Well in a green wooded area. — *Well in a green wild area.*

After I left my accounting job in late 2023 to heal from autistic burnout, the first few months of recovery weren’t pretty.

A “productive” day was one where I’d get around to changing out of my sweatpants at about 3:00pm, and lug my exhausted body into the shower, only to put on a different pair of sweatpants right afterwards.

I didn’t leave home for 72 hour stretches at a time, emerging only when I was fully out of groceries.

Noises like the thud from a child kicking a soccer ball over the fence, a dog barking, a downstairs neighbor stomping reverberated through my body like shockwaves. I’d hurry to find and play a white noise track on my headphones to drown out the stimulation, but because I was already distressed, the mere seconds required to set everything up seemed as excruciating and high stakes as if I were rushing to deactivate a ticking bomb.

During this period, recruiters found me on LinkedIn and pitched me jobs similar to the position I’d just left. The one that had turned me into a husk of myself: a person with unwashed hair and a hair-trigger response to the slightest stress, unable to do much more than watch gently paced pastoral dramas on PBS.

*Woman lying on a couch under a blanket; an approximation of what my life looked like for several months of 2024.*

To my consternation, despite all the evidence that I was in no way ready to go back to work, I took the calls from recruiters, and afterwards, I’d panic at what I’d set in motion.

As each call progressed to the next step of the interview process, shame flooded me. I knew I wouldn’t take whatever job we were talking about, and I knew I was wasting everybody’s time by pretending otherwise, and yet, for some reason that I didn’t understand, I couldn’t stop myself.

After about three instances of this stressful routine, turmoil dominating my emotional terrain, I sat with myself, to try to make some space for how to stop using energy I didn’t have, to apply for jobs I didn’t want, so that I could finally get some rest and recover.

From my meditation cushion one morning, I gazed at the trees behind my apartment and asked inside, “Who is speaking? Who is pushing me to take these calls?”

This might sound strange to hear, but the answer that came was not that the speaker was a part of me. Rather, the voice that was pushing me to go back to work prematurely was that of my long deceased paternal grandfather.

First, I felt fascinated.

Then, I felt angry, and I demanded that he stop intervening in my life.

But as is true with all protective parts, my grandfather did not want to be told what to do. The more I asked him to back off, the more he dug his heels in and raged at me.

The more I tried to argue with him or convince him to let me rest, the more pressure I felt inside to get a job.

So then, I decided to listen.

With curiosity, I asked my grandfather why he was pushing me so hard.

And I paid attention as sensations rushed through my body: heaviness, tingling, the feeling of sinking like an anchor dropped in the ocean.

Then, I began to cry with a deep-felt knowing that I was grieving the hardships he had faced.

I was filled with awareness of the legacy of anti-Irish sentiment that my grandfather might have experienced in the early and mid-1900’s in the Boston area. I felt the generational pain of loss of Irish land, language and culture that has traveled through my lineage. The pain of his mom (my great-grandmother) having left Ireland for a better life in the US only to arrive in a place with a communal memory of “No Irish Need Apply” signs hanging outside places of work. The pain of living in a general atmosphere where Irish Americans really weren’t accepted into US culture until JFK won the presidency in 1960.

As I compassionately witnessed my grandfather’s ache and anguish, I understood more deeply his insistence that I take a job, any job, regardless of my current state of extreme burnout.

I could imagine how he might have adopted protective strategies such as never negotiating, never leaving a job, never taking a job for granted, in an effort to keep himself safe from the ambient discrimination.

And because he seemed to be stuck where he was in the past, limited to his own traumatized perspective, he didn’t see that my options were different now from what his were, then. He didn’t want me to lose access to work due to Irish-ness either.

His rage at me for leaving my job and not working made a lot more sense.

This is how intergenerational trauma works: it travels through generations until someone has the capacity and resources to transmute it.

My work was to be that someone.

Eventually, in continuing to get to know this part with the help of my own IFS practitioner, my grandfather was able to leave that stuck place he was in and release his burdened belief that “You must take and hold onto a job regardless of the cost to you.”

Once I had fully witnessed his pain, my compulsion to get a new job began to fade.

When parts unburden like my grandfather did, we can ask them if they want to take on a new role. As I worked with the energy of my grandfather, I asked him if now, since he no longer needed to push me to take a job before I was ready, he’d instead protect my home from burning down. He was a firefighter, so this job felt appropriate, and, because I live in California in near- constant vigilance of wildfires, pretty helpful.

I had a felt sense – which manifested as a kind of lightness inside – that he was happy to take on this new role.

After this experience, I changed my settings on LinkedIn so recruiters couldn’t contact me anymore.

And I didn’t feel any inner resistance to doing so.

I was able to properly rest, and eventually, when the time was right, I took a new job that felt manageable.

In my spiritual practices, when I acknowledge my grandfather and thank him for looking out for me, I sense our relationship deepening, even across the veil.

Many of us who are autistic are highly sensitive and take in a huge amount of input. It’s crucial to have a practice of discerning where the input is coming from, so we can separate out the parts of ourselves, and the voices and influences of others.

Working one-on-one with an IFS-informed practitioner can help you to identify your own parts, as well as the parts that are what we call legacy and cultural burdens – and develop relationships with them, so that they don’t feel so alone, and so that they no longer feel the need to act out in extreme ways.

If you’re interested in learning more about this work, you are very welcome to book a free 30 minute consultation with me so we can further discuss your needs and my approach.

Who is speaking?

TENDING TO, RATHER THAN PUSHING THROUGH