95: “I didn’t understand the toll that survivalism took on my Self.” (ft. Chrystal Toop)

Chrystal: I didn't understand the toll that survivalism took on myself personally, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually.

laura: How to make love? Now, is that from recipe or from scratch? This is how to make love.

Speaker 3: Wow.

Speaker 4: Oh, gosh.

Speaker 5: Ooh.

Speaker 6: Oh my God.

Speaker 7: A little to the left and faster.

laura: A show that tests the edges of what love is.

Speaker 8: Worthiness.

Speaker 9: Empathy.

Speaker 10: Beauty.

Speaker 11: Sex positive.

laura: The borders it can cross.

Speaker 12: How you do integrity in all of our relationships.

laura: And its hidden costs and shadows.

Speaker 13: In a world where we other other people, where we build walls and just tear down walls.

Speaker 14: Fuck finding it or falling into it. Our future depends on making it.

laura: Hey, friends, welcome back. Welcome back to a podcast designed to stretch your love and courage and liberation muscles. I'm Laura and I'm glad you're here. For the next chunk of time/always really, episodes here are going to focus on healing. I think if you go back and listen to every single episode we've had to date, there has always been content about healing. But for the next little bit, I'm going to invite you and ask you to listen to guests and to me through the lens explicitly of your healing. What is there to heal in your life and world, in our world? What stands in the way of your wholeness, of your healing, of our collective healing?
My hope is that as you listen to guests, some of whom are healers in the world and others of whom will be sharing personal stories about their own healing journeys, my hope is that we can demystify what healing is, what it entails individually and collectively, and leave conversations with more ideas, more hope, and more tools than we came in with. Today's conversation is with a human who is both healer and healing, Chrystal Toop is an indigenous storyteller, community educator, and a life spectrum doula. In this conversation, we cover a lot of ground from survivalism to enoughness to fitting in to grappling with tensions that reside and the nuances and complexities of our identities and a whiteness to a discussion of where we find ourself and how we find ourself.
This is ultimately a conversation about the unlearning required for healing. I'm so grateful to Chrystal for her willingness to share some of her unlearning with us. Speaking of unlearning and not by accident, uniquely timed with this episode, I'm really excited to release my new program, The Unschool, next month. Stay tuned to hear more about a unique way to work with me and a really unique place to practice putting down so many of the things that we've all been conditioned to pick up and put on like perfectionism and urgency and self-critique and imposter syndrome, defensiveness, enoughness, more on that soon. For now, I invite you to listen to Chrystal through the lens of healing and liberation.
Welcome to a conversation about making love by learning to unlearn. So, Chrystal, for folks who don't know you, haven't had a chance to meet you or see you in the world, who are you and how do you identify in the world?

Chrystal: Well, my name's Chrystal Toop and I am Anishinaabe-euro mix wunderkind. I'm a counselor, I'm an author, a storyteller. I'm an auntie, a mom, a wife, and I'm very fortunate to be embodied version of my family's resilience. Yeah, those are how I'm showing up today.

laura: That's beautiful. That's beautiful. What does that mean to you that you're an embodied version of your ancestors and your family's resilience?

Chrystal: Well, I've mentioned the Euro-mix, so there's some Polish and Ashkenazi Jew that are running through my veins. Also, my mother's family has First Nations ancestry from the Algonquins of Pikwakanagan First Nation where I'm a member and there's a story of surviving the residential schools. So, my great-grandparents survived their experience and they went on to have lives and children and survived those really massive wounds to their persons and their identity and their ways of being in the world and relating with their families. I'm here today because they were able to survive what they went through. It's feeling very present for me today on the top of everything. So, it feels like a badge of honor.

laura: Thank you for bringing your ancestors and your family into the space and into our conversation, and I will be honoring them as we talk. I was wondering what, if anything, does it feel like in your body to hold that legacy? One of the words that you used was embodied and think about embodiment as you are a physical manifestation and a physical miracle of all of those stories. Also, I think about what we carry in our bodies. I was wondering how or if you hold your family in your body.

