At some point last year I had a revelation that was at the same time completely obvious: vulnerability is not safe.
It’s literally what the word means!
What perhaps confused me was that I’ve grown accustomed, in my life, to move toward vulnerability in my relationships. When I find myself armored and readying my weapons, it has been profoundly transformative to set those done and approach my would-be adversary as a possible friend.
When we become vulnerable, and set aside our weapons and armor, we can relate to each other as humans. When that relating is betrayed, it hurts far worse because we allowed ourselves to be vulnerable. When I expect an attack, I come prepared and may turn an insult into a joke. When I am with those I trust, an insult cuts deeply.
The truth is, vulnerability is the foundation of intimacy and authentic relationship. To allow ourselves to be healed requires vulnerability—to show the doctor or therapist the wound, allow it to be witnessed, and then risk the process of healing. To love and be loved requires vulnerability.
At times, vulnerability transforms a hostile situation into a human moment. The first person to lay down armor and weapon could be initiating the end to war.
Or, they might end up riddled with arrows. Not everyone deserves our vulnerability. Not everyone will handle our vulnerability with the care and respect it deserves. Some will let you do all the work of being vulnerable while they continue to shelter behind sword and shield. Some will belittle you to your face or when you’re not around. Some will use your vulnerability to hurt you.
In trauma-informed perspectives, when we’ve experienced hurt we develop parts of us that seek safety, a state in which we can be fully ourselves without fear of being physically or emotionally harmed. Yet these protective strategies are our weapons and our armor, and what creates safety for ourselves may legitimately make others feel unsafe.
Perhaps your weapon is flattery, perhaps your armor is falling apart and crying instead of accepting accountability and apologizing. Perhaps your armor is growing bigger and angrier to scare off threats, and perhaps your weapon is to lie and hide the truth.
These protectors are so necessary. When vulnerability is punished, a shield is appropriate. When a person is racing to harm you, a sword may be the boundary you need.
When we are not present, however, those protectors may become unaccountable forces who only see the world as a place of dangerous foes and silly people who need to be kept safe. Those protectors may insist on adding more and more weaponry and defenses to their systems, to shutting down any activity or connection that seems too risky.
Their job is to keep us same from harm and eventually we will want to take risks, and they don’t deal well with it. They punish, they criticize, they panic, they “sabotage.” They try to force you back into the small shape they could protect.
To become free, we must restore them back into the helpers they truly are. We must remind them who they are and of their caring toward us. And we must also listen and take seriously their concerns, their valid assessments of danger, and come up with solutions together.
Perhaps, for example, we can take the risk of socializing with others again, but we might stay protected by making sure they are in agreement with our COVID safety protocols around masking or vaccination, whatever they are. Or perhaps we’re willing to extend ourselves into riskier territory, but then we want a plan for if it gets too much.
Think of a part of you that becomes activated when you feel unsafe. The fighter, the drinker, the runner. The perfectionist. The Good Child. The Bad Child. Or your parts may be more esoteric and specific. Don’t try to name them all, pick one. Find a place and time where you can be alone and undisturbed and see if you can sense into your body where that part of you lives. If you can’t, just guess, and pretend you’re right.
Imagine you can say to this part:
I see you, [Name of Protector]. I see that you have, in your ways, tried to help me and keep me safe. I see that without you I might have been lost in my pain and suffering. I acknowledge your work and your service. With my whole heart I thank you and honor you. This work, which has been so necessary, has been a gift to me. And if you are ready, I would like to grow beyond it. What would you do if you could do anything? What kind of life would you make if we were safe, secure, and free? What can I do to help you make this happen?
Listen for an answer, whether it makes sense or not. You might imagine you can give this part of you that experience, and see how that feels. Or if it’s achievable, see if you can set a goal to work toward that experience.
Having been a child who spent a lot of time alone, I went into lockdown thinking, “This’ll be fine, I know how to do this.” But after several months I started noticing the extent to which I was having imaginary fights with people, over-interpreting signals from friends and getting mad about things that turned out not to matter, and particularly having a hard doom focus on the apocalypse.
After people who loved me advised me to try being social, I scheduled some phone calls and outdoor distanced hangouts with people and almost immediately felt better.
“Oh,” I—a therapist with eight years’ experience—realized. “I was lonely.”
My younger, more left-brained and dismissively attached self tended to need explanations as to why socializing with other people was important. For a time other people seemed unsafe, more likely to bully or alienate than to accept and understand, but I let those bad experiences be reasons to avoid trying altogether.
In brief, Cacioppo suggests that loneliness is “social hunger,” the indication from our whole organism that we are in need of social connection. When we go too long, chronically hungry, we start to experience certain recognizable patterns:
Feelings of low self-worth
Sensitivity to real and perceive rejection
Fears of setting boundaries in current relationships, and a tendency to be taken advantage of
Poor health (positive social connection decreases stress and blood pressure)
Increased substance abuse or self-harming behavior
Increased depressive symptoms (lack of motivation, tiredness)
Paranoia and mistrust in others
Important things to know about loneliness is that, while the effects are the same, the appearance of loneliness varies widely. Social hunger is variable. Some of us need daily social contact; others feel perfectly well satisfied with the occasional phone call or outing.
Our social hunger is also only met in relationships that are mutual and authentic. If your only social contacts are your therapists and doctors, there’s nothing wrong with that, but those don’t feed the hunger in the ways that peers, friends, and family do.
One can have a job where they talk to hundreds of people a week, always networking and being “on” but still incredibly lonely because they necessarily cannot be their whole selves in these relationships. Two people can live together in committed relationship and be lonely. One person can live on their own, only go out once a month, and feel perfectly well-fed.
Being alone does not necessarily lead to loneliness. The easiest way to think about the differentiation is choice. Choosing to go to a silent meditation for a week may be a beautiful experience of time alone and in connection with what is greater than the self. Being compelled into isolation through solitary confinement or protracted lockdown due to pandemic concerns is not chosen, and thus far more painful and lonely.
