Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Surviving Saturday, a podcast about holding on to hope in the midst of life's difficulties, disappointments, and dark seasons. Times like that remind us of the agony and despair the followers of Jesus felt on the Saturday of Easter weekend, in between the Friday on which he was crucified and the Sunday on which he rose from the dead.
Speaker: That someday forever changed the way that humans can relate to God. But what does it look like to be honest about the very real pain we experience in the in -between? To fervently cling to hope in the God who promised us his peace and his presence at times when he feels distant or even cruel. I'm Wendy Osborne, a licensed counselor in Charlotte, North Carolina. And I'm her husband, Chris, a marriage mediator, conflict resolution coach, and trauma -informed story work coach.
Speaker: Join us each episode for authentic conversations about how life not turning out as we'd expected has created the contextual soil for the growth of a tenacious hope in the resurrection and in a God who is still making all things new.
Speaker: Hey there folks, welcome to another episode of the Surviving Saturday podcast. I'm Chris Osborne, one of your hosts. So Wendy, for this week's episode, kind of jump in. How you doing? What's going on? What's on your mind? Well, today I am 53 and a half. Oh my gosh. I didn't think about that. It was 53 and a half. My half birthday. You calculated that. And I am tired and I am learning to listen to my body.
Speaker: And what does your body tell you when you listen? Well right now it's telling me that I am tired. And it is telling me that I am in this interminable, undefinable season of life called perimenopause. Oh dear.
Speaker: And it is telling me that although I enjoy wine, just in the last five years, as a way to relax at the end of the day, the same wine that makes me feel calm and able to enter into the evening from the work day becomes a stimulant in the middle of the night, according to my nutritionist, which makes me wake up
Speaker: in the middle of a hot flash with soaking wet pajamas. That feels almost cruel. It does. It's like the invitation of here's calm and rest and peace and then psych. Yeah. So I'm having to listen to my body. Tell me, I liked the wine in the evening, but I don't like it four or five hours later at 2 AM when you're in wet pajamas. That's understandable. Just as a quick plug real quick, we're not going to play it here, but
Speaker: One of my personal favorites, not as much Wendy's, but the Holderness family, uh, do very funny videos. They mainly do kind of silly videos, but they occasionally will get serious. And she's actually got a very funny one about Perimeter Paws. Okay. You go check it out if you have any interest in that, but you don't have to. So my nutritionist has told me that it is better.
Speaker: that I take a capsule of black cohosh with a glass of pomegranate juice at night instead of drinking wine. I actually really like the pomegranate juice. I have some right here beside me. I'm laughing and our kids and I were laughing about this. I forget how it came up when we talked on my birthday.
Speaker: then the word pomegranate had come up and that was always what if we needed a secret code word or a safe word or something like hey if somebody needs to pick you up from school and it's not the usual person they'll have the code word and it was it would usually be like pomegranate I forgot that like picking up from IMCA camps you have to do the code word yes pomegranate is back so yes it is back
Speaker: Um, so I have come to Seattle in my tiredness for about 10 days to rest to receive some good care from some of my favorite women.
Speaker: You came along with me for the first few days and step one was while you were doing a little work the morning after we got here, I decided to go down to the spa in our inn and have my first ever hot stone massage. Like literal hot stones are a part of this.
Speaker: It was lovely. I'm pretty sure that the angels heat up the stones and Joanna who did my massage was so lovely and I didn't realize it, but they actually heat the rocks and then they do the massage with the rocks. I thought they would lay the rocks on my back.
Speaker: and then maybe come in massage. But she actually did the massage, rubbing one rock at a time. So this puts a whole new meaning on the phrase, getting stoned, I guess. Yeah, it's probably a better way to do it. Probably a better way to do it. A better way to get stoned. So I didn't want it to end. Joanna was so kind and so good. And so thankfully I had booked a 90 minute massage. Nice.
Speaker: And then I had booked this add -on of a foot scrub, which they called a ritual. And that was very smart marketing, because as soon as they said that word, I was like, sign me up, here's $35.
Speaker: And so that was the ending and I felt super calm and relaxed and my feet felt so smooth. And then on the way out, they have all their cosmetics right by where you pay. And I saw that there was this eye cream that was going to make my eyes look brighter. Oh, okay.
Speaker: And so I figured while I'm so relaxed, I should look younger. So she assured me, the checkout lady did, that it was great for sensitive skin.
