During any trying time in my life, it drops in for me that adequacy and interdependency are two sides of the same coin. And during those days of COVID, I saw this coin being flipped in every moment, with one word or the other, each coming up about 50% of the time.

For adequacy, on a macro level, there was a lot of failing, from government to social structures to “what does the science say now?” However, on an individual level, what abounded on the internet was the ingenuity of people everywhere to take care of themselves, their families, their community. I loved the grandparents who plastic-wrapped themselves so they could hug their grandchildren; I marveled at the private 3-D printer owners who voluntarily made parts for face shields; I laughed at the Tik-Tok videos; sang the hand washing songs; and cried at the online concerts. The list goes on and on with hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions of examples of people turning to the thought, “well, what can I do given these new parameters?”

I project the human species didn’t survive and get to where it is today by sitting down with fire in a cave and calling it quits. I mean, fire in a cave must have felt yummy after no fire in a cave. The truth is, we humans are inventive, filled with creative energy, and we actually can’t stop ourselves from trying one more thing that might improve an experience (really, pour over coffee is the bomb, such an improvement over drip, French Press, and yes, espresso).

And yet, as many inventors find out, creating includes mistakes, wrong turns, back steps, riffing off past successes, which leads me to the definition of “adequacy.” What a relief to find it does not include “doing it perfectly, or originally.” Adequacy means, according to Merriam-Webster, “sufficient for the need,” “good enough,” “acceptable.” What I sense can happen for many people during trying times is that they are making the situation they are in acceptable, not perfect, not necessarily original, simply adequate. Again, back in COVID, we saw that with healthcare workers, essential service workers, people who had been laid off, and students graduating into a world of who knows what. It sorta sucked, it was sometimes not fun, and yet, they did it anyway.

Which leads to interdependency. Beyond being a “lone wolf,” the way many people experience adequacy is 1) they accept help, or 2) they ask for help. When we do the latter, we automatically understand we can not do anything alone (and asking the Universe for help is a very viable option). Again, during COVID I saw this starkly in my NextDoor app search for the latest sightings of toilet paper on store shelves. When that proved dicey, I found on Amazon an ebook to make my own toilet paper. Intrigued, I wondered if it would have me collect wood scraps, chip, boil, and mash them, and roll the paste between … something … to create a paper-ish substance that might work (turns out, it was reusable toilet paper made from t-shirts, yikes!).

When I found that unappealing, I flipped the coin and came up with interdependency (or adequacy, crap, either one is good here) and picked one morning as a “treasure hunt” and just drove store to store (finding places I never would have gone in before, real treasures!) looking for toilet paper, and lo, at the fifth one, scored some Charmin (I purchased my allotted 2 packages which is an entire other blog about self-worth, a “spiritual” mindset of not being greedy, yada, yada, yada). And it struck me … the Charmin didn’t magically appear on the shelf. Someone, somewhere cut down a tree. Someone drove it to a processing plant. Someone pushed some buttons on some huge machines that did what I was going to do in my bathtub. And these folks relied on the plastic people to supply the clear wrap. Then someone delivered it to the store where I bought it. Oh, and the checkout person, masked, gloved, and behind a plastic window, sold it to me.

The more I heard from people about their experience during those COVID years, the more I saw how the little linings of silver appeared — the sparks of ingenuity, the new space of time to attend to passions, or simply cleaning the house; the new-found love for family members they can’t see (how many of us thought absence was a blessing and found out we didn’t like that either?!) Many people discovered they were stronger, more capable and wholly adequate. And even those who had a desperate, despairing, miserable time, I propose, they too are still adequate to it because … they made it through.

We can’t have one without the other. Our interdependence works because we each are adequate. And we are most adequate because we are wholly interdependent. With everything going on in the world today, now is a good time to bring out that coin, and start flipping it again.

