This morning I opened a book of poetry.

Lucille Clifton. The Book of Light. A poem called june 20th — her vision of the day she was born, written from before her own arrival.

She sees her mother. She sees her father — a man whose fingers will itch to enter me. She sees what is already in motion before she takes her first breath.

And she writes: none of us know that we will not smile again for years.

I sat with that for a long time.

Because what Clifton is doing in that poem is something the wellness industry, the healing industry, the therapy industry almost never does.

She goes back before the beginning.

She says: this story did not start with me.

The Problem With Personal Pathology

Most approaches to healing — even the most compassionate ones — begin with the individual.

You are struggling. Let’s find out why. Let’s heal what’s wounded in you. Let’s help you become stronger, more regulated, more whole.

There is real love in that. I mean that. I have spent forty years sitting with people and I know the genuine care that lives in that approach.

And — something is missing from it.

It’s this: the story didn’t start with you.

The anxiety that visits you in the night. The difficulty speaking up in rooms where you feel you don’t belong. The way your body holds itself smaller than it might. The hunger that you’ve been told is too much, the anger you’ve been told is inappropriate, the need for rest that you’ve been told is laziness.

These are not personal failures. They are not signs that you haven’t worked hard enough on yourself. They are not even, in many cases, primarily about you.

They are inherited. They moved through your family line the way water moves through rock — slowly, invisibly, shaping everything it touches. They were formed by forces much larger than any one family: by gender, by race, by class, by the history of what was done to the people who came before you and what they had to do to survive it. Even the history of what they did to others, to injure, harm, murder.

When the wellness industry tells you that your health is your responsibility, it is not entirely wrong. You have agency. Your choices matter. Your work on yourself matters.

But it is telling you an incomplete story. And the incompleteness is harmful.

It’s SHAMING.

The Woman Who Wouldn’t Ask to Use the Bathroom

A woman came to see me for years. She drove quite a distance to get there. The sessions were long.

One day I asked her: do you ever need to use the bathroom during our time together?

She said — and I could hear the hesitation in it — no, not really.

Which meant yes.

I asked her: what would it take to say — just stop, give me a moment, I need to use the bathroom?

We talked about it for a while. And what emerged was not a small thing. It was a whole story. A story about not wanting to interrupt. Not wanting to miss time she’d been given. Not wanting to inconvenience a man. Not wanting to risk that I would be irritated, or withdraw something, or think less of her for having a body with needs.

Someone might say: that’s a small thing. Just encourage her to speak up. Maybe she needs a little more confidence.

But that misses the weight of it.

What she was carrying in that moment — the difficulty of saying I need a minute to use the bathroom in a safe room with a therapist who would never punish her for it — that difficulty did not originate with her. It goes back at least to her grandmother. It goes back through generations of women who learned, very practically, that having needs created danger. That speaking up cost something. That the body’s requirements were best kept quiet, managed privately, never allowed to inconvenience the people whose good will you depended on.

She wasn’t weak. She was carrying something old and heavy that had been handed to her without her consent.

And when she finally stood up and walked to the bathroom — that was not a small healing. That was a woman taking one step in a story that her granddaughter might finish. A revolution.

What the Transgenerational View Does

When I work with someone and I ask — for how many generations do you think this story has been going on? — something shifts in the room.

The shame grip loosens.

Because shame requires the story to be personal. Shame says: this is yours. This is your failure. This is your pathology. Fix yourself or suffer the consequences.

But when you go back a generation — when you say I wonder if your mother carried something like this, and her mother before her — suddenly the person is not alone with it anymore. Suddenly they are part of something. A member of a long line of people doing what they could with what they were given.

That is not an excuse. It is not a reason to stop working. It is a context that makes the working make sense.

Of course this is hard. Look at what you’re carrying. Look at how long it’s been in motion. Look at how many people before you tried and couldn’t finish.

You are not weak. You are the latest person to take up something heavy that has been passed through hands for generations.

And you get to do something with it that those before you couldn’t.

The Social Forces That Don’t Get Named

Lucille Clifton was abused by her father. That is a story about a father and a daughter.

But it is not only that story.

It is also a story about a Black woman in America. About the particular vulnerabilities that race and gender create. About the systems that make certain bodies more available to harm. About a mother with a frown on her forehead who could not protect her child — not only because of her own wounding but because of the forces that had diminished her long before her daughter arrived.

When I work with a woman and something in her is telling her to be smaller, quieter, less visible — I sometimes ask: can you add the words ‘as a woman’ to that instruction? Does it fit?

Almost every time: oh. Yes. Of course.

But the therapist didn’t name it. The healer didn’t name it. The wellness program didn’t name it. And so it remained invisible — a personal quirk, a personal limitation, something she needed to personally overcome — rather than a force with a name and a history and millions of other people who know exactly what she’s describing.

The naming does something. It doesn’t remove the difficulty. But it removes the isolation. And the isolation — the sense that this is only happening to me, that I am uniquely broken — is often where the deepest shame lives.

Healing Is Not Subtraction

The wellness industry tends to imagine healing as subtraction.

Remove the anxiety. Release the trauma. Let go of the old story. Get rid of what’s holding you back.

But what I have found, in forty years of sitting with people, is that healing is more often addition.

You add witness — someone who finally sees what has been invisible.

You add generation — the understanding that this didn’t start with you and won’t end with you.

You add community — the recognition that you are not alone with this, that millions of others know exactly what you’re carrying.

You add perspective — the long view, the transgenerational arc, the sense that what you’re working on matters beyond your own life.

And then something shifts. Not because the difficulty disappears. But because you are no longer carrying it as a sign of your personal failure. You are carrying it as your portion of a longer story. And your work on it — even the partial, imperfect, incomplete work — contributes something to the people who come after you.