Chrystal: Well, one of the many hats I tend to put on is that of a doula, a life spectrum doula. I trained as a birth doula and we received a teaching in that training. I was very fortunate it was a donor international/native youth sexual health network training. I was really fortunate to be present when we had an elder come and share with us about matrilineal DNA. That's something that I'd never learned about before even being a woman that when my grandmother was born, she had all of the eggs of her grandmothers in her body, and we just have this matrilineal DNA that has carried us. So, when I was pregnant with my daughter, it made me think about how some of my grandmother is actually coming through this experience of having a child, having a female child at that matrilineal line.
So, it is very real in my cells and in my DNA that that's part of me. But I think for myself, before I could ever even land on any of those concepts or understandings or self-realizations, I spent many years in survival mode with my family. So, treading water, so many of us are familiar with treading water to pay the bills, keep the roof over your head, make sure they get their vitamins, make sure the kids are getting... Oh, they had a growth spurt. They need more shoes or whatever it is. There's always water to tread in that fight to stay afloat. I spent many years in that space and I didn't understand the toll that survivalism took on myself personally, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually.
So, when the day came where I was in that doula training and there's this amazing neuroscientist talking about matrilineal DNA, I was in a very special place where I was still. For a moment, I wasn't struggling and I was able to receive that knowledge about the strength that is in my DNA and in my cells. It's in me at a cellular level to survive and to be resilient and to overcome these things. It was also the first time someone had ever said to me, our ancestors were smart people and our ancestors had ways of understanding menstruation and the life cycle and the seasons and the different parts of their environment.
It was the first time I had ever gotten a positive message about being an indigenous person. So, when I say that embodiment piece, it's been 10 years almost of incorporating that understanding into how I walk in the world and how I treat myself physically. That medicine wheel of wholeness and holistic care, it just took so long, but now, I'm getting worn out, but I am not in survival mode. Yes, I'm still resilient. Yes, I'm going to take care of myself and it's not a bad thing or a selfish thing or a frivolous thing.

laura: Thank you. What does survival mean to you?

Chrystal: For a long time, it meant reaching success. It meant the opposite of a failure. When I was younger, my family was very much below poverty line, so I started working very young. From a young age, I understood that I had rights to clothing and food and safety, but I didn't have an understanding that that was anything that I possessed. So, from a young age, I had to work for my own survival because it was really made clear to me early on that no one's going to give these things to you. Being out of survival mode meant not worrying about paying my rent, meant not worrying about having to find a better place to live because the place I could afford wasn't suitable for my children. There's lots of places we live but we're not suitable for my children.
So, there was always an element of you have to keep reaching for more and it was about creating a sense of security for my kids but also achieving a level of stability so that they would hopefully not have the same intimate familiarity with survivorship and survival energy.

laura: You said that's what survival used to mean to you. What does it mean now?

Chrystal: That's such a great question and it's something I've been working on a little bit. Now, I think it means not feeling frustrated all the time. I'm really fortunate to know others who are at peace with their work and how they spend their days, but I find I'm often struggling to find that same level of peace. So, I'm not necessarily worrying about where we're going to live anymore, but I do worry about, "What am I leaving behind?" It's not a survival line of thinking that I have to use to think of those things. I had this really cool moment of, I guess, reckoning.
So, in that death doula work that I do, a lot of the discussion revolves around legacy. What are you going to leave behind? That's starting to feel more where I put that survivor energy is, "How am I going to be a good ancestor? How am I taking steps today, now tomorrow that are going to add up to something positive for my descendants and what am I going to leave behind?"

laura: Is there a word that resonates with you more now today than survivorship or survival?

