Through the last year, we have been doing our “Humans of MHT” series, where each of our clinicians has had an opportunity to share a word that resonated from David Whyte’s book, “Consolations.” This month, we have the privilege of hearing from Dr. Michelle Harwell, as she shares with us what it looks like to live our lives with a robustness that breaks our heart open for all the beauty and sincerity that the world has to offer us, even in the heart breaking and tumultuous moments.
Below you will find the interview transcript.
Lauren Furutani: Round two!
Michelle Harwell: Round two!
LF: Michelle’s got the mic. So we are continuing on in our series of the words we chose from David Whyte’s “Consolations.” The words that resonated deeply for ourselves, for our work. So Michelle, tell me about the chapter that you chose.
MH: Yeah, well the word that I chose, which I am going to cheat a little, because I don’t think I can talk about this word without talking about another word, but, I chose robustness. I think it is probably a word you have heard me say. I think why I love that word so much, is that it is really about showing up. It is a sturdiness, it is engaging the world wholeheartedly. To also kind of understand that we are not entitled to life going any particular way, that we show up and work with the pieces that we have.
This year has taught me a deeper understanding of the idea of robustness. I think it is about heartbreak. Living this last year and the collective trauma, physical vulnerability, racial injustice, I think it’s untenable, the amount of heartbreak we’ve experienced collectively. In the last six months myself, I have enduring a couple of heartbreaks personally to me that have ushered in a season of grief.
I don’t think I can talk about robustness without talking about heartbreak, given the year we’ve lived and what the vulnerability and heartbreak of this year has tutored me in understanding what it means to step into and dialogued with and be robust in like we’ve lived. I think in my younger years, robustness could have a sense of toughness. I can endure this, I can take this, come at me with it. What I believe this year has tutored me in is this idea of robustness and vulnerability. How I’ve been thinking about it of late is how close in degrees our heart break is to our heart breaking open.
LF: Yeah
MH: Our threshold of our robustness is our ability to stay in conversation with our heartbreak long enough to make it to the other side of breaking open to things like tenderness, to the ability and sincerity to recognize our heart breaking is a sincere nod to true love that has happened, a lived life. If we shut down in that space or are tough and endure it, verses allow ourselves to be broken, allow ourselves to be impacted and grieve what is lost, we gain a deeper sense of integration and longing — being able to hold on to what we want to go after in the world.
“Our threshold of our robustness is our ability to stay in conversation with our heartbreak long enough to make it to the other side of breaking open to things like tenderness, to the ability and sincerity to recognize our heart breaking is a sincere nod to true love that has happened, a lived life”
LF: Yeah I love that. I think it takes wisdom to be able to camp out long enough in the pain of heartbreak in order to allow for that to break open something new. It sounds like this year has contributed to some growth for you, a new way of learning to be with yourself robustly in painful parts. I can only imagine that that has impacted how you show up for your clients, that that changes something too, when it clicks for us personally.
MH: Yeah, I think one of the things I am noticing this year is how easy it is in heartbreak, when we lose the thing we longed for, or we don’t get it, or when we have to reconcile with this illusionment, we tend to ask why, “why me, why this?” We get stuck in this sense of battling the heart break instead of realizing that it is a part of living. If we can move into the vulnerability of living and the fact that we get to try, we get to long, and come back around and try again. I think the idea that I really hope for with my clients, is the hope of ushering them across the threshold, to endure heart break into a new place, integrating it into their human experience. Rather than “why is this happening to me?” it becomes, you know you are getting into heart breaking open territory when it is “why does this happen?” It is not the question you are asking but how you are asking it.
You can feel a difference when the client and myself can contend with and live the question. Often our clients come in and they ask questions, they’ve experienced trauma, they’ve experienced the hurts and pains of the living and the loving and the loss and pains that happen, and the “why me” happens, but when that shifts into a “why?”
LF: Curiosity. I think I am hearing curiosity instead of “why!!”
MH: Yeah, the heaviness of the “why”
You know what’s interesting, I was thinking of this, Lauren. I am turning 42 in a few days and have you ever listened to “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?”
LF: I have heard of it but no I haven’t. Tell me about it!
