Tag: Emotional Labour

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Emotional Labour

kimberleen

The best way to sum up doulaship is that it is, in essence, emotional labour. Emotional labour is a feminist term. Emotional labour describes the unseen and unvalued work that women do to maintain functional relationships. The emotional work that women do to keep relationships of all kinds running smoothly at all costs. It’s the work of maintaining and sustaining family life and communities. Emotional labour very often takes place in the work space too.

The challenge that I have when I write about emotional labour or emotional work is that few of us consider emotional processing as work. That it takes time to effectively process our emotions and the difficult situations that they often accompany. That if we are really engaged in the work of being human then we are deeply engaged in emotional labour. Emotional labour is the real work of being alive.

Life is rarely straightforward. Yet emotional labour and emotional work are frequently overlooked in day-to-day interactions, whether it is a fight with our partner or a work altercation, or just figuring out what is right for us. These things take emotional labour and time. We have to be able to feel what is right for us and engage with other people’s emotional processes to truly understand ourselves and our lives. As of yet emotional labour is not fully understood, accepted or valued as a legitimate form of work. Women’s work thus goes unpaid. As a result of this women are largely put at a disadvantage having the bear the responsibility of both production-based work and the emotional labour of our families and communities.

‘A woman’s work is never done.’

When it comes to big threshold moments there is often a lot to emotionally process. It’s hard to imagine a woman going through pregnancy without taking the time to consider how pregnancy, birth, a new baby, and motherhood might impact their life. That pregnancy might cause them to reflect on their own childhood and life going forward. Obviously, pregnancy is a life-altering process that shouldn’t be easily overlooked. Traditionally these bigger moments would have been given the space and honouring that they deserved as families and communities took time to give space to the human experience which at its core is marked by both growth and transformation. As the saying goes “It takes a village to raise child’. As I say in the concept page of this website it takes a village to hold there most vulnerable. What if it just took a village to show up for everything? Marriage, death, divorce, disability and everything else in between. Humans change with the seasons and with each life phase we learn, grow and expand into new ways of being with each season and role we step into.

So much of the capitalist and colonialist systems are built on the oppression and suppression of our emotions. By obscuring, refusing, deny and rejecting the emotional experience we deny our humanity. Our primary systems have emotional abuse built-in. We reduce the human experience to a means of production from which financial gain can be extracted. Our systems are built on the suppression of the feminine aspect that our emotional labour is regarded as free for all aspect of human life and society. If emotionality has been removed from a process or system, that system lacks humanity and is in essence inhumane.

In my own life I have done huge amounts of emotional labour for our human collective. I didn’t see it as a choice, it sat at the very nature of my being. That my process, as me had the human emotional field at its centre. Maybe you could say that this was a choice. I think that’s the nature of my vocation there was and is no choice. There is only the way. If we continue to deny the nature of emotional labour, the role that it plays in our lives and its necessity to the human species at this juncture between the climate crisis and the mental health pandemic we continue to deny our own humanity. We continue to deny who we are as a species.

This article was written by a dyslexic with a punk attitude.

If you enjoyed reading this article I would be delighted if you can buy me a ko-fi here.

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Anxiety Paralysis

kimberleen

I just updated the article that I wrote about overthinking and found myself writing about anxiety paralysis. A fear of the future that is so strong in paralyses you. Fuck it’s intense and it’s also something that I believe is affecting a lot of our young people today. The reason that I say that is because it was something that really affected me for a very long time and I couldn’t even name it. Anxiety was gripping, wrenching and chest-crushing all at the same time. Anxiety was paralysing and it was one of my big teachers in this life, though it did take a very long time to get wrestle it to the ground, as it basically left me on the brink of panic every single day. I mean what the fuck do you do when every move you make is going to lead to climate disaster for everyone and moves beyond the human paradigm? After all, we are taking all the other Earthlings with as as part of our rather indulgent behavior and that really doesn’t seem very nice. Later this specific aspect of anxiety paralysis came to be known as eco-anxiety.

Anxiety paralysis was a term that I came to know during my InnerLifeSkills life coach training. When one of my fellow students used it to describe their experience of anxiety and how it had affected their life. That they had become stuck and unable to move forward in their life in a meaningful way. They felt paralysed with anxiety. It made so much sense to me.

These days conversations about mental and emotional health are commonplace. It’s become normal to talk about both anxiety and depression. It’s become common for people to name anxiety as the thing holding them back or affecting them in any given situation. The list of anxiety-related behaviour and symptoms seems to be ever-growing. these days social anxiety seems to be topping the ranks. Anxiety is now known to be impacted by the influence of social media, the need to be perfect or at the very least suitably photographed. We still seem to be caught up in consumptive image-making that consumed us emotionally, especially when we seek to commodify the human life experience. This is especially true particularly within the wellness industry which seems to promote toxic aspirational body imagery. All I can really say is thank fuck for people like Lizzo.