Chronic loneliness is the ultimate self-defeating condition, with its tendency to make us assholes toward those trying to connect with us. We’re so on edge, mistrustful, desperate for connection and terrified of getting hurt, that our guardedness and vigilance for signs of rejection are highly sensitive. Instead of tolerating awkward moments, jokes that landed badly, or confusing statements, we’re more likely to interpret these as signs of scorn or rejection and then react with our own protective “fuck off” energy.
At the same time, we’re more likely to settle for people who really do treat us badly because we’re afraid of having boundaries and losing all connection. It’s very confusing.
In the past year something obvious finally clicked for me. We talk about authenticity in terms of “vulnerability” because it requires setting aside, on purpose, our social safety measures. To connect, we must lay down our weapons and armor.
There are times when it is unwise to do so, when we need those weapons and armor, particularly with those unwilling to lay down their own. There are times when our inability to lay down our weapons and armor costs us opportunities for the connection and love they long to experience. There is risk in every choice, but from every experience we can accrue wisdom to guide future risks.
In these COVID19 pandemic days, social connection without proper safeguards exposes us to serious threats to physical health and wellbeing, not to mention the threat of overwhelming our medical system. And the lack of connection has tremendous and important social and emotional consequences for our wellbeing.
Some focus on the social and emotional damage of isolation and say we need to end social distancing and masking now because of it. Some focus on the medical risks of COVID19 and say we should be stringently locking down because of the real and enormous risk. These two positions, in my mind, are not equal in merit, but we do need to reckon with managing the physical and emotional risks and the current tension between them.
There are plenty of options available for getting some social connection that are low risk of COVID infection: phone calls, video calls, outdoor distanced gatherings, going on walks with masks.
As more of us get vaccinated, obviously the range of safe social options increases with other vaccinated people. I am not an epidemiologist or an expert in transmission, but I’ve come up with four “slider bars” by which I calculate COVID risk:
Masks: The more people involved are wearing masks, the less risk of COVID infection.
Proximity: The further apart people are, the less risk of COVID infection.
Time: The briefer the social encounter, the less risk of COVID infection.
Ventilation: The more ventilation in the space, the less risk of COVID infection. (Outdoors is ideal.)
When risking social connections, if you want to increase risk on one of these slider bars, you could offset it with the others, such as: hugging someone you love (more risky time and proximity) while outdoors and masked (less risky ventilation and masking).
In general, if you’re feeling lonely and having any of the experiences I’ve named above, consider extending yourself a bit to connect. If you don’t talk to anyone, try texting a friend to tell them you’re thinking about them. If you only text people, try scheduling a phone call. If you have lots of calls, try scheduling an outdoor walk.
Remember, when you’re getting connected, that it’s going to be emotionally challenging. It’s like if you used to be athletic but find yourself getting winded going up a staircase again because you’ve lost conditioning. This is not a permanent situation, it’s simply about getting your conditioning back.
You don’t jump from not exercising at all to running a marathon next week. You start where you’re at, start getting some practice exercises in, get rest between exercise, and then slowly increase the duration and intensity.
We’re getting through this, and in some ways this may be the hardest time, when we can see the end. If you’re struggling, know that we’re struggling with you, and if you can, take a risk.
When I was younger and felt less at home in the world, one of my escapes was to wrap my awareness into daydreams. These dreams could be quite elaborate and even serial, typically around relationships I longed to build with people I found attractive or admirable but felt too inadequate to approach in person. Sometimes these were very deep, long, reflective conversations; other times they were relationship arcs: how we’d finally begin to speak, the rising action of our connection, special moments together, even the ways we’d finally break apart.
In a sense, these fantasies were a balm to loneliness and anxiety, yet they took on an agency of their own. There were parts of me that actively resisted presence in life, finding it disappointing and demoralizing in contrast to the mental reality in which I had control.
Except—I didn’t really have control. In my mind I could make these images sock puppets of my inner self talk to each other, but it was difficult to pull my mind out of the dream and back into dealing with my daily life. The mental theatre of life was missing aliveness, spontaneity, fulfillment.
This is an example of what I’d call a “coping strategy,” a habit that helps smooth the sharp and painful edges of painful reality. Coping strategies are useful, and they are limited in that they do not help us to do the work of transforming that reality. Often coping strategies may actively resist the changes of life, which tends to require a certain amount of experiencing pain and discomfort to ensure transformative action is thorough, effective, and includes as many of our parts as possible.
And there are times when coping is a perfectly good move. There are certain experiences in life that cannot be transformed all at once, or are so overwhelming that we do not have the space or capacity to feel and transform. When we are trapped in a relationship, a home, or a country by an abusive person, a certain measure of coping is necessary to get through the awfulness while we strive to find an escape.
But a coping strategy also contains within it truth about ourselves. Lately I find myself falling back into that pattern of getting lost in my imagination. Sometimes that lostness means having intense and irritable arguments with people in my mind that I would never have in person. Sometimes it means imagining relationships or experiences that are deeply unlikely.
Along with that, I strive to also practice what I’d call “Self-care,” which are the practices that bring presence and awareness into life and let that awareness illuminate the inner and outer work that reduces suffering. Self-care is sitting meditation, calm conversations with our loved ones about difficult relationship patterns, tarot readings, baths, and walks. Self-care is also showing up to protests, challenging unfair working conditions, educating one’s self about one’s history and material realities.
Self-care is also simply being alive, feeling one’s feelings, and not looking at life as something that requires fixing or salvation. My daydreaming, I think, has a touch of the salvation within it.
Parts of me have struggled, like all of us, with the grief, stress, and enormous contraction in my life due to stay at home orders and pandemic safety measures. When there is no clear finish line, staying in the stress of it begins to feel intolerable. I can endure much when I know it will end, particularly when I know I have control over how it ends. And, though I do know this will end because all pandemics end, not knowing for sure when has been painful. So it makes sense I’d start escaping into fantasy.