Chrystal: I think it's unlearning probably. It's that really awesome multi-capacity word of unlearning because I remember when I went to back to university and got my degree in sociology as I was in my 30s. Sociology is such a cool subject area where it's so broad and so diverse and the heck all the intersections go in there. It's a whole thing if you're not into sociology, but I remember at one point when I was going to school, I was in this one class and I'm like, "Wait a minute, so I am middle class. What the heck?" It was something really basic. You live in a house roughly this big and you have a car. That was it. That was the definition of it. I was, "Okay, well, I got a bathroom and a half and a townhouse here."
It was subsidized housing for natives in the community, but it qualified the textbook definition of middle class. I thought that's what I was working towards with vacations and that stuff, maybe pay for the kids' post-secondary, that thing. So, just that, realizing I'd already achieved what I was struggling to do with my degree, technically, I'd already achieved that social status. We don't need to be in these high stress corporate roles to be successful and to have what you want and what you need. So, it was a moment where I had to unlearn, "Okay, you've been pursuing the success of keeping up with the Smiths or the Jones thing, and then you find out the Smiths and the Jones are house poor just like you." It was a moment of a reckoning.
I had to ask myself, "Okay, you've done that. You've achieved success as per the outsider's perspective, but what is my success?" So, I had to unlearn all of the things that school had prepared you for thinking you have to do X, Y, and Z and you're successful. If you don't go to post-secondary, you're going to be doomed or something. So, for myself, I did not have that typical path and I struggled with it. I felt less than. I struggled with feeling like a failure, like a loser. I was the only one on my dad's side of the family who had had these struggles. We were the one low income pod in the family tree there.
On my mom's side, it was very typical. So, I was the first one to get my university education on my mom's side of the family. So, I started to try, like I said, unlearn what society was expecting of me and teach myself these are my own values and these are my own benchmarks that I'm reaching for. So, it took a while. It turns out the main one was just survive university and get the degree and get the hell out of there, but yeah, it fit for me. Now it's unlearning how do I exist without being in survival mode.

laura: Yeah. Thank you so much for that. I want to talk about unlearning a bit more broadly. I think for so many of us, at least for those of us who live in Western parts of the world or on the land now called the United States, we're all conditioned to be taught to navigate capitalism, which I think keeps us in a survivalist mode, because we must have money and we must acquire some semblance of power, utilization of that money, et cetera.
So, I think there are real challenges for all of us to unlearning scarcity and survivalism. I imagine that when we have a personal history of trauma and that when we have a personal lineage of resilience based on literal survival from genocide, atrocity, violence, I could imagine that that unlearning is extra nuanced because we may have made a home in an identity of survivorship. I guess I'm just wondering, does that land, does that resonate? Has that been your experience? What do you think about that?

Chrystal: I do think that's been my experience. Yeah, learning to exist outside of that survivorship is really tricky and everybody has such differing degrees of what it is that they've learned to cope, learned to adapt, learned to get by. I grew up feeling like I was not indigenous enough. That's a pretty common feeling that comes out in circles, communities of color. It's shadeism and shadeism can be just a weapon of internalized racism. I heard an elder once who told me it's like that saying about the devil, the devil's greatest trick is convincing you he's not real. It's like that where, but she was saying the greatest achievement of the colonizer is that he made it so we can't recognize our own people. We fight over who is and who isn't instead of just caring for each other.
Those things can really eclipse the beauty of what's been accomplished in our lineage. So, there's a long time where I didn't feel like I was allowed to be part of my community, and I felt like I wasn't welcome in certain spaces. That was maybe very true in certain circumstances, but others, it was just an internalized message. So, it took time to unlearn the difference, what's perceived and what's actual, but when I think about some of the things that helped me align all that, it did come from statistics. So, I would hear these statistics and I remember having full-blown panic attacks because I could say yes, I was one of those statistics in every single situation.
Then I would meet these distant cousins who were not taken out of the community, had maintained their ancestral connections, had maintained their ancestral location to the land and proximity to the land, and they didn't know the same amount of struggle that I did. So, for a while, I was confused by, "Well, if I'm so White and you're so native and I'm not, how come I've had this experience that according to everything I've read matches up?" You've never worried about seasonal changes of clothes and you're never homeless. It just took so much to separate all of that and realize that it wasn't as important as I thought. It was about coming back to the circle and healing yourself. Sometimes you have to take what's good and leave what's not good for you. It's just that simple, but it doesn't feel that simple.

laura: Yeah. In my work, I think a lot about unlearning and I think a lot about healing and I hold space for people to heal and I hold space for people to unlearn. I can only access this in the ways that I can uniquely access it, but for me, it's been particularly hard to unlearn things that my lineage has used to make it through life but also felt a tremendous amount of pride. That healing has been really complicated for me, fairly easy example of that. It's just the notion of hard work. I'm curious to hear your perspective on this too, Chrystal.
For me, unlearning isn't about tossing out, getting rid of. It's about alchemizing, re-relating, embedding consent, being really conscious, teasing out the things we want to keep and value, but being very aware of how we're relating to them and learning how to re-relate to them so that we can leave some of the toxic stuff behind. So, I was just curious what your experience was when we think about generations and lineages that have literally survived genocide. I wondered if for you, in your heart, body, spirit, mind, et cetera, if it has challenged the unlearning or clarified the unlearning, the things that we carry, the things that we bring from our ancestors.