Clifton didn’t heal everything. She couldn’t. The story that was in motion before she was born was too large, too old, too deeply woven into the fabric of the world she lived in.

But she made something from it that her readers carry now. She finished something her mother couldn’t. She handed something forward. She writes of her parents:

They will do for each other all they can but it will not be enough.

And Clifton did what she could. And she handed it to us. And we do what we can.

Struggling “hand over hungry hand.”

The rope knotted with our years.

What This Means for the Work

If you are a therapist, a coach, a healer — I want to offer you this invitation:

Go back before the beginning.

When someone brings you their struggle — the anxiety, the difficulty speaking up, the body that won’t cooperate, the relationship that keeps going wrong — ask the question that opens the story wider:

How long do you think this has been in your family?

What do you know about your mother’s/father’s relationship to this? Their parents?

What were the forces in the world your grandparents lived in that might have shaped this?

You are not dismissing the personal. You are contextualizing it. You are saying: you didn’t invent this. You inherited it. And that changes what healing means — from fixing what’s wrong with you to contributing your part to a much longer arc of transformation.

That is not a small thing.

That is, in fact, everything.

This is the work of unshaming — not fixing what’s broken, but finding what’s been buried across generations, and recognizing it as the medicine we are here to alchemize.

David Bedrick is the author of five books including The Unshaming Way (North Atlantic Books, 2024). This June he is teaching in London and Haarlem. Details at davidbedrick.com

I wrote about my surgery last week. I asked to be kept informed. I asked not to be left in the dark. I wanted to be present for what was happening to my own body. I was asking to be a witness to my own experience. That agreement was quietly broken.

I wrote about the difference between being managed and being met. I didn’t expect what came back.

Thirty thousand people read the piece. Hundreds responded. I am sharing some of what you wrote — without names, with only small edits for length — because these voices deserve to be heard together.

But first — for those who didn’t read the original piece — here is what happened, and why it matters.

What happened in that room

Before my surgery I asked the surgeon to narrate what he was doing as he went. He agreed. He told me the injection would feel like a stick and last ten seconds.

My whole hand lit up — burning, pain spreading through the hand for almost a minute. When it finally stopped I said: it felt like you gave me two injections in two different places. He said: no, only one.

I held my ground. Eventually he explained that while the needle was in, he had moved it to cover two different sites. One needle, two locations, two distinct waves of pain — exactly what I had felt.

What I wanted him to say: Yes. One needle, two sites. That’s exactly what you felt.

Three sentences. Everything confirmed. Instead his first word was no — which immediately positioned me as wrong. Only when I pushed did the fuller truth arrive, dressed as explanation.

Then I waited for him to tell me he was making the incision — cutting open my hand to expose the sheath and tendon. Ten minutes later I heard: Almost done. I’m cleaning out the sheath now.

The cutting had come and gone without me.

I came home angry. Not at his hands. At something else.

This is what I am calling the information float — the gap that opens when what is communicated doesn’t match what is actually happening. When you lose the facts and the relationship at the same time. When you’re no longer sure what literally happened and no longer sure who you’re with. When you wonder: was I told the truth, or was I managed?

That gap doesn’t close when you leave the room. It follows you home as distrust, as anxiety, as leftover questions — what really happened in there? It keeps some people from going back to doctors at all. It confirms what too many people already believe: that their perceptions can’t be trusted, that their experience doesn’t matter, that the one in the white coat knows what happened in your body better than you do.

That is how the gap becomes a wound.

And then you wrote back. Doctors and nurses. Patients who had never found words for something that happened years ago. Women whose bodies had been entered and altered without narration or consent. A man who had surgery at four and carried the anger for decades. Practitioners who recognized themselves and wanted to do better.

The ones who feel the gap are everywhere.

This is yours as much as mine now.

The practitioners who recognized something

As a pediatric nurse of almost 30 years, I’ve always strived to witness my little patients with validation. The little girl patient in me was so often managed, often abruptly, and very rarely truly witnessed, leaving marks.

I work as a doctor and this inspires me to deepen my own embodiment practice so I can be more fully present and truly meet the human beings in front of me — seeing them as powerful and sovereign beings.

Being a nurse, I really appreciate this and it confirms why I value telling awake patients what we are doing and what’s happening. Basic respect and dignity.

I always ask if my patients want narration or explanation as I work. Some don’t, but most do. It rekindles agency in a place that feels dark and frightening.

My dentist does that: tells me what he is going to do — and also while he is working, lets me know what is happening. I can follow, and can be prepared for pain.

The long cost — those who were harmed and never went back

Over 20 years ago I had a similar experience in the context of female reproductive care. I explained my history of sexual violence and asked for slowness and narration before each step. My request fell on deaf ears, along with my expression of physical pain. The experience felt like an assault. I have never been able to go back.

Last week I saw a periodontist who knew I was phobic and was so patronizing — accurate in his diagnosis but got the tone so wrong. I left. I saw a new periodontist this week. Similar prognosis. Twice the price. Knew exactly how to deliver treatment with kindness and detail.

A surgeon shamed me on the operating table for being anxious and scared. He told me other patients would have welcomed the surgery appointment I was occupying. I jumped off the operating table and ran away. As I waited outside, I saw him speeding past on his way back to his office. He left me holding the shame.

Women’s bodies

I had a biopsy of the womb with no narration and no anesthetic. Just — one second before — I’m just going to take a quick biopsy. It felt very much like an assault. There is so much research on how, if we have understanding and feel held in the moment of trauma, it becomes an experience — not trauma.