In my younger years the romantic notion that I kept envisioning was that somehow I’d befriend a person, a wise person, or find a lover who would finally both see me and save me. See in me all the potential and goodness I had to offer, and save me from my self-loathing and self-defeating habits. Eventually, however, I started to find the wisdom that I was doing that work for myself—I was cultivating an inner capacity to see myself through this imaginal work, to see my merits and strengths but also my avoidances.
Dreaming is a beautiful practice of stepping outside of the limitations of ego and envisioning other worlds. By necessity those worlds cannot exist in this one in the way we imagine. Imagination is a powerful engine. In some esoteric traditions, it is the capacity through which we encounter beings and energies not of the material world.
Yet it’s all mixed up with our personal unconscious. Some clients tell me they imagine having conversations with me between sessions. What they are doing is talking to a part of themself whose nature and capacity is expressed by whatever it is they symbolically associate with me.
In a sense, we can look at dreams in this way, whether they are sleeping or waking dreams. Many dreams are whisperings from parts of us who we do not recognize as parts of us. They appear in monstrous costumes, or like friends and ex-lovers, or colleagues or family members, or spiritual beings. Perhaps these fantasies show us something we long for ourselves that we’re not ready to claim, or could become ready to claim. Perhaps they’re ways of testing and playing out patterns to imagine how they unfold.
And, in some spiritual traditions, we may dream of the real beings that are not merely psychological internalizations. There are dreams I have in which a person tells me a message, and I relay that to the real person in waking life, and that message has meaning for them. There are dreams I have that prefigure future events that happen later—rarely in a way that’s useful to avoid the events, but often in a way that helps me work through them more quickly. There are dreams I have had in which I am certain I encountered the real person’s psyche, and dreams in which I am certain it was not the real person, and none of these certainties are verifiable in an experimental design.
Dreams are softer and more liquid than goals. A goal is so concrete and fiery. It pushes you in a clear direction and brings with it the experience of obstacles, successes, and failure. Dreaming flows, expands, deepens, and reveals. Now may be a good time to dream, and to see what the dreaming means.
What does the dream pull you toward? Truth telling? Adventure? Risk? Playful experiences? Possibilities of living you’d not allowed yourself to consider? What if these dreams were not about escape, but about planting seeds that you may choose to nurture?
NOTE: This was editedon 1/9/21 to remove some lines that minimized the violent intentions of some of the insurrectionists, after learning more about what happened in the Capitol this past Wednesday.
Sometimes as a therapist, our clients become focused on a particular answer to their problems that may bring up questions and concerns for us. They’ve been starting to work on their core issues but suddenly put all their hopes on a new relationship, or a weekend retreat, or a new kind of medication.
All the attention shifts from the difficult and scary inner work toward focusing on this new situation. You can sense the hope that finally they’ve found the magic pill, the fix, the thing that’s going to solve their pain.
This new thing is not necessarily bad, though it can be. Typically the new thing may really help some problems, it may create some new problems, and it will leave an array of problems wholly untouched. That’s how life seems to go.
The problem is, when we put too much hope on the magic fix, if it fails or does not give us all the results we wanted—we may be thrown into a feeling of powerlessness. The despair may cause a bigger setback that leads us to give up everything that’s been helping.
Those underlying feelings of powerlessness preceded and gave rise to the hope for the magic fix. When we feel stuck in our problems and pains, and our efforts to change have failed too often, we may hope for someone or something else to rescue us.
One of my supervisors once said, “False hope is worse than no hope at all.”
On the other side of powerlessness, when even false hope is gone, lies despair and rage. The past several years have confronted me with the way my own mind tends toward imagining the big fears, anticipating enormous problems to come around climate change, civil unrest, resource wars—basically anything umar haque writes on Medium.
Such despair has bloomed in my mind in the past few years as any momentum and collective will we had to address these problems seems to have become whelmed in the expressions of an empire in decline: a flirtation with fascist doubling down on this doomed course, unrest, impotent governing structures eating their own tails, and the whispers of civil war.
Perhaps my attraction to doom comes from from growing up with the looming threat of climate change. One of the long-tried tactics to push for change has been explaining, with greater and greater alarm, the dangers to come if we stay on this course.
What I know is that we need those on the edges: the radicals, the queer, the marginalized, the ones who speak up and remind me of what I’d want to ignore. These are the voices that see we are the Titanic plowing heedlessly into the ice and shouting for us to stop. We need these voices if we’re going to survive the changes that are already happening.
For a time, after the last election, I found my mind jumped to envisioning this future with a terrifying and overwhelming certainty. When talking with folks who I thought were in similar places I would share my fears of civil war and the others would get quiet and uncomfortable, and I felt more alone with my fears and even more afraid.
Now that concerns about civil unrest potentially spiraling into war have become more mainstream—I was able to talk about it casually with a neighbor the other day—I’ve felt freed up from my terror. What I’ve discovered is that, for me, what was most paralyzing is to feel alone with my concerns. When others can listen to my concerns with grounded compassion, together we can appraise the danger realistically and make practical plans to prepare. Then I feel lighter, freer, and better able to act.
Without that—realistic appraisals and making plans—the despair, powerlessness, and rage become overwhelming. When we focus too much on issues that are so big, so encompassing, so beyond our personal power to influence, it is hard to feel anything but those big, defeating emotions. This is, of course, worsened by media that capitalizes on making those emotions big and defeating so that we keep clicking, reading, watching, and consuming to deal with them.
And this is where I’ve begun to imagine “false despair” as a compliment to false hope. Having been so afraid of authoritarian governance, the rise of fascist movements, and the possibility of civil war, the realistic expressions of these tendencies has been unexpectedly grounding.
Which is not saying these experiences are not terrible. The pandemic is a horror and the national response to it is a disgrace on the people who were supposed to be our leaders. Destructive and disgraceful, too, is the deliberate stoking of polarization and the most fascistic impulses of the American people.