As a community activist that had an overriding desire to create wellness for everyone (including the Earthlings) I too was often paralysed with anxiety. What was I supposed to do when almost every decision that I was allowed to make resulted in harm for others? Not only that it didn’t create wellness for me, given that the success of our collective futures was inextricably linked to one another’s wellness. It was a shit show to figure out and disentangle. There were some many causes, and so many people to help, even in a small town, even if I kept it local. There is no way that I could turn up for everyone and everything that was in serious need of attention. Not only this each one of these people, places, and things once engaged with always seemed to be bogged down in an unstopped chain reaction of negative consequences. Whose management led to half-arsed, disappointing outcomes that barely scratched at the problem and provided no meaningful solutions. Community activism seemed like a commitment to drudgery, that in the short term was corrosive, exhausting, and in the long term was soul destroying. It was no different to any other job even if it was self-directed. I hit a brick wall.

Speaking truth to power was a waste of time and institutional and structural violence was entirely normalised, legitimised, and expected. The unconsciousness of the humans that had any kind of handle on power was entirely upheld back the bankrolling power of the establishment. In short, everyone that worked was co-opted to uphold these practices and behaviours with little regard for how their decision-making processes impacted the most vulnerable and the unrepresented. Which includes other earthlings and the environment. It was a shit show that I couldn’t solve. In an act of self-preservation, I turned to radical rest as a refuge, and rather than acting, took to observing and witnessing instead. I named this position the art of in-action.

In the meantime, people who had a grip on our larger social issues seemed to manage their anxiety by taking massive action. It was disturbing. Let’s plant a million trees, build a million homes and fuck the consequences for anything in my way because my ego and need to succeed were so important. It just wasn’t right. The activated ego’s too wanted to coopt everything in their path onto their mission, having done no research, no community engagement, and when I get down to it very little thinking or planning. They just powered on and largely collapsed in on themselves while banging on about sustainability. The emotional and relational component quite simply was catered for within their attack of massive action. It didn’t take long to realise that these massive actions were all based on a desire to bulldoze the physical situation into submission that represented the unhealed parts of themselves. Even now I boggle at the amount of unpaid space holding that was required to be still with my silent screaming of “YOU ARE GOING THE WRONG WAY”. The idea of emotional labour would present itself until much later in my life.

In these moments I became grateful too my anxiety, in the long term and I mean the very long term I saw it as protective. I also understood that it minimised harm to others. I didn’t and don’t have all the answers and although I had a very good brain I couldn’t solve everything and I came to a place of radical acceptance. I could only take responsibility for my wee small part. Using guidelines like ‘act local, think global’ as a mantra for those that might want to continue to live, along with other members of our species and our earthling companions. I just needed to focus on what was right in front of me. It was a major intellectual challenge to figure out how best I might exist sustainably in the world. Because as we know not everything is what it says on the tin. It feels like I’ve spent a lifetime junking products that are no longer viable. It feels like a metaphor for our species.

More than this I found that slowness was not just desired but necessary in our fossil-fueled turbo charged world and I was delighted when the book ‘In Praise of Slow’ emerged. This book gave me permission to live my life exactly as it was, entirely present with the now. In a process that I termed Real Time Existance. I had no TV, no internet, and only my phone. you’ll also be amazed at how few people call you when they can’t benefit from you socially or financially. It’s an incredibly powerful place to be, which continues to serve me to this day.

Radical rest, glocal, real time existence and the slow movement gave me the philosophical underpinnings to live my life differently to live my life as a human being free from the propaganda of capitalist production. That I had to be productive.

In the end, I view my anxiety paralysis as a gift, it gave me the space and time that I needed to figure out life. That I was right to be anxious I was being forced to live in a toxic anti-human system that was emotionally destroying me. That I was being gaslit to believe that there was something wrong with me. That I was to be forced to believe that there was something wrong with me for valuing life, not just my life but everyone’s around me. That I was not a productive part of the system and therefore I was obsolete, no more than a glitch in the matrix. I now know better, anxiety no longer fuels my day-to-day life, nor does it guide it. It turns out that standing still is a superpower.

This article was written by a dyslexic with a punk attitude.

If you enjoyed reading this article I would be delighted if you can buy me a ko-fi here.