Speaker: So I bought it and I was pretty happy. So the first few applications, and they had even said, oh, the owner of the spa put it on under one eye and not on the other. And then she could tell the difference. One eye actually looked brighter. They pulled that trick. Yeah. And so I can already tell the difference. Oh my God. So I was like, okay. So the first few applications of this stuff,
Speaker: seem to deliver. And then last night or the night before, I was like, well, I'm going to do the eye trick. I'm going to do the one eye. So I put it under my left eye and I'm like, I bet I'm going to wake up in the morning and my left eye is going to look like 35 and my right eye is going to look like 53 and a half. So instead I woke up with these little red dots under my left eye.
Speaker: And then they began to spread to my right eye, especially after I had a bit of an emotional meltdown and there were tears mixed in. Yes. Before we go there, and I want to hear more about those tears, but talk about like you speak as someone who is well versed in spa and self care and things like that. But how, how new is that for you? And what's that like to,
Speaker: What's that been like to even embrace the idea of caring for your body in this way? Because this is not like how you've always rolled. Oh, no. No, no, no. By any stretch. I had my first massage one year ago. I'd never had a massage. Yeah. So 52 and a half years before I had a massage.
Speaker: But I started having facials maybe two years ago because a friend of mine who's actually an Asian American man, he's a counselor in Texas, and he was saying his face
Speaker: knows so much harm from people who experience him as not having the expected American male strength. And he had learned that with all the pain that his face carried,
Speaker: he needed to find a way to be kind to it. And so it was taking his daughter to the dermatologist to have some hormonal teenage acne treated. And the lady said, would you be willing to him, would you be willing to come and just experience a facial? And so he described what it was like to have someone very gently and tenderly touch his face. Like,
Speaker: as if his face were good and not as if his face were not meeting the standard for American masculinity, but as goodness. And so when he told me that I was like, gosh, my face has experienced a lot of pain and there are
Speaker: Places in life where I have been very unkind to my face out of some painful experiences And so I started going and you know, they can get very expensive So I don't know that was always your favorite thing for me to do but you know But I really appreciate I had forgotten that that was the roots of it that was what that that guy who I've heard speak as well. Yeah, it was not about trying to take years off my face, although I
Speaker: Again, when you go to pay and they want to tell you all the things they just put on your face. You're like, yes We can subtract from your life. Yes to me and thousands from your bank account and so It's really more about the tenderness of someone touching my face. That's what I was hearing is this is a
Speaker: this is a precious thing for you to and given the work that you do counseling um and the hard stories that you sit with the people that you you part of your job is to be with them in their pain yes and so you you in the day caring in some sense and it's work that you love to do and are glad to do but you carry sort of the weight
Speaker: Um, and, and that is a physical toll, not just an emotional one. So, um, it's, it's been a great thing to see you embrace self -care and embrace I've got to recharge. I've got to end to tend to this good body and to see your body is good enough to be worth tending to. That feels like a very hard fought battle. Yes. Yes. Yes. It's been decades of fighting.
Speaker: So you alluded to an emotional sort of breakdown though, that contributed here to the mix. What do you want to tell folks about kind of where that came from or what was that about? Yeah. So, um, first let me just say that I did notice this irash
Speaker: Um, was not in my eyes, under my eyes, but this rash being associated with tears probably about seven years ago. And took me a while to catch the pattern, but I realized it's really connected to grief for me and
Speaker: To me, it's as if my body is still afraid of my own tears. And so it responds to them on that sensitive part of my skin as if they're a sort of threat.
Speaker: So the truth is that I stopped crying when I was pretty young, I was probably five or six, and those tears stayed away for decades. That was because the emotion of sorrow was overwhelming to the adults in my life when I was little.
Speaker: And no one knew what to do with my sorrow or my tears, except insist that I stop demonstrating sadness. Well, there even was, you know, to name who, but there was a family member who kind of mocked your tears. Yeah. Yeah. I think people didn't know what to do with the sorrow because I think they didn't know what to do with theirs. And so the best thing to do with mine was to make it go away. Yeah. So I learned to comfort myself
Speaker: by not needing much of anything from anybody. And I became really self -reliant. Yeah. So one story that comes to mind that I think is formative in all of this and how the day unfolded is an experience I had when I was 11. I had really, really, really wanted a 10 speed bike. I wanted to graduate from my little kid bike.
Speaker: We had moved into a house in neighborhood from living in the country and then living in the city where I didn't have as much ability to ride safely. And so I wanted to be able to get out and connect with friends. There were a lot of kids in my neighborhood.