I support women who are in surgical menopause. Having your reproductive organs removed without any proper conversation is just awful. As a therapist, I hear it time and time again.

I work with women who had traumatic cesarean births. If doctors and support staff did this, it would change everything for us.

My second C-section was planned. The doctor was explaining everything to two students, and at one point I said — it’s also for me. It helps a lot to hear what you’re doing. With that, she narrated everything for both of us. It was such a helpful, healing experience.

You’ve captured how women feel in the doctor’s office and surgery every single time. Our perceptions are. Always. Invalid.

Children

My youngest son had to go to the hospital. He point blank refused to be treated. A female doctor came in and told him he could just sit with her a while and look around the room. She assured him she wasn’t going to do anything to him. After about fifteen minutes she asked if there was anything cool in the room he wanted to know about. He picked up dozens of apparatus and she explained each one. After a while she said — can I use that one to look in your ear? My son was as calm as I’ve ever seen him.

I had abdominal surgery at four. No one said anything going in — or why. I came out of it angry at the doctor, whom I never saw until I was ten. I still felt the anger then. The surgery maimed me for life and led to lifelong disabilities. I later found out it was basically experimental — never done on a child so young — and it turned out it wasn’t even really necessary. Only somatic trauma work has started returning me to my body.

Finding words for the first time

I’ve never had words for my experience with a surgeon until now.

Thank you for unpacking the communication and interpersonal consequences. It helped me to understand my distrust.

I always blamed myself for being too sensitive. You empower me so much.

I want to take this post in to show the doctor. Maybe they will take it more seriously knowing a man wrote it.

That’s been my whole life right there.

A closing note

The ones who feel the gap are not rare. They are not fragile. They are not oversensitive.

They are paying attention.

And they have been waiting — some of them for decades — for someone to confirm that what they felt was real.

Confirmation of accurate perception is medicine.

Thank you for writing back.

This morning I had surgery on my right index finger. A trigger finger release — a small procedure, about fifteen minutes, highly successful, a skilled surgeon. By any measure, it went well.

And yet I came home shaken and then angry. Not at the surgeon’s hands. At something else.

What Happened

Before I went in, I prepared myself. The injection would come first — a local anesthetic. I knew it would sting. I’ve had injections before. I told the surgeon: I’m the kind of person who really likes to know what’s happening. Could you please tell me before you give me the injection? He said, of course, I’ll always let you know what I’m doing.

I knew the injection would be particularly and acutely painful. I’ve had an injection there before. He said, You’ll feel a stick.

What he didn’t say, what I didn’t know — was how burning and how painful it would actually be. I said to the surgeon that I had looked it up and that the pain could last between thirty and up to sixty seconds. He said no, it’ll only last about ten seconds — not everything you find on AI is true. I was relieved and we both laughed.

What I found out after the surgery is that the hand is dense with nerves. The tissue is tight, small spaces between joints, almost no room. The anesthetic burns as it goes in. And then it has nowhere to go, so it spreads — and you feel that spreading as a second wave of burning, moving through the hand. The needle repositions to reach another area. A third sensation. It lasts thirty, forty seconds that feel much longer.

I was not prepared for that.

When it finally stopped, I said to the room: Woah. That was pretty big. The response: Oh, yeah. People always feel it that way. You did fine.

I noted that too. Filed it.

Then I waited for the surgeon to tell me he was beginning the incision, the way he said he would. I waited with the image of a scalpel cutting into my hand — prepared to track it, to follow in my psyche what in a way my body could not. I wanted to be present for what was happening to me.

What I heard instead, after a silence, was that the incision was already done. He was cleaning out the sheath. It had already happened.

I lay there for several more minutes holding the image of the cutting — which had come and gone without me.

After the surgery, I asked: did you give me two injections? He said no, only one. It felt like you were giving me an injection in one spot and then an injection in another spot. Well, while the needle was in, I moved it within your hand to reach two different sites, one above the palm area and one below.

What I would have wanted him to say when I first asked: Yes. I made one injection but I moved the needle to two different sites. That’s exactly what you felt.

Three sentences. And everything would have been confirmed. Instead his first word was no — which immediately positioned me as wrong. Only when I held my ground did the fuller truth arrive, dressed as explanation. Why the no first? And why, if I hadn’t pushed, would he have left it there?

I don’t ask that as accusation. I ask it as a genuine question about what happens in that room, between that kind of authority and that kind of patient, again and again.

I came home first thinking, I wish he had told me what was happening, I said to Lisa. Then I realized there was an even more forbidden feeling — I was angry. Not because anything went wrong medically. Because I had asked to be a witness to my own experience, and I was promised just that, and that agreement was violated.

The anger arrived organically, truly — and something immediately ruled it inadmissible. Not fitting. Not warranted. My immune system knew: this was a violation. Shame said: he was just doing his job. Don’t be difficult.

And there it is already — internalized. I go to a doctor and believe he’s not there to take care of me.

What I Would Have Wanted Them to Say

Before the injection: This is going to be more intense than a typical injection. The hand has a high density of nerves and very little soft tissue. The anesthetic burns as it enters — that’s normal, nothing is going wrong. It will spread, and you’ll feel an expanding pain. I’ll move the needle once to cover the full area, so there will be two distinct sensations. The whole thing lasts about thirty to forty seconds and then the pain stops completely. Take a breath. Here we go.

That’s it. Two minutes of honest preparation. It would have changed everything — not the pain, but my relationship to it. I would have known what was coming. I could have met it.

And during the surgery: I’m making the incision now. I’m opening the sheath. I’m clearing what was caught. You’re doing well — and I mean that specifically, not as management.

