Lindsey A. > Recent Status Updates

This first chapter was such a wild ride 👁️👄👁️

I love how each book in this series always has an entertaining hook

“When we hurt, we think of therapy, not community involvement, political action, or spiritual service. It takes a prolonged period of economic decline, a community wide tragedy in our midst, such as a war, to remind us we are all emotionally interconnected.”

“Fear Beliefs Inventory”

“Affect tolerance”

“Almost any fear or phobia that you could name, at its core, gets down to these six.
Fear of:
- Pain
- Loss
- Death
- Vulnerability
- Isolation
- Chaos”

“When we are afraid of feeling fear, when we are unconscious of its hold on us, when we avoid it, then we can’t use it or move through it. We become frozen in the fear of fear and we’re more likely to end up one of the phobics of panic sufferers. The word fear, like anger, is global and undiscriminating. It would help matters if we have more words with more nuanced distinctions.”

“See the demon of despair and greet it, ‘hello darkness my old friend.’ Be with it, but don’t indulge it. Read about it, speak about it, dream about it. Write down your dreams. Don’t fight it. Fighting it only wastes your energy….”

“While contemporary books on emotional intelligence advise you to distract yourself from your bad mood, I would say the opposite.”

On the other hand, she makes many great arguments for why it’s important to lean into the discomfort of “negative feelings” (vs. being afraid of them, pushing them down, using avoidance behaviors, etc.)

Reflections so far: I know that spirituality can arguably be a component of building resilience, but I was still surprised by how often different religious texts are referenced and interwoven into these stories. I also feel a bit cautious of interpreting some of the more Freudian-inspired interpretations of therapy and the author’s stance against psychiatric drugs.

“When we are most vulnerable we are most alive, most open to all dimensions of existence. In our venerability is our power.”

“A sense of living a life that cannot be listened to.”

Learning through first person narrative storytelling 💡‼️

“Emotion phobia”

“When I call them dark, I don’t mean that they are bad, unwholesome, or pathological. I mean that, as a culture, we have kept these emotions in the dark - shameful, secret, and unseen. As a result, we tend, for the most part, to shun them. But the emotions that we reject and suppress can become dark in an altogether different sense. Like a rich fertile soil from which unexpected flowers can bloom.”

“Artists well-being essentials”

“Toddler to train wreck pipeline”

“Media and audiences had unique entitlement to entertainers lives. They also held performers to different standards than other humans. I was just barely starting to understand this unchecked access. At ten years old, I had no reference point for what was healthy or acceptable, so I let everyone have their way, doing my best to please them.”

“The American Eugenics Campaign…. The United States was the first country in the world to undertake forced sterilization programs and that the Nazi party in Germany took many of its policies, procedures, and theories from American eugenicists… The US was the leader in the eugenics movement and after WWI held international conventions to spread the word… In the mid 1920’s…”

“… looking for help, but the police refused. Said they was a bunch of dumb hillbillies.... All I know for sure is my kin is buried on this land. In the city you get old and die, you’re forgotten in a week. Up in these here mountains, some of the people in the graveyard’s been dead long before I was born, but I feel as if I know them. People I heard talked about all my life…”

“To think, she had come here to give her daughter a better life. She would’ve laughed if she hadn’t been so scared.”

This post-war immigration process sounds so cruel and frustrating

“.,. But these polleros are different…. ‘It’s gonna be easy, quick.’…” 😮‍💨

My heart aches while reading all of the struggles, traumas, and disappointments that these people have gone through, while trying to reunite with their families. Even when there are bright moments of hope, it still feels like so much is stacked against them 😔

“The closet isn’t why we fell in love. We made this room special, not the other way around….”

“The best years of my life were in here and I’ve never felt safer than I do in the closet.”

“Beneath the smell of mildew, there is the unmistakable smell of him; the danish cigarettes, his aftershave, the bright linens scent of his laundry…. Pressing the flannel to my face, I inhale, choking through a sob.” 🥺😭

“It’s a little like being in the eye of a tornado. All around me, things are happening, but inside my head, it’s so quiet.”

What a great analogy for describing the overwhelming feeling of when an anxiety attack or panic attack starts. It’s like the mind goes blank but your ears ring and you feel like you’re falling…

Pillows filled with hair?! 😳

“… before she recognized the horror she’d seen and screamed…. she wonders if she is destined to be torn in two by the parasitic rage and hatred she can’t release… their most profound theft is stealing her right to scream... the realization hits her…. those who sought the sublime were white men with lives of leisure. They sought an unattainable beauty because they’d already attained everything else”