MH: Well, so there is this aspect to the series that they go to the computer and say “what’s the meaning of life?” and it spits out 42. The meaning to life is 42 and basically the whole series is about, “this is the answer, but you don’t know the question you’re asking.” I think about 42 is the answer to existence, but I am living my question, right? I have the answer, but I don’t even know what the question even is. Somehow that speaks to me in the sense of, heartbreak demands that there are questions that aren’t going to be answered. There are ways in which the pains of life don’t make sense. it comes alongside the sense of, with that kind of shattering or lack of knowing or uncertainty, we also get the opportunity to love, to connect, to be awake in the world. Those things dance together.
LF: Yeah and it is so hard to not have things go the way that you imagined or hoped and it is a humble reminder that we just don’t know how things are going to go, there is uncertainty. A helpful thing for me at some point of realizing is that there is also so much freedom in accepting that we don’t know how things are going to go. This goes back to how you were describing the two different ways of thinking of robustness, the first way feels a little more set in, okay maybe things don’t always go, but I will be okay and i’ll keep going and I will find solutions and I will barrel through and I’ll be strong through it verses a much deeper wisdom in humility, acceptance, allowing for the heart break, for the open possibility of who knows what might come.
MH: Yeah, the simple truth that in going after love and after things in this world, we are likely to be undone. It is like that Judas Butler quote, is like if we are not undone by the relationships we’re in, what are we doing? That’s the truth of it, that’s the mess of it. It’s all one package.
David Whyte, when he talks about robustness, is in that coming out of our isolation, moving from heart break, grieving the loss of something, and coming out of the isolation, and coming back out into the world and trying again. With the wisdom that loss can happen again and it’s worth doing over and over again and trying in our half assed attempts or half baked and working it out as we go. It is like the idea of the okayness of not being okay.
LF: Yeah, I think we forget that the experience of grief or letting ourselves grieve and really feel it into heart break is such an honoring act of love, of what we’ve loved, and man that doesn’t feel good necessarily, but also there is something so beautiful about letting ourselves grieve and I don’t know if we think about it that way often enough.
MH: I like how you said that, because I think it connects with that word that was coming to my mind, sincerity. Letting our heart break is to acknowledge the sincerity of our love and our desire, which I think then sets up to this idea of our heart breaking open to the world, to be open to all kinds of splendor and ways in which things cross our path. Yes, hard things like this year and the devastation of really coming to know inequities and racial and social injustice and bearing the weight and the grief of knowing that deeply, to coming back out into the world and breaking open to a deeper call and longing to work hard and be in the mess of cleaning up the uncleanable. There’s no putting humpty dumpty back together again. There’s something noble in the act of staying in it, even when we have been exposed to the shattering mess of humanity.
“ Letting our heart break is to acknowledge the sincerity of our love and our desire, which I think then sets up to this idea of our heart breaking open to the world, to be open to all kinds of splendor and ways in which things cross our path. ”
LF: Yeah, that is truly robust. When you talked about allowing it to lead us into a deeper calling, that really resonated. I think living a robust life does allow you to be more deeply connected to your calling and to others and in relationship. The ability to live in it and through it together. That was beautiful.
MH: We’re doing the book of David and even though there’s not a book of Mary, there’s a Mary Oliver quote that I think speaks to this. Sometimes in my life I try to do something so grand and my words become so abstract, but I think what’s so great about poetry is the felt sense of what I’m talking about, the feeling of what it is like to walk through heartbreak and to find a breaking open that is really about robustness, so I thought I would a poem by Mary Oliver that exemplifies that.
So this is called, “Lead” by Mary Oliver and it is almost a storied poem.
Here is a story to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one, of nothing we could see.
A friend told me of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one just where that is.
The next morning this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.
LF: I feel like we could just end there with the words of Mary Oliver and the invitation to allow our hearts to break and break open.
MH: Thank you Lauren
LF: Thanks Michelle for sharing!
Dr. Michelle Harwell, PsyD, LMFT is an expert trainer, respected speaker, and licensed therapist in trauma and attachment. She is noted for her specialization in areas of development, attachment, trauma, and neuroscience, and her ability to communicate complex topics with clarity and humor. Michelle completed her PhD in Psychoanalysis from The Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis. She received her BA in English Literature from University of Oklahoma, MA in Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary, and MS in Marriage and Family Therapy from the Fuller Graduate School of Psychology.
Lauren Furutani, MA, LMFT is an advocate for emotional, physical, spiritual, and social health. She blends her psychodynamic and relational orientation with her down-to-earth personality to bring both complexity and ease to the therapeutic space. Lauren received her MA in Counseling Psychology from National University and BA in Psychology & Social Behavior from University of California Irvine. She serves as the Executive Director at MHT.