That last phrase matters. Not as management. Because there is a difference between someone telling you you’re doing fine to keep you calm, and someone telling you you’re doing fine because they’re actually watching you and it’s true. The body knows the difference. The psyche registers it even when the mind doesn’t name it.

The Two Kinds of Information Float

There are two kinds of information that flow between a patient and a doctor. The first is content — this is what’s happening, this is what’s coming next, this is what’s true. The second is harder to name. It’s the feeling of alignment. Of being on the same page. Of knowing that the person standing over you is tracking not just your body but respecting your experience. When congruence breaks, both streams go at once. You lose the facts and you lose the relationship. You’re no longer sure what’s literally happening and you’re no longer sure who you’re with. You’re not sure whether you’re being told the truth or being managed — or worse, ushered through the assembly line. That aloneness — in the middle of a procedure, with a scalpel already at work — is its own kind of injury. Small, invisible, and real.

The Pharmacology as Metaphor

Here is something I learned afterward, looking it up from home with a numb hand: there were two anesthetics used this morning. The first — Lidocaine — is fast acting, working within minutes, lasting one to two hours. The second — likely Marcaine — is slower and longer, designed for post-operative pain control, lasting several hours.

The Lidocaine is there to get ahead of the pain quickly so the procedure can begin as soon as possible. But it also does double duty: it softens the experience of the injection itself. In other words, they gave me a second anesthetic to soften the pain of receiving the first anesthetic.

The body’s experience in that small tight space is so intense that the medical system built a pharmaceutical workaround rather than simply telling the patient the truth about what was coming.

The solution to the problem of pain was more medication — not more honesty.

That is the information float made visible in the chemistry itself. Managing the experience rather than witnessing it, built into the pharmacology.

A Longer History — The Poison Ivy Shots

I have carried a small trauma response around injections for most of my life. I didn’t always know where it came from.

When I was very young, I got severe poison ivy reactions every summer at camp — intense breakouts on my ankles that kept recurring. A doctor offered a solution: a series of desensitization shots, one a week, doses of the toxic substance itself to build immunity. I said yes.

The first injection wasn’t just painful. My system responded violently — nausea, vomiting, a full-body reaction. The doctor said afterward: we should have given you a smaller test dose first.

Of course. My system had said clearly: this is too much. The response was to recalibrate the chemistry, not to attend to the person.

My body remembered. For decades afterward, I felt a small trauma response before injections. Tension going in. Lightheadedness coming out. My nervous system activated, causing dis-ease.

The Discovery — Okay. Go.

During COVID, facing another series of injections, I asked myself what I actually needed. Not how to manage the anxiety — what I needed.

What came was simple. I wanted to be the one who said when.

I began asking doctors: get the needle ready, position it where it needs to be. Then wait. I’ll take a breath — it won’t take more than thirty seconds. And when I’m ready, I’ll say: okay. Go.

And they would go.

That changed everything. Not the pain — the relationship to it. Because the moment I could say go, I was no longer a body being acted upon. I was a person in relationship with what was about to happen. A participant, not a recipient.

It wasn’t about control. It was about involvement. About consent — not just the signing of a form before surgery, but the live, moment-to-moment experience of being asked: are you with me? Are you ready? Shall we proceed?

Two words. Ten seconds of breath. And fifty years of injection response dissolved.

What the Field Calls Trauma-Informed Care

The medical field has begun developing what it calls trauma-informed care. Its core principles: safety, trustworthiness, transparency, choice, collaboration, empowerment. In practice this means explaining procedures before performing them, asking permission, acknowledging the power differential between doctor and patient, recognizing that medical settings can activate trauma histories.

This is important work. It is also incomplete.

What it addresses is largely historical — does this patient have a trauma background that we should know about? What it doesn’t address is the live quality of presence in the room during the procedure itself. The difference between managing a patient and witnessing one. The information float that opens when what is communicated doesn’t match what is actually happening.

That float — that gap — is felt by everyone. Some people can dismiss it, move past it, file it away as the ordinary transaction of medical care. Others cannot. Not because they are fragile. Because they take incongruence seriously; because the relationship matters.

Oh yeah, people always feel it that way — said after the fact, as reassurance — is management. It closes the loop without opening a relationship.

This is going to be bigger than you expect. That’s okay. Here’s what’s coming — said before — is witnessing. It enters the relationship before the violation of the skin, and stays with the person through it.

The Violation I Mean

I want to be careful with the word violation. I don’t mean the surgeon was unkind or negligent. I mean something precise: the skin was cut. The sheath was opened. The body was entered and altered. This is the nature of surgery — necessary, skilled, healing. And it is also, in the literal sense, a violation of the body’s boundary.

Trauma-informed care in the fullest sense would acknowledge that. Not with alarm or apology — but with honesty. Something real is happening to you today. Your body is being entered in hopes to bring healing. That deserves your presence, and ours.

Instead, medical culture tends to minimize. To manage the patient’s anxiety by making things sound smaller than they are. A prick of a needle. A little pressure. You’ll barely feel it.

This minimizing is meant kindly. It often backfires. Because when the experience arrives larger than the description, the patient is now alone with both the sensation and the incongruence. The gap between what they were told and what is true. And in that gap, something closes — the honest relationship between the patient and what is happening to them.

A Note on Language

I almost wrote: this matters most for sensitive people. I stopped myself.

Sensitive is how we pathologize perception. It implies excess — too much feeling, too much response, a nervous system that overreacts.

I prefer: the ones who feel the gap.

The people for whom congruence is not optional. Who feel the distance between what is said and what is true not as oversensitivity but as accurate perception. Who cannot be managed into comfort because some part of them knows, always, whether they are being witnessed or handled.

These people are not rare. They deserve better than you did fine.