About the Author: Beth Hinnen came to the spiritual path from the corporate world. After experiencing impermanence and greed, she left to study Yoga and has over 1,000 hours in Yoga teacher training, and ended up specializing in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, spiritual scripture that closely aligns with Buddhism. From there, she studied Zen Buddhism for over ten years, including in-person, month-long monastic retreats, until she earned certification, in January, 2023, as a Mindfulness and Meditation Teacher with Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach. Currently, Beth is a co-leader of the IMCD Council, and on the Teachers Collective, as administrator. She hosts a Meetup group called Yoga Meets Buddhism, and for the past three years, has held an online Dharma Wednesdays class that discusses the Yoga Sutras while also bringing in Buddhist teachings, along with Sufi poets, Christianity, Judaism and other spiritual paths that reinforce the words of Sri Swami Satchidananda, the founder of Integral Yoga where Beth studied. “The truth is one, the paths are many.” More information about Beth is at www.samayaco.org.

“I’m not optimistic, but I am hopeful. And hope is the virtue that sits between the vices of optimism and pessimism. Hope is the idea that good things are going to happen because we can make them so.” 

In my last post, I explored the virtue of kindness. Kindness is powerful because it affirms and celebrates the humanity of others, making it an effective tool and countermeasure to the widespread cruelty of our times. Adjacent to kindness is a similar and equally powerful virtue: the virtue of hope.

Hope in Literature and Films

As a kid in the early 2000s, I grew up with films inspired by classic books such as Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. I still revisit these films, and each time I watch them, I walk away encouraged and heartened by their underlying message of hope.

Broadly speaking, these stories portray a world that is becoming increasingly dark as a growing evil threatens to overthrow and destroy the world as it is known. As the evil grows, fear spreads and courage becomes rare with most succumbing to feelings of helplessness, despair, and apathy.

Yet, the impact of these stories is found in the struggle of the characters who hold on to a sense of hope – the deeply rooted belief that the world isn’t condemned to darkness and there is still time to redirect the world towards a brighter future.

At times, their hope feels ridiculous and ill-advised, but through the course of the story, their hope is vindicated. The path towards victory was small and hidden, and it was only those with hope that were able to see it and follow it to completion. 

Hope in Our Times 

Today, there is a growing sentiment that the world is becoming increasingly chaotic, hostile, and unsafe. In such an environment, it can be easy to fall into either pessimistic fatalism, where one feels powerless to alter the course of history, or into naive optimism and the flimsy belief that “things will work out, so I don’t have to do anything.”

Hope, in contrast, requires action – it is an active virtue rooted in reality. It pushes us towards involvement and participation in our historical moment.

I want to return here to the quote I initially shared, particularly the latter part, “Hope is the idea that good things are going to happen because we can make them so.” 

This encapsulates the beauty of hope: by having hope, we move toward action, which in turn helps us realize that which we are hoping for. In other words, we are the solution to our despair.

The Fire that Spreads

Hope is often symbolized as a light in the darkness. A single candle can be seen from a great distance on a clear night, and its flame carries the potential to light a thousand more. Hope is contagious and can spread like wildfire – it may start small and in isolation, but can quickly build momentum into collective action and societal change. 

In this historical moment, will we dare to hope? Will we dare to envision a better world and actively move towards its creation?

About the Author: Kevin Culver, LPCC, is a professional counselor, published author, and owner of Resilient Kindness Counseling. Kevin has a MA in Mental Health Counseling and a BA in Theological Studies. With a background in spirituality, philosophy, and psychological research, Kevin provides a holistic approach to therapy that seeks to honor each client’s unique personality, worldview, and life aspirations. In his therapeutic work, he helps clients rediscover their humanity and create greater meaning in their lives, work, and relationships. He enjoys working with individuals from all backgrounds, but specializes in working with men’s issues, spirituality, and relationship issues. If you are interested in working with Kevin or learning more about his practice, please visit resilientkindness.com or email him at kevin@resilientkindness.com

Nomads. We’ve become a bit traumatized living in modernization and separation from land. All mammals have emotional circuitry for grief and when we are without our kin, our village, our land, that circuitry goes into full alarm (anxiety, sadness, depression and loneliness are all related symptoms). And then we may shame ourselves for our perfectly natural response to the alienation from the modern world.

