Episode 22: Do I need an emotional support redneck?
a conversation with Patrick Barnes about how to build new pathways to discipline after accepting an autism diagnosis and rejecting coping strategies like disordered eating and self-punishment
You’re gonna want to read this interview if you’re curious about how neurodivergence might impact your approach to athletic training. You’re gonna want to read it if you’re curious about what the kink community can teach us about trauma-informed training. You’re gonna want to read it if you’ve ever asked yourself, “Do I need an emotional support redneck?”
Probably you do.
For the last installment in our series of conversations about trauma-informed training, we’re talking with Patrick Barnes. Patrick is based in Oakland and he is the swiss army knife of movement coaches. He coaches ballet, weightlifting, powerlifting, strongman, parkour, kettlebells, martial arts, swordfighting, and basic gymnastics. This is the last interview in our series of conversations about trauma-informed training, and it’s a fun one.
If you’d rather listen to our chat, pop over here:
Patrick and I used to throw around concrete stones and schlep sandbags to and fro. I met him seven or eight years ago at a workshop in Berkeley. I was there to learn about the sport of strongman. I had never tried it before. I was intimidated by the whole scene, but my curiosity got the better of me. And I’m so glad. I showed up, and fell in love with doing weird meathead stuff. I got invited to join a strongman group that Patrick ran in the back of a crossfit gym called Grassroots, and that’s how we started training together.
I’m excited for you to get to know him, too. Patrick’s available for personal training, hybrid remote coaching, and something that he calls “movement problem solving.” If you have a persistent problem that is hindering your existing practice and you want to workshop that problem, Patrick can do that. Check out his website for more info.
This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.
Meet Patrick Barnes
Kelly: Patrick, I'm so excited you're here. Thank you for talking with me today. Will you introduce yourself and talk a bit about the kinds of movement practices that you coach and the ones that you do for yourself these days?
Patrick: Absolutely. My name is Patrick Barnes. I currently coach and have coached a plethora of things, maybe not everything, but a lot of things – weightlifting, powerlifting, strongman, parkour, dance, sword fighting, martial arts, some basic gymnastics.
My current personal practice is always a work in progress. Right now most of my training is kettlebells, dance and circus. I haven't really done competitive strongman in a while, although I'll still toss sandbags around because I like them, but my own training has been a really interesting evolution over the past four years through the pandemic. That’s a whole conversation in and of itself!
Kelly: Can you talk about where you live and work and the kinds of spaces where you tend to coach people?
Patrick: I'm in Oakland. I have a warehouse in Fruitvale, a live/work space. I coached CrossFit for a long time, which I feel dirty saying. I was one of the many reluctant CrossFit coaches. I started CrossFit in the very early days of CrossFit – I was 23 – and the entire modality and culture of CrossFit was three things. It was:
I'm right, you're wrong.
Work harder.
And my dick is bigger than yours.
I feel like that’s how CrossFit in that era can be described. So as a 23-year-old boy with self-worth issues, it was exactly what I wanted to do to punish myself. And then I moved away from it and was very much like, “This is not what I ever want to do again.”
But then I ended up at Grassroots CrossFit, where I met you. I was training strongman there, and the owners kept asking, “When are you going to coach CrossFit?” I was like, “I don't fucking coach CrossFit.” Then I trained there for three or four years, and I was like, “Actually, you guys run a really positive space. This community is really, really good. And I would be delighted to coach for you guys.” I just recently left coaching CrossFit there in January, but I still do some private training there. I have a gym in my warehouse and that is most of what my actual coaching work looks like right now.
Kelly: Oh, that's cool. How has it been to transition and get to work in your own private space?
Patrick: Oh my God. The downsides are I don't quite have as much equipment as I'm used to having, and I don’t have quite enough space. But let me tell you, having control over the environment is amazing. Also, being able to just walk down a couple of flights of stairs and be in my gym has been just divine.
