This could change your life. I’m not kidding.

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In every situation you encounter, you choose to behave as either a victim or a creator. Which orientation you’re operating out of makes all the difference in how your life feels and looks, and the impact you have on the world around you. Once you see this difference, you can consciously choose to act from a place of empowerment. This is the basic idea of David Emerald’s TED: The Empowerment Dynamic, a cheesy yet profound book. I’m finding this concept mind-blowing and incredibly helpful.

Like many of you, I’ve known about the Drama Triangle—composed of victim, persecutor, and rescuer—for decades. But the antidote to it, the “Empowerment Triangle,” is a new idea for me.

I feel like I’ve discovered the secret of life, the Rosetta Stone, the key to personal and organizational growth and health.

Most of us, most of the time, are living as victims. This is completely understandable. Our culture is a victim culture. We’re taught victimhood from our cradles. We’re steeped in it. We swim in it like water. We’re mostly unaware that we’re approaching our life and our choices as victims. This Drama Triangle feels completely natural.

An alternative triangle, what Emerald calls the “Empowerment Dynamic,” is composed of a creator, a challenger, and a coach. To grow up is to become aware of where we’re living as victims and to choose to take on the creator role. To grow up is to see that we’re always making a choice. This is scary as hell, sure, but it’s also why we’re here.

When we behave as victims, we approach our life as a series of problems to be solved. Viewing life as a problem creates anxiety, which causes us to act in ways that reduce the anxiety but almost certainly don’t solve the problem. And the cycle starts all over again. Not much changes.

Creators, on the other hand, develop clarity on what they want to see happen in a particular area of concern. Clarity leads to passion and motivation, which creators then harness to move toward their desired outcome or vision. Creators change themselves and thereby the world, if they choose to.

When you’re feeling frustrated, stuck, and powerless, you’re in victim mode. When you blame others for your feelings and criticize yourself and them, you’re in victim mode. When nothing changes and you really wish it would, you’re in victim mode. When other people aren’t doing what they should and you’re sick and tired of it, you’re in victim mode.

Conversely, when you’re energized, focused, and open to surprise, when you’re making choices that move you toward what you want to see happen, when your boundaries are firm and you’re in charge of your time, you’re acting as a creator.

How do you make the shift from victim to creator? Realize that you’re always, always, always making a choice. Even if you’re truly a prisoner and you can’t actually make decisions about your actions, you’re still in charge of your thoughts, and thereby your feelings.

If Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl can be responsible for his attitude while imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, we can learn to be responsible for ours. Frankl famously said, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

If you’re curious about how this shift feels, you could choose to try this exercise:

  • Bring to mind an area of your life where you feel stuck, frustrated, and powerless to change the situation. This might be your marriage, your job, your aging body, COVID, or political polarization in the US. (Many of my clients feel the most frustration with their marriage.)
  • What do you see as the problem? (For many of my clients, their perceived problem is that they crave growth and change, and their husbands or wives seem to want to stay the same. This disparity causes my clients to feel afraid that if they choose to change and grow, their marriage will end.)
  • In this scenario, who’s the victim? Who’s the persecutor? Who do you expect to rescue you? Do these roles seem to change?
  • Now, ask yourself what you want to happen. What’s your vision for this area of your life? What’s the outcome you desire? Take time to get as clear as you can. Your clarity will be your motivation.
  • What’s one tiny step you can take in the direction of your desired outcome or vision? If it’s doable right now, go do it. I’ll wait. If it’s truly not, make a plan to take that step.
  • Check in with your body. How do you feel now? Do you still feel stuck and frustrated? Or do you feel more energized, compassionate, and empowered?
  • If you’re feeling more open and enthusiastic, pat yourself on the back! You’re making the shift from victim to creator.
  • If not, please know that’s okay. This work may be simple, but it’s often not easy. Celebrate your new awareness and give yourself compassion. There are many reasons, some of them very good reasons, why we choose not to change.

Questions? Want to go deeper? Contact me to schedule a free no-obligation conversation. I’d love to talk!