Chrystal: Absolutely. What comes to mind for me is this idea of reclaiming culture and traditional roles. Come and learn this or that. Learn what you would've learned had colonization never occurred. That's a powerful idea and often that is how unlearning begins. It's like you get this awareness of colonization and the untold histories of the world or rather the unrecorded and unrelated by White people histories as the First Nations person who was trying to unlearn. Yeah, what I think about a time where I was working at an indigenous women's support center and I started as an executive and HR assistant in that place. They ran a shelter for indigenous women and children fleeing violence.
They had a counseling department and then they had these cultural programs, one for parenting and one just for women of any age. It was such a beautiful place to start working. I had gotten out of mommy land with my last child and went to work with my little diploma and office work. For the first time, I was spending large amounts of time with indigenous women and that was not a norm for me at all. So, in a big way, that was my first introduction into culture, because pre-contact, the women were always doing stuff together. They were looking after their community and families. It wasn't like today where you go to the grocery store and you get your stuff for supper.
Back then, it was somebody would kill meat and the whole community came together and took care of it and fed everyone or foraging or prepping. There was so much work that went into life back then. So, just to be surrounded by indigenous women and to spend time laughing with indigenous women, that was such medicine for me and such a gentle way to reclaim my culture just by laughing. It's so powerful and it's so healing. So, for the first time, I'm surrounded and there's a lot of focus on teaching traditional roles and the roles have always been drumming and singing and powwow dancing. I had never felt called to any of that.
I'm a little bit interested in singing and drumming, but I was really shy and again, I felt personally, I wasn't entitled to accessing those teachings because I was too White. Over time, I came to understand that doesn't matter. You come in. If you want to learn, you can learn, but I still never really felt old to any of these traditional roles that I saw others picking up until I took that doula training. I have this awesome auntie explaining one, that our ancestors were intelligent beings. Also that I, for the first time, understood that I've always occupied a traditional role. I'm a mother, I'm an auntie, I'm a sister, I'm a friend, I'm a helper. All of those are traditional roles. It wasn't something I had to go out and take a class for.
Who I am, every fiber of my being, I'm that big sister. I'm the auntie. When I understood that that was a traditional role, I finally understood where I fit in and everything else. It was the unlearning about what I'm supposed to do to reclaim my culture. I was able to find that authentic connection that I needed to restore myself and to heal myself. It's been no looking back ever since. The momentum just carries me on and it's been great.

laura: How did you think you were supposed to touch into your culture or reclaim your identity and culture?

Chrystal: I thought I had to make my own regalia. I had to learn songs and I had to learn how to drum. Really learning the songs is key. People don't really care too much how good of a singer you are. It's about the collective voice. Those are the typical things. Even now with young people and in my community, I see it. Come and make your regalia, come and learn how to drum, come and learn how to sing. But there's never been a class or a workshop or a call out for people to come and talk about traditional parenting or how to be a caregiver or even how to make traditional foods. It was always within me to nourish those around me and nurture those around me and make them feel cared for and seen and loved, but there was no space for it.
Getting to learn more about birth and the ceremony, that is the transition from sky world to earth walk, and then vice versa, the return trip, these things felt authentic to me. Every fiber of my being was like, "Yes, this is it. Grab it, grab it. You do this already. Just let it take you where it has to go." Like I said, it was a realignment for me. I realized that I had unlearned the popular approach to reclaiming culture just because I had learned that's what everybody's doing doesn't mean that that's what I had to do. It had never been put out as another option. But don't worry, if you don't get these traditional roles, there's some more out there, you'll find them. But there's lots of roles.

laura: That makes a ton of sense how sometimes the most obvious and intimate connection can be we're so close to it. We're living it out that, and we think we have to go find something much more mysterious or elusive or whatever and it can be right there. What else have you had to unlearn in your life, Chrystal?