One of the ways that I'm coaching right now is I do personal training. I much prefer to do a combination of minimal personal training – to do technique work – and then working with people that are motivated enough so that I'm not necessarily hands-on all the time. After a certain point I want to be able to say, “Here's your programming. Here's what you're doing.”
But in the past, when I've done programming, there's not nearly as much personal investment as I like. So I like to see the people that I'm working with at least once a month, making sure that everything's going, making sure that there's still a connection maintained, and that everything is working well. That’s an advantage to coaching group classes and things like that. You're constantly present in the space, but that's a whole lot more social energy.
Unmasking and Deskilling
Kelly: Yes! You mentioned that, during the pandemic, your own personal movement practices evolved. What are the things that you notice internally or externally that prompt a change in your own programming or the communities that you’re training with?
Patrick: Well at the risk of diving face-first into it, the biggest thing that changed for me over the past four years is I stopped using self-hatred as a tool for training, which –
Kelly: Oh cool! Me, too. Good job.
Patrick: Yeah, right? But let me tell you, it fucked up all of my practices. And the other thing that happened is I finally accepted an autism diagnosis, which came with a whole host of skill regression. So those two things coming together meant that I hadn't realized that one of the things that I relied on for my entire life – in a way that not only was I really proud of, but was an identity marker – is that I was one of the most disciplined people I'd ever met, period. Like if I said I was gonna show up and do a thing, I would show up. I would be there at 5:00 AM every single day. I never missed a workout.
Pretty much all of that discipline was built off of a foundation of, “Well, I'm going to do this because I am fundamentally unworthy and this is the pathway towards worthiness.” And if I removed that belief, that skill went away. My discipline evaporated in a way that was really hard for me to engage with for a long time. And that, coupled with the skill regression that happens when you start unmasking, was wild. There were a whole bunch of identity crises that I had around my own training because training and being strong and being disciplined were all huge parts of my identity, and they just vanished. That’s what it felt like.
One of the things that's been happening over the past year is I’m treating myself almost like someone who is brand new to training. So much of that is just habit-building. It matters way less what you're doing or whether you're doing the most effective or most intense thing so much as you're actually getting into the habit of showing up and being able to hold yourself accountable. The practice that I'm right in the middle of is very simple. I'm just doing 500 kettlebell swings a day. I do other stuff consistently, but I was like, “What if I just actually made the time to do daily practice?” It's simple and it's approachable. I can do it wherever I am. It doesn't take that long.
Part of that game is just getting back into having discipline, and then also giving myself permission to not be strong anymore, which is really hard because I was competitively strong.
Kelly: Oh, dude. Yeah. I am so delighted that we’re talking about this. I feel a lot of points of connection to what you're describing – coming from different factors and different contexts. But I'm gonna try and organize my questions so I don't lose too many of the threads. But this is so great. First thing, would you mind explaining unmasking and why unmasking would be connected to skill regression?
Patrick: Oh, totally. So I'm going to use an analogy that I really, really love. So I want to use the metaphor of language acquisition to tie this in. So when we're learning language, if you've got a child that knows what a cow is, for example, and then they see a dog and they might look at the dog will be like, “Cow!” And you might look at the child and be like, “No, no, no, no. That's not a cow. That's a dog.” They've learned the pathway of “a dog” through the pathway of “not cow.” If you were to spontaneously remove “cow” from their brain, their knowledge of “dog” would disappear. It's there, but they wouldn't have the ability to access it because their brain has learned that pathway, that language through “not cow.”
So one of the things that happens in masking is that you are constructing an entire identity and way of being, which is a whole bunch of neural pathways, through a series of constructed personalities or masks. When you stop using those masks, you lose access to the skills that were built or learned from the place of those masks. It's not that I don't have discipline somewhere inside of me. It's that my brain only knows one route to it, and it is a route that I am no longer willing to take because it is unsustainable and damaging to me. My coaching has also had to develop because I realized one of my masks was the “coach mask.” It’s how I can be socially acceptable in the world. I'm rambling a little bit, but did that actually answer the question?