We have convinced ourselves we don’t need each other, but in reality our mammal bodies are made for relationship. This is an expression of a deep truth: all of life is relational. We exist in interdependence. We seek relationship from the earliest moments of life and our lives unfold and take shape relative to the nature of the relationships we encounter and create. In fact, all life forms down to the single most cell seek to connect, because we are inter-relational.

We think the world is linear, i.e., that we are going somewhere. Our culture values the heroics of the rugged individualist, In that viewpoint, it’s not ok to admit we are lonely. Loneliness is when we don’t experience being seen for who we are, understood, valued, remembered, or cared for. The linear worldview finds its roots in Western European and American thought. It is logical, time oriented, and systematic, and has at its core the cause-and-effect relationship. The belief is that if we understand the cause, we can find the solution.

Yet, the linear view is narrow. It inhibits us from seeing the whole person. A more holistic viewpoint would see the world as relational. Problems should be seen in terms of its relationship to other events, circumstances or people around them. We have a mosaic of feelings that indicate when our basic needs are being met or unmet. For example, when our need for care is met, we may feel love, affection, calm, happiness, etc. Conversely, when care is not met such as when we lose a friend, we feel grief, sadness, even physical sensations of emotional pain.

These feelings can be common for us when we don’t have real relational understanding. How do we find a way to be seen, understood, valued, remembered, and cared for? That is the inner work we are faced with. So how do we get that connection we’re longing for? What needs to exist for us to feel belonging? 

I first learned to validate my body sensations, feelings and needs. I learned this through working with a Nonviolent Communication (NVC) practice group. NVC was started by Marshall Rosenberg in 1984. Here is where I learned my feelings made sense. They weren’t something to get rid of, they were there for me to listen to myself and what I needed.

NVC created a new way of processing and communicating with ourselves and others. It educated us to weed out our cause-and-effect language. Searching for causes makes us a very blame-based culture, i.e., “Whose fault is it?” We want to let go of cause and look for the needs that are either being met or not met. Only in that way can we resolve the feelings we are having. We had to reframe blame from:

I feel _____ because you _____! (blame!)

Reframe to:

I feel _______ because I _____! (ownership of feelings)

When we reframe our communication, we have greater understanding of what we need and can ask more directly to get our needs met. This is the best way to hold ourselves with more understanding, connection and love.

About the author: Rev. Catherine Dockery, MA, is a People House minister and a trained facilitator in conscious aging, nonviolent communication and resonant healing of trauma. She has an MA in Public Administration and BA in Communications both from the University of Colorado at Denver. Catherine started The Center for Conscious Aging in 2015 where she conducts workshops, personal coaching and support groups for older adults helping them to understand their developmental changes and transform their lives. She has 10 years of experience in individual and group facilitation and presents on aging topics throughout Colorado. To learn more about Catherine’s services please visit www.centerforconsciousaging.org or email consciousaging1@gmail.com

The extensive support of the community and the rituals surrounding death serve as an example of how to care for the bereaved and communally process death.

When Maria was a young woman, her father, a local influential attorney and community leader, passed away suddenly at the age of 56, leaving a legacy of a large family and a prominent and valuable position in the community. The shock of his passing left all in the community grieving, and so began a days- and weeks-long ritual of mourning his death.

Because Igbo people are a majority Catholic group, much of Maria’s story of the beliefs and rituals surrounding the death of her father relate to the Bible. Maria described her community’s belief about rituals related to the ages of the deceased as stemming from Psalm 90:10, “Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away.” For this reason, a celebration of life ritual is valued for those eighty and older because they have reached the pinnacle of strength. If a person dies between 70 and 80, and the person is not in pain, it is also a reason for a celebration of life. If the deceased is younger than 70, it is more difficult for the community, especially if it was due to unexpected circumstances. Due to this, Maria described the impact of her father’s death as immense “crying and wailing” throughout the family and community.

