Finding Your Tribe

The Second Question: “Can I take care of myself or am I dependent on others for my survival?”

A couple of months ago, I wrote about the first question of life, "Am I safe?" on my blog. It was the first in a series of posts on using the developmental stages of life as defined by the psychologist Erik Erickson to understand the story you are living and to help you find your tribe -- those who support and uplift you and who need your unique qualities to support and uplift them. Tribe -- your grid of aligned and empathic others. Tribe, as in the African word "Ubuntu": "I am through you."

I knew for some time that the struggles I was having with money had less to do with my attitudes about money itself, or even my sense of self-esteem, than with some deeper story that was replaying throughout my life. If I were to draw a portrait of my life, it would be an endless series of mountains and valleys, high peaks and deep abysses -- boring and sad in its predictability. Soaring, often unexpected success followed by a painful crash into the bushes -- usually financial -- that broke the continuity of my life, requiring me to scramble around picking up the pieces and blocking timely completion of whatever writing or business project I was working on at the moment. Over and over, I had to start over -- never really getting traction, never really moving, never able to establish solid ground from which to grow.

It was when I began to realize that this continuous pattern was in fact a deeply buried narrative playing and replaying in a vulnerable area of my life, and work with it as a story, that I was able to dissolve that pattern from the deepest inside out. What did working with it as a story mean? This:
1. Looking for the solution beyond childhood wounds and applying the classic hero's journey, which lays out in story terms the dramatic arc of growing up, to my own life;
2. Writing, as an adult, personal stories based on the questions a child must resolve for him/herself to arrive whole at the threshold of adulthood;
3. Writing my own fairy tales (metaphorical journeys through crisis, struggle, and transformation) inspired by the conflict between autonomy and dependence;
4. Translating the metaphorical story into concrete world actions.

What I saw clearly lacking in my childhood through the lens of story was not love, but the ability to mentor, that is, to:
1. Provide a positive holding environment where the word "failure" didn't exist, and the words, "You did it!" acknowledged the smallest accomplishments and the courage for trying;
2. Model skills in a way that child body and brain could imitate them;
3. Show how to take small, incremental steps toward autonomy and celebrate each one;
4. Believe in my capacity to do it;
5. And most importantly, the ability to recognize the creative swan in the troublesome duckling -- to see and nurture my inherent gifts rather than chop away at them so I would fit into a preexisting mold of what a girl should be.

Traditional storytellers use metaphorical tales that speak directly to the unconscious mind to diagnose the root of a problem in a suffering person and then tell curative stories to heal it. My curative tales seemed always to concern someone who possessed a dangerous knowledge and had to find a way out of a tower or castle where they had been imprisoned. The how was where the suspense of the story and the clues to my own needs were buried. I would write these tales and hold them in my mind. Eventually, from within, my entire life changed, taking on a different quality altogether. I found myself making different choices, new opportunities were offered, and new kinds of clients started arriving in my office. The question itself dissolved rather than being answered.

Core stories represent the neural pathways laid down in our brains at the beginning of life, which filter perception and create experience until pathways become trenches and it's hard to even imagine another way. But we can change the actual architecture of the brain and change the story of our life.

The Little Warrior and the Power of “No”

The conflict between autonomy and dependence is rooted in the second phase of life, which generally begins at 18 months and lasts until the age of three -- that time known as the "terrible two's." By a year and a half, a distinct child is beginning to emerge from the helpless infant totally dependent on others for his/her survival. The great dramatic question of this stage of life, which will be echoed each time that child (and later, the adult) steps into a new and unfamiliar environment, is: “Can I take care of myself or am I dependent on others?” Positive outcomes of this stage are self-control, courage, and will -- qualities that will be needed for the next preschool stage, the age of play, as well as for success in adulthood.