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Change Makers

kimberleen

I’m on a writing roll and just finished the previous blog post about me as a ‘Changemaker’. That ended with me questioning how deliberate am I being. Once again as I write this very deliberately in messy, unorganised and detached ways. Doing my best output me at the centre of my world and very clearly dishonouring others and my promises in the process. Fuck!!! The emotional labour is real. The ideologies of success can feel toxic. 

Recently I have been called to look at The Four Agreements again and as great as they are right now I am being shit at them. Which doesn’t bode well for my Trauma-Informed business or even supposed attitude or approach? My Emotional Labour right now feels highly intensive as the demand for my skills seems to be ever-increasing. I wonder how well I am actually skilling up. How well I am holding myself in this accelerated process of deepening. As I sit here anxiously typing away trying to fast forward in order to buy myself time. I feel like I keep on sliding off the treadmill, wobbling off the board as I begin to understand the much deeper responsibility of occupying the space of Change Maker. Where I think at this point I might even want to say honour keeper (OMG it sounds so lame, geeky and real). How about I just managed that? How about I just did what I said I was going to do? What I feel I can achieve? Who I feel I can be responsible too? The things I say I think I can get too. There is soooo much juggling and dropping. I can’t even reference, edit and maintain my website blog well. Let’s be clear here the blog is as much about honouring my own emotional process as it is about projecting my ideas out into the world. Even this I am struggling with and I can’t keep up with my own brain. My own process, my own space of personal self-expression, which has nothing to do with generating change and everything to do with generating personal stability. These are very different things or are they? 

You see stability is the change that I seek to make for myself and indeed other. Even in this toxic fast-paced environment that is hurtling towards disaster. I want the stillness, the openness, the expansiveness of self-knowledge and assurity and yet here I am barely tending to my own innermost needs. Being mildly driven by the passing need to make money. Yes the system still occupies me from time to time. Right now in this moment each article. Blog posts and even presence seem to sprout branches; one more thing to write about. One more nuance to understand, One more deepening understanding of language. Maybe it has all been said before. So who am I typing against the clock for. Maybe radical self-expression is as much as we can do to acknowledge the ever-changing within us. As we process the inevitable change that is happening around us. What is our sole purpose here on Earth to witness the inevitable change as it occurs here on as part of the multiple layered and deeply interconnected process of being alive on planet Earth as part of a far greater and expansive cosmic system?

You see people watching? Regardless of how long we sit still everything changes anyway. In the meantime I must brush my hair and get ready for dinner and think about what respectability is with regards to honouring one’s self.

If you have enjoyed this article please consider buying me a ko-fi here.

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Emotional Healing

kimberleen

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Running like fuck dropping the ball, falling flat on your face and then having a wee cry. That what my week has been like. How about yours? never mind feeling a little overconfident, to begin with. Humility, that where I need to begin. In other news the sun is shining in Scotland?

 

I wish I had better news for you. That you could heal your self and your trauma without feeling anything, It’s just not possible unless of course, you are talking about the physical pain and even that is a little tricky. I have believed that emotional healing is at the centre of all physical healing. That our bodies react and even responds to how we feel. That our bodies are constantly and continually responding to emotional information.

We need to pay attention to how we feel or can’t ignore it or it won’t be long until we are in the myre. Like seriously. I know that there is a lot of talk about plant medicines these days and alternative therapies. Really all they are is guiding you on a journey back to yourself to visit your core wounds see where the hurt lies and get you to sit with yourself for a minute. It’s a lot of what I do too. When all you have to do is sit down and talk to me. Imagine that. What you will discover is that you are actually making time to have a conversation with yourself. When was the last time you did that?

You don’t have to believe in some secret kind of woo that somebody just discovered from some archaic branch of ancient knowledge. All you have to do it sit down and speak. Speak the language of your soul and realise whatever has been vexing or stealing you out into the world. It’s wild huh? This is the world that I know. Holding space talking, tea, chat and conversation or in Scotland we call a wee blether. A wee blether and even a long blether offers us the opportunity to fix just about everything. To get it all out in the open in a safe space. Where it’s all about you. Where there is no reciprocity required and you can just be heard, find space to feel and even cry. Sometimes rage. I don’t mind the raging and in fact, it’s important that we are able to feel into those spaces of anguish and desire. That we don’t drink run or dance them away. That we own them and then realise we can bear them like new life that we can carry their weigh, love and care and find ourselves there. I know it all sounds very hippie and trite and maybe even a little bit shite, yet it is true. What more could we want from this world other than to be witnessed and heard and at the very least by ourselves? Have you learned to lick your wounds and love yourself in the dark spaces beyond what you have already known? Have you swam in the abyss? I know, I have lived there for years of my life. If I could find a comfy sofa I’d probably sit down. You see we enter the inner scape and make it real with our own metaphors. that is how we tell our stories, that is how we heal, for Churchill it was the black dog for me it’s the abyss and for others, it’s the dark side of the moon. It’s the pushing beyond and just like that… self-realisation happens.