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

The Messy Flamboyant Contradictory Wholeness of Reality

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Getting ready to hike the Sierra in 1972

This is me, my little sister, and my dad getting ready to head off into the Sierra Nevada wilderness on our annual backpacking trip. The photo was taken in 1972, I think, when I was fourteen and Carol was twelve. I posted this photo to Facebook on Father’s Day, because even though my dad’s been dead for over 40 years now, I wanted to express my gratitude for the gifts he gave me, primarily my love of wild places. So many people responded with positive comments, mostly about what a good dad he must have been.

But he wasn’t. Not really. Not in the classic sense. At the time of this photo, he and my mom had been divorced for several years. He was actively drinking, and he was between wife #2 and wife #3. My brother, sister, and I called him “Wayne,” not “Dad.” Our mom gave me and my sister those “Chicken Shirt” t-shirts for this trip – perhaps, I see in retrospect, as a commentary on our father.

There are so many questions I’ll never have answers to. He died in a skiing accident when I was twenty-one, and my mom’s been dead for almost twenty-five years. There’s so much I don’t know or can’t remember. I was just trying to keep my head above water while saving my family from drowning.

For decades, I’ve held either the good or the bad Wayne, but not both together. He was the good dad who took his girls into the woods, or he was the bad dad – the arrogant alcoholic who hit his son and his dogs and left his wife to be with other women. Somehow, his goodness or badness meant something about my goodness or badness – if he was bad, I was irrevocably wounded junk. If he was good, I needed to deny my own experience in order to defend and prove his goodness. But he couldn’t be both.

Now, today, through writing my first novel that includes an imaginative seeing into my dad’s reality, I’ve found healing and forgiveness. I’ve found acceptance of him in his totality, as far as I can know him or it. I’ve found a way into my sequestered pain and grief, and an understanding of my dad’s choices, through writing about them. It’s a sort of miracle.

I’ve learned that healing comes through listening to and feeling the pain and grief I’ve carried for half a century, and letting go of the suffering that comes from wanting life to have been different. Healing comes through accepting reality as it is, with all its messy contradictions and flamboyant wholeness, and profoundly owning my “one wild and precious life.”

Death and resurrection is the way of the universe. Healing grace – resurrection – is always available to us.

Love is always there for the flowing, even if it takes fifty years.  

Happy Father’s Day, Wayne.

Love, Barb.

Joy in the woods
2020, Three Sisters Wilderness

PS. You can contact me here if you’d like to talk about any of this.

2020 photo credit: Jed Holdorph

I don’t want to be racist, but I am. Here’s what I’m doing about it.

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Like many of us in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, I’m having conversations about American racism. This morning, in a group of White women, several said they were taught by their families not to be racist. I didn’t have that advantage. Not only was I raised in a family with overt white supremacist attitudes and beliefs, I grew up and currently live in a racist society. I am racist, whether I want to be or not. I don’t want to be racist, so I’m examining my internalized racism because I want to become more and more anti-racist.

Most of you are further along this journey than I am. I feel very uncomfortable talking about racism. Writing this post, telling you that my parents and grandparents had white supremacist beliefs, is extremely uncomfortable. So what? That’s as it should be. This is uncomfortable work. Because guilt, shame, and all the other self-flagellating feelings don’t help me or anyone else, I’ll leave it at this: I want to root out, as much as possible, my own racist attitudes and beliefs. And I want to work for the dismantling of systemic racism in America.

In listening to Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) speakers, reading books and articles by BIPOC writers, and in talking with other White people, I’ve found these two resources especially helpful. I humbly offer them to you. More to follow as I continue my self-education.

In this episode of Unf*ck Your Brain, Kara Loewentheil discusses why we’re all racists if we grew up in a racist society, why we need to understand that our thoughts don’t make us good or bad, how perfectionism can derail our efforts to become more anti-racist, and how discomfort doesn’t mean we’re doing this wrong. And so much more. This podcast gave me the courage to admit my own racism.

And, following Ijeoma Oluo’s suggestion in So You Want to Talk about Race, I’m inventorying my privilege. Here are a few items from my list.