They deserve someone in the room who knows what is happening to them — and says so.

The hand is still numb as I write this. The anesthetic coursing through, doing its last work. The body finding its way back to itself, slowly. When the feeling returns — and it will — it will come first as tingling, then warmth, then the first edges of soreness as the Marcaine clears.

That’s the body telling me what happened. It always does, eventually.

The question is whether anyone in the room was there to witness it when it did.

Most people with chronic symptoms have never been asked what their symptom actually feels like. Not really. Not with curiosity. Not with the expectation that the answer might matter.

This is a story about a man with migraines — and what his body was trying to show him.

—

A man came to me with migraines several days a month. Debilitating. He had tried everything — medicine, diet, meditation. Sometimes a week out of thirty days lost to them.

I asked him what the migraine was like. Not while he was in one — when he was a little detached from it, able to describe without being lost in it.

He closed his eyes immediately. Without thinking.

That told me something. Part of the migraine was to close out the outer world. He confirmed it: he had to go into the dark. No light. Sounds became overstimulating. The senses wanted to turn inward — away from the busy outer world, toward something else.

He told me the migraines sometimes made him feel like he was spinning. Even nauseous. I asked him to stand up. Keep one foot centered. Let the other move — slowly — just the first glimpse of that disoriented feeling.

His head became looser on his neck. A sway. He seemed dreamy. Less present to me.

I coached him to stay there. To enjoy it.

The world a blur. No need to see each thing as sharp and distinct. Trees blurring into trees. Streets into buildings. He said it was soothing. Almost spiritual — sensing how everything is woven together.

The migraines got somewhat better. They never fully went away. But the man was a photographer. And he began making photographs that were not in focus — showing things with the blur between them. His work hung in galleries. I have one of his photographs on my wall.

The migraine was not a malfunction. It was trying to show him a world where things are not separate — where the blur is the truth, not the failure of vision. His body found a way to give him that world at great cost, until he found another way to live in it.

—

If this resonates — if you or someone you love lives with chronic symptoms that haven’t responded to what’s been tried — I’m offering a workshop on working with chronic illness and somatic intelligence next week. Check it out: https://www.davidbedrick.com/finding-medicine-in-chronic-symptoms

Today I taught over a thousand therapists and coaches about trauma. Sitting back, digesting the depth and beauty of a 40 minute Q&A, my phone notified me of a message.

I won’t reproduce the whole thing. But here is the shape of it: Fuck you. Go jump off a bridge. Joo asshole, repeated four times. A wish that I were dead.

I’m a Jew. That’s part of what they were writing to, who they were writing to.

I read it. First, the shock of it — not hurt or devastation. But the unexpectedness, the part of me that still can’t quite believe unprovoked hate and Jewish hate. “Can you believe this?” people say. Then I put the phone down and went about my evening.

I was fine. I am fine. I want to say that clearly because some, rightfully so, would want to know: David, are you ok?

I decided to post the message on Facebook.

—

Not because I needed comfort. Not because I was rattled. I posted it because I wanted people to see it — to sit with what this kind of consciousness looks and sounds like. I wasn’t asking for care or sympathy. I was asking something harder:

What happens in you when you read this? Not your concern or compassion for me. What happens?

I wanted to let the field wrestle with it. I wanted to witness how people bear witness.

Within two hours, over a hundred responses came in. Many were people capable of looking directly at what they’d read, to feel the weight of it, to witness rather than manage.

But some responses were something else.

Let it go.

Breathe in, breathe out.

That person must be in so much pain.

That person needs a lot of love.

Just gotta let it roll off. I call these emotional vomits. I put a visual bucket out for them and move on.

Witnesses that only saw the writer’s pain, their fear, their agony, their brokenness, their crying out for help, their unworthiness.

And: Why you?

And: I fail to see the usefulness of sharing this verbatim.

And: Remain detached.

—

I want to be precise about what disturbs me. It wasn’t the disagreement. People are free to process differently, to have different world views about how to meet hatred. I have no objection to that.

What made me sit up straighter and pay attention was the cloaking.

To the person who wrote “I fail to see the usefulness of sharing it verbatim” — I wrote back: Your question to me doesn’t feel right, congruent. You are not only failing to see why it is useful, you object and have judgements about my action. I am not saying don’t be judgmental — your judgements are yours. I am saying: don’t cloak your objection and the level of hostility that you feel in questions.

A question that is not a question. An objection dressed as curiosity. A judgment wearing the clothes of concern.

I have been on the receiving end of this my whole life. So have most of the people I work with. The therapist who asks “Do you really think that’s healthy?” The parent who asks “Don’t you think you’re overreacting?” The colleague who asks “Is that really necessary?”

These are not questions. They are verdicts with question marks attached. And the question mark is doing something specific: it’s asking the receiver to participate in their own diminishment, to answer the question as if it were genuine, to walk into a trap. To not push back, resist, defend themselves.

I learned to recognize this move at thirteen years old, sitting across a dining room table from my father, who asked me four questions about marijuana he already knew the answers to. Each question was a step deeper into the net. The fucker should have been an attorney.

I’ve spent decades teaching myself — and others — to name the move when it happens. Don’t cloak your objection in questions.

—

To the person who wrote “just gotta let it roll off, move on” — I wrote back: Moving on is one response. I respect the choice. But I don’t agree with ‘gotta let it roll off’ — because you’re not saying this approach is right for you. You’re suggesting a strategy and an attitude. Implying what is healthy, reasonable or mature. ‘Gotta.’ That is genuinely wrong for many people who have been taught to let things roll off before they have ever fully felt the violence. In this particular case, this kind of violence shows up in words — but it also shows up in bullets, fists, belts, knives, bombs. Those are not only different. They arise from overlapping sources.

