Overcoming Powerlessness: Finding Strength in Adversity

Coping with Powerlessness: A Personal Account

At 5am on January 16th, while I was asleep, my home was invaded, my car and identity (my purse) were stolen, and a few days later, all additions to my website over the past two years vanished. I was given a clean slate.

The Rise of Desperation and Crime in Oakland

The increase in collective desperation and escalation of crime in Oakland are very real. A neighbor asked if I had any idea why I was targeted. Maybe they were watching me as a single woman come and go? That is logical, but I have an additional mystical take on things.

Confronting Ancestral Fears

At the beginning of January, I excitedly dove back into preparing to market and launch my online course. This meant I’d need to also prepare to be more visible in the world, beyond my weekly clients and international podcast listeners. While I’d recently had a surge of a thousand new followers in a few days’ time on Instagram, historically, I’ve had mixed feelings about visibility.

Unearthing Subconscious Fears

Everything that occurred this past month stimulated a deep cleansing and excavation of subconscious fears that relate to being seen. These fears, such as the belief I will be taken advantage of, and people will want more from me than I want to give, originate from a legacy of child sexual abuse that goes back through three generations of women on my mother’s side.

Tracing the Roots of Belief Systems

It’s useful to ask yourself if the beliefs you hold, which run your thoughts and behaviors, were inherited from someone? Where did you learn this? They often come from multiple directions, personal experience, ancestral trauma (family members’ experiences), cultural trauma, and social trauma (being a woman or any oppressed group in the world).

Gratitude Amid Loss

I am truly grateful this loss was in the form of money, time (inconvenient tasks such as canceling credit cards, getting a new driver’s license, and replacing all my locks), and stuff (replacing all my locks, buying a new car and alarm system), and not the loss of my dog, Toshi, or my own life.

Finding Meaning in Adversity

My home being broken into is familiar. When I was a kid, our house in Venice, CA, was a regular target for thieves. Having this experience of a home invasion as an adult, I can ask the question, “Why is this happening for me vs. happening to me?” 

While it was terrifying, from a spiritual vantage point, I can zoom out, get curious about the bigger picture and hold the value of this experience: it lit a fire under me to add additional locks, reinforce a door, set up brighter floodlights, alarms, and cameras, and forced me to get a new car that can hold an additional guard dog (one that alert barks, unlike my cuddle bug Tosh).

Embracing Emotional Turbulence

Each day I attempt to recreate safety, I do it to break a family legacy as much as I do it for myself. If I imagine I am my ancestors’ personal assistant, managing three generations worth of stockpiled home safety errands it’s really not that many tasks. Of course, this reframe is flippant, and simply speaking about the details of the invasion, or feeling taken advantage of at the car dealership brings up heightened anxiety and rage.

 Each day asks me to ride waves of emotions, sometimes treading water, other times reaching shore. But even this amplified dysregulation is useful because moving in and out of these states gives me practice repeatedly finding my way back to center.

Nurturing Stability Amid Chaos

The 6-month-old, reactive, rescue pitbull I adopted needs intensive training, which is grounded, alpha presence bootcamp for me. And as intense as this puppy training has been, it’s also a mindfulness practice, because there is only room in my mind to track her. Even including Toshi or another human on our walks shifts her level of agitation and focus, which gives me immediate feedback about where my attention is… on them, not wholly on her. I am slowly introducing more triggers and variables to our walks, but establishing her safety with me is what I want to do first.

Self-Regulation Amidst Chaos

I need to be calm to help regulate this traumatized animal. And guess what my course is about? You guessed it: self-regulation and stepping outside of habits that cause you to sabotage yourself rather than live a passion-filled life. So this whole experience could potentially be designed to reinforce the embodied leadership training I have. 

It’s motivating me to actively cultivate a presence that can lead from a grounded and heart-centered place because no matter how big a challenge this new pup is, I am also falling in love with her. And how can I elicit trust from her and create the safety that allows her to refrain from vigilant attack and defend mode? This is what I have helped humans unwind over the past twenty years.

Asserting Self-Worth Amidst Adversity

I received the universe’s message that I am worth protecting. I get to assert that I value myself enough to do that. And every time I get stressed about the unexpected financial expenditure, I try to reframe my thoughts with this reminder. I get to invest this money in my protection because I value my safety in a way that I did not feel valued as a kiddo. 

I get to change the story for those who came before me: my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. We are all worth protecting. There are moments I can say this and feel more at ease. Through these actions, I am rewiring my nervous system, overriding old trauma neural pathways as well as rewriting inherited familial beliefs.

Confronting Past Traumas

In other moments, I drop into my physical body and feel anxiety and rage, mostly at the police officer’s complacency and lack of willingness to take action even when given information (video footage and an address from a tracking device) to follow up with. It triggers the childhood fury I felt towards my mom for choosing to keep our abuser in our home and stay in a relationship with him. Or stand by watching abuse happen.

Finding Growth Amidst Adversity

These thieves are what I call Asshole Angels. Asshole Angels often show up to teach us where we still need to evolve and develop self-respect, self-care, boundaries, and strength. They offer us opportunities to expand so we can heal at a core level. Remember, healing happens in a spiral and with each turn around, we go a layer deeper. We have additional tools to address the roots of the same old material and hopefully, dig them up fully this time.

Healing Amidst Trauma

It wasn’t the home invasion alone that brought on PTSD symptoms, such as not sleeping, nightmares, inability to think clearly, increased anxiety, weepiness, agitation, and anger. The home invasion brought up prior experiences of powerlessness and assault from childhood, while home and asleep. Life is a series of situations that get us to

readdress past traumas in new ways, to depersonalize them and understand it was never about our lack of value or goodness. We were always worth caring for. Life can also be a series of opportunities to reoccupy our bodies and claim them as sources of pleasure, strength, and joy.

Overcoming Repetition Compulsion

Freud’s theory of repetition compulsion is that we will unconsciously play out traumatic scenarios to resolve them in new ways. This is also known as the reenactment of past trauma. This traumatic event presented a new opportunity to receive support from my community in a way that home invasions and violations that happened when I was asleep as a kid could not be spoken about or addressed. 

So even inside the terror of a stranger breaking into my home when I am unconscious, there is healing in the aftermath in a way that I did not get previously.