Sara Sweat, MA – Founder, Monarch
The Golden Thread
Trigger Warning: *this blog post references addiction and suicide
It was eight o’clock on an average Tuesday. As was the case with so many evenings before, my mother was on her fourth double Smirnoff and tonic.
By sixteen, I could map her drinking like a meteorologist tracks a storm. One drink brought relaxation. Two drinks in, she was silly and warm and a little inappropriate. Three, and she turned mournful or bitter, obsessing over the memory of my father’s death two years earlier.
By the fourth cocktail, she was usually face down on her bed, crying into a pillow, and I was beside her doing the thing I did best. Comforting. Validating. Manufacturing hope out of nothing, on command.
Nobody outside our house knew any of this was going on. Mom had a good job. She made dinner most nights. She’d remarried a man who was kind, if not mostly bewildered about the state of our home.
We were good Midwesterners. We didn’t air our laundry publicly, didn’t talk about our feelings, didn’t share our troubles with others – not that we would have had the language for it, anyway.
This particular Tuesday, Mom changed up her routine. Instead of taking to her bed, she stood in our foyer, car keys in hand shouting about how nobody cared what happened to her. She felt isolated and alone and said she was “just going to get in the car and go for a drive”.
You know how sometimes the words you hear are completely ordinary but the meaning underneath them is not? That was one of those times.
She wasn’t going for a drive to clear her head. She was going to end her life.
My younger brother Jerry and I didn’t discuss a plan. We didn’t need one. We flanked her like we’d rehearsed it a hundred times, and somehow Jerry got the keys out of her hand. The three of us stood there like gunslingers at high noon, my mother sobbing and angry – confident that we wouldn’t even care if she died.
My brother redirected her anger at her husband – who was washing a pot in the kitchen hoping to fly under the radar of the whole scene. Her rage at him is, strangely, what snapped her back. She stormed off to aim her ire and left the keys in our hands. We kept them for the rest of the night.
The next morning, everyone got up, got dressed, and went to work or school. Nobody said a word. When I tried to bring it up later, I was shamed and questioned for my concern.
I was being dramatic.
I was making a big deal out of small things.
Why did I always have to make everything mean so much?
What Happened Next
Trauma researcher Peter Levine has a quote I share with my clients a lot: trauma is not what happened to you, it’s what happened in the absence of an empathetic witness.
It’s not the crisis. It’s the morning after, when everyone acts like the crisis never happened.
That wasn’t the first night we’d had like that, and it wasn’t the last. But over twenty years later, I can say something now I couldn’t have imagined then.
I’m grateful for it.
Not for the thing itself. I’m not glad my dad died at fifty-one, or that it sent my mother into a grief she could only manage with copious amounts of vodka, or that two teenagers had to learn to read a room like it was a live grenade. I would erase every bit of it if I could.
But I can’t. And if I don’t take something from it, all it did was take something from me.
So, in the absence of a compassionate witness to my story, I became one.
The Golden Thread
The Japanese art of Kintsugi began with a legend. A shogun in the 1400s sent a broken tea bowl out for repair. It came back functional but ugly, stapled together with metal. So the owner had artisans fill the cracks with gold lacquer instead. When the bowl came back it was not just fixed, but more valuable than it had been before.
In breaking and being repaired, the bowl now shone – stronger and more beautiful for all it had been through.
At Monarch, we use this same principle in a practice called the Golden Thread. It allows us to find the specific vein of gold running between what broke you and what you made of it.
Every fracture has one. The kid raised by parents who fought constantly learns to read a room before anyone else senses something is off. That’s a golden thread of intuition.
The person who grew up keeping the peace at all costs usually becomes the one everyone wants in the room when things fall apart. That’s the thread of resolution.
Doing this exercise, doesn’t require you to relive any of the hard things you’ve been through. You already know what happened. What we’re after here is something else. Something more.
We’re walking back through an old and shattered scene, collecting what’s still useful.
What survived. What served you. And, what’s actually yours to keep.
What I Carry From That Night
When I go back to that scene in the foyer now, I don’t look at my mother, or Jerry, or my stepfather at the sink. I look at the sixteen-year-old standing between two people, holding a set of car keys like her life depended on it.
I have so much respect for her.
She was grieving her father, terrified, entirely on her own, and she did something most adults never have to do. She saved someone’s life using nothing but her voice and her nerve.
The calm I can find in the middle of chaos. The exact words I use to talk someone back from an edge. The instinct to notice when a person is two sentences away from breaking through.
I built that superpower on an ordinary Tuesday at sixteen years old. As a grown woman, I get to decide what it’s worth.
My Golden Thread doesn’t erase the crack of what I’ve been through. It fills it with something worth looking at.
Your Turn
What are your golden threads, Monarch? What superpowers have you built from the hard things you’ve been through?
What did the difficult seasons of your life actually teach you in return for surviving them?
Start with one moment. One scene you know by heart. Something you’ve done the work to hold without it undoing you. Then observe and ask it three questions.
- What did I actually do? Don’t judge or analyze. Name the specific thing you did that changed the course of the event, protected you, or gave you something new.
- What did that require of me? Give the skill a name. One or two words. Calm. Timing. Precision. Compassion. Redirection. The ability to see clearly. An ability to read the room.
- Where does it show up now? Maybe it’s knowing when your boss is about to say no and shifting your pitch to get them to pivot. Maybe it’s the way you sit next to someone in silence instead of rushing to fix them. Maybe it’s how you parent, how you love, or how you achieve.
Whatever your skills, those are your golden threads. They were forged the hard way, but the belong to you now, free and clear of whatever it cost to get them.
Because those lessons, those abilities? They are gold. And, more importantly they are yours.
There’s no undoing the past, as much as we might wish we could. But what you’ve survived doesn’t define you.
What you do with it does.
Monarch is coaching and community for the people who turned survival into a personality and are ready to turn it into a life. If this is the first time you’re hearing your own story reflected back at you, you’re not alone in it anymore. Join our online community, Kaleidoscope, and let’s go get your gold together.