The prescription to detach, to let roll off, to breathe in and breathe out — these are not neutral suggestions. For people who have been trained since childhood to manage their responses to violation, to make peace, to be the bigger person, to not let it bother them — this advice lands differently. It reinforces the very training that kept them from knowing what was happening to them. That keeps them from fighting back, walking away, ending relationships, setting clear boundaries. Saying no.

You can’t witness what you’ve already decided to let go of.

—

To the person who wrote “remain detached” — I said: I am detached personally. But not collectively.

This distinction matters enormously to me. Personal detachment — the kind that comes from real inner work, from sitting with your own wounds long enough that someone else’s hatred doesn’t shatter you — that’s something I’ve worked toward for decades. I’m not rattled by this message. I don’t need to be rattled to take it seriously.

Collective detachment is something else entirely. It is the decision to look away from patterns — from cycles of vengeance, trauma, hatred, and perpetration that are part of how this world moves. To treat each incident of hatred as an isolated emotional vomit, something to be bucketed and moved past, is to refuse the larger witness.

And the larger witness, in this case, includes something I want to name plainly:

I am a Jew.

When someone asked “why you?” — perhaps wondering if I’d provoked this, or whether my reach had made me a target — I understood the question. But something in it missed the most obvious answer. Why me? In part, because of what I teach. In part, because of my reach. And in part — a part that shouldn’t be elided — because of what I am.

A Jewish man in the thread wanted to understand more. The texture of this Jew hatred, he wrote.

I know some of the textures, I told him. Not all of them.

There is the kind that is cold steel: You must be erased. Not exist. This hatred doesn’t have the texture of fury or anger. It is clinical. It moves with fundamentalist conviction. It may even feel like morality to the perpetrator.

There is another that functions as an extreme form of perfectionism — everything that is not my idea of superior, perfect, must be cut out, removed. A surgical hatred. Tidy in its own mind.

And then there is the texture of the message I received. A raging dog unleashed. When the dog is in that rage, it cannot hear commands — not of others, not of pain, not of conscience. It is foaming at the mouth and it tastes good to inflict injury, to contact one’s deadliness.

That last word deserves a moment. Deadliness — the raw power to end something, to destroy — lives in the shadows of most human beings. In people who have been violated, controlled, diminished, it often goes underground entirely, exiled as too dangerous, too frightening, too much like the one who hurt them. Some people would rather die than feel it. But to contact one’s deadliness — not to act on it, but to feel it, to know it is there — is its own kind of power. Its own kind of freedom. The raging dog has found a grotesque and destructive path to that contact. That doesn’t make the contact itself wrong. It makes the form of it catastrophic.

He suggested that the antidote for the raging dog — the thing that would make it yield — might be calm.

I don’t think so. It will more likely yield to channeled, laser-sharp rage. The full embodiment of that energy, met completely. The antidote is in the essence of the sickness, not in its opposite. Dear brother.

Someone else offered a framework I hear often: unmetabolized pain. The idea that violence comes from the inability to find a pathway to love. That if we look closely enough at the perpetrator, we will find a wounded child.

I see that sometimes. I know it in myself at times.

And — some people are unable to metabolize hatred, the raw desire to inflict injury, not pain. Not all wounds are hardened grief. It can also be hatred that has been practiced, handed down, sharpened, and yet still living in the shadows. Unseen. Unmet. Some who insist it’s always the lack of love are sometimes the ones who can’t hold and metabolize hatred itself — in the world, or in themselves.

I’m aware I’m offering a challenge to a widely held view. But I watch my clients use the unmetabolized pain framework to gaslight their own experience — to explain away the person who violated them, to find the wounded child behind the fist, before they’ve ever fully felt what the fist did.

And here is what comes next in that work, when it goes deep enough: the client begins to feel their own fist. Not the perpetrator’s. Theirs. First, notice you are hurt. Then, name that someone injured you — perhaps chose to, repeatedly. They are not innocent. We are not naïve. And then — that fist is in me too. I need it. Not to become the one who hurt me. But to know that I have force. That I can end something. That I am not only the receiver of what others do. That wholeness — the capacity for both tenderness and force — is what the unmetabolized pain framework, used too soon, too tidily, can foreclose.

I’ve noticed, over many years, that many of the white Christian progressives who follow my work — people who care deeply about racial justice — have a particular blindness when it comes to antisemitism. If a person of color received messages this violent and this explicit, I don’t believe the response would be “let it roll off” or “that person needs a lot of love.” The witness would be different. I’ve seen it a thousand times — that’s racist, white supremacy at its ugliest; I’m anti-racist. Not generalized explanation or concern for the target, but a bold collective outing, a de-cloaking in case anyone missed it.

Of the hundred-plus responses that came in, perhaps five mentioned the word Jew. Jewish. Antisemitism.

Five.

The rest witnessed the sender’s pain, his rage, his brokenness, his need for love. They witnessed me — my resilience, my wellbeing, my ability to handle it. What they did not witness, mostly, was the specific target painted on my back. The ancient hatred with a name. The part of ‘why you’ that has been answering itself for thousands of years.

That absence is not nothing. It is its own kind of message.

I’m not saying this to accuse. I’m saying it because the blindness itself is worth looking at. It says something about the collective consciousness: I have only learned to see a slice of social violence. It means something to those who are targets: You are invisible.

—

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” James Baldwin

Here is what I know from my work — with myself, with clients who have been traumatized, with the thousands of people I’ve sat with over thirty-five years:

The impulse to say “let it go” is not always wisdom. Sometimes it is the trained response of someone who was never fully permitted to feel the weight of what was done to them. The advice gets passed forward — person to person, generation to generation — not because it is true but because it is familiar. Because it worked, in a way, to keep the peace. To keep functioning. To survive.

