The Tactile Tongue

 A story about communication, boundaries, and relationships

It is hard to establish the words. The tactile tongue can present as an elusive creature. But the tamed tongue that flexes and rests with calculated alignment is the tongue that tells the most successful story. This is an ode to our Story and the impact it has on communication and relationships, and, on the quality of experiences and abundance that manifests for you.

 A Story defined:

Our story is told every day whether we want it or not. It is told in our physical presentation, actions/behaviors, and how we show up or how we don’t, but it is also told in every sentence, written or spoken, text or phone call, and the truth of the story can be found in the crevices tucked into the bulk of the unsuspecting conversations we have daily.  And if we dare to look closely, this is where we can find our self-doubt, trauma responses, hidden glimpses of what really wants to be said versus what is indeed being said, and where we can start to unpack the self-sabotaging language that literally drives our experiences in such a way that we dare to lie to ourselves and cheapen our potential and call it our “reality.”

 Bountiful Boundaries:

Get behind your words. Mean what the Fuck you say. How are boundaries applied or not applied to our story and what does that look like? There are many ways we can process boundaries but for the sake of brevity in this article, we are going to focus our efforts on an aspect many are familiar with called dumping. Whether you are the dumpster or the dumper, and chances are, if you’re here, you’ve played both, this is for you if you want it.

Self-sabotaging comes back to one phrase for me: lack of boundaries. I can tie nearly every self-sabotaging effort back to my lack of boundaries for myself, for my healing journey, and for others.

Recognizing when someone is not establishing boundaries in a healthy way towards you does not always come in the form of over-imposed comments or ideas, egregious acts, or obsessive interest in your affairs. It is usually a benign effort and can look very sentimental and even beautiful, especially when shared among those closest. There can be an insidious subtlety to it that can go undetected until, well, it one day becomes apparent, either because you wake up or someone else does.

This was a painful day for me when I started to wake up to these spiritually fundamental ideas. Once I initiated the thoughtful practice of making sure that everything I said, written or spoken, was in alignment with my healing journey and what I wanted at a Soul level, I didn’t realize how much of my daily dialogue would be cut. All the conditioned ways I had established to express myself in this life felt empty and void of anything meaningful. To this day, I am a much quieter person.

Every time I spoke of my disabling mental health, I felt like I was on a hamster wheel. Even though I didn’t admit it, my identity was tied to my mental health diagnoses and my trauma, and for a short time, it excused a lot of my self-loathing and self-deprecating behavior and my failures.  When I felt overwhelmed I would impulsively, with a hijacking quickness, lob bags full of my recurring sludge at people, novels, of all the ways my mental health is plaguing me, and of all the things I haven’t accomplished because of all of these things I am doing for everyone else and it was just a nonstop pity-party of being stuck in my woes. This is where it gets tricky. Because on the surface, I am going through and have been through a tremendous amount, and there have certainly been big sacrifices made. There have been deaths, sicknesses, mental illness, and addiction dynamics garbed in traumatic childhood. On the surface, I had every reason for my inflammatory responses. These were and are inflammatory times with many complexities. So, it’s an understandable story, but a very disempowering one. When I lean into the heaviness of this story, I feel my density at every level of my being. It was sucking the life-force out of me to move through my story this way, so why would I assume that it does not have that same energetic imprint or effect on someone else I am attempting to share it with? There is a saying that, in truth, you can’t unknow what you know so once I became aware of this disempowering way of moving through my challenges, I could now not unsee it from others or any other area of my life. Boundaries go both ways. They must.

Every time I dumped out my woes, I never felt lighter. I confused a band-aided shift in consciousness for “feeling better.” What I was doing inadvertently was perpetuating my story as it was, fortifying my weakness, and validating my failures and I wanted company in this. I wanted someone to be miserable with. I never said that aloud or knew it with awareness, until I did. I just didn’t want to be alone in it and masked it as “venting.” I didn’t want to feel crazy, and every time I was not met at my low level in my story because someone didn’t know how to respond, or was operating at a higher frequency than me in the moment, or perhaps even going through their own quiet struggles, I felt somehow slighted or unheard, even though that was not at all their intention.