Speaker: And so I've been asking and asking and asking and I came home from school one day and my dad called out from the kitchen. Hey, there's a surprise waiting for you in the playroom. I was a little startled and he said, um, your bike came. And so my heart leapt.
Speaker: And I started running up the stairs, which would take me right past my bedroom into the play frame where he said that the bike was. And so I opened the door and I saw two 10 speed bikes. There was one that would be for my older brother who was four years older. So he would have been around 15 and one for me. And the second half of my dad's sentence,
Speaker: after he said, your bike came was, but it's too big and you're not gonna be able to ride it. So then my heart just sunk. So I had this quick, oh my gosh, the bike, he actually got me one to, oh, he got one that's too big. So about this time, I'm opening the door to the playroom and sure enough, the bike is way too big for my little frame.
Speaker: And so I'm caught in that moment of how to proceed. I can go with hope and the tenacity that God planted in me from birth. Yeah. And I can try to master this thing even though it's too big. Or I can give in to the heartbreak and the cynicism and decide why bother. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah. Were you about to say something? No, no, no. I'm just, I'm just feeling the, the dilemma of that and remembering you're 11 and you're not like, you know, mature and ready to, to, you know, we're not supposed to have to navigate like complexity like that. You know, it feels kind of cruel. Yeah. Yeah. And we do, and we have to. And so, um, in that moment, I was kind of frozen.
Speaker: And he went on to say, there's probably no use to try. And I think that is what lit the fire. And so I had become, like I said, very independent. I wasn't gonna need anything from anybody, not much. I mean, I needed food and I needed housing, I needed transportation. But I was like, my little body had decided
Speaker: It was better and safer to just depend on me. Well, it's like an extension of the decision you mentioned a minute ago about, I'm not going to cry. I'm not going to give any sign of vulnerability or weakness to anybody. It's sort of, it's that same theme. Yes, exactly. So I got on the bike and you've been in that playroom many times. There's a ping pong table in the middle of it.
Speaker: And I began to take the bike and laps around the ping pong table. So kind of in an oval and it's hard to ride a bike in an oval. I will say that. On carpet also. On carpet. It was a challenging situation. So I would pedal, you know, a few circles and then, you know, fall over and then I'd try again. And I would hear my dad say to my mom,
Speaker: I don't know why she's bothering. She's never going to be able to do it. Oh, come on. And so I was caught again whenever I'd hear the commentary of, do I give up? Am I foolish to hope that this bite can actually work for me? Do I want to just give in to despair and to sentences? Or do I want to keep going? And so the ovals, the circles,
Speaker: I just kept doing and kept doing bit by bit by bit. And eventually I could ride around the ping pong table multiple times. And then I took the bike to the driveway, which is another challenge because now if I fall, I'm on asphalt. Yeah. And then I took it to the street and right outside my driveway was a hill going down. So I immediately had to deal with speed.
Speaker: But I kept going and I was really in my soul fighting the foolishness of hope. Um, and so I was moving toward something that would give me life and freedom.
Speaker: but at the cost of potentially not being able to succeed and maybe having to go to my dad and say about the bike, I can't do it. Which doesn't sound like something that would be very fun, like admitting defeat. Yeah, admitting defeat and depending on someone else to then
Speaker: see my plight and care and go and spend money on a new bike. Well, yeah, because what were the chances that your dad would comfort you and be supportive?
Speaker: Yeah, that was, um, that, that was not the way that our relationship functioned and I knew that. Yeah. And so, um, I made the decision to move forward with hope in the face of potentially being found to be a fool. Well, and it's hope and it's also, it sounds like a mix of, there's a defiance sort of aspect of it too.
Speaker: Yeah. And I think that part of the defiance felt holy. Yeah. Yeah. Like I'm going anyway. Yes. Yes. Um, so I want to shelve that story for a minute and come back to the, um, day after this.
Speaker: Fab or the moments after this fabulous massage. Okay. Yes. Um, and I came in with a hope and an excitement to connect with you. So it's a little bit like, you know, anticipating walking in the front door and there being this glorious surprise of something I'd wanted because I had been lying on the massage table and thinking, Oh my gosh, what a great day. What a great beginning to my self care retreat.