Kelly: That's not rambling. That was great. I initially got to know you as a coach. We met in the strongman training group at Grassroots CrossFit. It was such a lovely place to train. And the strongman group was like, the even more weird, even more open and flexible and queer space inside a place that was already so lovely. I got to know you and delight in you in that coach and training-partner framework. So it would be really interesting to me to hear how the coach role was a useful mask.
Patrick: So there's a few layers of it. Most of my masks were about being useful. This is why I used the phrasing, “I stopped hating myself.” One of the things that has been the most transformative for me in the past four years is deciding that I have value. Because a lot of the things that I'd internalized for most of my life were that I had to earn value. That was how I was allowed to exist in space. A bunch of this comes from having grown up in the ballet world which is incredibly toxic. There's a whole bunch of gendered things here as well. Regardless, I think that my coach mask was very much about being good at things. Also one of the skills that I've had my whole life – and this is related to being autistic and having your special interest be how the body works – is I understand things. My capacity to communicate that understanding usefully made me feel like I belonged in spaces.
Kelly: Yes, you're really good at communicating the things that you understand. And very kind. It's not just that you're skillful in the nuts and bolts of the content, but the methodology, the way that you do it is really special. I don't want to derail you too much. Just wanted to say, “Yes!”
Patrick: Thank you. I really appreciate that. That's something that was kind of a curated skill set. That’s one of the things that I wanted to do in all of my coaching, because I know what it's like to feel like you are not valuable and I know how transformative it can be to feel yourself becoming more powerful. But to go back to actually answering the question, coaching was very much a way for me to take a special interest and both be really useful and have a container in which I could gush about this thing that I care about and no one's going to look at me weird. Cause I can't help it. If I'm into something, everybody around me is going to hear about it. But if I'm coaching, then everybody wants to hear about it.
Kelly: Yeah, they're there for it. And the enthusiasm is actually one of those affective things that people expect in fitness. The high-energy, fast-pace, high-enthusiasm trainer is the standard.
Patrick: So that was the coaching mask. One of the things that I think is funny, especially as I was coaching CrossFit, is that I'm not a cheerleader coach. I'm a technical coach. I'd be so invested in talking about movement and correcting movement. And then when people were working out, and it came time to tell people to work harder, I'm like, “I'm not here for that. You don't need me for that. If you don't want to work hard, I can't help you.”
Kelly: CrossFit tends to self-select for people who are there to work hard anyway. It's like, “You guys don't need that. You need me to slow you down and teach you how to snatch properly because you just wanna blast through this W.O.D.”
Patrick: A thousand percent. Yep. Grip it and rip it, baby!
What do we do without self-hatred?
Kelly: As you have been unmasking and finding ways to do what coaches do, but from an unmasked place, or as you engage with a practice of 500 kettlebell swings a day but doing it from a different place that's not like self-hatred, how have you done it? Like what is it? I'm asking partly because, as you know, I had an eating disorder for a really long time and I engaged in really intense training. Athletic accomplishment was part of my attempts to manage the intensity of my body and to manage discomfort around taking up space. For the last six to ten years, I’ve been trying to figure out how to engage in movement practices from a different place. I’ve had to de-skill and deal with being weak. Everything you were describing has been a part of my experience of recovering from my habit of not eating food and using exercise to manage the size, shape, and intensity of my body. I'm asking for very selfish reasons how you figure this out.
Patrick: God, I identify with so much of that. I don't know if we've actually talked about this. I've also had a fair amount of disordered eating in my life. I mean, it comes with the territory and growing up in ballet, and then I put some of that into competing in strongman with weight classes. I was like, “Oh yeah. Sweet. This is a great excuse to obsessively manage my own diet and have a socially acceptable container for this.”