But surviving and witnessing are not the same thing.

What I did — posting the message, holding the field open, pushing back against the prescriptions — was not a failure to let go. It was a refusal to let the violence become invisible. A refusal to manage it into something the room could tolerate more easily. I enacted James Baldwin’s keen sight: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

—

Some people are not my people. My vision of healing and witnessing doesn’t nourish their soul. I’m at peace with that.

But for those who are — for those who want to develop the capacity to witness rather than manage, to feel the weight of what’s happening rather than prescribe their way past it — I offer this:

The next time someone asks you a question that doesn’t feel like a question, notice it. Name it, if you can. Don’t walk toward the trap.

And the next time you’re tempted to tell someone to let it go — ask yourself whether you’re offering wisdom or whether you’re asking them to under-stand. To go underneath their own experience and hold up yours instead.

Witness first. Prescribe rarely. Or never.

I was five years old, in kindergarten, weaving pot holders.

Not playing with the other children. Weaving. Stretching fabric across a small metal plate with teeth, loop by loop, color by color. I had only one thing on my mind.

The pot holders were for my mother.

She lived in a harsh world — a rough beard that could chafe skin, an angry cloud of energy that froze everyone on sight when he came home, a leather strap that once held up pants, menacing the air.

I couldn’t stop that father.

But I could weave something soft.

Something to protect her hands from what was too hot to hold.

Now, you may be looking at that boy and seeing a parentified child. And you wouldn’t be wrong. The pattern followed me — the reaching toward partners in pain, the putting of myself aside, the weaving and weaving for those who needed holding.

But let me open the door to the wound a little further: the remedy was never to stop the weaving.

The remedy was to see the boy doing it. To see. To witness.

Not to fix him.

Not to redirect him toward more age-appropriate activities or less entangled relationships.

But to witness what he was actually doing — his dedication, his love, his extraordinary capacity to put himself fully in service of another’s wellbeing. These were not symptoms to be reduced.

They were gifts waiting to be given their full size.

Because that boy grew up to hold other things too hot for most hands.

The Holocaust of his ancestors. The burning question of Israel and Palestine. The heat between men and women who have wounded each other across centuries. The traumatic experiences that arrive in a therapy room or a training circle with nowhere else to go.

He learned to hold these the way he learned to hold everything — carefully, skillfully, not turning away from the heat. Hands that held with the same devotion he brought to a small metal loom at five years old.

The poet Galway Kinnell wrote, in Saint Francis and the Sow, that the bud stands for all things. Everything can flower if we recognize its essence.

All we owe each living thing is simply this:

“to reteach a thing its loveliness.”

Not to heal it. Not to fix it. To reteach it its loveliness.

The traumatized child is not broken. He is not a problem wearing the costume of a person. He is fine, whole, carrying something real and needed.

It is our eyes that are unwell, that create dis-ease. Our seeing has been infected — like an errant immune system that turns against the very body it was meant to protect, our shamed gaze turns against the child, attacks what it should be witnessing, and calls that attack healing.

We don’t have sick children.

We have sick eyes.

The cure is not better treatment. It is better seeing. A witness who can look at the boy weaving pot holders and say: there he is. Look at what he already knows how to do. Look at the child who can lead the way; look at the teacher that adults need to learn from.

That’s the sun of true seeing. And in that light — slowly, the way things grow when they are finally given what they need — the bud opens into what it was always meant to be.

— David Bedrick

The Unshaming Way · @david.bedrick

Natasha Trethewey taught me, through her poems, about pentimento — the painter’s ghost, the earlier image beneath the surface that was painted over but never truly erased. Given enough time, enough light, the original bleeds through. The painter’s first vision, his first truth, refusing to stay buried under the revision.

I think about this when I think about shame.

And I think about the wound. Our wounds.

Last year I traveled to Romania and spoke to an audience of 700 people about shame.

The night before, I couldn’t sleep. New bed. Jet lag. The particular electricity of knowing that in the morning, I’d have to arrive and deliver. I lay in the dark and waited. The way I’ve learned to wait — not for an idea, not for a plan, but for something truer than either. For Spirit to tell me how to proceed.

The slides were prepared. The ideas were sound. But I knew, the way you know things in the dark, that the slides weren’t the answer.

When I finally got out of bed, I noticed it. A bruise on my forearm. Purple, blue, red — two or three inches wide, six inches long. I didn’t know where it came from. I still don’t.

I stood there looking at it.

And then — I don’t know exactly why, except that the dark teaches you things the day won’t — I asked it a question.

Dear forearm. What is your message?

It answered without hesitation.

Show your wounds.

The next morning (which was really the continuation of one long day), I stepped on stage, a 10 foot televised image of me and the slides behind me. I told them the story. The sleepless night. The question asked of a bruise. And then I held up my arm so everyone could see it.

The room went quiet in a particular way — the way rooms go quiet when something true has entered.

Tears came. Not from everyone. But from enough people that the air changed.

Afterwards, people came up to me. Not to discuss the ideas about shame — though those came too. They came to share their tears. To stand close. To show me, in their own way, that they had wounds too. That they had been waiting for someone to hold one up in the light.

The slides were good. The ideas about shame — I believe in them deeply.

But the bruise. That was the teaching — keep showing your wounds, see them, paint them, sing them, dance them, even moan them if that’s all you can muster. And whatever you do, don’t try to erase them.

