fix the anger.
- Your friend is passive aggressive and unhappy and she always makes you feel guilty for not having enough time for her, so you regularly give up your rare free time to go for coffee with her and listen to her long list of complaints.
- You’ve written something online that somebody responds to negatively and even though you really believe it to be true, you delete it because you don’t want to offend anyone.
- An impatient driver keeps honking at you, and even though there’s a lot of traffic and you don’t feel safe, you rush to make the turn to avoid annoying the other driver.
These are just a few examples of the many ways that we take on other people’s baggage. We often do it at the risk of our own safety, our own happiness, and our own health. Instead of letting them carry what is theirs, we take responsibility for fixing their anger, making sure they’re happy, and avoiding offending them.
Most of us have such ingrained patterns that we don’t know why we do it or where it came from – we barely even know we do it until our growing self-awareness makes us see it. Perhaps we picked it up from our parents’ patterns, perhaps we’ve always just assumed that that was the role of a person of our gender, or perhaps we’ve been lead to believe that that’s the only way we have value in the world.
At the heart of it is always our own discomfort, fear, and lack of self-worth. We are afraid that if we don’t fix someone’s anger, then they will reject us. Or we’re afraid that if we offend someone or say no to them, it will mean they won’t like us anymore. Or we’re sure that if we don’t help other people succeed then it will make us look bad.
When we take responsibility for other people’s baggage, we make it about us rather than about them. It’s now about OUR discomfort, OUR fear, and OUR lack of self-worth. In a strangely paradoxical way, it’s a self-centred act, even though it usually appears to be a self-sacrificial act.
We try to fix other people because we want our own lives to be easy and free of fear.
But we’re not doing anybody any favours when we do this. We’re not doing them any favours because we’re denying them the opportunity to take responsibility for their own issues. We’re taking their power away by taking their responsibility away. And we’re not doing ourselves any favours because the stress of trying to control the way the world around us functions will kill us.
What can we do about it? We can choose to detach. We can choose to return the responsibility for the baggage to the person who owns it.
That doesn’t mean that we are no longer compassionate or supportive of other people. We can support without taking on the burden. We can hold space for people. We can hold them accountable for their own choices and their own emotional growth.
And in doing so, we take back the responsibility for our own fear, discomfort and lack of self-worth that got us into trouble in the first place. Because just like it’s not our job to fix them, it’s not their job to resolve whatever’s going on for us.
I’m working on that in my own life by writing about it in my journal, talking to people who get it, and practicing it daily with baby steps. If you need help processing your own intentions to take responsibility for your own baggage and nobody else’s, perhaps you need a new journal too. Or maybe you need a coach who understands because she’s on that journey too.
I encourage you to consider how you need to let go of other people’s baggage, because the more we learn to do it, the more freedom we have and the more freedom we give them.
Note: If journal-writing is of interest to you, you might find some support for it in the upcoming Openhearted Writing Circles.
by Heather Plett | Feb 3, 2016 | grief, growth, journey, parenting
(Trigger warning) When I was just a little older than my oldest daughter, a man climbed through my bedroom window and violently took what didn’t belong to him – my virginity. I fought back, but he was stronger than I was and he held my own scissors over my head.
One of my memories from that hellish week was the shock on my dad’s face when he admitted that he – a lifelong pacifist – was suddenly aware that he was capable of murder.
Yesterday, I learned that the followers of a pro-rape misogynist pick-up artist are planning to meet this weekend in a mall near my home – a mall that my daughters frequent. Rage suddenly consumed me and I knew that I, like my father, could kill a man for hurting one of my girls.
Just after reading that article, I read another one by Melissa Harris-Perry in which she shares a story of a man threatening her in the lobby of a hotel. She froze, remembering her own rape and slipping into “the trance of survivor submission”. The only thing that jerked her back out of it and allowed her to fight back was the sudden awareness of her nearby students. Her students saved her, she said. She fought back because of them.
The combination of the two articles left me shaking and in tears. I was glad it was dark in the van as I left to pick up my daughter up at the pool. She didn’t know that my eyes were red – she only knew that she had finally succeeded in getting all the way through her synchronized swimming routine without faltering and she needed me to celebrate with her. And then, when a story came on the radio about Harry Potter, her passion for the half-blood magician filled the van and she chatted the rest of the way home. One of the things she told me was that Draco Malfoy was not a monster like everyone made him out to be, he was just misunderstood.
My daughters, like Melissa Harris-Perry’s students, save me again and again.
Later that evening, I was thinking about the many conversations I have had with a dear friend whose son, though he made some mistakes in his lack of understanding of girls, is not a monster. And yet now, because those girls painted him into a monster, he awaits the court’s decision about the seriousness of those mistakes.
And I realized that those young men who plan to meet in the mall to talk about how to pick up girls, are not monsters, they are somebody’s sons. And they make mistakes in their fumbling attempts to find affection. Perhaps they are the Draco Malfoys of their schools.
And suddenly, I don’t want to bring my rage to the mall, but rather my mother-love (and maybe milk and cookies). And I want to sit down with those young men, look them in the eyes, and say “how have you been so wronged by the world that you can only imagine getting what you want by taking someone else’s power away?” And then I want to offer them some tough love and tell them my story of how it feels to have a man treat you like that.
Sometimes it is rage that changes the course of the future, but more often, in my experience, it is love.