Her father was mourned also by smaller sub-communities – the local group of attorneys in Lagos, the Catholic society, their home village. Each community along with their family hosted wakes, called “wake- keeping”, to provide the necessary honoring of his life. Wake-keepings are times of mourning and celebration imbued with singing, dancing, eating, drinking and remembering. Families often spend significant amounts of money providing the community with several opportunities to commemorate the deceased. This can be overwhelming at times for the family and so the community often contributes. In the case of the death of children, the community forbids the family from providing for the ceremonies and burial, instead providing for the family to bury their child.

Maria’s family accompanied his body along the trek toward the home village, where his final resting place would be. After several days of wake-keepings and ceremonies, the people walked behind the car with his body for four miles to the burial site near his village in Igboland. The Igbo people believe that if the body is not brought home to Igboland, the soul becomes lost and will never rest until the body is brought home.

After his death, Maria’s mother shaved her hair in steps, a small bit after each ceremony. Widows mark the mourning not only by shaving their hair but also by staying out of markets and other shopping areas for three months to one year, until the ikwa ozu or “second burial”. The ikwa ozu is a celebration of deceased loved ones which takes place anywhere from two weeks to one year after the death. It is another time of spiritual rites, songs, dance and expression which also serves as a support for the bereaved family members.

Maria reminded me that for the Igbo people, death is a time of transition – a home-going for the soul of the deceased to take their place as an honored ancestor.

All their celebrations and mourning rites do not avoid or diminish the pain of the loss, but rather honor their love for the deceased and their value to the community as a whole. Finally, Maria emphasized the importance of the concept, “Mbọsi onye kwalụ mmadụ k’ọkwalụ onw’ye’”, or “The day you mourn and weep for another’s death is perceived as the day that you mourn your own death – a recognition of your own transition.” Through this, the Igbo community demonstrates ancient understanding of the vital need for extensive social support during times of painful loss and transforms the fear of death into a time of transition from one part of life to the next.

Resources:
https://www.academia.edu/35168817/Continuum_Journal_of_Media_and_Cultural_Studies_Creativity
_in_calamity_Igbo_funeral_as_interface_of_visuality_and_performance
https://www.nigerianjournalsonline.com/index.php/JOCAS/article/download/1757/1717?__cf_chl_tk=d
7cyfDvs9_khWRQoI0TMc.5q69pxSxSiPQcHRU1OGR8-1686090299-0-gaNycGzNDFA

About the Author: As a mother of six sons, Lisa’s greatest joy in life is her family. Tragically, however, in 2002, she and her husband, Aaron, lost their fourth son Benjamin in an unexpected accident. From then on, Lisa experienced a long, painful struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder and deep grief. She was introduced to yoga as a daily practice to help her rest and reset her mind. After over 18 years of her personal growth as a student and a teacher of yoga, she continues to explore the relationship between spirituality, somatics and mental health. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in clinical mental health counseling at Messiah University and is privileged to work with People House as an Affordable Counseling Intern. Upon licensure, she intends to combine her in-depth knowledge of spiritual practices, yoga, and meditation with clinical counseling techniques to offer holistic therapy to clients, focusing on grief, trauma and bereavement issues for parents.

So, what is connection anyway?