The deaths and grief are real. But what has surprised me often for the past four years is the ineptitude. Our would-be fascist was surprisingly bad at his job, which does not mean he’s not dangerous and the consequences of this won’t continue to unfold in harmful ways. The insurrection that stormed the Capitol building included people who had zip-ties, weapons, and incendiary devices clearly aiming for violent action, with calls for murdering elected officials, and also there were a lot of incidental folks who seemed to be swept in and not know what to do with themselves—milling about, breaking and messing with stuff, taking photo ops.
And while all that was happening, I needed to eat lunch and see clients. Life continued.
That paralyzing vision of utter horror and misery has done nothing to help me, and the certainty with which doom prophets make their utterances feels as unhelpful as the blindfolded certitude of the optimism peddlers and spiritual bypassers. Those who need to hear the doom prophecies are those with the power to do something about it. Those of us who are trying to live our lives and create something closer to the ground may need to hear enough of it to motivate us to act and gather power and influence.
What I seek is a path of clear perspective, which requires ongoing discernment and recalibration. Though this coup failed, that does not mean our struggles are over, and my fearful part worries that there are those who watched what happened that will reflect and come up with a better plan in the future. Thank you, fear brain! That’s an important concern. Now let’s finish this blog post.
What I mean to say is, even with that being true—even if somehow those chuckleheads had taken over the government—I would still need to make lunch and see my clients. That is the work of my life, what I am able to do, and the way I can be effective. Writing this blog post, as much as it feels like spitting into the ocean, is nevertheless something I can do.
On a fundamental psychological level, we need to begin acting where we have the most power and influence. It is not powerlessness, rage, and despair that make us effective—those emotions are valid and worthy of care and compassion within ourselves, but we cannot provide that when we’re flooded by them. What we need is to engage with these feelings from a place that is grounded and centered within our own agency—no matter how small or limited that agency may seem, we have access to it.
That story of despair and fatalism—”It’s all going to hell and there’s nothing I can do”—can crush us, or we can look at the piece of truth within it and let it guide us to where we can be effective. Me, the person typing, may have very small influence on the larger movements of history, but I have a great deal of influence on what we do with it. I have influence on my family and community in how we talk about and respond to what is happening, how we plan for what may be coming.
Whatever is coming, when it comes, may have features of what we fear, but it will also be different from what we can imagine. We will still have lives to live, floors to sweep, opportunities for joy and laughter and tears, people we love. There will be loopholes, secret places, and unexpected opportunities for power if we are awake enough to see them.
When you are feeling overwhelmed by despair, rage, or powerlessness, I would invite you to try any or all of the following:
Take a moment to acknowledge you feel this way because you care, and thank yourself for caring. Even if you see yourself as surrounded by a field of monsters in human bodies who care nothing for anyone else, recognize that within you, at the core of despair and rage, is your genuine caring for and love of life, the world, and humanity. It can be a lot simply to stop, take a breath, and acknowledge this. “I acknowledge I would only feel this way if I cared.” If you feel softer, you might try saying, “I appreciate that I care enough to feel this,” or even “I am grateful that I care enough to feel this.” But if you do not feel appreciative or grateful, it is great simply to begin with acknowledgment.
Next, do something for your body. Drink water. Take a nap. Eat some food. Go for a walk or otherwise get exercise that works for your body.
You might do something for your environment, too. Sweep the floor. Make the bed. Wash a dish. Clean anything. Pick up some litter. Don’t make a big, ambitious plan, just pick one thing to do and do it.
Then, you might also do something for your heart. Journal your thoughts and feelings. Draw a picture of how you feel. Talk to someone who can listen without offering advice or judgment.
Finally, you might also do something for your mind. Take time to write or speak out your fears. (Speaking could be to another person or to a voice recorder.) Really put them out as succinctly or clearly as possible. “I am afraid of civil war.” “I am afraid of losing my home.” Then take a break for a bit, and come back to this. Pick one of your fears and spend more time writing out what you think could happen that would make this come true. Once you’ve articulated this, think about what resources or supports you need that would help you plan to survive or offset these risks. Look around and start connecting with those resources, skills, or supports.
When I used to teach mindfulness workshops to folks, the idea of practicing nonjudgmental awareness tended to be a lively topic. Isn’t it important to judge certain things and behaviors? Shouldn’t we judge when people are doing harm? Underneath this was often a feeling of threat by the idea that completely giving up all judgment would be making ourselves vulnerable to victimization, a very valid concern.
Engaging with these conversations helped me to refine what the practice meant to me.
As a therapist, what seems clear to me is that people heal when they can move past their shame to be witnessed and accepted as they are, and this healing leads to greater integrity. Few people enjoy their own suffering and find little relief when that suffering is met with contempt, even if it’s “deserved”. People make choices based on what they know, and often under stress those choices are short-sighted and create more suffering. Helping people to slow down and soothe the stress response helps them to access their executive functioning to better reflect on and make choices, and mindfulness practice is one way of doing this. Much of this would be easier if we lived in a society where people had access to healthcare, housing, and food as needed.
Things that get in the way of moving out of the stress response are emotional cruelty, physical violence, and a certain energy of scorn or contempt. All of these are essentially social threats that exacerbate shame and distress and make people more reticent to share their true feelings. What we often call “being judgmental” is this attitude of scorn or contempt, communicating a belief in some essential badness in a person for their choices rather than offering curiosity to understand why they are as they are.
In mindfulness practice, the primary work is to practice offering to ourselves that inner witnessing, kindness, and acceptance with presence. We notice our thoughts, feelings, and sensations, and the stories we tell about these things. We do not act on them, except to be with the practice and continue breathing.
When it comes to our behaviors, we may wish to make judgments, though it is helpful to move past a simplistic binary of “good” or “bad” and into a deeper reflection on how we feel about our behaviors and the consequences of our actions.
If you are an alcoholic, for example, you could practice nonjudgmental observation of the craving to drink, and in many ways that okayness makes it easier to be with the craving without doing anything about it, until it naturally passes. What could be not okay is having the drink, and it could be not okay because you know from history that having the drink leads to a whole host of unwanted consequences and harms to you.
Inner acceptance is the primary work that allows all of our conflicting parts to better work together. If we can offer that to others, that is lovely, but we cannot do that without boundaries, which requires judgment.