So the place that I came to this is, to be very flippant, a very autistic pathway. Using what I knew about masking and unmasking, which is to say that the neural pathways that exist in my brain for discipline are still there. What I've done is I have removed my access to them, right? Because I have removed the on-ramp, for lack of a better word. It doesn't mean they're gone. It just means that they're inaccessible right now, theoretically, as far as I understand it. My understanding is almost certainly incomplete, but it's a decent place to operate. I’ve been trying for the past couple of years to figure out a way to engage with this problem. I've done a lot of other different varieties of attempts towards daily practice. One of the things that I believe in very strongly is that you should probably take a smaller step than you're planning.
I have a very active journaling practice, but the moment I try to make something daily, it gets really, really hard for me. I'll fill a composition book every month journaling-wise. But the moment I was like, “I'm just going to make sure I do it every day,” it would fall apart. I would try to be at the barre every day. I would try to stretch every day. And I wouldn't do it. I sat down and I said, “Okay, well what were some things that you really enjoyed? Not from a self-hate motivation. Like what were the things that you viscerally enjoyed about training?” I like working hard. I actually, earnestly enjoy something that feels like it's hard to do. I like being able to be like, “That was hard. And I did it.” It was one of the reasons that I like CrossFit in the first place. I did a thing that was tangibly challenging to do. For re-engaging with 500 kettlebell swings, I was like, what if I reveled in the fact that this is not a throwaway. This is not a small step. This is a hard thing. It gives me the reward every single time I do it. This is not a small thing, right? Like this isn't just, oh, you know, stretch for 10 minutes. I'm sure a more evolved person wouldn't feel this way, but if I stretch for 10 minutes it's really hard for me to feel like that's an accomplishment. It is really hard for me to give myself any tangible psychological reward from that because my brain's like, “Well, that was fucking pathetic. You just stretched for 10 minutes. That's not worth anything, right? Good job, asshole.” I'm working on being nicer to myself, but it's a process.
Whereas when I finish 500 swings and I'm like, “This is hard.” It's doable. It's approachable. But every single day that I do it, I'm like, “No, you're actually showing up for something that is challenging.” I think at this point this year I've done like almost 60,000 swings, which is crazy! I do a lot of intense physical things. I do intense body-mod. I do hook suspension. I like courting intensity. So finding a way to have discipline that's not self destructive, that still allows me to scratch that itch, is where I've settled. And it seems to be working better than anything else I've tried, but it came from a place of finding joy in it.
Kelly: Yeah, in my mind, one reason why a kettlebell swing would be really effective for this is that the kettlebells are there. It doesn't take a lot of time to set up. The gear is right there. Also, swinging a kettlebell feels fun, at least to me and my body. There's something playful about the dynamics. It engages your whole body. There's a decent amount of technique involved, but it's not like you have to set up a yoke or something. It’s also really easy to scale back the weight of a kettlebell swing for a day where you're like, “I'm not feeling great. I'm gonna pick up this bell instead of this other bell. I’ll do what my body can do today.” There's just a lot of things built into the choice of the movement that feel like a great fit for more kindness, more presence that’s also something intense and challenging to do.
Patrick: Agreed on all points. You nailed it. Because sometimes I still fall into comparison patterns, for the first six weeks, I was like, “Well, you can't use anything under a 53 pound kettlebell.” And then a friend of mine was like, “Patrick, what if you get sick? You don't want to ruin your daily practice.” I was like, “That's a really good point.” I’ve given myself grace while still accomplishing the task.
Enthusiastic Consent + Trauma-Informed Coaching
Kelly: One of the things that prompted this series of conversations that I'm doing is an experience I had in a new gym where I got triggered and I just had a really hard time accepting the fact that that was something that was gonna happen in a gym space. I've been trying to wrap my brain around how to better take care of myself and accommodate my own needs. I am wondering how you have managed trauma-activation in your work.
Patrick: There's a couple things that I do as a coach that I believe are really effective, and I think they're really important. The first one is – and this might sound counterintuitive – I'm really aggressive about not modifying my demeanor and presentation in the way that I coach when I first meet someone. People are going to have a lot of experiences. However, I can't predict them and me trying to predict them can be a trigger factor. If I'm using the gender or size of someone as a gauge for how I treat them, that can be upsetting. As someone who's been in a lot of spaces where people treat me differently because I look different – it’s really upsetting. So the first thing that I do is I'll modify only after I've developed a relationship with you. But from the outset, you get treated exactly the same as everybody else who walks in. At least we've created a clear baseline. And then we can modify from the clear baseline.