Further, every time I would see someone my age or younger succeeding or accomplishing all the things I felt were taken from me, I was incredibly frustrated and it came out in my everyday conversations with people I truly love. Worse, they were always the same conversations just told a million different ways. My story never really changed. I was a victim on repeat that could not see all the blessings that surrounded me on the periphery. I lasered in, narrowly focused. And by highlighting and constantly ruminating about my unjust disabilities in life, I was consequently cheapening and trivializing all the greatness around me, including relationships. And sadly, after I became devastatingly aware of this and made the shift, I recognized it now in conversations with others I didn’t want to have to see it in. It became excruciating. I realized I had to be far more economical with my energy, even if it came off as insensitive. I was taking on too much. Boundaries.

I also learned the very hard lesson that not everyone I truly loved would be able to move beyond the contextual assets of my newfound discovery and into applying it and reshaping their own reactivity to life’s challenges, organically shifting the power and trajectory of their own story. This is hard. It's hard to change your own behavior, but I would argue it can be even harder to now newly command it for yourself from others. It can feel like you are letting those you love down, like you might look like you are better or even hypocritical because you once-upon-a-time used to show up that way too. On the hardest level, commanding peace for yourself from a new place of awareness that others aren’t in yet can feel like you are abandoning those you love. But I would argue even further in those darker, unclear moments, we are only ever showing up as the shell of someone they think they know anyway because we don’t even know who we are, so we were never giving them our wholeness.

When you cannot show up for yourself as a whole human, there is no way, without the dramatic cost of “you” that you can truly show up and take on anyone else’s trials and karmic obstacles and you certainly can’t expect others to know how to show up for you either.

We take on these fruitless obligations and assign ourselves this fruitless responsibility of trying to soften or fix the burdens presented to us during these hard exchanges, or dumps, from loved ones. Even if the exchange is preceded or concluded with, “I am just venting.” Once you do not show up with the same level of enthusiasm that you did in times past, there will be, no doubt, some level of discomfort that did not exist previously in these moments. BECAUSE THERE ARE CONDITIONS. Programming has been established, and most likely codependency, without even realizing. No matter what, once that shifts, it is felt on some level and it challenges the comfort that was there. This must be okay for true healing. Grieve. Then let people journey the way they are meant to journey. Boundaries.

A Conclusion:

Please hear this. I am not suggesting to keep all your problems to yourself, suffering until you implode, or that indeed if you have problems you are somehow asleep. Far from it. I have LOTS of fucking problems. What I am suggesting is gaining clarity on the difference between venting or asking for guidance from a trusted loved one and chronically showing up with an onslaught of repeated heavy sludge and self-loathing peppered with statements that pretty much translate directly into “I can’t be happy until…, or I can’t be happy because…”

Please consider this, dear Soul, if you have not solved this human’s problems as a close and trusted confidant over the course of repeated conversations on chronically routine topics that never reach resolution, and sometimes for years, you won’t magically today. And by continuing to participate, you are validating their inability to take inspired action for themselves and devaluing your own deserved wellness, depleting your resources. In the end, there might be Souls that fall away, you might lose people, and that hurts, but you will gain so much more in relationships, and the application of these boundaries and updated way of telling your story will launch you into the unlimited potential that is so sweetly yours to taste.

The Five of Swords:

This article was supported and guided by the 5 of Swords in the minor arcana of Tarot. This card spoke to me in a reading and forged what would become The Tactile Tongue. The 5 of Swords is often read in its traditional form as a card of conflict and sometimes loss or defeat, in short terms. But I discern it slightly differently. An invitation is always presented in the 5 of Swords to rise in service of your own good, or...a higher good. The Swords speak to our mental faculties on this earthbound journey and involve the thought processes that seek truths. Swords represent the mind. The story that can be extracted from this card is a beautifully multifaceted one that I find to be deeply misunderstood. If you'd like to learn more about the cards and how you can leverage them for creative resolution and absolute abundance in your life, then look no further. All kinds of Tigress Tools are being assembled for your convenience. Stay Tuned...

The Tactile Tongue inspired a mini-course now in the works called:

Abracadabra, The Story You Tell is the Story You Spell. Stay Tuned...