One task in this second phase of life is to learn how to become little warriors for ourselves -- to take care of and protect our emerging self. Toddler rebellion may be pain for parents, but it develops important skills of the will, courage, and personal boundaries. In a nourishing holding environment made safe by the atmosphere of unconditional love and joy in the child's mere existence, no matter what, a child learns not only to talk, feed him/herself, finer motor development including toilet training, but also self-reliance and resilience. In short, during this stage, a child is learning how to learn and how to take strategic risks.

In an unloving, neglectful, or dysfunctional family, if a child is ridiculed or humiliated in the process of toilet training or in learning other important self-care skills, he or she may feel great shame and doubt their capabilities to go forward. Low self-esteem, confusion, paralysis, and the inability to learn can result. Highly restrictive parents may fill the child with a reluctance to attempt new challenges. On the other hand, if caregivers demand too much too soon, a child may develop a core story that they're helpless to handle problems.

So resilient are children, however, that one positive adult somewhere in that child’s world can be the lifeline that child needs to make it to the next stage. This is where the existence of healthy mentors -– in or out of the immediate family -– can be so influential on a child’s development.

What's your story?

1. You probably don't remember anything from that time, but you may be able to remember the house in which you lived, your parents and extended family. Memories are stored in the senses. List 10 sensory memories you have from early childhood. Pick one or two that stand out for you and free-write for 10 minutes. Let your imagination roam free; don't even limit your writing to your own life. Don't worry about writing the "truth." Let the words on the page lead you beyond conscious memory to a deeper kind of truth.

2. Every parent, teacher, and adult who works with children is a mentor -- for good or ill. How many musicians and painters, for example, were tutored early in life by someone who recognized a possible gift in the 4-year-old? And how many violent criminals were "coached" in skills of preemptive strikes by a father, older brother, or other family member? Can you name the most important mentors in your life? When did they show up in your life? What challenge were you grappling with at that time? How did they help you? What was the gift you gained from them? What do you think they would say that you gave them? Thinking in terms of story structure – beginning, middle, and end; environment; characters’ and their desires; and situation, write a short tale about a mentoring relationship. Begin with "Once there was a ...." and let the words lead you, always keeping in the back of your mind the basic road map of story: Crisis, Struggle, and Transformational Realization.

3. Finally, are you a mentor? If you're a parent, teacher, therapist, or coach, you definitely fall within the mentor archetype. Can you give what you've got and then let go? Write a short piece about someone whom you're mentoring, what you hope for them, what gifts you see in them, what you feel them asking of you.

(Note: My October newsletter has the complete list of Erickson's developmental stages.)


© 2011, Juliet Bruce, Ph.D. All rights reserved. This post is from my forthcoming book, A Write of Passage: How to Recreate Your Life through Telling Your Story. This is the companion book to my Write of Passage course.

"Am I Safe?" The First Question

Hurricane Sandy, NY Times photo, 10.28.12

Originally published in 2011, this is the first in a series of posts on life as story. As the East Coast endures under Sandy, this is a reminder that in the Big Picture all is well.

I've been thinking about how to live with some sense of safety in a world that offers very little, and how to give it to clients who come to my office in search of a place where they feel safe enough to give birth to a new story. "It takes courage to become who you really are," wrote the poet e.e. cummings. And never more so than in times when being safe can feel more important than being true -- even if that means staying in an unhappy relationship or job, or hunkering down away from your dreams.

What I keep coming back to is resilience: the capacity to transform devastating experience into something positive. The self-healing mechanism that causes someone to carry on, no matter what. The inner safety that enables you to step out into the unsafe unknown to keep giving birth to yourself. Resilient people have a self-confidence and self-esteem based not on circumstances but on their own capacity to deal with the worst life throws at them. However, living as we do in a culture that tells us pain is bad, and that the solution to our problems is out there or in the medicine cabinet, many of us have lost touch with our natural resilience.