Chrystal: I mean, that doula training was such a catalyst time for me because I was in the middle of my degree. My oldest child, he had hidden disability. He had ADHD and memory disability. My other child had some other stuff that was also a hidden disability. So, all three of us had these hidden disabilities. If you've ever had a hidden disability, you'll know that it most often feels in your best interest to hide your disability and to assimilate and just not draw attention to it. Generally, that seems like the way to go, but I was in a time where, again, I was very stressed out in university and not making hardly any money. I had been working five jobs halfway up. They're all part-time in different research focus groups and different things.
I was so burnt out and exhausted, and physically and mentally, I had nothing left. Then my poor children, they were having their own issues and they needed their mom. There was bullying at school. There was trying to advocate for the supports that they needed. There was just never an end to the ways that I felt pulled on. There was just every direction was getting pulled on and I ended up crashing and burning. I remember just stopping everything and committing to the poverty. This isn't ideal. I feel like a loser. I'm not happy. My back's going out constantly. I'm not sleeping. I'm disassociating, all these extreme feelings, physically, mentally, everything.
So, I just stopped everything. I stopped working and I just took the summer off with my kids and I pulled both of them out of school. There was maybe two months left for them. We focused on our connections with food, because being poor, we built up some habits around just eating food that we could afford, but unfortunately, that's not always the healthiest. So, we just stopped everything and we started growing our own food and containers in our little 10 by 10 garden attached to the house. It was really basic. We grew tomatoes, we grew cucumbers, chives, some flowers, planted a strawberry patch, just did really simple things, learned about companion planting. If you plant this flower, that will grow and all that cool stuff and permaculture.
Also, I started getting into seed sovereignty and food sovereignty and food justice and understanding it's so much bigger in the US than it is in Canada. It's finally started to flow this way a bit, but everything that I could find was US based. So, I was just trying to educate myself. We would work in the garden and then we would spend afternoons at the beach. I would round up, like I said, the nieces, the nephews, everybody. We would trek out to the beach and that's what we did all summer. My daughter and I started doing yoga together. There was free yoga at our native friendship center. We started working on mindfulness and just slowing down and trying to reconnect with our bodies and our spirits. It was at a point where I used the idea of survivorship and treading water.
It was like we were not really treading water when I said stop. We were starting to drown. So, the full stop just gave us a pause and there was no obligations to do or be anything. It was just to be okay. So, sometimes we would stop on our journey because we'd have to do deep breathing exercises because one of us needed it and we would be there with the others. We're just a small family of three, but it was so oppositional to this struggle. I had my son at... I turned 19 a month after I was born. I had my daughter at 24. It just felt like I had always been hustling to get through the daycare, hustling to get to work, hustling to get to school.
When they're 12 and 6 years old and you look up and you're like, "Holy cow, I've been doing this for over a decade and I'm tired." That summer we took to just care for ourselves was hard to willingly walk into extreme poverty, but it gave us the space to say, "We're most important." It was really rewarding time. Then a few months later, I end up in this doula course that blows everything I care about wide open in a way. It was like, "Hey, I am so traditional." I didn't even know it. So, when the seasons changed and I decided not to put my kids back in school and we started unschooling them, because I was in sociology degree, I took a sociology of education and this is how I am people.
I'm wired this way. I'm going to look at homeschooling my kids and I'm going to find a way that works for us that makes sense. Unschooling was the philosophy I landed on. I needed to teach all three of us what we needed to learn. We had just had that amazing summer that fortified us, and it was the first time we went into the fall and the colder months not feeling in extreme survival mode. It was still survival mode, but for once, it wasn't extreme and it wasn't like this compounding feeling.

laura: Thank you for sharing so much of your story, Chrystal. Again, your family and all the ways that you are with me and with us, with listeners. What do you think most folks need to unlearn for the purpose of healing and liberation?

