Gabriela Gomez: Following Grief on the Path to Joy

The recording of this episode glitched out so most of my audio didn't end up coming through in the final piece. I had to go back and re-record my questions and edit them into the interview, so this may read and sound a bit awkward at times. I am but a simple human and with the help of a couple robot friends we have produced something I feel proud of!

Susie (00:00)

Welcome to Pleasure Morsels. I'm Susie Showers, your host, and we are exploring the non -normative routes to finding creative expression and pleasure. And today I have Gabriela Gomez as my guest. I'm really thrilled to have her here. Gabriela completed her master's in educational psychology from McGill University and is a registered somatic experiencing practitioner. So cool.

She combines narrative counselling techniques with somatic exploration to meet her client's whole being with care and curiosity. She has expertise in the immigrant experience, intergenerational and developmental trauma, gender identity development and diverse sexuality. Her career has taken place largely on the ground in community settings that center youth, emerging adults and the lived experiences of LGBTQ plus and BIPOC communities.

Centering her work around those most impacted by systemic oppression, her approach always strives to support the healing and amplify the brilliance that lives in the, excuse me, that lives in the bodies and hearts of all those who've experienced the world this way. Gabriella, such a treat to have you here. Thank you.

Gabriela (01:18)

Hi Susie, thanks for having me.

Susie (01:23)

What drew you to working with the body as a site of transformation?

Gabriela (01:33)

Yeah, I really love this question. I think when I first heard it, I was like, oh, it was when I got into somatic experiencing, because that's such a body based approach. But if I sort of think back, I think it was much earlier in my life. Eating disorders, actually. So I struggled with some disordered eating when I was young, I think really linked to being like a curvy Latina in a very white place and like having my body be received really differently and sort of as like, you know, inferior in lots of ways to like this like white skinny, you know, also this was like the early 2000s, right? Everybody was wearing low rise jeans, like thin was in. So I sort of experienced my body as non -normative and that I think was a pretty pivotal piece of like how I've landed where I am now.

And then I sort of in my first year of university, I was studying queer and feminist theory and I had this roommate who had a very severe eating disorder, much more severe than I had ever had. And she had images from magazines plastered all over her walls. And I was reading and learning about feminist theory and having my conception of the world expanded, learning about gender constructivism and all this juicy stuff that I had no idea about. And physically seeing that happen, seeing that those types of oppression sort of like in the body of this person that I shared a very small space with. And that really impacted me. And so I sort of I was really thinking a lot about like how body how culture writes itself on our bodies. And I sort of stuck with that and I was really interested in like clothing design and making clothes. And I had this like idea that I wanted to in my career, like create like educational programming to help youth, particularly young women and girls and like AFAB folks make their own clothes as a way of like resisting gender socialization and like unlearning the kind of ideas we have about what our bodies are supposed to look like.

And that's what got me into my master's in educational psychology. But then during my master's, I was working at a clinic for trans and non -binary youth, providing gender affirming counseling. And that was like another layer of like sort of exploding my consciousness about how like body as a site of cultural script and also as a means of resistance, right? Like seeing all these young trans kids. Yeah, just like living their own truths in spite of all of the kind of obstacles, very, very significant obstacles as we see. And then, yeah, and then there's layers and layers and layers, right? So then realizing I wanted to do more counseling, realizing I wanted to do sort of more art and community building beyond just working with girls, but really working with all different types of people across the gender spectrum and creating space for that kind of erotic aliveness of what it, there's just so much of that in gender exploration. And I was seeing trans kids show up with their sketchbooks and their notebooks and their erotic fiction that they'd been writing on their Tumblr and just how much pleasure and exploration was happening because it needed to by definition. And then I got into, yeah, counseling in a community setting, continued working mostly with queer and trans folks, started to explore my own queerness, and then got into somatic therapy, which, you know, I think it was just, again, another layer of like, the body has so much wisdom.