Connection is defined on dictionary.com as “a circle of friends or associates or a member of such a circle”, however connection can look so widely different to each of us. If you are extroverted and very social, you may thrive in high energy, high contact interactions. If you are more introverted or socially anxious you may prefer a quiet meet-up with family or one or two other people. You may even thrive in the at-home, online interactive world. You may also land anywhere in between on the introvert/extrovert spectrum, and your connection preference may change based on the setting, people, and your mood. You may even have been a social person pre-Covid, but now feel anxious about being around other people. We are each unique in what energizes or drains us, and no connection style is better than the other. It is part of what makes us each individual. The important point is to focus on what feeds our connection and feeling of community. Try different things, and then notice what you are feeling. Does your body feel more relaxed in certain environments? Do you find yourself happier around certain people? Notice what feels right to you, and also notice when you may feel overloaded or overwhelmed during these new points of adjustment and the re-opening of society.  

Why is it important to connect with our fellow humans? Since May is Mental Health Awareness month, the message here is that feeling connected with others can actually improve our mental and physical health. Studies show that people who feel a sense of connection experience less anxiety and depression and higher self-esteem. When we feel connected, our immune system becomes stronger. Overall, we are happier. 

What are some tips to flexing our connection muscle and rebuilding community?  

Be Curious – ask questions, wonder, inquire and ponder together. Ask about another person’s stories. You may have more in common than you think, and you can learn from different perspectives and experiences. In learning about each other we can connect in new ways. 

Be Generous – listen, help, support and share. Others are feeling isolated and lonely too but may be feeling anxious to reach out. Send a text, direct message someone on that Zoom meeting, comment on social media, make a phone call. Share your stories and reach out to connect. 

Be Authentic – be vulnerable, share our hopes and fears, be human. While lives and people may look “perfect” from the outside or on social media, we all share struggles, anxieties, challenges and also triumphs. Start to remove your mask of perfection, and others will feel safe to do the same. We are all perfectly imperfect. 

Keep trying, keep showing up and try again – not every situation or person will be your cup of tea, but you can find the type of connection and other humans that feed your soul. 

You deserve love, happiness and connection.

Michele Bailey is a current Affordable Counseling Program intern with People House pursuing an MA in Marriage and Family Therapy at Regis University. She is a mom of teenagers, dog mom, and marriage partner. She has an MBA and a BA in international studies. She draws from attachment and experiential therapies in her work with individuals and couples with a goal of creating a supportive environment to help clients heal, grow and become empowered to live their most authentic lives. You can reach Michele at michelebailey@peoplehouse.org or (720) 600-4615

Dichotomous thinking, a thinking that we must either do this or that or we can only be this or that, forces us to choose between two or more different ends of an assumed spectrum, creating a division that implies superiority for the chosen and inferiority for the rejected. In all of the ways that we adhere to this thinking style, I’m going to focus on emotions and our relationship with them and offer an alternative style of thinking, which is called dialectical thinking.

We often label certain emotions as “bad” and others as “good”, and when we participate in this thinking, we culturally and individually invite shame and distance into our process of “bad” and our “good” emotions get placed on an unfair pedestal. 

When we hit layers of emotions that feel uncomfortable, we run.

We run and run and find distractions along the way to justify our reasons for running and even get culturally rewarded for doing so, and then sometimes we run head first into the desolate, dry lands of stigma and pathology when we haven’t listened to ourselves along the way. “I’m not supposed to feel this way.” “I’ve been working so hard in therapy to be happy, why am I still sad?” “Why am I angry at my partner? They’ve been so kind to me.” “What’s wrong with me?” The more we ask those questions of ourselves, the easier it becomes to think the same of others. We disconnect from our “bad” feeling because it’s terrifying and then we disconnect from others when they experience “bad” because they are too close to the thing we’re terrified of. 

What are we missing when that distance is activated with “bad” emotions? What would it be like to invite the “bad” emotions just as easily as we do with the “good”? What if we created and held space for ourselves to practice that and shared it in community with others? What if we chose not to label certain emotions as “bad” or “good” at all?

Emotions are messengers and they will keep carrying their message to us until we listen to them.

