I Got Out of My Own Way

In my last blog post "Shedding Fear to Find My Unique Strong Voice," I addressed my fears and how self-defense training supported me in my healing journey and increased my sense of personal safety and confidence. And that now, instead of walking around with that old familiar feeling of fearfulness, I now feel more vibrant, alive, and confident. 

This week, I am sharing a link to a podcast “The Untold Story, Get Out of Your Own Way and NARM” that I did with Chicago Center for Integration and Healing (CCIH). In the podcast, I address:

• My journey into developing more safety and enjoyment in my  body and working with anxieties and fears
• Exploring trust and mistrust
• The profound experience of realizing I was holding someone else’s fear
• My personal journey into exploring the truth of the untold ancestral story as half German and half from the South
• How to connect with our own desires as an empathic person
• Personal agency and how we can get in our own way
• What the body-centered and relational model of NARM (Neuro-Affective Relational Model) offers
• When you feel you’ve had a set-back it could actually be the natural contraction that happens after expansion

Bianka Hardin, PsyD

Licensed Clinical Psychologist

Centered Therapy Chicago

A Room Full of People Finding Their Voice

Standing Up for Self and Others
Photo credit: Kathleen Grant 

IMPACT Chicago wasn’t planning on a late December workshop. In fact, late December is a notoriously difficult time to schedule, well, ANYTHING. But something unexpected happened: the requests for self-defense training were through the roof. IMPACT believes in our broader mission to teach people self-defense in a world where living with dignity and in safety can be hard to come by, and that’s how we knew we needed to respond. We offered a free workshop to all on December 20. Next one: January 11, 6:30-8 pm at the JCFS Knapp Center, 3145 W.Pratt. 

            
There is nothing that will warm you up faster than a room full of people finding their voice and learning their first physical tools. The attendees brought many things with them: their fear, their feeling of powerlessness, and their desire to be able to not only protect themselves, but to learn how to support someone else in need. They wanted to know how to help.

Workshop Leader Deb leads a knee drill
Photo credit: Kathleen Grant

            While IMPACT’s main program teaches gender-based self-defense from sexual assault, we have found that the principles behind our empowerment model can apply much more broadly. For some, the last few weeks have shone a light on a powerlessness they weren’t aware of in our society; for others, it was a feeling they knew all too well. In the workshop, we were able to come together as a community, to begin to have conversations about what this new climate means, own our fear, and start to take our power back.  

Molly Norris

IMPACT Chicago Instructor

Instructor Molly demonstrates a powerful voice
Photo credit: Kathleen Grant

Thank you to IMPACT Chicago instructors, staff, and volunteers for making this workshop possible: Lisa Amoroso, Kathleen Grant, Rachel Marro, Deb Mier, Molly Norris, and Martha Thompson. Thank you to all those who participated!

Developing Skills to Meet Courageous Disclosures

Our next challenge, now that there is so much truth-telling, is developing the skills to meet these courageous disclosures.

We know a tremendous amount about trauma and healing now. But -- and I say this as a social worker -- we cede this knowledge to professional clinical spaces. We think that people who have been hurt can be helped in the magical therapeutic treatment space, and polite social discourse can remain untroubled by this ugliness.

I say this as someone whose life has been absolutely transformed by what I have found in the magical therapeutic treatment space.

But if recent events tell us nothing else, they tell us that the general discourse cannot be shielded from interpersonal and sexual trauma.

This is why we have to learn skills of empathy: The ability to be present to someone else's strong emotion. The willingness to be awkward when we're not sure what words are right. And, the right words:

I'm sorry that happened to you.
I believe you.
You didn't deserve that.
That wasn't your fault.
I'm glad you told me.

Lynne Marie Wanamaker, Facebook post, October 15, 2016