Like so many, I grew up as a teenager who never learned how to feel.

When I turned 11, my older sister became a long-term heroin addict and my older brother became a white supremacist gang leader and murderer. The very ground our family stood dropped out beneath us, and my teen years were the darkest of my life.

It’s not that my feelings weren’t there—they were—I just didn’t know how to locate them, name them, or trust that they mattered. I had no role models, and my identity became shaped around trauma and attempting to appearing “fine” to others—and to myself.

Looking back, I can see that the instinct to “seem okay” served as a kind of survival strategy. If I looked fine, then maybe I was fine. If no one, especially my parents, felt burdened by me, there would be no more catastrophies. It was my best attempt at damage control.

Meanwhile, my emotional pain got buried underground—quiet, dissociated, unacknowledged, misunderstood, and certainly unshared.

The Cave Years

While most of the teenagers I watched around me were socializing, performing, or exploring who and what they were becoming, my world was … much smaller.

I isolated myself and didn’t have any friends. There was no vibrant circle, no after-school community, no place I felt seen or mirrored. I felt invisible … and that’s how I knew myself.

Instead, I mostly stayed home—tucked away in what I now think of as my psychological cave—like a wounded animal licking its wounds. Trying to breathe. Trying to endure. Trying to exist.

I also didn’t have a spiritual or emotional framework back then—no cosmology about life that suggested a loving presence, no container that could hold pain as the cry for help that it was. The dominant presence inside me was one of loneliness and feeling forsaken.

When Tender Seasons Return

Throughout my adult life, I’ve noticed that my inner world moves in cycles. There are seasons where I feel grounded, resourced, and strong. And then there are seasons where my human sense of frailty resurfaces—vividly felt and searingly tender.

At these times, it feels like my underbelly is once again exposed: raw, honest and without the protection of performance. I’ve come to discover that this is not regression—I am again being invited into healing repair.

At these times when I’m feeling ultra-sensitive, I’ve continually gotten better at remembering to step past my old pattern of pretending and offer myself safety, compassion and reassurance.

Every single time that I do, something remarkable happens: my younger self—the aspect of me that still curls up in its cave—receives love now that wasn’t available then. My love. And each time I bring this gentle medicine to myself, my wound of abandonment softens, loosens and dissolves. I release shame. I heal a little more.

The Risks and Rewards of Being Seen

I’ve also learned that it matters—deeply—to let the people who love me actually witness me in all my seasons. Not only the confident, wise, or grounded versions, but the deflated, uncertain and vulnerable ones, too.

Amazingly, allowing someone in doesn’t make me feel weaker. It makes healing a shared process rather than an isolated one. I discovered that trauma takes place in relationship, and can be healed in relationship. With each passing year of my life, I release subtler levels of shame that I’d stored and carried. As I make more progress, I find that healing isn’t only about feeling better—it’s about no longer needing to heal alone.

This is the evolutionary path that ushered me to discover my life’s work of facilitating others in embracing their transformational journey.

A few years ago I captured the brief video below about the power of sacred community in healing trauma:

And, just like I remind others as a therapist to feel their feelings fully without collapsing into a limiting story or identity, I continue to deeply feel my wide range of emotions without believing every thought that arises with them.

My spiritual teacher taught me that we are not responsible for the thoughts that come into our mind, only for the thoughts that we choose to hold there.

Intense body sensations accompany our tender emotional states. It takes bravery and practiced skill to feel intensely—while staying connected with our spiritual center.

The key is to resist the temptation to spiral into discouraged thinking about life or my future—and simply hold steady with myself as the purification process moves through in its own time. I find it’s a natural process, much like the way a weather front sweeps across the face of the earth.

These days, whenever tender terrain comes to light, I find my energetic frequency shifts. I enter into a graciousness, a slower rhythm of being where I have access to my compassion which nurtures my hurt and pain. As I do, my masculine and feminine energies come into balance, and once again experience my emotional depth as a blessing, as sacred.

At these moments, I often imagine myself as a snake as it gracefully glides its way out of the now-hollow, translucent shell of its old skin—an astonishing process of moulting that magically reveals its glimmering and colorful new skin.

My Ongoing Practice

These days, I often find myself:

• enjoying the quiet, profound contentment of my being

• embracing transparency with those I love

• being in awe of the exquisite sensitivity we all carry

This is how I heal.
This is how I integrate.
This is how I become more deeply rooted in an inner presence that feels real, more real with each passing year of my life…

An Invitation for Discovery

In support of revealing your own new layers of awareness about tenderness and transparency, here are some inquiry sentences you can respond to in your journal:

1. Where in my life might I be defaulting to appearing “fine”—making myself unavailable to discover and reveal my deeper truth underneath?

2. “When I am hurting, I tend to ________________________. Underneath that, what I’m actually needing is ___________________________.”

3. “The two people in my life I feel most safe to share my inner world with are __________________________ .”

4. “What might assist me in confiding to them (and others) even more fully is _______________________________.”
   

I’ve traveled a long way from being holed up in an isolated cave in my teenage years. I’m genuinely grateful that my life-long dedication to transforming my pain into new levels of wholeness catapulted me into my life’s work as a seasoned spiritual therapist.

My own evolutionary journey has been my core apprenticeship, the path of learning my art and craft which fuels my calling to serve others.

It’s sometimes hard to believe that the days of my life are immersed in the blessings of healing and awakening—of supporting others in discovering and honoring new layers of tenderness, aliveness, wisdom and divine presence.

All my best, Gavin