We can try to drown them out with whatever is accessible to us at the time, but we have to feel them to hear them and often they have something important to say. In dialectical thinking, we don’t need to choose one thing. We can be with the entirety. And guess what? We are capable of doing this. It’s the fear of what we think our emotions are telling us before even listening to and understanding them that lies to us and tells us we are not. And the more we understand that our emotions and bodies have a language all their own, the more we’ll be able to speak with them and expand our understanding of ourselves and those around us. 

Where do we start? With vulnerability. With our hearts. With our innate humanness that knows how to feel and listen and trust our deepest and most authentic, whole selves. We are human, first and always.

Resources on Cultivating Compassionate Presence

Meditations:

https://insighttimer.com/padmagordon/guided-meditations/reset-to-presence

https://insighttimer.com/dorakamau/guided-meditations/practicing-presence-2

https://insighttimer.com/meditationoasis/guided-meditations/simply-being-relaxation-and-presence

https://insighttimer.com/brotherlobsang/guided-meditations/queer-practice-trust-the-roots

Grounding Exercises:

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5e5e4a7d1ddf3d2088a1d90e/t/5e87a19dbfbd0c40d74563a4/1585947082450/Self-Regulation+Tools.pdf

Colleen Ladd is an Affordable Counseling Intern at People House. She enjoys reading cheesy thrillers, writing about her life, cooking vegan and vegetarian food, eating vegan and vegetarian food, traveling the world (when there’s not a pandemic), learning/expanding her scope, gazing at the stars, random dance parties, seizing opportunities of joy and weird, practicing presence, standing up with others in the fight for social equity, and making her friends and family laugh. Colleen can be reached at colleenladd@peoplehouse.org or (720) 295-3569.

The thread that seems to tie all of these conditions together is the environmental and subsequent somatic stress I experienced. And the bitter irony of sleep disorders is that they can often be both a signal for and symptomatic of an underlying mental health issue. In particular, insomnia has been linked to an array of anxiety, depressive, psychotic, and substance use disorders (Khurshid, 2018). From my own life, I can also tell you that not getting adequate sleep has contributed to more instances of illness than I can count.

And yet, getting adequate sleep is a privilege and not a right.

People who work in healthcare settings or the service industry often have schedules which vary from week to week inhibiting the structure required for a regular bedtime. Add to this the pervasive fear that one might be furloughed or fired due to the deleterious economic effects of the pandemic, and one can see how peoples’ quality of sleep may be impacted. Furthermore, discrepancies in quality of sleep have been shown to not only be a genetic issue but a racialized one. Recent research indicated a correlation between sleep disturbance and likelihood of cardiovascular disease among people of color, especially African Americas in the United States (Egan et al., 2017). 

What does all of this mean?

Sleep is as much a personal issue as it is a systemic one. Tricia Hersey, activist and founder of the Nap Ministry, calls rest “a spiritual practice, a racial justice issue and a social justice issue”. Professor Matthew Walker on the Feel Better, Live More podcast hosted by Dr. Rangan Chatterjee referred to REM sleep as “emotional first aid”. Sleep and all its synonyms provides the necessary foundation for scaffolding resilience so how can we access it?

Oftentimes, I witness my clients overwhelmed by the amount of care that they have to show in all areas of their life. The oft-quoted but unrealistic idea of “self-care” feels unattainable. Self-care becomes another commitment that they have to check off their to do list rather than an intentional ritual to self-regenerate—especially when already fatigued. As sleep lays the groundwork for all other forms of self-care, I argue that it should be approached first. 

What is one small step that you can take today to improve your relationship to rest? How can you find accountability in your action? Perhaps you tell a friend or family member about your small change, and request that they check in with you about it regularly. Maybe your technology can assist by providing an alarm or reminder alert on your phone. Although the healing work of sleep occurs in solitude, the pathway to better rest doesn’t have to happen in isolation. For ideas on how to improve your sleep, check out the Sleep Foundation’s recommendations. 

