I first learned of Aundi Kolber’s work shortly after her first book was published in 2020: Try Softer: A Fresh Approach to Move Us out of Anxiety, Stress, and Survival Mode--and into a Life of Connection and Joy. Since then, her expertise as a trauma therapist, and her personal insights as a trauma survivor, have been a significant source of encouragement and reflection for me. 

In her recent book, Strong Like Water: Finding the Freedom, Safety, and Compassion to Move through Hard Things—and Experience True Flourishing, Kolber offers a timely and compelling reframing of what it means to be strong in a society that often equates strength with enduring pain and pushing through it alone (which can leave us exhausted and disconnected). She invites us to consider strength as a balanced, dynamic force, like the tide: soft yet bold, fierce yet gentle. The book offers insights into how our nervous system shapes our experiences, practices for navigating challenges with compassion, and tools to cultivate resilience through connection, love, and safety. 

I’m delighted to share her work with you and to feature this excerpt, thoughtfully framed by her own introduction below.

Enjoy,

Annie

Compassionate With-ness and
the Work of Becoming Strong like Water

Many of us know what it’s like to white-knuckle or suppress our pain when life is difficult, but not many of us know what it’s like to be cared for or truly seen in those spaces. The difference between those two ideas may seem small, but experiencing care and belonging can change the trajectory of a life. In this excerpt from Aundi Kolber’s book Strong like Water: Finding the Freedom, Safety, and Compassion to Move through Hard Things—and Experience True Flourishing, she describes her own journey of receiving this kind of attunement from her husband and why it mattered so deeply.

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Excerpt from Strong like Water: Finding the Freedom, Safety, and Compassion to Move through Hard Things--and Experience True Flourishing

By Aundi Kolber 

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ONE MORNING, just a few months after Brendan and I were married, I sat holding a cup of lukewarm coffee on the pink couch in my parents’ living room. My eyes were red from crying. Just days before, this old but beautiful house had been sold. Cognitively, I knew that selling the house I’d been raised in had been the right decision. My parents were in the middle of a contentious divorce, and this place was much too large and expensive—not to mention too much work—for my mom to keep on her own. 

But this was one more change—many of them painful—happening in a short period of time. In retrospect, I can see that this season marked the undoing of most of my family. When my parents split up, most of our family’s belongings had been sold, and my dad had decided he no longer wanted to have a relationship with any of his children. 

It was a lot. And it was painful. 

Together Brendan and I had flown back to Oregon for a friend’s wedding and then driven to the coast to see my family and say goodbye. I don’t mean to dramatize saying goodbye to a house—houses are bought and sold all the time—but this particular property had witnessed much pain, heartache, and loss. My sadness at seeing it sold was not so much about the house itself, but more about all that it represented. Because of my story, there was just so much grief. I was grieving the loss of my dad, my parents’ marriage, and the sense of family (fractured though it was). I was also mourning all the losses that accompanied my childhood. I felt grief about what didn’t happen then, grief about what did happen, and grief about what couldn’t happen. In my soul, that morning felt sort of like a funeral. 

After a few decades of being a certain kind of “strong,” I found it profoundly disorienting to have so many wounds exposed at once. My situational strength couldn’t keep up. I was still quite young, but I felt much older than my years. I had no idea how to navigate what was happening in our family, and though I’d started graduate school to become a counselor, I found it challenging to connect what I was experiencing with anything I’d learned in my program. 

As I sat on the couch that morning—heavy with emotion—Brendan joined me, holding my hand. Already in the short time we’d been married he’d done this often; listening as I tried to make sense of the way my family was disintegrating, laughing with me when I couldn’t cry anymore—reminding me that he was with me and wouldn’t leave. Then he gently asked if I’d like him to take pictures of the house so I could be sure I’d remember it. 

“Yes,” I said, between sniffles. Gradually Brendan made his way around the house and then finally back to the room where I sat. As he stepped back to snap a picture of our long living room, he also captured me on the couch. It’s not a glamorous photo in the slightest: me, sitting with my hair in a messy bun, my heart in pieces. I remember feeling ashamed that I felt so needy, so cracked open, grieving what felt like my entire world falling apart. All the situational strength I had acquired in the twenty-four years I lived in that house was beginning to show its edges; it was unable to keep me going. 

Only now when I look at that picture and reflect on that painful memory can I see something else alongside the grief: Brendan’s love and care for me, tethering me to hope and safety amidst the trauma of loss. After living through a few decades of unresolved and chronic relational, emotional, and psychological trauma, this was no small thing. Brendan was one of the first people whom my body, mind, and soul felt truly safe with. And not only that, something in me was beginning to learn that even when we faced challenges, we would make it through together. I had no language for it then, this liminal space—a space where I began to receive the support and resources I needed to be “with” pain. I’ve since come to call it transitional strength. 