It's like the site of our inherent existence of nature, right? It's like, there's dirt and there's like, ocean and there's ground and there's rock and there's our bodies. And like what happens in our kind of minds and our relational fields is something else and it's all connected. But there's like such a rhythm and wisdom to how things occur in nature and that is also alive in our bodies. And so just like kind of seasons change and like things transform in the natural world like so so do they take place in our bodies and then how we move through and unlearn the kind of colonial constructs that our culture is really structured on at this moment in time, at this place, in this place that we're living in, feels like inherently has to be connected to how we experience our bodies.

Susie:

how do you tend to yourself while being a safer space for others?

Gabriela:

Yeah, I just think that's like such a juicy and important question that often gets dropped or like isn't the sort of centerpiece and it's always really helpful to be asked it because it gives me a moment to reflect and it's been a big part of my experience of being a healer is figuring that out. And I think I will always be figuring that out. But I've definitely made, like it's a place in my life where I can see that I've made a lot of progress and grown a lot because I've had to. And I really think like, you know, the only way that you can do this work, is to be like to do the work. I mean, like, you know, hold healing space for others, create, you know, support for their own transformation for people to move through the difficult moments in their lives and connect to the kind of inherent wisdom that they have in their bodies and systems and lineages and experiences. Like, I think in order to do that work with integrity, you have to be doing it yourself. Like you just have to be sort of showing up with yourself.

And I think it's a mandatory requirement of the job. I think it's confusing. I've seen therapists who are like not really doing that kind of work. And I'm like, how? Yeah, like how are you? And, you know, I think for me, when I was working in, I spent the last like seven years, seven, eight years working in like nonprofit community settings, which are really charged, intense, sites of change and also sites where like a lot of like our kind of cultural failure to like hold people well shows up like the failing of that shows up a lot in community spaces because sort of our like care matrix our sort of governmental systems our health care systems aren't holding that and so it's sort of community spaces tend to have a lot of really loving people who've experienced that in their own lives and hold that space well and end up doing with a lot less resources what should be held by the collective. So there's just a lot of burnout and pain and a lot of vicarious trauma.

And I went in, you know, young, excited, fresh out of my masters, really like so excited to hold space for people and to build my counseling skills. And within a year I was like, so burnt out, I was chronically sick. I was like in a lot of despair, because I just had really porous boundaries. No one had really taught me how to sort of do the energetic practice that you need to be able to do to like continuously and sustainably show up in the work of like loving and holding space for folks who are in a lot of despair. So I just had to learn how to do things differently. I had to kind of figure it out for myself. Nobody really taught me that. And now in my practice and, you know, I'm doing, I'm still working with community settings now that I've shifted into private practice. And I really want to, I really love doing like training and, you know, helping other folks who are in those environments learn the stuff that I've learned for myself.

But the stuff that I've learned for myself, it's a bit of a ramble. It's like, first of all, energetic hygiene. Like, you know, you brush your teeth, you, or some of us do, you know, you shower, you gotta shower sometimes, right? You gotta like, there's a grime that you kind of absorb just moving through the world. You have to sort of cut your hair once in a while, brush your hair, sleep enough hours in the night. Like we have these kind of basic hygienic practices for our bodies. And then there's like energy hygiene when you're doing healing work. Because you're just, you're sitting with people and you're absorbing so much. And, you know, like opening rituals, closing rituals, you know, sometimes at the end of a really long client day, I'll just immediately take off all my clothes and put them in the laundry. And there are like these really tangible tactile things you can do to be like, okay, now I am putting down everything that I picked up today.

and I'm like sending it back where it came from with lots of love. And that has been a game changer. So just being like, okay, there's actually like a really clear delineation between like the energetic compassionate space that I hold for others and my own experience as a human with a body. So that's been big. But then the other piece has been like exploring my own joy. Like I think I really at the beginning of this like journey of doing this work did not know what made me happy. Like I was so focused on helping other people find their way towards that kind of like love and joy, but I didn't really have it for myself.