References

Egan, K. J., Knutson, K. L., Pereira, A. C., & von Schantz, M. (2017). The role of race and ethnicity 

in sleep, circadian rhythms and cardiovascular health. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 33, 70-78.

Khurshid, A. (2018). Comorbid insomnia and psychiatric disorders: An update. Innovations in 

Clinical Neuroscience, 15(3-4), 28-32. 

About Me

Marielle Grenade-Willis is a current counseling intern with People House and a master’s student at the University of Colorado – Denver. With a B.A. in Sociology/Anthropology and a background in dance, dramatic, and vocal performance, she applies a somatic and systemic approach to the individualized work of counseling. Marielle works from a client-centered, experiential, narrative, and trauma-informed perspective with her individual clients. Prior to People House, she worked extensively in nonprofits focused on animal conservation, food access, and refugee welfare; and has had her poems read and published throughout the Front Range and beyond.

If you are interested in working with Marielle, you can reach her at mariellegrenadewillis@peoplehouse.org or 719-428-6267. 

I highly recommend watching the Netflix documentary “Disclosure: Trans lives on screen,” if you haven’t already. It is directed by Laverne Cox, a transgender actress and activist, who acted in Orange is the New Black among other shows. All the people who speak in the documentary are transgender individuals and they examine how transgender people have been represented in the film and television industry until now. 

I also listened to Laverne speak in an interview with Brene Brown, on Brene’s podcast “Unlocking Us” [June 17, 2020]. (also very highly recommended) Aside from just being incredibly eloquent, Laverne is just beautiful strong voice for transgender inclusion and transgender rights. One thing I found especially powerful is how she discusses how the more visibility and inclusion that transgender people face… the more push back they experience. 

Transgender visibility is changing so quickly that it is hard to keep up. I help facilitate a Friends and Family of Transgender People support group and I regularly have conversations about those changes and how to adjust to the changing social landscape, especially with parents of teenagers. It is not because trans/gender non-conforming people are visible or that there is more acceptance that we are seeing more people identifying as such. They were always there it is just now they can find words, expression and community to validate and express their identity. And creating an inclusive space for gender expression, expansiveness, transgender people is so important to making this world a safe place for people to live their authentic selves.

In my experience, learning how to be inclusive and serious about using pronouns correctly is one of the most important ways we can support trans inclusivity. A lot of people ask me about how to approach someone and ask their pronouns. Or they feel really flustered if they mess up. Here are some very simple and very important tips for being gender inclusive. 

1. Before asking the other person, introduce yourself with your own pronouns. “Hi, I’m Steph. My pronouns are she/her/hers”. This does a whole lot to normalizing bringing pronouns into the conversation without putting someone else on the spot. It also sets the example and precedent that you cannot assume a person’s gender by looking at them, which is very important for creating a safe and inclusive space. 
2. Practice using they/them pronouns. Yes, people are still getting used to using they/them as a singular pronoun but get used to it, it’s not going away. 
3. When you mess up, correct yourself and move on. No need to make a big deal out of it, but the correction is essential. 
4. Make introducing your pronoun part of protocol when doing group introductions and ask people to put their pronouns on their name tags. 
5. And last but not least, it is simply “pronouns”, not “preferred pronouns”.
6. Practice using gender neutral language like “Folx”, instead of “Guys”, “girls”. 

There are many, many resources out there on How to be a Trans Ally. You just need to google it to find many more helpful resources and guides that will help explain all the complicated things about gender and gender terminology.  You can also email me if you have questions or would like some resources.

Stephanie Boulton, MA LPCC (she/her/hers) is a counselor in private practice and is part of the People House Community. She also volunteers with Out Boulder County, co-facilitating a support group for Friends and Family of Transgender/Gender Non-Conforming People. Stephanie has a background working with a diversity of people in outdoor settings and draws from attachment theory, body-based and experiential therapies, as well as ecological and feminist approaches. Stephanie’s website can be found at www.soulterracounseling.com or you can email her at steph@soulterracounseling.com.