The First Story
Each human being arrives in life as a unique being, with potentials, gifts, predilections, and contributions to make. Jung called this potential our "star," an essential spirit that exists beyond our families, our environment, and our culture. It is an essence that holds the code to our destiny if we can discern and follow its path.

The most basic needs that must be met for a person to thrive (that is, to manifest their star) are 1) safety, 2) belonging, and 3) dignity. And the very first question we ask is "Am I safe?" Our first developmental task is to answer it. This answer becomes our first and foundational story.

In their book, Ghosts in the Nursery: A Search for the Roots of Violence, Robin Karr-Morse and Meredith Wiley (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997), describe the first two years of life as the critical period for setting the neurochemistry of the brain and building a template of expectations for life -- the core story. They write, “From our first breath on our first day of life we are learning who we are. We are building a model of what to expect, who will be there, how we will be received, how safe it is out there, how we can make ourselves known and comforted. We won’t remember these early experiences, but our limbic brain remembers and our body remembers.”

If our first caregivers are consistent sources of food, comfort, and affection, we learn that others are dependable and reliable. Like flowers turning toward the sun, we turn toward people. We leave infancy with a basic sense of well-being, a core resilience no matter what life holds for us, and a foundational trust in relationships. Karr-Morse and Wiley observe that children raised in nurturing families demonstrate compassion and altruism as early as four years of age.

For all too many of us, though, the first story is a different one. For whatever reason, our parents fail to provide a secure environment and to meet our basic needs for safety, belonging, and respect. The core story is that the world is undependable, unpredictable, and possibly dangerous. No matter how earnestly we go after our goals, we may be steeling ourselves against a deep-seated feeling of worthlessness and a mistrust of the world in general. We become spiritual if not actual orphans. The pace of life and the distance created by the very technology that is meant to connect us help us to hide the orphan from others and from ourselves.

Until one day, we can’t anymore: The life we’ve known falls apart. Or the inner yearning breaks through the walls we’ve erected around it. All too many adults come into my practice with an emptiness in their life that nothing can fill – not material success, pleasure, busy-ness, alcohol, drugs, traditional therapy, nothing. What I sense that they’re looking for is the missing piece of themselves that got left at the gate, back at the beginning of life -- that wasn’t loved into being.

Art and Resilience
My role as a creative healer is to create a sanctuary where adults can drop the mask for an hour or two and find their way through the hidden bi-ways of the right brain to who they really are. Freewriting, poetry, fairy tale, drawing, collaging, dancing, playing -– in these activities both my clients and I connect with a primal innocence that has nothing to do with naivete and everything to do with being fully awake to reality, within and without, and seeing the truth of existence from a light-hearted place. The Islamic poet Kabir wrote, “I wish I could show you the astonishing light of your own being.” Artmaking is the healing mirror.

In his book, Art as Medicine, the well-known expressive arts teacher Shaun McNiff wrote: “The immersion in the materials and process of art-making frees a person from their ordinary self, the familiar, rules, the system, the conscious, controlling side of their personalities. Hidden characteristics of the self shine forth. In this special space, the person experiences themselves -– beyond label, self-concept, problem. It is in this place that the person can shape new ways of being, create new life, find new direction.” Creativity reframes the question, “Am I safe?” into “What can I make?"

Researchers who have studied people who have overcome the odds, such as those coming from high-risk environments characterized by alcoholism, abuse, mental illness, violence, and poverty, have found that these people share many of the following qualities:
~ Empathy;
~ A sense of humor;
~ Resourcefulness;
~ Autonomy, internal sense of control;
~ Imagination;
~ Sense of purpose and spiritual connectedness.

For thousands of years, human beings have survived storms, earthquakes, droughts, wars, trauma, heartache, and long, dark nights of the soul by gathering together, telling stories, and making art and music. Within darkness, the stars are always shining. We just can't always see them.


by Juliet Bruce. All rights reserved.

I'd love to hear your thoughts, experience, and suggestions on healing story, creativity, or resilience.


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