And now it's like, I love to move my body. I love to dance. Finding my way into dance was like a big part of this journey for me. I do dance classes like a couple of times a week and dance classes that are very like kind of erotic in nature. Like it's, I do like heels dance, which is a lot of moves from pole but like off the pole um and it's really fun. Shout out to sex workers and particularly black black femmes um like a lot of the original healers yeah um so yeah really grateful to get to kind of move my body that way and um and my spiritual practice as well so like It's not necessarily something that I'm sharing with clients, although sometimes clients come curious about that. But it's like, I have my own sort of spiritual anchors for when things get really choppy in session or, you know, in a process that somebody else is in that I'm assisting. I have my kind of my guides, you know, my abuela for one is like a big anchor for me.

So when things get dicey, I've got some folks behind me kind of pulling me back and helping me be like a tree in someone else's storm and not getting my own branches tangled and pulled in, because that's not helpful for them and it's not helpful for me. And then I think the last piece is like encountering my own grief as like a regular practice. So part of that energetic hygiene also, not just be cleansing out, but also be like tending to my own grief because, you know, there's a lot of hopelessness in this world. And when you sit with lots of different people all day long, you see more of it. You just see a lot of it and you see it at a quite close vantage point and that's really it's a really honor to get to sit with people in those moments and to get to like be really up close inside of that despair when it's there but then I also need to digest it like I think this is a piece that I it took me a while to figure out it's not just cleansing it out and sending it back, there's a lot of love that I have for the people I work with and there's a lot that our world is kind of failing to do well in terms of caring for people.

And so, yeah, just regular prayer and like letting myself sit in front of my altar and like cry and scream and, you know, just feel the pain and let it kind of digest and move through me. And that's also feeds into my creative process as well and the like music that I make and the dance that I do in my own room, not in the dance studio. That's a little less extra.

Susie:

How do you know when to change up your routine?

Gabriela:

Oh yeah, I mean, I think it's like you're kind of tweaking and, you know, things get stale, rhythms or routines get stale. I noticed sometimes I sort of, I stopped doing my hygiene, my energetic rituals because I'm like, oh, it's been, things have been going good lately. Like I haven't been feeling, and then it's like, oh, no, you gotta actually just, it's like brushing your teeth. Like you gotta brush your teeth. You know, you don't only brush your teeth on days where you ate a lot of sugar, you always brush them.

Susie:

how do loss and pleasure relate in somatic therapy?

Gabriela:

yeah, I mean, my hot take is that grief and joy live in the same place. Like that they that you can't really have one without the other. Because like the fact is that like everything that you love, you will lose. Like in order to love deeply, to experience like the pleasure of life.

All that life has to offer, all that like yummy goodness, what it feels like to be really connected to somebody. You have to open in equal parts to the kind of deep grief of being alive, right? Like Pema Chodron calls it like the fundamental groundlessness of being, but it's like everyone has all sorts of different names for what that is, I mean, I'll die and everyone I love will die and we don't know what happens after that. I have some ideas. You know, you live in an apartment and you really love it and you, you know, create the space and you painted all the colors and then something happens and you have to move, right? Friendships grow and they, you know, provide really generative things and we change and transform inside of them and then they end. We go our separate ways.

There's incredible violence in our world. There's just like a deep, and I, yeah, I just think grieving, when I look back, the moments when I've been most in grief, they're hard to look back at, because it sounds so poetic or whatever, but grief is messy and hard and painful. But those are also the moments that I feel that are connected to the threads of the moments in my life when I've been most alive. when I felt like most creative, most fertile, most awake.

My brother is an addict. And so I, I move a lot through like fear of his death and then, you know, what that would be like to experience. I've gone through that for most of my life. And I just remember there was a period where things were really tough and I was walking, I was walking home most nights from work because I needed the walk and it was cold. It was still like kind of end of winter. And I would like turn my face to the sky and feel the cold air on my face. And I just felt really aware of like the trees around me, sort of talking their talk and like my feet on the ground and really, really awake and alive in my own life. Like the proximity to the possibility of his death enlivened my experience of being. And that was always really impactful for me. I was, I think that was when I started to be like, oh, like grief and grief, because I was really feeling my grief. There've been other moments where I haven't been able to because for whatever reason, my system was like protecting me from it. And I've been really numb and really disconnected. And that feels worse for me than just being inside of, you know, what's so painful and hard.