  • I’m white.
  • I’m heterosexual.
  • I’m cisgendered.
  • I grew up in a middle class family.
  • I usually felt safe from physical harm.
  • My parents were married for the first twelve years of my life.
  • I’ve never been worried about having enough food or a place to live.  
  • I had an excellent public education.
  • I graduated from high school.
  • My teachers almost always looked like me.
  • My parents expected good grades from me.
  • My parents assumed I would go to college.
  • My parents paid for most of my undergraduate degree.
  • My family traveled.
  • My mom read aloud to her kids.
  • My mom was involved in school and girl scouts.
  • I had grandparents who cared about me.
  • I had plenty of friends who cared about me.
  • I am neurotypical.
  • I am able-bodied.
  • I do not have a debilitating or chronic illness.

The list goes on. This is only the start. I’m confident there’s more that I don’t even see yet, because that’s how privilege works.

Of course, the biggest privilege I have is my choice about whether to do this work or not. I choose to do this work. Most of you are further along this journey than I am. Tell me what’s helped you. Show me what I’m missing. I know I’ve only just begun.

“I need to repair my leaks.”

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Woman holding a string of Christmas lights
You’re here to make a conscious, intentional, reverent offering of your energy to the world.

True confession: I sometimes hear voices. To be precisely accurate, I hear a voice. This voice seems to come from both within me and from outside of me. I know that makes no rational sense.

Martha, the heroine of my new novel Lost and Found: A Magical Journey on the Camino de Santiago (now available for free download here), also hears a voice. This voice comes to her, completely unexpectedly, as she’s walking the Camino. To her intense surprise, Martha’s healing is the voice’s aim and highest priority. Martha doesn’t know she needs to be healed, so she’s unprepared for what happens when she listens to the voice.

I got longer missives from the voice on the Camino in 2014, just as Martha does. At home, in real life, the voice isn’t as verbose.

I only hear the voice when I’m quiet, and usually just a phrase or a sentence. Short and to the point. The voice doesn’t mince words. I’m always surprised by what it says.

Here are a few examples. About twenty years ago, while doing yoga, the voice told me my job is “to understand and share.” Two summers ago, while sitting on a rock in the sun, feet in a high mountain lake, obsessing over something or over, the voice told me to relax and trust. “Stay connected and flow,” it said. I hear the voice in my coaching work with clients. It says things like, “Ask her about her connection to trees,” when I have no conscious reason to think a woman’s connection to trees is important.

Maybe it’s intuition. Maybe it’s God. Maybe I’m crazy. All I know is the voice has my healing as its aim and highest priority, and it’s always a good idea to listen.

This morning, feet in the Deschutes River, pondering my new inability to prioritize other people’s priorities over my own, I heard, loud and clear from out of nowhere, “I need to repair my leaks.”

What does this mean? Here’s what I think it means, for me and possibly for you:

I have a tendency to be diffuse, to let my energy leak. Like a porous canal or a pipe with a hole in it, my energy goes places I don’t necessarily want it to go. This is how women are trained in a patriarchal culture.

What’s actually true is that I am in charge of my energy, and I want to notice where my energy goes. I want to decide if it’s going where I want it to go, or if I’m prioritizing someone else’s priorities.

  • Are things plugged into me that I don’t necessarily want to power?
  • Am I trying to manage others’ reactions to me?
  • Am I maintaining a façade? A fake front?
  • Am I pretending to care about something I don’t actually care about?
  • Am I attempting to control the uncontrollable?
  • What incompletions and open loops are draining my energy?

You are in charge of your energy. Your energy is your life. Your energy is all you have.

You might be asking, “But won’t being selfish about where my energy goes make me a heartless monster??”

No. Here’s why: Being who we are, being connected to and flowing with the holy in our unique way in our unique life, is why we’re here. We’re not here to power other people. We’re not here to power institutions we don’t believe in. We’re not here to be colonized. We’re here to be free.

Ask yourself what you’re NOT here to do. What’s on your “To Don’t” list? Repairing those leaks directs your energy to your soul’s purpose. This is why you’re here – to make a conscious, intentional, reverent offering of your energy to the world.  

