Episode Details

Jill Dyer is a writer, editor, story coach, poet, narrative trauma practitioner, mother, wife, and is on the Allender Center team.

Danielle begin with checking in with Jill during COVID: Jill has many hats that she wears and finds herself navigating school online with her four kids at home, while she and her husband are both working.  She notices that she sees what’s going on with them and tries to fit her self and her projects in wherever she can... But it’s not always easy. Jill finds it is difficult to find space to work without interruptions during this season.

Maggie agrees; regular life has been so disrupted that she wonders how we will be able to do everything we did before, having so much “quantity time” not necessarily “quality time.” Things are just different and emotions are high! 

Jill agrees emotions are all over the place; “Everyone is in a different spot every day. We are not all on the same page.” She says it’s hard to fill the gap when someone isn’t doing well. She asks, “How do you manage or tend to the gap of people not being at their best with kindness?”

Danielle had awoken the last few days feeling like “I gotta get this done. I gotta get this done….” before she really stopped and asked herself, “What is it that I need to get done?” And she couldn’t think of anything that needed to be done. Through talking to Jill on the phone, they came to this idea of a sense of panic that is happening for many people right now. 

Jill says she is the type of person who can hold a lot of anxiety in her body without even knowing it. She believes that to be part resiliency, part survival and part not helping at all, all mixed together. Jill gives us a snapshot of a story where she and her daughter went out on a beautiful day to do a bit of hiking down by a river. The water was moving pretty fast and she felt like “eh, I don’t want to do this,” yet she ahead went anyway. As she got about a third of the way across the river all of a sudden her legs started to shake and she couldn’t move. Her daughter was all the way across now and looking at her. Jill could not get her legs to move! Finally her daughter came back to and asked her if she was okay to which Jill replied, “I don’t think so.” Her daughter suggested that she scooted on her butt back across the river. Her daughter said, “I’ve never seen you like that.”

Jill acknowledged she had never felt that way before. She began to try to put words and explain to her daughter, “I’m not normally like that. I think all of the things that are going on are held in my body more than I’ve known.”

This was a loud signal to her that she is holding the collective panic of her family, of herself, of our nation, of our world. And she is working really hard to be kind to herself in the midst of all of this and STILL she is at the edge of panic. 

Maggie felt terror just listening to Jill’s story – panic, not being in control of your body, sense of urgency and overwhelming fear of not knowing what’s happening. Maggie loved how Jill engaged her daughter in the midst of it, offering more than just “I’m fine.” Maggie noted that her daughter was clearly aware that something was happening and Jill took the time to tell her “I think I am holding more than I can carry” in a way that wasn’t asking her daughter to carry it for her (placing the burden on her daughter.” Maggie wondered what was it that helped Jill to calm down and reengage her body again?

As Jill was lying in the sun, she kept reaching over and touching granite rocks, feeling the warmth. It was the stability and grounded-ness of the rock that was really soothing to her in that moment. It wasn’t actually until she wrote the whole story out, spent time walking and listening to worship music, that she was able to feel