Yeah. And I think that when we, when we can really meaningfully grieve and face kind of the possibility and the inevitability of loss, then we can show up, we can show up with so much more aliveness and integrity in our relationships. Like I think when we're in fear of loss and avoiding the kind of grief that, yeah, we lose people, that's part of life. We're not as able to really honestly connect and show ourselves to each other. And connecting and showing ourselves to each other is like, that's the juice of life. That's the pleasure. I don't know if that's making sense, but I think there's like, when we avoid what's inevitable, because we are afraid to feel grief. We deprive ourselves and each other of the beautiful joy of being known exactly as we are in the moments that we're in, and confronting that we don't control the future. We just can't control the future. We want to so badly as human beings, but we just can't.

Susie:

how does grief show up in the people you work with in queer community?

Gabriela:

Yeah, yeah, I think, well, there's a lot of grief inside of queer community. There's like grief, it's kind of built into the lineage of just, you know, so many of our queer ancestors having experienced so much repression, oppression and violence. You know, the AIDS crisis being just one example. so much loss, so much grief, the violence that is still very much alive. Like it's not just a history, it's like a day to day for many of us. And then I think that that sort of illustrates this thing I'm talking about because like there's so much radiance and like pleasure play practice in queer community. There's so much aliveness. There's so much like erotic, yeah, erotic radiance. I'm sure somebody else has said that before. I'm like, I don't know how that's bumping around in my brain. I definitely didn't make it up. But yeah, erotic radiance, erotic brilliance. Alok Vaid-Manon is for me a great example of that. They're just color and light and raw, beautiful. It's like staring at a star. And they experience so much violence all the time that they're really open and candid about in the world. And then they just like over and over and over again show up with love. So I learned a lot from them. They're like somebody that I, yeah, it just that came to mind.

But yeah, like in session, how it shows up is there's the most grief around is how family often can fail to accommodate and hold adequately that erotic radiance. And I think particularly because I work with a lot of queer people of color and children of immigrants, there's so much survival energy inside of lineage, inside that lineage that actually the brilliance and the expansiveness of, oh, I actually get to choose who I am, like, choose how I show up in the world, build family in a way that feels like organic to me and to who I am and to what I believe and to how I love uniquely me, me, not just not this like script of loving. It can be really threatening within family systems and constellations. And there's a lot of grief at that. So I think that's a lot of what I sit with.

And then also, I think, yeah, I don't know how to say this exactly, but I just think like queer folks are experiencing, yeah, more deeply, maybe there's more capacity for grief, I don't know, but like more grief about like the world and the social structures that are failing. It feels like a lot of queer folks that I work with are really coming up against capitalism and its failure to like provide us with the care that we deserve. It's broader than just who we date how we date, you know, how we express our gender identity, it feels like it's more all consuming of really being alive to the world actually kind of in this way I was describing with turning my face and feeling the trees and it's when you have that because you've learned how to do that because you've had to learn to fight for it. Like you've had to fight for it in a way that we have to fight when who we are isn't isn't aligned with like the power governing structures that we existed. When you have to do that, you become alive to all of the other things that are worth fighting for.

Susie:

what does it look like in queer communities to be alive to what’s worth fighting for?

Gabriela:

We're naming it, we're engaging with it. We can't actually look away. We do try! Queer people don't have superpowers, as if we've got it all, it's not hard for us. It's so much harder sometimes. I mean, yeah, depends. It depends on the day.

But yeah, like I guess what I mean by that is not to be like putting it on a pedestal. There is a lot of grappling and imperfection and you know, lateral violence as well. And this is the sort of magic and power of transformation is not to be undervalued.