The other thing I do that’s really valuable is I don't touch people without checking in full stop ever. And the way that I do that is more akin to negotiating in sex party communities. Because I don't say, “Can I?” I say, “Are you comfortable with this?” And if I don't get an immediate positive response, I do something else. Because oftentimes people will hesitate and be like, “I guess . . .” I'm like, “Cool, that's a no.” If I was asking if you wanted sex, and you're like, “I guess,” I'd be like, “Oh, we're not doing that.” Right?
Kelly: Yeah, that is not enthusiastic.
Patrick: It’s not enthusiastic at all. Most of the time people are like, “Yeah, of course, you're coaching.” And that's the kind of response where I’ll go ahead and modify it.
And then sometimes people will – this happens all the time when I'm coaching – people will be like, “Do I have to?” And I'm like, “No. You're a fucking adult. Make your own choices. You pay me for my opinion. I'm not God. I'm not here to dictate what you do with your life.”
Those are kind of baseline things. Engaging more thoroughly takes a deeper personal relationship. Usually I just have to trust that people are gonna be responsible for themselves, and it's my job to give them the space and sensitivity to handle their own emotions. Unless I know you well, I'm not gonna dig into your experience.
I've got personal training clients, and with them it comes up in a different way. There's a whole lot of value and worth that comes in, especially for competitors when they're in a down cycle or things aren't going their way. Helping people deal with injuries. What that means to their identity. All of those things. Those conversations can get really, really intense.
Kelly: That’s part of the coach-client or coach-athlete relationship. We're not always performing at our peak and sometimes those things come up when we're not feeling our most powerful or capable. And how do you manage yourself when you get activated in these kinds of spaces?
Patrick: The answer is very different — how I used to manage and how I currently manage in this kind of unmasked state. I don't have a good answer to that because I've actually stopped doing a lot of things in group spaces since I've been unmasking, because I haven't figured out how to regulate. And so that's an interesting process. Because you know my background, the thing that I've done most in life that I started at the age of three and then did professionally is ballet. And there is no place on earth that I feel less comfortable or welcome than a ballet studio. I walk into a ballet studio and it is just like, like all eyes are on me. There is no safety or comfort. I'm a big muscular tattooed white dude. The presumption is that I'm a predator. And that's a really hard thing to navigate when it's the form that I have given most of my life to, to be totally, totally unwelcome in the space. And so the way that I used to engage was to be like, “I'm just gonna go. I'm gonna be in the corner and I'm gonna do this for myself and I don't have to talk to anybody.” As I unmask, I've found less capacity to do that.
This is more in gym spaces – some of the ways that I most mitigate my own discomfort and trauma is costume. I could rant for literally hours about clothes and how they affect how people walk through the world. But I do most of my training at this point in overalls. I have, you know, plenty of issues with showing my body. In CrossFit gyms, specifically, it's like, you're going to walk in, everybody is going to take their shirt off and it's just going to be blasted with six packs.
A lot of my challenge with my own trauma is being perceived negatively in spaces. And I hyperfixate on that. But if I have a mechanism – I probably look weird in overalls – but I can least assume that everybody is looking at me weird because I'm just lifting in overalls. And it's really comforting, right? I'm just like, “I've chosen the way in which I get to be weird,” and that's really, really comforting.
Kelly: Ha! Oh, I love this. I never thought about it that way, but that makes so much sense. I'm going to be thinking about that for a while.
Patrick: Is that guy doing stones in overalls? Yeah, that's Patrick!
Kelly: Oh, that's beautiful. Also, overalls are really practical and helpful when you think about the implements of strongman, like lifting concrete stones or sandbags or cars. Having some durable athletic apparel that's not really thin Lycra is actually, practically helpful.