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Emotional Labour as a Priority

kimberleen

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The Red Tent Doulas Community know all about emotional labour.

All is not right with the world. The media is gaslighting us along with most governments. The conspiracy theorist are going at it too, it’s all a hoax, to keep us compliant as the reptilian forces continue to clutch at control. I believe you. I’m convinced and it’s exhausting. In the past I fought everything, from NHS cuts to the bombing of Gaza all in the name of doing what is right. Holding back the storm of shit that is destroying humanity and the planet. I have exhausted myself trying to be right and do right. Expecting sane responses in an insane world. I’ve learned over the years that there is not much use in fighting things. I’m far more interested in building things.

That healing ourselves and the connections we have are the key to community and planetary recovery.

I’ve drilled right down into the centre of my need for equality, justice and found that there is everything right with this aspiration. That I as humans we should all be entitled to it. That we have to create it for ourselves. That healing ourselves and the connections we have are the keys to community and planetary recovery. That unless I create it for myself there is no way to share it. That if I wanted to create equality and justice in this world my emotional state has to be at the very centre of that balance. I need to be stable to create stability, to create safety. The micro informs the macro. Our healing is central to the maintenance of humanity.

We create what we focus on. I live my life differently to most people. I prioritise my emotional over just about everything else. My feelings matter because they are the compass of my soul. My soul doesn’t work on clockwork. At best it can be timed by the moon and it cycles and the flow of my womb and all worst of other magic that has been whole scaled denied for the convenience of control. That what makes us safe is not necessarily comfortable and there is always pain in growth. We have to push, lean, relax and even expand into pain to learn it’s lessons and this takes time, the kind of time that you can’t set your watch by. All my effort as a human has to be put into creating the new by clearing out the old. One emotional disturbance at a time that needs to be felt into.

That vision is ensuring that I am continually committed to doing the personal work and emotional labour to ensure that I am in alignment. So that I am always able to have the conversations that have been denied us. So that we can hold circle and protect the balance of our centres.

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The Birthing Process

kimberleen

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The blossom on the tree is not the end product yet it is the most beautiful part of the process. It seems to tell us a story about beauty that it is the blossoming. That real value can be hidden from us that the red flesh of the cherry tree might warn of danger yet if you are brave enough to bite through the dangerous flesh you will find delcious fruit

Right up until this week the primary focus of my work as The Life Doula has aways been Emotional Labour. Louiza Doran very kindly reminded me of.  Emotional Labour is largely the work or women and is the internal unpaid work we have to do in order for The System to function effectively. In addition to this Emotional Labour is our way to embody our collective wisdom, it also the way in which we navigate our own trauma; release and mitigate it on behalf of the collective. I was first introduced to Emotional Labour via a friend Natalie Swan, who had been reading Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown (which I still haven’t read yet due to the clusterburach that was 2019). Part of that Emotional Labour has been the slow-moving realisation that there just hasn’t been the language or terminology to explain what I do. Which left me somewhat forlorn and frustrated in my slow diligent movement forward through life. I’ve been delighted to discover that the language that I am looking for is that of decolonisation. And beyond this I discovered a knew word this week epistemic – relating to knowledge or the degree of it’s validation.

Mental & Emotional health have been colonised by the limited insight of science that is bound up in matter. The only way I have been able to explain The Life Doula being “that you wouldn’t leave someone in labour. Why would you leave someone in emotional pain?”

In the process of becoming The Life Doula I have had to unlearn and challenge much of what I have been told is true. That one-hour sessions are optimum so that clients don’t learn dependency. That offering too much value undermines the financial stability of your business. The thing is I’m interested in healing. In ways that only The Great Pause could highlight. Our world is fucked because we failed to pay proper attention or take due care. That all of my work and the approach that I take is painstakingly considered through the teaching of my own healing journey. Now the science is catching up with my own theory and I find that I have allies in the shared work of trauma healing. To my disbelief, I stand on the precipice of being an educator nor just a dessentor.

You see the informal healing culture of the west is covert, as it has needed to be to survive. “You’ll be needing a cup of tea” is short form code for you’ll be needing a long chat and some ritual connection. We have always known how to heal each other. It’s that our wisdom has been removed from us in favour of the linear precision of the surgeon’s knife. We would rather have things cut out of us than gently resolve our inner wars through presence of mind.

