Thank you to everyone who registered for the Trust Your Life Coaching Project where, from May 1-31, I am gifting 20 coaching calls over 31 days.
Calls began this week <3 I’ve been writing on Substack weekly since April 2020, and it’s a total dream to chat with you and see your faces and hear what’s on your hearts and minds.
*If you didn’t have a chance to register and the terms of the coaching project speak to you, reach out and I’ll get you on the calendar*
I want to trust in the universe so much that I give up playing God. I want to stop struggling to hold things together. I want to experience such security that the concept of “allowing” —trusting that the appropriate forms will emerge—ceases to be scary. I want to surrender my fear of the universe and join with everyone I know in an organization that opens willingly to its environment, participating gracefully in the unfolding dance of order.”
―Margaret Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for any length of time you know I have somewhat of an obsession with the why behind human behavior and how so many of the ways we tend to default operate keep us from living lives in which we feel baseline good about who we are and how we’re living.
This obsession evolved into an interest in chaos theory. This was the result of a pattern I noticed my first year of coaching. At the time, I was working full-time as a recovery coach, working for a now dead organization, that, prior to its implosion, had delivered me to my own recovery. I worked with hundreds of clients during my tenure, some for as briefly as four weeks, others for many months, and others still who continue their work with me to this day. For most, if not all of them, I was often the first and sometimes the only person they’d ever opened up to about the way they were struggling. Meeting someone in their moment deepest struggle is sacred. It’s a gift I take seriously, because it’s the moment around which so much change can begin to unfold, spiral, emerge.
To say I was—am—invested is a gigantic understatement.
The means by which a person enters recovery (or whatever word you prefer—I’m attached to plenty of things, but labels aren’t one of them) are as unique as they are. But the methods by which they stabilize and begin to recover are pretty predictable.
As my coaching experience deepened, certain patterns emerged. There were specific boxes that when checked would more often than not lead to some fresh successes:
Creating a toolkit.
Learning to “force the pause,” and “play the tape forward.”
Finding community, either in real life or virtually—even one trustworthy person could be more than enough.
Experimenting with different strategies to address stress and discomfort.
Making space to listen to one’s inner self, and then getting curious about the voices and stories rattling around inside.
Drinking lots of water, getting in some consistent movement, improving sleep quality.
Viewing slips and stumbles as opportunities for reflection and learning, rather than another reason to self-flagellate.
Enacting boundaries where helpful.
You can see how these things would start to move a person in a more helpful direction.
But there was one pattern that stood out for its strangeness and unpredictability.
When people got to what was ultimately the tail-end of their drinking—which is to say, those last weeks or months, or sometimes years, before they were finally done—their behavior would often get a little bizarre.
➡️ They might have racked up dozens of days of abstinence, only to be waylaid by something small they’d been navigating up to then with grace and aplomb.
➡️ Or, the voice inside their head that urged them to drink suddenly reached a fever pitch after several days or weeks of quiet.
➡️ Or, on the everyday drive home from work, they might find themselves in the parking lot of the familiar liquor store, having no recollection of how they even wound up there.
Bizarre. Sideways.
Chaotic.
I noticed this phenomenon because I had experienced it myself. What I describe above is my story. Discovering that it wasn’t unique to me, and that not only was it not unique to me, but that it actually seemed to be a feature of change, not a bug, fascinated me to no end. It still does, hence my continued forays down multiple rabbit holes.
So I set out to answer some questions: why did this happen? And not just why, but what? What was this about, really?
If only I’d kept track of some of those early Google search terms, but they were probably something like “chaos and recovery” or, “chaos and addiction” or some such. None of the results moved the needle on my understanding; mostly, it was just confirmation of what I already knew, which was that….addiction and recovery can be chaotic.
Um, DUH, Google.
I wanted to understand why.
Since the word “chaos” was in “chaos theory,” I forayed in that direction. I’m forever happy I did, because what I learned gave me a framework for not only deepening my understanding of how addiction and recovery function, but also, for how life functions. It’s also shaped my worldview and my experience of being human, which in turn has shaped how I coach.
Addiction is an inherently chaotic system. What I’ve learned is that so is life.
Life is fundamentally unpredictable, unstable, and chaotic. And instead of moving with life as life is, what do we do? We fight to control, manage, predict. My struggle with substance was the result of a failed effort to control how my life felt. It was a symptom, a response to feeling utterly out of control.
It just so happens that my method for addressing this lack of control still has stigma attached to it. But there are plenty of other more culturally smiled upon ways of trying to manage chaos. You know the ones: I’m talking overwork, perfectionism, busy-ness. “Being productive.” Ay, I feel nauseous just typing all that out.
The moment I began to be in relationship with chaos, instead of constantly trying to manage and control it, was the same moment I began to be in relationship to my *actual* life, rather than the *idea* of my life. It was at this moment that I began to *receive* my life, instead of constantly *driving* it toward some conclusion I didn’t even know that I wanted.
This doesn’t mean that my life doesn’t still get weird and hard. Of course it does. But I can say that life feels like far less of a fight. I can say that I have, well, more of a say in how my life is going, instead of feeling like I’m just being dragged along by someone else’s agenda. And, best of all, I can say that when things do get hard, I can trust myself to be with, and take action around, whatever is arising (instead of fleeing/numbing/anesthetizing).
Chaos is a Friend of Mine is an invitation into a new conversation about how embracing CHAOS might actually offer you the freedom you’re convinced is on the other side of all that neverending micromanaging. It’s an invitation to consider a way of being that isn’t contingent on perpetuating systems that are in collapse—a way of being that supports all life.
🌀 Details below. Mark your calendars, register, and see you soon 🌀
WHAT: Learn about Chaos Theory and its practical application for building personal and collective resilience through uncertainty.
You will consider how disorder, unpredictability, and lack of control are natural parts of change and growth, and discover a model through which you can reconstruct the default narratives you have about yourself and the world.
You'll leave the workshop with a concrete framework you can apply toward imagining, creating, and living a new future beyond the limitations in possibility insisted upon by the culture-writ-large.
COST: FREE
The workshop is 75 minutes plus a Q+A/conversation that will go fifteen minutes or as long as there are questions/comments.
*There will be a recording so please register even if you can't make it live <3
SELF MADEisa call to deeply connect with the self—self-knowledge, self-trust, self-development—and then to make, small step by step, a life that you savor.Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Certified Integral Coach, and Holistic Recovery Guide, based in San Francisco, CA.
Click here to learn about working with me 1:1 and/or here to sign up for a complimentary Alignment Session.
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