Conversation Starters

 "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.  When the student is really ready, the teacher will disappear." - Tao Te Ching For over 11 years, I had an almost daily yoga practice. It started in February 2008 when a housemate and dear friend of mine all but forced me to join her for a class.  She'd selected the studio and told me what time to be ready and because I'm a good wingman, I went along with it -- just for her.  I am  certain  I told the desk staff that I would never return. Famous last words. Not only did I return a week later, I returned the week after that and the week after that until I found a teacher or two I really enjoyed and the next thing you know, I was hooked. Before long, I was enrolled in a monthly membership and prioritizing time on my mat over afterwork drinks. Sometimes I'd compromise and go to class  and then  show up to drinks, normalizing the "wear your yoga gear in public" long before it became the now-standar...

Recently, I met up with a friend of mine from MSASS and had an incredible four hour lunch where we caught up on our lives and talked about what's teaching us these days.  Near the end of our time together, my friend was talking about how she sometimes falls into this "therapist" role with people to help them "solve their problems."  And I smiled at her and said, "Let me throw this at you and see how it sticks: what if, instead of the problem-solution model, you used Asset Based Community Development?  What if instead of deficits, you thought about strengths?" My friend grinned at me because she knows my affinity for ABCD, so she indulged me as I explained: "I think in my own life, I've struggled a lot with this idea that I should 'get over stuff.'  That there's a pressure to 'get over' a relationship or a traumatic event or really anything.  What does that even mean, 'get over it'?  Who does that language benefit?  ...

It can be difficult to find a succinct and helpful tool to spark a dialogue about emotional abuse.  Gas-lighting, most specifically.  Emotional abuse, in general, is difficult to explain to people because there's no broken bones, no visible bruises, no stitched up skin, no discernible sign of physical trauma.  I'm not here to say that one is better or worse than the other (clearly, they are both horrible and difficult to overcome) but with more "invisible" evidence of emotional abuse, it can be frustrating to know that what folks went through was damaging, demoralizing, and destructive but then still have the added knowledge that there will be people who don't believe them -- who say they're exaggerating -- who don't understand.  People understand a broken bone.  They don't understand a broken sense of self.  Maybe they think   get over it  or   get over yourself  or   we still talkin' about this?   The recovery period isn't as...