In this mini-series, I’m using personal examples to demystify somatics and translate the power of somatic practice into everyday life.
For those of us LGBTQI2+ folks lucky enough to have supportive moms, the mums proud to have a queerdo for a kid, or the mommies who willingly parent our chosen family because their own biological family isn’t so welcoming, we get to count our blessings.
And being blessed with a supportive family isn’t the same as having a family without conflict, trauma, heartbreak, or struggle; it just means we (hopefully) have a more solid foundation to navigate the tough stuff.
Even if you aren’t queer, many folks struggle with holding the realities of our parents as full, complicated, and complex human beings. Few of us make it to adulthood without wounds or patterns in our relationships with our parents that could use an upgrade, and my relationship with my mom is no different.
Whether it's offering food, gifts, or advice, care is more than a casual practice for my mom. Her sense of belonging and safety comes from acts of service. Caregiving, being useful, and proactively solving others’ problems are the ways she feels valued. She’s spent her life feeling safe by appeasing others, and boundaries are something she struggles to set and receive.
In contrast, I’ve spent my life with others not offering me the opportunity to authentically consent, so boundaries, choice, and autonomy are how I feel safe in the world. I experience safety, dignity, and belonging through my autonomy – it’s important for me to have options, not feel pressured to make decisions or feel boxed in by someone else’s urgency.
You might be catching on to the issue at hand: My mom is a giver who feels destabilized by a decline in her offers of care and generosity, and I feel destabilized when I feel pressured to accept care, even when it’s offered with love and generosity, especially if I feel I don’t have an authentic choice to decline.
For years, we’ve been in a pattern of disconnection that goes something like this:
She offers to buy me a gadget she believes will help me solve [insert symptom of anxiety, depression, ADHD, and chronic pain here].
I say no.
She asks again.
I say no again.
She checks to make sure I don’t want the gadget, while offering a hefty dose of “evidence” about why it will help me.
I ignore her for a few days or weeks to avoid the topic.
She pleads with me to try it out, convinced it’s the solution.
I say no one more time.
And then she buys it for me anyway.
To say this pattern is annoying is an understatement – it’s infuriating in part because it’s happening all the time in big and small ways, from unsolicited advice to surprise supplements I receive in the mail; it’s rarely welcomed, and navigating her hurt and disappointment when I get upset that she’s steamrolled my decline frequently uses up all my empathy spoons.
After a big blow-up about me not using the Seasonal Affective Disorder light I said I didn’t want, but that she bought me anyway, I knew something desperately needed to change.
Unfortunately, I knew it had to be me. I paused, took a beat, and asked myself: What am I actually longing for in my relationship with my mom?
I wanted to stay connected to her even when I was angry and annoyed. I wanted to have compassion for my mom while maintaining my autonomy and agency. I also wanted to talk about the impact of this pattern on our relationship without shame or blame, or trying to avoid my own piece of the accountability puzzle. Finally, I wanted to be less responsible for caretaking her hurt and frustration when I don’t react and receive the way she wants me to.
So I committed to repetitions of a somatic practice called the grab practice.
In a grab practice, one person is the person being “grabbed,” and the other person, a coach or practice partner, uses consensual movement and words, or energetic pressure, to simulate a “grab.”
A “grab” can be anything from an inciting moment or trigger, a word or phrase a partner, parent, or friend uses that sets us on edge, or any action we want to take that feels high stakes for us, to name a few.
In other words, a “grab” can be internal, like a story of self-belief that gets in the way of our desires; an external request or circumstance that feels high-pressure and high-stakes; or a move we need to make for the sake of our dignity, commitments, purpose, or longing.
The purpose of this practice is to build somatic awareness so that over time, we come to understand and befriend our default responses – the habituated strategies we’ve learned to use to keep ourselves safe (or as safe as possible) in stressful situations.
As we build somatic awareness alongside somatic practice, we begin to develop the capacity for more purposeful, choiceful responses – we build capacity to turn and face the “grab” with our dignity and the dignity of others – intact.
In my case, I’ve learned that when my mom overrides my no, my body tightens, my breath gets shallow, and I begin to clench my jaw. A low-level panic in my belly grows, and that panic is fear that has nothing to do with the current moment and everything to do with past experiences in which I was powerless to keep myself safe.
Getting clear about my default responses meant I could make space for new ones.
Through many reps of grab practice, I’ve learned how to (re)center after a grab (for more on the centering practice, see my previous post in this series) so that, more often than not, when I’m “grabbed” by my mom, I’m able to access my inherent safety, dignity, and sense of belonging, and to reconnect with what matters to me. Ultimately, that’s having a loving, joyful, mutually beneficial, and boundary-respecting relationship with my mom. I’m also able to see and feel her dignity, and dignify her actions as her own ways of feeling safe.
When I first started recentering after every override of my no, my tolerance was incredibly low. I might get through two overrides before I was back in my default pattern. So, I kept practicing recentering after a grab.
Eventually, after recentering, I could use humor rather than frustration, experiment with requests, or simply look at her and say, “I am so grateful that you care so much about me and I do not want [insert gadget or unsolicited solution]. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t love or appreciate your care of me.”
I was also able to practice an intentional and purposeful grab back – having a hard conversation about why this pattern needs to shift for me in order for us to have the relationship we want together.
Today, we have a lot of repetitions together!
We use a lot of verbal cues. For example, I might say to her, “Hey, Mama, I've said no twice already.” This helps her “wake up” to the beginning of the pattern.
Instead of interrupting me with her urgency to let me know what she’s thinking of buying me, she’ll ask, “Is now a good time?” or “Can we talk about [insert topic] when you get a chance,” which I receive as an authentic opportunity to consent or not.
When I can be fully present with her request, offer, or idea, I can access my empathy and feel for her fierce love and good intentions. This calms her nervous system, decreases her urgency, and allows her to be seen, heard, and witnessed in her acts of service.
And now that we’re practicing together, she can also better communicate the impact of my default response on her – how my anger, or cutting her off mid-sentence, feels in her body – which is my reciprocal cue to slow down, breathe, recenter, and feel for my own needs in that moment.
The grab practice has made conflict with my mom generative – it’s brought us closer together, deepened our relationship, and made it possible for us to see each other’s humanity and dignity. Neither of us practices perfectly, and that’s not the point of somatic practice or somatic transformation – the purpose is to build more choice while building connection to ourselves and what we care about.
P.S. My mom approves this message.