Our healing challenges are now systemic. That we have outsourced our intuition, sovereignty and our ability to heal; to people that have no connection to us. Our being, our lives, our place. That somehow the human spirit and body is one miraculous generic creation that can be ‘fixed’. I think not. This is why I am a doula, not a coach. I’m not interested in your productivity, functionality or civilisation. I’m interested in the jagged edges of your soul and how they cut you to ribbons at night, silently in the dark where your screams consume you. Maybe this can be best described as your Emotional Labour. Now we long for something else beyond the pain of oppression, repression and survival. We long to be heard honoured and cared for. These radical ideas of worth are the decolonisation of a species. The decolonisation of a planet. Where the forced extraction economies of Mother Gaia may be coming to an end, it’s all very symbolic.

One of the most valuable lessons that I have learned this year is that you can’t have true love without respect. Which seem very pertinent as I start my Birth Doula training. You can’t extract a baby and the creation of one under force isn’t recommended. All creativity stems from vulnerability both sex and birth are representative of this act. The truth is you can’t achieve human life through human individuation, nor can you achieve optimum human status without the support of community. It is our human connections that make us capable of bearing human life, as well as bearing the wait of pregnancy. Like everything birth and birthing are a process. Where it is once again hard to know where is begins and ends. Where thresholds are crossed both literally and metaphysically, a baby is born, just as the mother is birthed. Birthing is painful, life is painful. It is also exquisite, miraculous, beautiful and extraordinary as The Great Pause is amplifying that stillness, waiting and gestation all hold purpose. Nothing is conceived fully formed. Where would the fun be in that anyway? We have to honour what emerges.

I started out this year following a theme of rebirth returning to Scotland after several years abroad. What occurs to me now is that I am deep in a birthing process; is that I am only now creating a life, a practice and knowing that I conceived years ago. That I was not ready to bear. The deep truth that I was not ready to bear being me and all the very real things that I would have to lose in order to find respect aka love. That the birthing process is one of love, protection and care that cannot be commodified and doesn’t belong in a system that wishes to do so. That my real work is birthing the sacred in all of us where birth, death and trauma are inextricably linked.  Where the light meets the dark and the shadows create the sparkles.

If you want to find out more about my work with the The Red Tent Doulas please do get in touch. In the meantime please enjoy the below meditation from The Soul Matrix

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Emotional Labour, Community Activism, Boundaries and The Rise of the Divine Feminine

kimberleen

IMG-4499This year it feels like I’ve taken a crash course in all of the above. I’m also feeling pretty proud of myself in the process.  For the first time in the history of my own community activism, I have refused to take on other peoples shit. True Story.

Emotional Labour is the work of me, The Life Doula. I create space, I hold space and I offer up time as if it is an infinite resource and utilising a lost healing magic that seems to have been long forgotten in the realms of 21st-century healing. You can’t hack everything. It is at the very moment we can become grateful for the ageing process, proud of the whispy grey hairs and that wisdom usually has to be earned.

The truth is that Emotional Labour is, for the most part, the work of women. The absorbing, the explaining, the understanding, the coaxing and sustaining of families and communities. It’s the care of the dying, the nurturing of children, the comforting of the ill and distressed and the perpetual maintenance of the household. It’s also the commitment to healing, healing ourselves to be of better service. Healing our selves to create better homes, stronger families and resilient communities and yet so little of this work are appreciated and honoured even though it is the very stuff of life.

These days as healers and let’s be honest here as women we now have to resolve to set boundaries for ourselves. We have to decide to take care of ourselves first, heal our selves first before we ever hope to have a deeper impact on the world at large, even though there is so much to heal. Too often now I have had the call to action. “Kimberley we need your help” and too often now I have learned that the help I have to offer is mistaken for something else. That somehow I can do the work for you. That by me showing up and listening to the problem at hand is a cure and that due to my caring nature I might be willing to solve the problem by taking on the role of community enabler. That I will be project manager, researcher, facilitator,  admin assistant,  fundraiser and counsellor. All for free of course.

The answer is I can and I won’t. The truth is my house isn’t in order. I expect too much from hurt people. The best remedy I have for this is, of course, is getting back to the drawing board and straight back into dharma. Chopping water and fetching wood, figuring out where the mix up happened and re-committing to healing myself first, loving myself best and serving reason from a cup that radiates joy.

The age of Aquarius is here. The divine feminine is on the rise and emotional mastery is calling to us. Nurturance is key and taking on the emotional labour of others is over. Nothing is disposable. The energy we put out into the world is the energy we get back. After all, it’s the circle of life.