Speaker: I'm being so tended to, and then I'm going to go have this wonderful afternoon in a gorgeous place with my husband. So as I walked in the front door, the proverbial front door, which was the door to our room, our tiny little room, our tiny little room, it was not expansive. It was pretty, but it was tiny. Um, and I've taken over sort of with my work stuff and kind of the desk is sort of, yeah,
Speaker: my chaos is sort of starting to unfold there. Yeah. And I had stuffed a lot of stuff for 10 days in a suitcase and it was exploding too. Um, so my intuitions picked up almost immediately. Um, when I entered the room that maybe the next period of time was not going to go as I hoped. What kind of, where'd you get that impression? Well, I noticed on your face,
Speaker: And I heard in your voice that your time had not gone as you planned and that you were feeling futile. Um, you were feeling discouraged. You were not in the
Speaker: um, solid and ready to go have fun place that I had expected. Now I have to say my intuitions come on fast. They're not always, they generally are passing. When you say, wait, uh,
Speaker: You're not grading the speed, because the speed is not questionable at all. It's the, are they right? Are they accurate? Yes. They're not always A plus accurate, but they happen fast, and they're always, I would say I get a C plus two, a B minus. Right, you have a good radar, something's amiss, something is wrong, but how you interpret it, or what it is,
Speaker: Does that match up with what I'm experiencing, what the other person is experiencing? Yes. Yes. I think that's a fair way to put it. Yes. So I walk in, my eyes and ears notice this data. My nervous system goes back to times where I had wanted something
Speaker: And then it was probably not going to happen. Back to that war with hope again. Do I hope in something going how I want it to? Yes. And so in the twinkling of an eye, my body felt tense that it just felt so relaxed. My face felt older, um, inspired this lovely eye cream. Um, and I felt less desirable than I had just
Speaker: minutes before. And I heard this accusation in my head was almost audible saying you were so foolish to again be open to hope. Why do you keep letting yourself be vulnerable, believing that someone will care for you in a meeting? Oh gosh. And so there's just this war that plays out in me often. I want to move toward hope.
Speaker: And then something happens that reminds me we live in a really broken down world. And I feel foolish for thinking that something would be better. Yeah. So I turned on myself, um, especially on my body and most specifically on my face. And that's very familiar. That's very familiar ground.
Speaker: And the truth is that Self contempt has served to protect me often from wanting too much. Okay say more about that It's a safer posture for me for a couple of reasons one is
Speaker: because self -contempt used to serve as motivation for me to be better, do more, become something else that others might want. Okay. Be smarter, be more interesting, be thinner, be kinder, be prettier, be more well -dressed, be more educated, whatever it might be. And then the second reason is because vulnerability
Speaker: leaves me undefended. Yeah. So when I'm on vacation with my husband and the odds are great that we can be available for each other. And then I get surprised by being let down. Um, I don't have defenses ready to like protect me. Okay. Okay. So I'm open to hurt. I'm open to the devastation of hope unfulfilled.
Speaker: I'm left with a heart that named what it wanted and didn't get it. And that pain is so scary that I'd rather be defended against feeling it, which means I would turn off the possibility that I might receive it.
Speaker: Right. So that's sort of where you want to put up a wall or push away. And what you're describing, you're now sort of able to break it down and see it happening. But what you're describing happens almost instantaneously. It's like that's part of the battle is to even recognize because I have similar ways that I'm off on a loop or off on a way of reacting to something. And it's
Speaker: if I don't somehow pause it or stop, it's gone. It's off to the races. These thoughts are all just sort of flooding it at once. And if I had stopped long enough to let my left brain and my wisdom come back online, I would have realized your intention was not to let me down. And that maybe you weren't actually going to
Speaker: be preoccupied with what had happened that morning. But that I could trust that you were fighting your own battle and you would continue to and because you're a good man you would do your own work and you would come back to a place of connection with me because you really wanted to.
Speaker: Um, but it's really important to mention here that our emotional brain, um, the right brain that takes over and hijacks everything when there's stress or a trigger. Um, and the specific part of talking about is our amygdala. Yeah. The limbic system. Yeah. Even it's not necessarily it's right left, but it's, it's like the primitive part. Yeah. It's a doer. The amygdala is and not a thinker. Yeah.
Speaker: So it just reacts to stimuli in the present that seem to match the data of past times. In my case, past times that I've been let down, left, abandoned, not chosen, not wanted. I mean, the list gets really long.