It’s important to acknowledge that accessing transitional strength didn’t cause the hardship and pain of that season to go away. Brendan’s love and the therapeutic work I had already done to process my story did not save me from all the grief that lay ahead. It could not heal the trauma and abuse I’d suffered in that house. And in no way did it shorten the years of therapy and work needed for me to move toward a more integrated strength, to more fully inhabit my healing. But if ever there was a time I needed an embodied knowing that someone was in my corner, it was then. Brendan’s presence communicated to my body that I wasn’t alone. I could begin to tap into the belief that even here—in the middle of some of the hardest hard I had experienced—God’s love was still for me too. 

Other people had loved and supported me before this moment, but this experience was markedly different. For the first time in my life, with Brendan, I no longer felt I had to trade my “authenticity for belonging,” as physician and trauma specialist Gabor Mate says. I was truly safe. I no longer lived with my family, and the parent who had caused me the most harm no longer wanted to know me. The grief sat right next to the promise of healing. 

But even if only for a moment, I was able to allow goodness, safety, and connection to attend my pain. To let goodness be a compassionate resource to the trauma I had experienced so long ago. 

This, all of this, is the work of becoming strong like water. 

Embodied Experiences of Compassionate With-ness

That day in my old house, I had an embodied experience: I was fully present to my suffering, and I also experienced connection to Brendan’s profound support. When we feel safe enough in our bodies to actually be present in and to them, moment to moment, our systems are fully “online” and we have the capacity to live in our God-given bodies, wholly and fully. 

Maybe it seems like I’m splitting hairs here; after all, it seems obvious that humans are embodied (or, to put it another way, we always seem to be in body). But the truth is, there’s a pretty big difference. Think how often we go on autopilot or get “stuck in our head” as we examine an idea. Consider how many of us have been taught it’s better to stick with the “facts” whenever a situation brings up emotion. We live in a culture that frequently objectifies, commodifies, and quantifies bodies. When we treat ourselves and others like we are static objects—machines relying solely on rational thought—rather than image bearers with actual bodies and emotions, we don’t have capacity to truly connect with what’s happening in and through us. We learn to disconnect from our bodies as a default way to be in the world. 

This is a particular danger for trauma survivors. Because our bodies are the physical location where the trauma is held, we may find it necessary to remain disconnected from them simply so we can function from day to day. That makes total sense, and we can honor that part of us that has had to work so hard to survive. 

At the same time, as we do the sacred work of healing and experience more and more moments of true embodiment—of security and hope—it begins to change us. As I packed up my childhood home with Brendan’s help, it felt extremely familiar to me to be in pain; it felt normal to feel as if I would have to figure out everything on my own and to stuff my feelings. What didn’t feel natural was to sense deep validation and companionship in the midst of my pain; to have someone with me. 

Now, let me be clear: The gift of presence that Brendan gave me earlier in our marriage was not based on his ability to save me. Frankly, he can’t and he couldn’t. I love him dearly, but he is just a person with limits and wounds himself. 

What he could offer, though, was what I’ve come to call “compassionate with-ness,” a posture through which others convey that they are attuned to us—that they resonate with, understand, and share our feelings—and that we can attune to them and to others. Hopefully this makes it possible for us to begin to learn to attune to ourselves as well. In Latin, the word compassion means to “suffer with.” Suffering with someone while being attuned to them is powerful; it conveys a sacred solidarity. This with-ness also speaks to the way our nervous systems and bodies are created to sync with each other as we experience co-regulation. 

This is the key difference between the idea of a “witness” and “with-ness”: A witness can observe what has happened—which certainly matters. But “with-ness” implies that the person has resolved to be in it with us, right down in the dirt and mire of whatever we’re going through. This is what Brendan did for me as I sat and cried on my parents’ old couch. He was with me. Not just physically, but emotionally. He himself was embodied as he tuned in to my suffering, and he cared about it. Critically, he was also grounded himself, which enabled him to be calm, curious, and kind with me. And his tiny offering became the fertile ground for me to learn to become strong in new and unfamiliar ways. 

Those moments of deep safety and co-regulation began to shift my internal narratives, sensations, and experiences in ways I could never have believed. They began to show me there was a different way I could live, a different way to be strong.

While I know not every person will have my story or experience—it’s my great hope that each of us come to experience even tiny glimmers of safety, care, and with-ness that allow us to know ourselves, God, and others more deeply and fully. Remembering, again and again, it’s not pain or shame that makes us most truly strong, but love. 

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