You mentioned earlier that you had a story of working with a client who was activated. Do you want to share that?
Patrick: I'd be delighted to. This is an example where I fucked up and it was actually unrecoverable. I learned a lot. You've got an experience of me coaching. And one of the things that I think is very real in my coaching style is that I'm very friendly. I'm very loud. I swear a lot. And I've got a really open face and I smile all the time. One of the things I've developed – and this seems counterintuitive in having been autistic – is that I'm also hypervigilant. And one of my special interests is human social systems. So I'm really good at reading people's faces, like annoyingly, obnoxiously good. Too good for my own wellbeing sometimes.
But during the pandemic, we were all wearing masks. We were lifting outside. And so two things happened in that. I had a new member at the gym who was a smaller-framed, pretty effeminate gay man who is a partner of one of my other members. I swear a lot when I coach. I don't swear at people, but I swear a lot. I hadn't realized before this that I used my demeanor and the presence of my face and the fact that I'm smiling at you to really carry the tone that I'm presenting. But the moment I am wearing a mask and sunglasses outside in the sun, I'm just a big tattooed white dude swearing at you. And you can't see that I'm like beaming and excited to be working with you.
Kelly: Yeah, it makes the swearing completely different.
Patrick: It changes everything. And because he was wearing a mask, I couldn't see him getting upset. He kind of froze a little bit. And I was just rolling through, trying to help. I was invested. I'm engaged. When I've got a new member, I really want to show up and help. So I'm like extra paying attention to him. Like all eyes are on him because my way of demonstrating care for new members is to pay a lot of attention to them.
Kelly: Oh, so you're extra, extra at him. Oh no.
Patrick: Eventually he was like, “I'm leaving class. This is absolutely unacceptable.” And at that moment I was like, “Oh my God. I know exactly what happened. This is not something I can recover from.” I didn't realize how much I relied on my face, and this experience really changed the way that I was working with a mask.
One of the things I’d do was, at some point in the class, I would create huge amounts of distance between myself and members, like 20 feet away. I’d take my mask off and yell. It made me a lot more sensitive to other people's experience in that container, I was like, “Oh shit, I now know that I can't read anybody's face.”
Kelly: Yeah, you lost a resource that you were using to be an effective coach.
Patrick: That was definitely one of those that really, that really landed. I had to change a lot in that container. Getting back to being able to coach when I could see everybody's face was just one of the greatest reliefs, but it definitely made me think, once again, about how I am perceived and how that really can affect some people.
Kelly: Thinking about how you are perceived in a dance studio or how you are perceived in a gym in the Bay Area – a CrossFit gym particularly – there's certain assumptions of who are the default people are in those spaces. I can imagine people in a CrossFit gym seeing a tall, muscular, tattooed, white guy and making assumptions about your sexuality, making assumptions about your relationship to fat liberation, making assumptions that you might also be trying to coach people to lose weight. Because of who we assume are the people who belong or are in positions of authority inside certain spaces, you might feel compelled to find ways to try to communicate something else about yourself.
Patrick: There are very few spaces where I feel more obligated to perform gender or sexuality more than the Bay Area. When I was growing up, I grew up white trash and I did ballet and that was a whole thing. It was deeply ironic that I spent my entire childhood being called a fag to grow up to when I walk around space as a bisexual, as a queer man, if I'm walking around in the Bay Area, and because of how I present, the immediate read is straight. Especially because I present vaguely country or redneck. I chose not to be ashamed of who I am.
I remember I moved into this warehouse space, and one of my friends who’s also my neighbor said, “Yeah, as soon as you moved in, everyone's like, ‘Oh my God, did you see this guy? He looks like he's a racist, sexist white dude.’” Nobody even talked to me by the time that assessment had been made. Being perceived as safe. Having to perform queerness —I am queer — but I have to perform it in a way that you like. I do and don't sometimes. I don't like having to flag. I don't like having to perform gender for other people. It's a weird container.
