On Echoes

In a paradigm shifting training about effective messaging to reduce the impact and incidences of antisemitism, I learned to avoid natural metaphors affixed to unnatural social problems. Now instead of saying that racism or antisemitism are “in the water” or “a virus”, the training invited us to use messages of machines. That people feed the machinery of antisemitism when they use language that divides people. I’ve worked to internalize this. I’ve become more aware of where I use natural and human made metaphors in my speech. Through the this inquiry and reflection, I’ve found more choice about language and I’ve interrogated what it means to use metaphors based on “creation” (nature!) or “creations” (human made processes, objects, etc.).

One consequence of this reorganization and reorientation is that I have stopped using the word trigger. Triggers are parts of guns. Guns are machine made and violent. A person pulls a trigger, usually on purpose. In the trigger warning debate, I notice that there is some mobilization to try to protect people from triggers or “being triggered”. How do we protect people without taking away their agency to feel, react, respond, and nurture their own selves? Why is it bad for something to remind us of our past? I do not believe that we need to soften the world. We need to increase softness towards and inside ourselves.

Triggers are not natural. Trauma patterns of avoidance and intrusion are. Years of studying trauma has taught me that trauma patterns are natural survival instincts.

I’ve started to use the term echo where others say trigger. The past is echoing in me in the present. It links the feeling to both the past and the present, a shout against a cliff that returns to us like a rocket when it bounces. Acute traumas will reverberate through us. Trauma responses are natural. I encourage myself and others to focus in on the what instead of the why, receiving the messages that the autonomic nervous system sends. The echo is in the body and through the body, often more present in sensation than cognition. The echo can arrive as sweaty palms, increased heart rate, jumpy legs, swallowing, blinking, muscle tension, headache, stomachache. Histamine, cortisol, adrenaline, and norepinephrine are coursing through the body on purpose. This evolutionary pattern is ours. Big ours, the kind of us that connects each person with all of life.

I don’t believe that the goal is to prevent echos of thoughts, feelings and sensations. That sounds like avoidance or numbing, which, while effective sometimes, is not the goal. Instead, I believe healing and care involves having perspective on the timeline of life whether through a simple phrase like “that was then, this is now”, on an ancestral timeline, or geologic time. This positions us as inhabiting this particular moment but connects us to many other moments recorded in verbal, somatic, ancestral, and geologic time memory.

Sometimes, I like to imagine that echoes reverberate in us until we actually hear the message, until we have the mindfulness skills to greet an echo when it comes back to us as both a friend and a stranger. To be able to say I’ve heard the sound before, but have I heard this sound? Familiar and new. Janina Fisher says we heal the past in the present. I add that each echo is an opportunity for a small amount more welcome.

The shift from why to what is profound here and I am asking new questions of echoes. What are you hear to show me? What do you need to feel heard? What am I feeling? Or what in this is for me? What choices do I have? How is this moment different from before? What do I know now that I did not know then? Where did this echo begin?

I have been imagining a world that is oriented towards being “echo-informed”. With a warning like “We are prepared for content in this presentation to echo your past. We invite you to care for yourself if, for a moment, the past and present blend”. If we weren’t trying to stop those reactions from happening, what could we learn about them? About our own beautiful vulnerabilities?

I believe that we are missing out on transformation when we separate ourselves from the natural pathways our brains travel around familiarity. Because when an echo happens, as it has for me this week, I can notice the distance between then and now. I can feel sadness and longing in the comparison. I can feel liberation in the change. I would not know how far I have come if the past did not echo through me sometimes.

Alternatively, I can imagine myself as the mountain. The natural form, made from pressure, strong and present. Being vulnerable to the elements is part of a mountain’s beauty. And a shout from the past can reverberate on, through, and around me. A mountain does not resist an echo. It is strong enough to maintain its form no matter what wind, sleet, and fire tear around it. We are natural beings and we’re going to hurt sometimes.

In a session this week, someone and I broke grief down into two categories. Missing something one had and lost, and longing for something one has never had. In our simplistic system, we brainstormed that gratitude can be the measure of sadness for a person, identity, or time that someone lost. And then we named hopefulness as a quality we can mobilize in a promise to the present that the future can be different.

I wonder if gratitude and hopefulness share an emotional root. And in that way, can we apply them as antidotes of shame, sadness, loneliness, guilt, grief, and the other emotions that echos bring? This week, I imagined gratitude and hope in each of my hands and asked myself which one is easier to access. Even if both feel far away, I think we can reach for them as an anchor to find something possible, something beautiful, something worthy of our attention. From there, I hope we can begin the process of finding ourselves in time again, hearing sounds and feeling sensations for the first time.