Photo by Natalya Letunova on Unsplash

“Uncertainty, Risk, and Emotional Exposure”

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That’s how Dr. Brené Brown defines vulnerability.

On June 1st, I put my novel, the story of Martha, a middle-aged woman who walks the Camino de Santiago, on my website as a free downloadable PDF. Yesterday I posted about and promoted its presence. Today, I feel vulnerable in about twenty different ways.  

I don’t know if anyone will read it. If you do, will you like it, hate it, or be bored?

If you don’t like it, if it offends you or annoys you, what will that mean about me?

I’ve shared a few raw pieces of my childhood in it, and I’ve included a scene I’m just not sure about. Martha’s conversations with the Divine will offend some readers. (If there are any readers.)

I’m swimming in uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.

Thankfully, other creators have lived through this and shared their wisdom. I’m finding strength and courage in these words from Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic: Creative Living beyond Fear:

“Recognizing this reality – that the reaction doesn’t belong to you – is the only sane way to create. If people enjoy what you’ve created, terrific. If people ignore what you’ve created, too bad. If pople misunderstand what you’ve created, don’t sweat it. And what if people absolutely hate what you’ve created? What if people attack you with savage vitriol, and insult your intelligence, and malign your motives, and drag your good name through the mud?

Just smile sweetly and suggest – as politely as you possibly can – that they go make their own fucking art.

Then stubbornly continue making yours.”

So why be vulnerable? Because here’s the thing. Everything I’ve said about my novel applies to my life, my whole life, when I’m being who I am in the world. There are aspects of me, when I’m living in integrity and letting all of me show, that you might not like. I may say something that offends you. I might just be ignored. Or misunderstood.

It’s simply not my job to manage your reactions to me. It’s not your job to manage my reaction to you, either.

Our purpose is to be who we are, as fully and completely as we can be at this moment, stubbornly and continually. Living as whole people requires accepting the discomfort of uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. As my ability to tolerate and even embrace the discomfort of vulnerability grows, the fuller my life becomes. My tolerance for uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure — vulnerability — is directly correlated to the amount of peace, freedom, creativity, and true connection in my life.

I’m proud of myself for sticking with Martha, myself, and this story. I’m proud that I’ve brought it into the world. I’m proud of myself for risking vulnerability. Whatever happens, I’ll have done this courageous thing. However this turns out, I’ll have grown my capacity to tolerate discomfort for the sake of growth.

You can download Lost and Found: A Magical Journey on the Camino de Santiago here.

She’s here! (My novel is live.)

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A statue of the Virgin Mary in Najera, Spain

What does it look like when a woman returns to her true nature?

What does it look like when a woman sheds the armor of culture and reclaims her true identity? What does it look like when a woman discards the disguises and camouflage she’s accumulated over decades of striving to fit in, to be who others want her to be?

A middle-aged woman walks the Camino de Santiago, and finds a whole new life within herself she never knew existed. What happens when that woman, faced with the potential disruption created by allowing that new life to emerge, says “Yes”? What shifts when that woman begins to understand that her healing is the highest desire of God, the Universe, and the Camino? What wisdom does that woman hear when she acknowledges that her former ways of getting through her days no longer serve her on this journey?

Lost and Found: A Magical Journey on the Camino de Santiago explores these questions. You can download it here. And thank you!

~Barb

The Audacious Act of Taking up Space

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Get in the habit of taking space — unapologetically speaking, writing, creating, and sharing — with clarity and conviction — for no other purpose than claiming the space allotted to you at birth.

We live in a society that gives more space to some than to others. This is called privilege. Although privilege feels automatic, built into the structure of reality, it’s not. Privilege is constructed, and it can be deconstructed.

If those with privilege — white, male, wealthy, for example — won’t use their space to deconstruct an unjust system, those to whom space is denied will eventually deconstruct that system from the outside by any means necessary.

Each and every child of the universe has the right to their allotted space. No more. And certainly no less.

Novel coming later today. I’ll post a link in tomorrow’s post, where I’ll continue audaciously taking up space.