It makes sense, you know, that you look at the muscular tattooed white dude and are nervous. Like that makes sense. And also I go back and forth on whether or not it's my responsibility to spend my time and energy to deal with that, especially when we're talking about masking. Do I really have to add another mask?
Kelly: Yeah. You're like, “Y 'all, I'm dealing with enough here. Could you please just give me the benefit of the doubt?”
Patrick: I'm like, “I promise I look better than you in heels. Like calm down. I just don't want to wear heels right now.”
Kelly: Hey, Lisa, is there anything that came up in our conversation that you feel like we should revisit or explain or do another take of?
Lisa: I don't think so. This was awesome to listen to. Thank you so much, Patrick, for talking through all this stuff.
Patrick: Yeah, I’m so happy that I got to talk with you.
Lessons From Kink
Kelly: Is there anything that you didn't get to say that you wanted to say?
Patrick: One of the questions that you wrote was, “Where did you learn how to navigate these skills?”
Kelly: Oh yeah, that'd be great.
Patrick: It's your call on whether or not this gets included, but my honest answer is that I found that the only place that I learned to navigate these skills with the nuance that I think it deserves, that is necessary, is the kink community. It’s the only place I've found that is really clear about – We are going to engage with the body. We are going to engage with trauma. We are going to engage with a whole bunch of things that are guaranteed to bring up things that are really triggering. How do we navigate and negotiate in ways that make that functional, in ways that make that safe? And it's a really extreme container, but I feel like the tools that are developed for extreme containers are so useful outside of those containers.
Kelly: Yes, yes. Even the concept of aftercare feels like such a radically important thing that we don't really have in other spaces where we should.
Patrick: Right. I didn't think to use this example, but I was working with a client yesterday. There's two kinds of people that I coach. There's people you need to stand behind and tell them that they can do things. And there's people that need to be grabbed by the scruff of their neck and kept from hurting themselves. He's definitely the latter. I actually know him through the hook suspension community. So his default is like, “What if I just put the intensity to 11?” After a very intense kettlebell-swing tabata with a 120 pound kettlebell – he's strong and we worked really hard – after that he’s lying down. And he says, “I cannot shake the feeling that I’m not safe.” I was like, “Cool, you did a good job.” He's like, “I don't believe that. I cannot shake the feeling that I'm not safe.” And I'm like, “Cool, let's sit there. What does it take for you to feel safe? Metabolically, what you just did was fight and kill a tiger. Can you lay on the ground and feel safe?” And he's like, “I absolutely cannot.” I'm like, “Great, let's sit with how it is possible for you to feel like you have accomplished a task.”
When we're talking about aftercare, it's like, “Great, like what is the container that we need to create so you can feel like you've done a good job?” Because I'm right. You've done a good job. I promise. Like I'm definitely the one who's right in this container. But how do we create a container where you actually are allowed to feel that? And so then it comes into this really weird game of negotiating a container or a scene or aftercare, exactly like you said. But there's a whole tool set for that.
Kelly: Oh, that's so helpful. I'm really glad that you thought to bring this up. Back when we were training together, I was trying to decide whether I wanted to end my marriage. Part of that conversation was around whether polyamory was a good fit for our relationship. And I remember you bringing tools that you gathered from the BDSM community and from your experiences with polyamory. And you said the tools you use to thrive in extreme situations can apply in all kinds of situations. Those tools were so useful in me figuring out what I needed and how to communicate what I needed. What's my responsibility? What's someone else's responsibility? So I love that this conversation ended up here. It's something that you did for me years ago that really helped me navigate a difficult time in my life.
Patrick: Oh, thank you for sharing. I'm really happy to hear that. Thank you for sharing that with me.
Kelly: You're welcome. Patrick, thank you for doing this and spending your morning with us. I have a feeling that we're going to need to do another conversation about clothing because I would love to talk with you about that.
Patrick: Oh my god, I will talk for so long about clothing and costume.
Series on Trauma-Informed Movement
Want to check out the rest of this series of essays and interviews on trauma-informed movement?