Freeing My Inner Church Girl
The steps I am taking to acknowledge my fawn trauma response
A couple weeks ago, I shared how I was reading Tricia Hersey's Rest Is Resistance. The book was thought provoking. It has led me to get curious about my relationship with rest. I have been examining what rest is, exploring what it means to rest, and taking steps to instill intentional habits to facilitate a deeper relationship with rest.
My last blog investigated the 7 types of rest that Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith identified in, Sacred Rest: Recover Your Life, Renew Your Energy, Restore Your Sanity. In case if you missed it, rest can be mental, spiritual, emotional, social, sensory, creative, and physical. Dr. Dalton-Smith designed a quiz to help her readers pinpoint where they can use more rest.
For me, that rest looks like emotional rest. Her newsletter defines emotional rest as “The freedom to authentically express feelings and eliminate people-pleasing behaviors.” It certainly was not a surprise to learn that I could benefit from eliminating people-pleasing behaviors. If nothing else, I have enough self-awareness to know that I have a tendency towards people-pleasing. It is a default response. My research for my Rest Is Resistance piece pointed me towards a sobering online analysis of fawn response. While I touched on it briefly to discuss why it may come up for persons of color in corporate professional settings, I tabled the topic for deeper discussion at a later date.
Traditionally, mental health and medical practitioners have recognized three key physiological responses to stress, threats, or dangers: (1) fight, (2) flight, and (3) freeze. I examined these responses in my piece deep diving anxiety. These primitive adaptive strategies are designed to protect us. Animals employ their lesser known cousin, the fawn response, to avoid or minimize the perceived threat by attempting to please the potential aggressor. The goal is to do whatever they can to keep them happy despite their own needs and wants.
My healing journey has forced me to get curious about what I need and want. Before we can identify our needs and wants, we have to be aware of our emotions and feelings. People who engage in fawn response normally become numb to these sensations.
I’ve spoken in past posts about the concept of somatic awareness or the ability to notice how our thoughts and emotions can trigger behavioral patterns and sensations in our bodies. Often, these behavioral patterns and sensations can become so automatic that we no longer notice them. We often hear that the first step to recovery is acknowledgement that there is a problem. When we become aware to the sensations in our body, we can empower ourselves to take important steps to mitigate the cause.
This month, I have been teaching myself to run again. One of my biggest personal accomplishments is completing a marathon the year before I started law school. If you are not familiar with running, that is 26.2 miles. That last 0.2 miles were probably the hardest. I ran the race in the first year that I learned to run. It is a perfect example of how I can push myself to achieve difficult goals.
The past year has felt like a marathon of its own. While I was new to running when I ran it, I suspect that this mileage can be difficult for runners of all experience levels. It requires people to dig deep, put mind over matter, and keep pushing forward, one step at a time. I love the rhythmic breathing that our bodies require during runs. I once had a shirt emblazoned with the phrase, “Running is my Prozac.” As I have been getting back into this hobby while recovering from depression, the words couldn’t be more true.
My Tuesday morning run inspired this week’s blog. I was never one of those runners who can train in silence. A good playlist makes all the difference. About fifteen minutes into my run, the first line of Pharrell’s Lemon, revealed an internal anger that I didn’t realize was lurking in the background. If you aren’t familiar with the song, he quotes Gloria Steinem’s “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off!” The anger that surfaced fueled me during my 5 minute sprint. When my 2 minute walking break followed, I found myself getting curious about the emotion.
What was the source for the anger? Certainly, I have been processing a myriad of emotions through my numerous forms of therapy, daily morning pages, meditation, and blog posts. As I continued my run, Spotify and Beyoncé helped me to answer this question with what is probably my personal anthem right now, Church Girl.