Here we approach the paradox that I’ve been mulling over for most of 2020. There are limits of nonjudgmental tolerance, and there are limits of judgmental rage, and we’re sitting in all of it. Whether you think masking is a government conspiracy or you think anti-maskers are dangerous sociopaths, we still have to be in the same space with each other and we cannot control each other.
Ruminating on how much you despise the other person’s beliefs and actions has very limited returns for one’s emotional equilibrium and wellbeing. At the same time, simply minding one’s business and not judging others’ actions may mean experiencing unwanted harms and risks.
For example, I have great compassion for whatever people living alone are doing to get through the pandemic emotionally. Some of them have a pod, some of them are hooking up with people, some of them are prioritizing family.
But if that person wants to come inside my house to hang out with me unmasked, then we encounter judgment and boundaries. I don’t think they are bad, but I have a risk management protocol that for me is doing reasonably okay at both helping me not to constantly ruminate every time I clear my throat (“This is it! I have COVID!”) while also not being utterly isolated. That protocol is a work in progress, but I need to have it, and it does not work for me to disrespect it. For us to meet, we would both have to renegotiate our boundaries and risks.
It is easy to be kind and nonjudgmental toward another person’s choices when the consequences do not impact our own wellbeing and stability. And when those consequences do impact us, it is not wrong to have judgment and boundaries about what we will accept.
This is one of the reasons why, even if you have a therapist friend or partner, you need your own therapist. In a social or intimate relationship we ideally meet to care for each other in a mutual way, to make decisions together that affect each other. A therapist has clearer boundaries and greater distance from the impact of your choices. Your professional therapist would not be personally hurt when you break relationships agreements. Your therapist lover would be.
The kind of judgment that comes with boundary-setting feels harsh and angry to those of us unused to it, and when we try it out we may err on the side of too much rigidity and anger after years of too much timidity. We may set those initial boundaries from a place of making it about ourselves, like their behavior is something they did to us. Often we may feel our own guilt about having the boundary, which may lead to more brittleness. These conversations tend to communicate more of the contemptuous judgments.
An image of a road on which is graffitied “Mask or Stay Home,” yet the graffiti is itself crossed out.
There are certain problems, such as a global pandemic, when we cannot escape being impacted by others’ choices. If you think COVID is a hoax, you still have to deal with the economic contraction of stay at home orders and people being unwilling to risk their health. If you diligently follow all the public health recommendations, you still may be impacted when the hospitals are filled up with active COVID cases. Collective navigation of what we judge, what we support, can only be done through collective process, but on a personal level we need to find what we can do for ourselves within that process.
It takes practice to get to a place of directness and dignity, and it may be surprising to learn that kindness and firmness need not be enemies but may indeed be very good friends. We do no one a service when we let ourselves be torn to shreds by our own caring and compassion. Firmness is also about being clear in what you are willing to offer and what expectations you have and accept. Kindness is also about not allowing people to disrespect and violate your boundaries in a way that will lead you to hate them if unchecked.
For those interested in my work, here are some current ways you can plug in or access more:
My new essay, “Talking to the Gods: Power, Money, Ethics, and Spirituality and Wellness Professions” is now up at Gods & Radicals. It offers some reflections on the messy issues of power and money in helping and spiritual work broadly, and offers some questions and areas of reflection for those who want to assess risk and danger in working with unlicensed or unregulated teachers, coaches, and healers.
The most egregious mystic healers become so enamored of their own feelings of certainty and disciple worship that they feel free and empowered to determine what is true for others. Such power is exerted through giving nonconsensual and invasive “readings” of the people around them, while simultaneously rejecting anyone else’s capacity to read them. In truth, there are also unethical mental-health establishment folks who enact the same kind of power onto their clients through interpretations and aggressive reframing of the client’s problems, who approach therapy from a paternalistic posture that disempowers and infantilizes their clients and may stir up more problems than we settle.
The course I find offers so many practical and accessible skills for times of instability, including foraging, making one’s own food and home remedies, and self-defense skills.
As my private practice remains at my capacity, I have turned my attention toward writing and making courses as a way of disseminating what I offer to be more accessible to folks who do not have the access to work with me one on one. These courses are not a substitute for one’s own therapy, but may be a useful compliment to them:
Crossing the Distance: Embodied Connection and Deep Listening in Telehealth Practice is a workshop that I have offered multiple times since this summer for therapists and other healers who are struggling to feel fully present and connected to their clients while working through telehealth. As the COVID19 pandemic continues, this course has been a rich opportunity to help us find ease, joy, and clinical efficacy in our work even in a medium that may not be our preference.
The Ram & The Scales: The Dance of Interdependence is an online workshop series I am developing that will begin in February 2021. This work emerges from a book in progress that draws upon psychotherapy and the Western esoteric tradition, using the seven classical planets of astrology to organize and deepen the skills of being fully ourselves and connected in authentic relationships with others. The workshops will include a copy of the text, audio meditations, video chats, and a forum for discussion.
It is a blessing to feel inspired to do this work. This year has been hard for me, as it has been for all of us, but something that is a source of resilience and hope for me is to continue to be mindful of what is problematic and painful while also returning my focus to what is generative. There is no single solution to all that ails us, ever, but I also find that simply the act of moving toward desire is itself a transformation of life.
I wish you strength, support, solace, and ease this winter.
One practice I learned from the Reclaiming tradition was the work of establishing group agreements for communication and working together, in ways that respond to the group’s unique needs and desires. Ideally, one builds those agreements among the people present, but often people do not fully know how to articulate what helps them to feel safe and included. A lot of people have never been asked, or not thought much about it, or can only tell you what has gone wrong without being able to say what they need instead.
So as I’ve run workshops and groups I’ve found it useful to come up with my own proposal of the values of successful groups. From this I came up with a formula: “Respect yourself. Respect each other. Respect the work.”
These three components—Self, Each Other, Work—are like the Tarot’s Three of Pentacles: three gears that may spin together in a productive way that makes the whole greater than its parts. But if one or more parts gets stuck, it can truly shut down the whole.