Speaker: And the amygdala, if I understand right too, I'm learning about this, but it has no sense of time. That's part of the problem. Everything is immediate for it. It's like threat now. And it almost can shut off the access to the prefrontal lobe, the prefrontal cortex that is, hey, let's assess this.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, it's like the smoke alarm in your house. It doesn't know if there's smoke because you burned the toast or there's smoke because the chair and the den is on fire. Yes. Okay, it's then an alarm.
Speaker: That's a great way of putting it. Another way I heard it put, um, I remember somebody sharing with me one time was, you know, if you're driving down the road and a deer comes bounding out in front of your car, you want your system to respond instantaneously, slam on brakes, swerve. That is super helpful. It's your, it's your brain doing the right job. The question is, do you want to drive around like that all day?
Speaker: Like that, that's not the mode you want to stay in. Immediate response, that must be a threat. Here I go. That's what we have to be on the alert for. It's doing the right thing. It's not aberrant or dysfunctional. It's doing the right thing. It's just, it doesn't always know am I needed to this degree that it wants to come into play. Right. And so the body holds all these experiences
Speaker: And they are held as implicit memories, which we're not always explicitly aware of. Right.
Speaker: While I had not invited my left brain to pull up times that you've actually let me down in the past, my body has all of that information like on speed diet. Right. And in the twinkling of an eye, again, I react accordingly. So in this case, my annoyance came on clearly and it came on strong because I was so disappointed. Yeah. And I protected myself with being annoyed.
Speaker: Now relationships we both know are dynamic and they effectuate a set of like dance steps that often become familiar and we do the same ones over and over again. So I want to pause here and ask you what was going on in you when I walked in the room.
Speaker: So when you walked in the room, yeah, I was still kind of in work mode. And I knew it was about to be time for us to get back together and to have kind of our, you know, the relaxing part. The way we had set this up, I had work to do during the week between school, graduate school, but also trying to get some productive work done for my law firm. And we had talked about this and you were cool with that.
Speaker: It happened that what I was working on that morning was kind of a cluster difficult situation. It was not an easily, let me just knock two things off my list. It was re -engaging with a client who was starting to kind of go into a spin cycle. And it was feeling frustrated for me. I was feeling frustrated having dealt with that client.
Speaker: and seeing, oh man, this is going to be way more complicated than I thought it was. This case that looks sort of like a godsend and this is going to be a nice kind of quick win for me started not feeling like that. So I'm feeling that frustration and futility. And then at the same time, and I think this probably is something that was probably hard for you as well, but I was also
Speaker: Engaged in a separate dialogue with a buddy of mine who I had been reaching out to and trying to get together with for a while and we had just landed on the fact that we might be able to go see you two together in concert at the sphere in Las Vegas and he and I had started a text thread communication where we were actually communicating about that and
Speaker: And I also had something I was kind of excited about and looking forward to, but we were starting to make decisions about the logistics of that. And part of the challenge with that, and we'll come back to this next time because we want to pause this episode here. We'll go more into sort of my internal dynamic and what started getting stirred up between us, because I think your metaphor of the dance was really, is really something I think it's good to spend some time with. But part of what's happening for me is I did have some engagement
Speaker: um, about this exciting opportunity as well. Both of those were sort of going on in me. And yet I started thinking about the logistics of the decision -making with him. And I think he operates kind of like me as well. We were, we were like, well, where should we sit and what day is best and all this. And so I started kind of looking at the, all the aspects of that. But what you could tell, I'm sure when you came in is my heart and mind were engaged elsewhere. And I think that's what felt like a letdown.
Speaker: Um, and, and, and as we'll see in the next episode, it's my expectation, not because I don't think your mind should ever be. That's right. Absolutely. Absolutely. We'll pick it up with you next time. Cause there's always two stories going on. Absolutely. And we'll unpack kind of cause the conflict sort of debilitated from there. I wish we could say we caught this one as it was happening. We didn't. Um, and it took us some hard places and we hope it'll be helpful for, you know, folks who are listening to, to hear about that.
Speaker: and to hear about what it's like to unpack it in light of our stories afterwards.
Speaker: The Surviving Saturday podcast is brought to you by Nurture Counseling PLLC, a counseling teaching and training center based out of Charlotte, North Carolina. We help families flourish one story at a time. Nurture Counseling provides counseling, counseling intensive for couples, conflict resolution coaching, story work groups, seminars, workshops, and retreats to provide a safe and welcoming context for exploring the agonizing experiences of pain, brokenness, and evil that disrupt our lives.
Speaker: and that God often uses to nurture deeper trust and intimacy with Him and with each other. You can find us online at www .nurturecounseling .net
