Matthew is a Speaker, Trainer, and Author of Connecting Paradigms: A Trauma-Informed & Neurobiological Framework for Motivational Interviewing Implementation. A book that should be on the bookshelf of anyone doing Trauma Informed Work! https://connectingparadigms.org

https://www.jamesencinas.com/forum/opening-the-narrative/kendall-evans-a-transition-august-8th-2020-a-tribute

YES!!!

So beautiful Gianetta! Thank you for sharing your gifts.

Dear Holly - Amen to your line "My stories and my experiences are how I become aware." I am grateful for your sharing and deeply aware of the courage that such vulnerability requires from us. Know that your words will touch those who are meant to be touched by them...... James Baldwin wrote “Only an artist can tell … what it is like for anyone who gets to this planet to survive it. What it is like to die, or to have somebody die; what it is like to be glad.”......It takes a deep Love to love what is mortal, thank you.

"Then you'll know how to be with me." This line informed by Jung's insights and quote makes me feel that everything I experienced has not only made me who "I am" but also that my darkest moments have allowed me see the light. Thank you Holly.

Thank you for posting Holly! I love this line and will meditate on it -"There is no done. There is no there to get to. Every day is there. Everyday is a beginning for opening to interbeing. My compassion for myself and others inter-is with my connection to my woundedness and my daily small sufferings in life, as well as my joys." Beautiful!

Dear Mary - I am so grateful to have peddled into your life over 5yrs ago! You have shaped and informed my thinking, have been a mentor, a source of inspiration and are a cherished friend. Like you I have committed the rest of my life to bringing ACE's science awareness to the world. Like you I am constantly intrigued and left in wonder by how OUR CHILDHOOD ADVERSITY impacts the lens through which we see the world and even more importantly constructs the false lens through which we see ourselves. Intrigued by the fact that our ACE's carries over into adulthood and actually prevents us from truly seeing ourselves. Your ending line of advise and shared wisdom "Know your ACEs, and face your AGEs" is profound and prophetic!

Dearest Cissy - As I've shared with you, this piece for me is poetry. It takes us to places that only poetry can, that only the language of the soul can reach. I've read it as I've learned to read poetic work - finding a line that resonates, sitting with that line and allowing it to inform me. "I have always been and will remain - underneath it all. Dirt is older than pain. The soil, the land, the earth, my soul is ever present for the returning to." So beautiful! A truth that helps me understand that I am more than the sum of my experiences. That the moments of sorrow and joy in my life have informed who I am but don't define who I am. That I am, that we are, so much more. The great Japanese writer Haruki Murakami said, “Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.” Thank you for sharing your soul. For helping us to see that life is complex, that it can be brutal and often is, but that at the same time it can also be, so beautiful as to leave you, in wonder. ―

So true. I have come to understand that the more compassionate I am able to be with myself, the more compassionate I am able to be with others. I am a testament to the fact that compassion like love can be learned and must be taught. If you have never experience healthy love and many who have high scores have not, you will not know how to love humanly in the deepest way.

Yes my friend "hurt people can heal people" and the more people like yourself that shine their light in this world the more of us that will be healed. Love and respect you and your work, which as you said is life-long but oh so full of wonder and joy. Please if you get a chance post Steve's post in all the places you've posted Tia and her colleague Arnold's research.

Dear Steve thank you for this powerful, thoughtful, thought provoking, and insightful post. I know that this work is near and dear to your heart and I feel privileged to know you, walk with you, and learn from you. I read somewhere that systems change begins when a few people step forward to act on behalf of what matters to them. People who as Brené Brown said, "understand that it is not about winning, not about losing, it's about showing up and being seen!" It is about having the courage to go into the arena knowing that you will get your ass kicked but doing so regardless. It is about dignity - the inborn sense of value and worth that lives in each of us. Rainer Maria Rilke said, "Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” Thank you, for asking the questions Steve! Thank you for sharing answers that you have lived into. Thank you for helping us to see that "hurt people hurt people." And in doing so hopefully create new and important questions that together we can strive to answer. Questions such as: who has helped you love the good that grows within you? who has helped with the ability to see your inner dignity? Who has given you a safe place? who has helped you see the gifts and abilities you posses, the strengths and abilities you bring into the world? And if the answer to these questions is "no one." If all you have experienced is cruelty, indifference, pain, and hurt. Why would we choose to impose more hurt? "WHY" is it that so many of our systems can't SEE and acknowledge what you have stated - "Expecting someone to establish healthy, respectful relationships after being raised in a world of abuse, cruelty, and disrespect, is unrealistic." Why do we continue to shame and punish individuals who are operating out of their shadow, out of their pain and hurt, out of a place of anger, jealousy, or resentment? Why can't we, given what the science, data, and research tells us, not see that if our pain is not witnessed and addressed we will continue to hurt ourselves and others? Why is it that rather than working to heal fragmented, disoriented, broken, and fear based individuals we actually have created systems that are based on retributive justice and the punishment of offenders rather than on rehabilitation? My dear colleague and friend Tia Martinez recently published a study that was commissioned by the Blue shield of California Foundation that I hope many read https://blueshieldcafoundation.org/sites/default/files/publications/downloadable/BreakingtheCycleLifeCourseFramework.pdf This graphic from her study validates your wonderful point my brother - "Understanding the impact of past traumatic experiences is critical in helping BIP participants learn to make respectful choices in relationships." Thanks again Steve I look forward to continuing to learn from you and the work that you and Dorothy are doing. Blessings and love Rev.James

I respect and value your thoughts and insights brother. Francis of Assisi a man we both admire identified the following path to peace and happiness “Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.” Thank you for doing what is necessary - highlighting that although advances have been made there are still countless homophobic slurs and injustices that feel abusive to their targets, that LGBTQ people still have to hide who they are in the workplace, that LGBTQ people have to sit in churches while priests and ministers bash them and their identities, and that the LGBTQ community has to wonder if there will be a day when doctors can choose not to treat them if giving them medical care goes against their religion. Thank you for doing what is possible - using your voice to leave your soul's print on the world and challenging the beliefs of those who seek to imposed their ideas of morality upon the rest of society. Thank you for having the courage to stand up against injustice in all its forms and being a warrior for all who are not deemed worthy. And thank you for helping us see that we can do the impossible - by sharing your courageous, empathetic and compassionate soul.