The Three of Coins from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot
Respect Your Self
When we come into a group or community, we bring with us our unique stories, desires, needs, values, wounds, boundaries, and cultures. We have significant questions pertaining to personal comfort, belonging, and survival: “Is there a place for me here? Will I get my needs met? Will I be safe?”
Those questions are addressed by the confluence of the three coins, but the place where we have the greatest power is in Self. There is no group or relationship that will consistently and unfailingly anticipate and tend to all our wants and needs without communication and conflict. Self-responsibility is the right and obligation to observe and tend my wants and needs, and it is one important ingredient for interdependent, resilient communities.
Within the realm of self-responsibility:
Advocating for or addressing my physical needs and accommodations.
Communicating what I need.
Communicating and enforcing boundaries when I feel endangered or hurt.
Establishing the necessary amount of space and connection for engagement with self-respect.
Self-responsibility is not radical independence. It is the recognition that to be interdependent means I need to make some effort to make things work. That effort could be in self-adjustment and accommodating my needs, and it could be self-advocacy and communicating what accommodations I need.
The best example, to my mind, of an ethic of self-responsibility in groups is around bathroom use. When I was in elementary school through high school, I was in classroom settings in which adults exerted control over my body through determining when I could use the bathroom.
There were 5-10 minute windows in which it was allowed, and it was incumbent upon me to discipline my bathroom needs so they could only be met in those windows. If I had to go during class or on a road trip, typically I needed to ask permission very publicly and visibly, and then to submit to the adult’s decision of whether or not I would be allowed. None of the adults knew how it felt to be in my body.
Should my body need to use the bathroom in an unpermitted way, I found it exceedingly distracting and overwhelming. I internalized shame that it was somehow wrong of me to need to go in the middle of a lecture or group discussion, for example, but at the same time most of my energy would then go toward willing myself to be present and mitigate an even more embarrassing accident.
This practice disciplines us to be ready for workplaces where our bathroom use might be in some way monitored and controlled. Whether it’s working at a fulfillment center where that time gets docked from your pay, or working at an office where you get tacitly monitored and judged, it turns your own relationship with your own body into a site of external control that undermines your bodily autonomy.
Perhaps ironic or perhaps by design, this kind of authoritarian control is primarily necessary in work places where people do not feel invested or empowered in their work. When there is not a sense of collective ownership in the work being done, then those who are simply there to get a paycheck may be more prone to taking long breaks that are about avoidance rather than tending bodily needs. But exerting more discipline and control only reinforces that dynamic, disempowering and disinvesting.
When it comes to my groups, now that I’m a grownup, I tell people that if they need to go to the bathroom, they should just go. Whether we’re in the middle of something or not.
Respect Each Other
We affect and are affected by each other. When we are in a group of individuals trying to get along with each other, some measure of civility and norms are both inevitable and necessary.
The way a person talks to me really affects how well I am able to hear them, whether I have to manage my emotional upset or whether I can consider their perspective. In turn, whether I am truly listening and valuing their input affects their own feelings of safety and belonging.
We often have unique standards of what is okay to say to others versus what is okay for others to say to us. We often have double standards or convenient exceptions—it’s never okay to speak in this way, except this time the dude really deserves it. We often think we know what is going on inside other people but also have no way of fully understanding their inner context, and the assumptions we bring to an interaction shape how we behave.
If you understand a person’s inner world, their history, and their context, their behavior makes complete sense. But mostly we only understand our own contexts and judge others’ behavior from our contexts. It makes life pretty challenging.
Group norms and agreements help to bring a sense of coherence to the group. Norms need to allow for conflict and disagreement with guardrails of acceptable behavior. I can hear a lot of critical feedback from a person but if they use a certain word, or say things that imply they know my motivations and inner world, I find it very hard to set aside my defensiveness.
For me, an important group agreement is for people to only speak from their own experience. So instead of saying, “You blew off the meeting,” which tends to engender the urge to defend or make excuses, I find it more workable to hear someone say “I was really disappointed when you weren’t at the meeting.” This tells me what my impact was and is often enough to provoke my guilt and responsibility, along with my desire to be esteemed in the group, to act better in the future.
Respecting each other means treating every other person’s needs as being as valuable as our own, which again sometimes brings us to conflict when it appears that needs are incompatible or cannot coexist. Sometimes a group cannot be for every person, and has natural boundaries that exclude people. At the same time, if a group does not wrestle with issues of inclusion and exclusion, its insularity can lead to a whole manner of toxic internal problems and problems for the greater community.
Respect the Work
Respecting the work is about the group’s process and tasks. This could encompass the business of the organization and the necessary tasks to keep it functioning, like filing paperwork on time, making sure everyone knows when the meetings will happen, having clear agenda and a process by which people can participate, processes to ensure the work produced is ethical and of good quality.
When I am doing workshops that involve experiential practice, for example, respecting the work means engaging in those practices with what John Kabat-Zinn calls “skeptical curiosity.” Make doing the work a sincere experiment, neither expecting it to fix all your problems nor expecting it to fail and be a waste of time.
To expect miracles means that when the work gets hard we may consider it a failure. It also opens us up to abusive gurus and community dynamics, believing that someone out there has the Real Thing, the Magic Cure.
To expect failure more or less guarantees failure. Every process has problems, which is not an excuse to continually work to rectify those problems. But at the same time, we don’t get anywhere if we don’t engage with what’s here.
Respect for the work includes the ways communities govern themselves. Whether decisions get made by consensus, by voting, or by fiat from a leader—any of these might be fine if the other two conditions are met. A benevolent dictator who respects the needs and wants of every person under their care might be a workable system. Until they die, and the person who takes their place does not respect Self or Community.
