If you’ve been anywhere near my socials lately, you know that I just released a new song. It’s the title track to the new album, “Bend in the Middle,” which comes out October 18th. But this single, or “buoyant new release” as one reviewer called it, starts things off on purpose. Yes it’s high-energy, catchy, and makes a groovy dance track. But the reasons I led with it are much different than that, and have more to do with my ongoing career as a licensed therapist.
On the path to becoming a professional counselor, I was required to undergo many hours of my own therapy, digging in the dirt as it were to better understand what made me who I am. One thing I discovered then and continued to learn in my role as a therapist for others, is that we all tend to receive feedback from the world about the parts of us that don’t quite fit. This is especially true in our upbringing - hello middle school - but begins way earlier than that. We often internalize these messages that we are too this, or not enough that, and we mistakenly come to believe the story (which, for the record, is a narrative rooted plainly in the discomfort of a caregiver who, instead of tending to their own dysregulated nervous system, tried to enforce a different behavior from the offender so they wouldn’t have to feel their feelings). We, being little humans, typically prioritized this feedback, because who wants to upset Mom (or whomever)? So we created a split. We cut ourselves off from different aspects of our being, in the hopes that we would then fit in a bit better, and therefore receive all the love and affection we require.
As you can imagine, this split, coupled with the ensuing years of a now-contorted posture, has long-term implications for our health, sense of wellness, our ability to engage in healthy relationships, to manage our own nervous system, and to generally assume a sense of autonomy and responsibility as an adult in the world. It stands to reason that most us who survive into adulthood had to manage the transition from listening to our parents (or teachers, grandparents, nanny’s, whomever had authority) to listening to our own inner voices. Some of us learned to do that quickly, and assumed adulthood in our 20’s. Some of us (late bloomers) took longer, waiting until our 30’s, 40’s and beyond to start feeling like full fledged adults.
This is all the context for what it means to me to learn how to Bend in the Middle. It starts with getting our eyes off of what other people are doing, and what they think about what we are doing. Let’s keep our eyes on our own paper, so to speak. Work on our own sense of being in alignment with who we really are, instead of so focused on the perceived “ills” of the world.
Bending in the Middle means being flexible. Going with the flow, trusting that the Universe is working on your behalf, even if the present circumstances make that difficult to believe. It means training ourselves to look for the beauty, and to talk about it. Take more pictures, witness more sunsets. Breathe. Life is magical.
Our problem’s our disconnection
Our well intended split
But we can tune back into the goodness again
By loving all the parts that don’t fit
We’ve got to work it out from the inside
We’ve got to pull the sheets from the bed
Like everybody else I have the typical fantasies
But then the battle comes, then the battle comes
If we don’t start to Bend in the Middle