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— David Bedrick

The Unshaming Way · @david.bedrick

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This morning I put on noise cancelling headphones, laid a silk cloth over my eyes, and waited. The frightened child arrived before the silence did. He came in my breath — held, shallow — and in the grip of my stomach. He’s been arriving this way for seventy years.

The silk over my eyes.

The headphones.

The scrolling IG first, because the flow is easier there.

Then the quiet. The waiting. The door that may or may not open.

And the child. Always the child. In my breath before I notice I’m holding it. In my stomach before the first thought arrives. Seventy years old and he still comes every morning. Frightened. Doubtful. Waiting to be failed.

I have built a life around witnessing this child in others. I am still learning to stay with him in myself.

I stopped scrolling. Went inside the silk and the silence. The dark.

I witnessed the fear in my body. The doubt. And noticed something else — a sureness in the witnessing itself. The same sureness I feel when I sit with another person in their pain. Wondering what would unfold. Not wanting to become the child so completely I couldn’t see him. Not wanting to leave him unseen.

Then something stirred. A creative energy. Thoughts about men’s work, masculinity, what’s being said and what’s being left out. It called to me. I let it call. It called again.

I told myself I’d make a note and go back inside.

That was three hours ago.

The men’s work I encounter these days speaks of the masculine with a kind of reverence I respect. A man must protect. Must lead. Must penetrate — his work, his purpose, his beloved. Must hold space. Be the container.

I know these truths. I have lived them.

But the child in the silk and the dark this morning kept pulling at my sleeve. Asking something quieter.

Can this also be true?

Can my need to be protected also be sacred?

Can following my wife’s brilliance and intuition also be leadership?

Can my longing to be penetrated — pierced by the truth of another’s words, another’s fire — also be masculine?

Can surrendering to how she holds me, how the earth holds me, be its own kind of strength?

These questions were not permitted in the house I grew up in.

My father. My brother. Violence that had different faces but the same message — the child who needs, doubts, fears, longs to be held — that child is a liability. Discard him or be discarded.

So I tried to discard him.

And spent the next forty years finding him again in other people. Sitting with them in their dark corners. Witnessing what I could not yet fully witness in myself.

Most of us build our callings from our wounds. The question is whether we know it. Whether we can stay with the frightened child long enough to let them become — not a problem to solve — but a guide.

He knows things the protected, providing, penetrating man does not.

He knows what it feels like to need.

To doubt.

To long for the earth to hold him.

To be afraid and stay anyway.

I didn’t learn to play until I was fifty.

A dream taught me. A room full of drums. A man at the door saying come in.

I said: “I don’t know how to play.”

I still weep when I say it. “I don’t know how to play.”

I never entered the room in the dream. I didn’t need to. Something entered me instead. My wife’s laughter. My own jokes arriving unexpectedly. The moodiness I inherited from my father — that dark weather — slowly lifting.

Play didn’t come from learning. It came from admitting, at fifty years old, standing at a threshold in a dream —

I don’t know how.

That not-knowing was the door.

Jung called it the Shadow. What we cannot own in ourselves we exile. And what is exiled doesn’t disappear — it goes underground, deforms, and emerges as something we can no longer recognize as our own.

The masculine that cannot admit need becomes the man who needs to dominate.

The protector who cannot be protected becomes the man who cannot distinguish a threat from a boundary.

The provider fueled by duty, never by delight, becomes the man who gives everything and feels nothing.

And the child — the doubtful, playful, frightened, wondering child — when he is exiled in service of the three P’s, he doesn’t vanish.

He gets projected outward. Onto women. Onto the poor. Onto anyone designated beneath you in the hierarchy. You put your own vulnerability into them and then police it there, because you cannot afford to feel it in yourself.

This is not just personal psychology. This is how a caste system maintains itself from the inside.

What becomes possible when the child is no longer exiled?

Not weakness. Not the collapse of the masculine.

Something more dangerous than that.

A man who can be penetrated by truth. Who can follow another’s brilliance without losing himself. Who can be held by the earth, by his beloved, by his own grief — and not call it defeat.

A man whose protection comes from having been frightened.

Whose leadership knows how to follow.

Whose strength has been wept through.

This morning the child came before the silence did.

In my breath. In my stomach. In the heaviness of too little sleep.

I stayed with him.

And three hours later I was writing this.

That is what he gives.

Not despite the fear.

Through the staying.

YES—background causal factors like trauma and the pain of social bigotry play a role in understanding and treating addictions.

NO—the story doesn’t end there. Behind every addiction and addictive tendency lies a valid hunger. Some say it’s for safety or love. My research shows these hungers are far more diverse: for altered states of consciousness, for pleasure, for feeling one’s deepest pains (not escaping them), for easier socialization, for focus, for creativity, and more.

We are blessed with needs, hungers, and desires. Yet hunting furiously for the causes of addiction, we dehumanize people, dismissing the diversity and profound human intelligence that seeks to nourish itself according to our natural hungers and demands.

The problem with the escape-only model: it’s reductive, it weakens treatment planning, and it shames people’s legitimate hungers. By pathologizing these desires, the conventional approach functions to suppress the natural diversity of human longing and dismisses how social oppression works to normalize certain hungers while colonizing the full spectrum of human desire. Models that leave out our needs, hungers, and desires—or remain totally blind to them—pathologize and serve a colonizing function.

I know that’s strong—to say that addiction treatment that focuses on escape is colonizing, because many people in the trauma field hold that notion of escape to be true. Nonetheless, it’s shot through with colonizing assumptions in the background that don’t believe in the human intelligence searching and seeking inexorably and intelligently toward its unfolding and fulfillment.

Yes, the manifestation of the addictive tendency in a substance or behavior is maladaptive. But the hunger behind it still remains true.