I prefer to participate in communities where there is more direct engagement by consensus or voting, but in some situations I accept hierarchy. In my therapy practice, I am a benevolent dictator. I run my own ship, and I strive to set clear expectations and meet clients where they are at. I am accountable to my ongoing clients to try to surface and address problems as they arise—that is part of the task of therapy—but my limit is when my clients’ needs or problems seem to require that I compromise what I consider to be the process. In those situations, I consider it respectful to all of us to support my client in finding a clinician who is a better fit. Even in hierarchy, there must be respect for self and each other.
All this is to say, the work of the group is its own being that requires its own tending and attention. This is the function of business meetings, as tedious as they are, in which the group intentionally gathers to do the work necessary to maintain its functioning. When I am involved in an organization, I want clear expectations. I want to know how decisions are made. I want to know how I can be involved in decisions if I want to be. I want to know what processes are available if I have a grievance or want to change the organization.
If these processes are not clearly delineated and publicly accessible, then the community will quickly become riven by gossip, secrecy, power struggles, and general bullshittery as social status gets leveraged to make organizational change. A governing process should exist and work regardless of who participates or does not participate.
In one of my early communities that was consensus-based, we had meetings in which the ethic was—whoever shows up to the meeting is supposed to be here and gets to make the decisions for the group. There was otherwise no criteria for membership or clear boundaries around who was a member and who mattered. That meant the opinions of people who invested hours of work into community were treated as equally important as those of the person who came to the meeting because they’re currently dating or having sex with another person in the group.
That’s no longer the way I want to practice community, but if that’s what you want, go for it. The difficulty arose from what I perceived to be a lack of confidence in and commitment to our process. People who did not come to the meetings voiced their angry criticisms over email, calling for decisions they weren’t present for to be undone or modified. And then we would violate our own process by allowing consensus decisions made at the meetings to be abandoned or undone. That doesn’t work! If decisions can always be undone or reversed on whim or because of a hurt feeling, then there is no process that can be relied upon to support the community. In a sense we end up stuck in process or always undoing and revising decisions around foundational practices.
Three Pentacles Spinning in Harmony
Once upon a time I believed there were intrinsically violent and destructive groups and ideologies, and others that were purely good and revolutionary. These days it seems to me that there are some that are absolutely violent and destructive, but many philosophies, religions, and practices that could be wielded for harm or healing. Or healing that entraps you in harm, like the self-help movement that turns into a cult. Or harm that leads to healing, like liberation theologies or the practice of what was once called “queering,” finding liberatory queer possibilities in heteronormative cultures.
What I have learned is that there are many kinds of transformative communities, and many ways ideologies can be wielded to opress or uplift, and every practice could work wonders, could create harm, or could simply be the wrong process for the task at hand. Life is really messy.
This framework of the three gears of respect may be a way of diagnosing whether a circumstance is harmful of helpful to you. When I am in this community, do I feel I respect myself? Do I respect the people around me, and feel respected by them? Do we have clear processes for doing our work, and can we engage in hard conversations about the work without it becoming personal and embittered?
And if there is struggle, where is it located? Is it hard to respect myself because we don’t respect each other? Is it hard to respect each other because the power dynamics are unclear and murky? Does it seem everyone respects each other but still I have no autonomy over myself? Does it seem like only one person really gets respect?
If it doesn’t work for everyone involved, it doesn’t work.
From writer, witch, and licensed therapist Anthony Rella comes a collection of short essays on emotions, boundaries, disappointment, guilt, hope, shame, intimacy, and connection. Written with the warm voice of a caring and patient friend, these essays help guide the reader to their own center where they can find power, balance, and joy not despite difficult moments and emotions, but because of them.
In the United States, we are passing through a threshold of change. At this moment no one is sure what will be on the other side, and it is possible that we will not know by tomorrow what is on the other side, and that it may take much longer than we like to know.
No matter who wins the government elections, we are still passing through other thresholds. We are in the midst of a pandemic. We are in the midst of an escalating climate crisis. We are having and raising children. We are taking care of the people who are living.
There is not going to be a singular event that determines history. An event is like a catalyst, like throwing active yeast into flour. An event sets reactions in motion that transform the matter into something else. The 9/11 attacks were one such event. The last election was another. The onset of coronavirus another.
We are periodically reminded of our limitations. How our lives are shaped by historical, political, and economic forces that we only have limited capacity to shape. But in truth, only some of us need this reminding. Many, many more have known this on a daily basis for their entire lives.
In our isolation this year, separated from loved ones and the familiar, many of us have fallen into despair and wondered what is the purpose of anything. Why set goals? Why dream of a future? Why keep showing up to the work?
And on a personal level, we don’t always know. There will always be setbacks and then unexpected moments of huge leaps forward. There will always be adversaries and people who find ways to corrupt what was beautiful and revolutionary, and people who will be corrupted by time and power and systems larger than the self.
Corruption is like mold, like rot, like ants creeping into the kitchen. It is an outcome of cleaning habits and environment. It is the natural world doing what it does, breaking down rigid form so it can feed new forms. And sometimes it breaks down things we love, and sometimes those things need to be broken down.
I do not have answers for us or promises of ease if you simply follow a protocol. My work is about helping others to know themselves and bring that fullness into their lives. None of that guarantees that others will treat that self with respect, but it gives us a much greater chance of finding what heals and empowers us.
Some battles will not end in our lifetimes. Even bigotries and fights we thought were settled seem to get stirred up anew when we least expect it. Each time they hurt, deeply. Not all of us will survive this time, as we know, not all of us have survived.
But.
Think about all the people from whom you have received inspiration, encouragement, or liberation. The book, the teacher, the relative, the friend who showed you something that you didn’t know was possible before. The person walking down the street wearing vibrant clothes that stuck out so much but showed you the enormous world that clothes could be. The person who showed you what kinds of relationships were possible. The writer who opened your mind to a revolutionary perspective.
If you have received a liberating fire in your life, consider that part of your work could be passing along that fire to someone else.
You might not even know all the ways you’ve done it. Perhaps it was when you told someone in public that you thought their joke was hurtful. Perhaps it was when you were just smiling and enjoying the beauty of the world.