Chrystal: I think a lot of us need to unlearn to the listening that we do to the voices in our heads, because often those voices don't belong to us. I think I made a lot of moves in my life based on the voices in my head, which were different times my parents or some impressionable authority figure that left a mark. I don't know. But we get bombarded with messages of so many different angles and directions and it's all worked where we have carried these messages, we have incorporated these messages into what we think society is and what our obligations as members of society are. It's just messaging. It's messaging from people who want us to buy more stuff. It is not messaging from a spiritual place. It is not messaging from good and evil. It's messaging from capitalism.
That added in with generations of maybe it's the hard work or maybe it's the people trying to negotiate their internalized shame or whatever has happened in their experience. There's just so much messaging that we carry and it's not from us. I had to take real time to work on where's my voice and where's all the influences I've had that are adding to my voice, because I thought for a long time, that it was me and my own drive and determination that was sending me off in different directions. After a while, I started to realize, "No, I'm only doing this because I don't want my dad to feel a certain way about something," or "I can't do X, Y, and Z because my family won't like that, or they won't be proud of me or that's not what I'm supposed to do."
So just taking a minute. Maybe it's in counseling, maybe it's with someone you trust, someone that is on a wavelength that you admire, finding those safe people to talk it out with or maybe it's a meditative place that you have to reach yourself on your own to just distill your own voice. What is your own voice saying and why? Is it because of something that's driving you or is it because it's connected to an actual need or want that comes from within you? So, unlearning those compulsions and what drives us and trying to distill our individual voice, that's such huge learning and I think it's something everybody can take time with.

laura: Yeah, I definitely agree.

Chrystal: I mean, unlearning is such a wide area, but it's such a special area. I think with unlearning, I really want people to embrace the discomfort and the awkwardness of unlearning, because it's uncomfortable and it doesn't feel right. Because you've spent so long in another space of doing what you think feels right or what is supposed to be what you're doing or whatnot, but it is awkward and it is uncomfortable. At first few steps, it feels counterintuitive.

laura: Totally.

Chrystal: But with practice, it does get easier. Because I carry White privilege, I talk with a lot of folks about White privilege and how to position that. Some people in the indigenous community will say, "We walk in two worlds." Other people say, "No, that's ridiculous. We have one world and we all walk in it." Whatever your thoughts are on what world you are or are not in, we do have a reality of privilege and power in our society in North America. Unlearning all of that is so uncomfortable, but it is worthwhile to get to that understanding and to get to that place of clarity where you do get it and where it does click. Yeah, I have lots of upfront learning and I have so much appreciation for having this discussion with you. It was pretty awesome. I don't get to talk about unlearning that much.

laura: It's come to be the way that I really understand almost all things and healing and unlearning are synonymous for me. I think at least in this moment in time, maybe over time, that won't be true, but I'm so grateful to have had the space. I'm going to ask you one more question, Crystal. I ask every person who comes on the podcast, how do you define love?

Chrystal: Oh, that's such a good question. I define love well differently at different times in life, for sure. I think I'm at a place right now where I define love as a selfless act. It's void of ego. Love, for me, I think it's got to be genuine and it's got to be without motivation and again, without ego. If you really love someone, you're going to want the best for them, even if it doesn't factor you into the big picture. If you love something, you're going to want that thing to be the best that it can be, again, with or without your involvement.
There's lots of times, especially with teenagers, where you're like, "This is selfish love. I want their approval or their validation." That's not their problem. It's not even close to their problem. So, I think love has very much got a big dose of unlearning in there because you learn love from your role models and the people who are supposed to love you, whether they do or do not or have their limitations. It's always changing, but I think it's a selfless act.

laura: Thank you, Chrystal. Thank you for this conversation. Just so appreciative for you sharing not only your ancestry and lineage and identities, but your very, very personal intimate stories of your own survival, which I deeply honor and I feel very, very lucky and privileged to be able to have learned from all of you that you shared with us. Thank you for teaching us more about unlearning.

Chrystal: Meegwetch for everything. This has been such a lovely experience.

laura: Okay, that takes us home for today. Thank you again to Chrystal for being a part of this conversation and this episode. Thank you to Patreons for supporting this podcast and helping make things like transcripts possible. If you want to snatch a copy of this conversation to reflect on more, noodle on, you can head to my website at humanbravely.com. Click on this episode and download the transcript and learn more about Chrystal and her work in the world while you're at it. Don't forget, the unschool is coming your way soon for it's very first semester ever and it's going to be incredible. Grab a spot on my mailing list. Make sure you get the details before enrollment closes. All right, my friends. I'll see you next month. Until then, here's to your unlearning.