I practically choked up reading Holly's kind cover note.
This is moment in time that marks a before and an after. My entire life trajectory changed because of this one moment. It took me two decades to be able to write it.
Funnily enough, it was lying on the couch, broken by another bout of PTSD, listening to Krista Tippet's 2016 interview of Bessel van Der Kolk, that opened up this story. While listening to Bessel's calm voice, I suddenly found myself back in the car, back at this moment of time, reliving something I had steadfastly refused to revisit for decades.
And as I reached for my journal and frantically just started writing, letting the story pour out of me, I experienced a release that had eluded me for decades. It was exactly as Bessel described it: telling the story of this day - with a beginning, a middle, and an end - allowed me to get out of a terrifying repeating loop of feeling so trapped that I had not being willing to ever talk about this experience with anyone. Not even my therapist.
I'm reading along (listening, actually) as Sue's novel is published on Substack, and am thrilled to read this section is advance of it's release date there.
I love how each piece stands on it's own.
In 2000, I was struggling to function as a recently emancipated 19-year-old laboratory science student with my first ever flat-mate showing me what receiving "the silent treatment" can do to one's nervous system. Hearing her come home to talk to her rabbit about me, my homework must have been affected: my hands were shaking from a lot less than gunfire.
One could say I was learning how frustratingly intractable standoffs can feel, but in the context of dissociated/local peace, in the Netherlands.
That comment was an admission of ignorance of global affairs, due in large part to lack of skills with which to respond.
I believe that the skills Sue Mann (the author) disseminates in her work as a coach fostering compassionate workplaces, are the very same skills we all need in order to have the capacity for news, the capacity for everyday peacemaking, the capacity for workplace as well as global change:
humble confidence firmly founded in first-hand experiences of peacemaking from within.
“peacemaking from within”: such a beautiful phrase! Yes! When our hearts are at peace everything changes. When our hearts are at war, with ourselves, with anything or anyone then….well. You know. You might The Arbinger Institutes’s Anatomy of Peace well worth a read. Ironically it features as its two protagonists an Israeli and a Palestinian who work together to foster peace from within in all…
I practically choked up reading Holly's kind cover note.
This is moment in time that marks a before and an after. My entire life trajectory changed because of this one moment. It took me two decades to be able to write it.
Funnily enough, it was lying on the couch, broken by another bout of PTSD, listening to Krista Tippet's 2016 interview of Bessel van Der Kolk, that opened up this story. While listening to Bessel's calm voice, I suddenly found myself back in the car, back at this moment of time, reliving something I had steadfastly refused to revisit for decades.
And as I reached for my journal and frantically just started writing, letting the story pour out of me, I experienced a release that had eluded me for decades. It was exactly as Bessel described it: telling the story of this day - with a beginning, a middle, and an end - allowed me to get out of a terrifying repeating loop of feeling so trapped that I had not being willing to ever talk about this experience with anyone. Not even my therapist.
I'm reading along (listening, actually) as Sue's novel is published on Substack, and am thrilled to read this section is advance of it's release date there.
I love how each piece stands on it's own.
In 2000, I was struggling to function as a recently emancipated 19-year-old laboratory science student with my first ever flat-mate showing me what receiving "the silent treatment" can do to one's nervous system. Hearing her come home to talk to her rabbit about me, my homework must have been affected: my hands were shaking from a lot less than gunfire.
One could say I was learning how frustratingly intractable standoffs can feel, but in the context of dissociated/local peace, in the Netherlands.
That comment was an admission of ignorance of global affairs, due in large part to lack of skills with which to respond.
I believe that the skills Sue Mann (the author) disseminates in her work as a coach fostering compassionate workplaces, are the very same skills we all need in order to have the capacity for news, the capacity for everyday peacemaking, the capacity for workplace as well as global change:
humble confidence firmly founded in first-hand experiences of peacemaking from within.
“peacemaking from within”: such a beautiful phrase! Yes! When our hearts are at peace everything changes. When our hearts are at war, with ourselves, with anything or anyone then….well. You know. You might The Arbinger Institutes’s Anatomy of Peace well worth a read. Ironically it features as its two protagonists an Israeli and a Palestinian who work together to foster peace from within in all…