I love Church Girl! I can’t sit still whenever it plays. It’s one of those songs that even makes my soul dance. The beat and music play a huge part, but really the lyrics are what speak to me:
I've been up, I been down
Feel like I move mountains
Got friends that cried fountains, ohI'm warning everybody, soon as I get in this party
I'm gon' let go of this body, I'm gonna love on me
Nobody can judge me but me, I was born freeI'll drop it like a thotty, drop it like a thotty
I said, now pop it like a thotty, pop it like a thotty (you bad)
Mi seh, now drop it like a thotty, drop it like a thotty (you bad)
Church girls actin' loose, bad girls actin' snotty (you bad)
Let it go, girl (let it go), let it out, girl (let it out)
Twerk that ass like you came up out the South, girl (ooh, ooh)
I said, now drop it like a thotty, drop it like a thotty (you bad)
Bad girl actin' naughty, church girl, don't hurt nobody* * *
I'm finally on the other side, I finally found the urge to smile
Swimmin' through the oceans of tears we cried (tears that we've cried)
You know you got church in the morning (the morning)
But you're doin' God's work, you're goin' in
She ain't tryna hurt nobody
She is tryna do the best she can
Happy on her own, with her friends, without a man
When I finished my run, I couldn’t wait to unpack my emotions. I was pissed off. I was fired up. But why? I sat with the emotions in my morning page ritual. Some mornings, my morning pages flow through me quickly and easily. There is a lot of data to dump into my weekday journal. Other days, the topic appears over time. This morning ritual almost always helps me to pull out thoughts or revelations that are lurking in the background. Writing has been the centerpiece of my healing because it helps me pull swirling and complicated thoughts on paper and out of my brain where I am overanalyzing or maybe even masking them.
While fawning results in hypervigilance and awareness of the moods and emotions of people around me, journaling and writing this Substack helps me to become vigilant to what’s going on within. These pages are where I am able to identify my personal needs.
As we become more aware of our emotions, we learn that they can give us powerful information. Therapy teaches us to use the emotion wheel to interpret these messages. Looking at the wheel below, my anger was telling me that I was feeling resentful, disrespected, and annoyed from following societal norms that were created to confine me and other minorities so that we “behave” and act a certain way that is acceptable to the majority.
I suspect I am not alone. So many of us are feeling frustrated, exhausted, furious, anxious, dismissed, and numb thanks to the political climate. As I dug deeper into these emotions during my morning pages, I was also confronted with the fact that I was simply tired of being “the good girl”, or what I now call, the “church girl”.
While I am Roman Catholic, I am not particularly observant. I believe in a higher spiritual power and love the rituals of Catholicism, but there are many things about my religion that I cannot defend. However, in relating to Church Girl, I resonate with the feeling of confining myself to a certain image.
As an only child, I put a lot of unnecessary pressure on myself. I think so much of my perfectionist and people pleasing tendencies come from the fact that I was my parents’ only opportunity to get it right. Being the only child of divorced parents led to me adding even more pressure, as I found myself attempting to please both parents and keep the peace.
I’ve spoken several times in this blog about my experience as a woman of color in my profession and how I added enormous pressure on myself to strive for the unachievable perfection to circumvent the potential for unconscious biases that result in microaggressions and comparison to impossible standards that my majority male counterparts rarely have to navigate. This looked like working incredibly long hours and allowing my husband to take on more of the parental responsibilities like child pickup and chauffeuring for various activities.
I balanced the inevitable maternal guilt by taking on volunteer roles in and outside of the classroom so I could attempt to ameliorate the effects of my absence. Maybe my children would feel it less if I volunteered to chaperone field trips, be the Girl Scout leader, or be the backstage recital mom. This overextension bleeds into my roles as wife, daughter, family member, and friend as well.
Simply put, it is exhausting. I’m tired of having zero time for me. I’m tired of being at the bottom of my to do list. I’m tired of living for the weekend and in fear of Sunday, let alone Monday. This exhaustion was present long before my daughter’s suicide attempt and my subsequent descent into depression. It was always lurking in the background, I was simply numb to it.
Thanks to my recovery, intensive therapeutic journey, and radical self-care, I now am feeling the feels. I am recognizing that no one can truly judge me, but me, and if they do, does it really even matter? In ignoring my emotions, wants, and needs, I have been saying I don’t matter. It’s okay to be at the bottom of my to do list and others can treat me with the same sense of neglect.
I now have new meaning to embracing my selfish phase. I am saying f*ck it to the needs, desires, and wants of others if they don’t align with mine. Who cares about the opinions of others and whether my actions please them? It’s okay to disappoint others, buck the system, and prioritize what pleases me. Stay tuned as I explore further what it means to set and reinforce boundaries so I can love on me.
In case if you missed them, below are links to resources I shared throughout this week’s post:
What is the Fawning Trauma Response? (Inner Balance Counseling Blog)
Sacred Rest: Recover Your Life, Renew Your Energy, Restore Your Sanity (Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith)
Rest Quiz (Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith)
Rest Is Resistance (Tricia Hersey)
The Feelings Wheel: unlock the power of your emotions (Calm)
I also linked to the following prior blogs: