I've lately been contending with the rarity of my skillset.
My friends are remarking more frequently about what I’m able to witness, hold, and the tone I curate in the space. I never think of what I know as odd, but it is a highly specialized skillset which I possess, and it IS rare, even in this work I do now.
It's been a while since I tried being held by a coach, but I hear from clients and potential clients things that reflect my frustrated experience as an enormous person looking for holding.
I don't do crisis work any more, but that's my level of training. I worked for three years in juvenile corrections, and now I serve a HIGHLY responsible and attuned group of people. They're sometimes wary and then in awe of what I can call out of them and hold. For me, it's light work.
I have training in being directly insulted and assaulted and doing repair work from that level of harm, depersonalizing direct violence.
People who meet me, in the context of my work or anywhere else, often remark that they feel strangely comfortable around me, at ease, as if we know each other. I am not surprised—what is rare for them is common for me.
I have training to build relationships with people who do not want to be around me, do not want to be where they are, do not want to engage with what I've been tasked to serve them. I can foster connection from this disadvantage; of course I can foster it with every advantage.
I share that I do just what I want to do, I share that I connect with people who display the most exquisite forms of relating, I share the way my life is free of conflict, and I can see how there's doubt about how that can all work out.
But I have a set of skills for meeting and diffusing conflict such that I can create harmony and engage harmonically without booting every misbehaver from my life OR hosting space for their misbehavior.
I know the ways of honoring connection as it asks for closeness AND for distance.
I know the practice of trust and safety that stays in place no matter how the world treats me.
I know how to hold the ENTIRE thing, so I know that I don't have to.
The techniques and skills I have mastered are ones that can solve the largest, most hopeless problems with the least enthusiastic collaborators.
Of course they work magic in your highly functional life, with the people who really want to love you well.