Dear Thaeda thank you for your post. It may be challenging for many to read the following - "It became clear to me that any kind of “intervention” would need, at the very least, to be directed by Latinx parents themselves--those who would know what help looks and feels like in their community. Those of us who work in agencies to play the role of the helper need to stop relying on the “best practices” research that is based primarily on white populations, and start relying on the people who are the real experts- the Latinx parents who we are intending to help." - but I can't thank you enough for having the courage and compassion to share it, give it voice, and most of all act on it as I know you do. I spent the last two days in an intensive "racial equity training" and among the many powerful things I walked away with is the understanding that "racism" is a social construct that has become institutionalized and put in place to give one group of people power over all others. Racism is a system of advantage based on race, a system of oppression based on race, and system whose very existence is based on a the false belief of "white supremacy."And it lives in every system that exists in this country. That said your piece gives voice to a group of people who have been marginalized and whose power has been taken from them by people who as well intentioned as they may be thrive in a system that was created for them at the exclusion of everyone else. The sad thing is that you don't even have to be white to support the "white supremacy systems."

Thank you Sharon! I couldn't agree with you more, we need to figure out how to better provide fathers with the tools, skills, and practices necessary to raise and nurture their children as well as themselves. Thank you for the three powerful insights that regard the importance and deep value of self care, unconditional love, and power of words! Our world can so benefit from the wisdom you share regarding the understanding that "parenting is the most important job a father can do" ~ ShaRon Rea

Yes! Our narrative helps us to place our experiences in perspective, who we are, why we do what we do based on who and what has informed us. It is in as you stated Reverend Thaeda that when we explore these experiences in safe spaces with community that we come to learn how connected we all are and how much we need each other.

Dear Mary the honor is mine and I feel so grateful to have met you and have you in my life as a friend, mentor, and colleague. The stepping stones you've identified are so important towards the process of healing and transforming and as you've pointed out require the taking of baby steps. From my perspective the first baby step begins with the recognition that one must learn to love oneself and the second that one must also learn to come to terms with suffering. Joseph Campbell wrote "suddenly you're ripped into being alive. And life is pain, and life is suffering, and life is horror, but my god you're alive and its spectacular." Over time I have come to see that people hold on to the suffering that life naturally bring them and rather than allow that suffering to transform them, often in trying to hold on to the thing that is no longer part of their lives, they stop themselves from living their lives. I am no different. For much of my life I felt that I was a victim and that the suffering I had endured was unfair. It made me angry, for many, many years I walked around with a lot of hurt and rage. At the time I was not able to see that all of that anger and rage that I carried was my will to live expressed in a very negative way. I didn’t know then and was not able to understand that the suffering I experienced was a part of my life, a stage in a process. That it wasn't the bottom line. It was not the end of the story. I was not able to see then that the wounds of mind and body I experienced would one day become the scars of my creativity, my solace, and my transformation. A man I consider a mentor and friend Father Richard Rohr recently wrote, “the supreme work of spirituality, which makes presence possible, is keeping the heart space open (which is the result of conscious love), keeping a “right mind” (which is the work of contemplation or meditation), and keeping the body alive with contentment and without attachment to its past woundings (which is often the work of healing). In that state, you are neither resisting nor clinging, and you can experience something genuinely new.” So true.

Amen! It takes courage and doing to be unapologetically fierce about our own truths, personally I don't believe it can be done without a community of like minded spirits. Thank you both!

One more thing I would like to add, from my perspective the Dominant narrative has created a series of "labels" and notions of "good" and "evil" that for some reason we have excepted and use to define people. "Victim","Perpetrator","Batterer", "Deviant", "Abuser"......words that deny people their "wholeness" and are used to punish them. As Parker J. Palmer, Founder of the Center for Courage & Renewal writes - “There are no shortcuts to wholeness. The only way to become whole is to put our arms lovingly around everything we’ve shown ourselves to be: self-serving and generous, spiteful and compassionate, cowardly and courageous, treacherous and trustworthy. We must be able to say to ourselves and to the world at large, ‘I am all of the above.’”Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen follows this truth up by writing, "We are here because we are born with the capacity to find the hidden light in all events and all people; to lift it up and make it visible once again and, thereby, to restore the innate wholeness of the world. This is a very important story for our times — that we heal the world one heart at a time. This task is called “tikkun olam” in Hebrew, “restoring the world.”

Dear Keisha the words "validating those in the presence of others who would seek to deny the truth of their experience" really speaks to me. The Dominant narrative seeks not only to deny the truth of the "other" but to place it in a box and through pragmatic problem solving "fix" it. Most of our lives don't fit into that neat little box but rather are a collision of opposites; death and resurrection, loss and renewal, injury and pardon, sadness and joy. Life is inherently tragic, and that is the truth that only faith, not logic, can reconcile. Matthew (25:35-36) I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me. It takes courage, compassion, and love to hold those who are on the edge of what the Dominant narrative has defined as normal, proper, or good. For the Dominant narrative to change we as you say must answer the call to be a witness, an advocate and a warrior for change. We must also provide people with the skills, practices and tools to make healthy informed choices that not only enhance their lives but also the lives of the "other."