There are so many little moments that are unfathomable. There are moments where you might have thought the opposite happened, when someone expressed anger or offense toward you, but it was because you pricked something deep within their souls that was longing to come forward. Something that scared them because they didn’t know it was possible to be you before, and because they didn’t know it was possible they didn’t know that they wanted it, and now that they know it’s possible and they want it they have to live with that knowledge like an itch that may eventually kindle into their own liberatory flame.
Our lives are valuable unto ourselves, and we are part of a web of people who pass the flame of light and aliveness to each other.
Meditation practice was something I’d attempted and failed several times over my late teens and early twenties, after reading a book by Lawrence LeShan that offered a rather straightforward, earnest, and very Western approach to starting a meditation practice. He made it sound simple and profound, though he was dismissive of the spiritual and supernatural trappings that came out of religious traditions in which meditation was taught.
Yet I would get stuck often, thinking that the busyness of my mind meant I was not meditating properly. And my discipline would flag quickly, and I’d give up, thinking it was something only a particular kind of person was able to do. It wasn’t until after I graduated college and started studying with a teacher who insisted on daily meditation as part of our practice that I was able to work through my resistance.
A resistance with many layers, a resistance that persists even after fifteen years of daily practice.
The main resistance was confusing the practice with the results. Those of us who are not taught meditation in a religious context are often drawn to it with promises of overall ease, health, relaxation, and stillness of mind. We think that this is what meditation is—to clear the mind and sit in blissful silence and ease.
It is not. And our attachment to those experiences becomes a barrier to both meditation itself and having those experiences. It’s very sad, believe me, and it’s not about you as a person. It’s a human struggle. There is a reason we have all these different ways of meditating and all these teachings about “monkey mind.” Our minds do not naturally lend themselves to silence and stillness. Nor do we get there through internal force.
There are many forms of practice to meditation, but whatever it is, the practice is simply the practice. Focus on the posture, focus on the breath, focus on the way your body moves or does not move, focus on the sounds in your environment, focus on this icon, focus on your inner state. Count your breathing. Imagine you are a mountain. Chant the name of the divine or this holy mantra and be with the sound you are making.
Notice when you get distracted and lose your practice. Return to the practice.
That’s it.
When we take on the discipline of meditating, we are immediately confronted with everything in us that refuses and fears silence, stillness, and emptiness. We notice everything within us that strives for control and is so afraid of not having it. We see within us all the qualities that those controlling parts suppressed—which could be some deeply unsettling experiences and memories that need therapeutic support.
During my first few months of meditation practice, not only did I notice my busy mind, I became increasingly aware of how much tension I carried in my body. I was in my early twenties and would never have called myself a tense person. I imagined myself to be a go-with-the-flow kind of guy. I was praised for it.
Once, on a field trip in high school, I was waiting in line for food and a woman blatantly cut in front of me. I said nothing. My Catholic school teachers noted this and stopped me to praise me for my virtuous patience. In truth, I was utterly terrified of upsetting anyone in my life, and suppressed all my anger and all my wants and needs to be as small as possible. Now, I do not consider that to be patience, but rather allowing myself to be disrespected.
Patience might look like engaging in the conflict with as much kindness for myself and the woman as possible. Or it might be choosing to allow the cutting and being with my upset. What I did was less of a problem than the way I was when I was doing it.
Meditation teaches patience because it is the practice of patience. It is the practice of feeling one’s full experience, letting go of the controls, and staying with the discomfort of practice. And it is through this engagement that I discovered how much anger and tension was in my body. Letting go of the mental efforts to control my inner experience, I felt how that effort was embodied in the tightness of jaw, the tension in my joints.
One amazing morning I was sitting and noticed that my right leg was tensed and lifted slightly off the ground. As I noticed this, I noticed that this leg had always been, almost instinctively. And as I noticed this, I noticed I could allow my leg to relax so that my knee rested on the ground and I was not holding myself up so much.
Later, as a group we were all sitting together for longer than I usually would on my own. Group meditation practice for me offers a greater sense of stillness than I can find on my own, though I find this to be a reciprocal practice. The more I practice, the more stillness I offer the group, and the more stillness I am able to receive. My whole body began to tremble. It was unsettling but I kept breathing. Later, I asked my teacher about it, and I’m not sure they fully knew the answer but they offered that it sounded like an infusion of power into my being.
Fifteen years later, I think this is true. Stillness and discipline creates space for power to enter into my being. And, concurrently, I believe this shuddering to be a somatic release of tension and buried stress. This experience does not happen often these days, but when it does, I notice it tends to come after periods of time in which I felt particularly disconnected and avoidant. When I’ve spent a lot of time doomscrolling and checking out of my body. When my sitting practice feels shallow and twenty minutes go by with me feeling “I” wasn’t there. Then, some beautiful mornings, I show up ready to engage in the practice, and the shuddering happens. Afterward, I feel like I’m here. My body is touching the earth. I am connected with the people in my life.
It’s as though something in me was trying to hold its breath and get through the hard stuff. Breath-holding is something we instinctively do when we’re anxious. It’s a kind of bracing for impact, and in some ways it’s a way of trying to skip over the hard stuff. Like if I simply stop breathing then what happens won’t hurt so much, and when it’s over I can breathe again.
In meditation, the part of us able to endure the hard stuff comes to ground and the breath-holding parts get to relax. Like an adult shows up who can handle things and let the other parts of us take a break.
Much has been written of spiritual bypassing, which is very much a problem of people turning their spiritualities into shields against reality and their “enlightenment” into cruelty. The problems of spiritual bypassing in New Age and white spiritual communities seems to have flourished in the way so many of them have proven fertile ground for QAnon’s anti-Semitic conspiracies.
We struggle, I think, to balance our Western teachings around knowing and protecting the Self while also remembering we belong to a whole that is greater than us. To hold sacred both our joy and our grief, our kindness and our anger, our stillness and our action. When we cannot hold both, we see them as enemies and must take a side that divides us against ourselves and makes us brittle.
We need boundaries and connection. Conflict is ongoing and the work of justice will be ongoing. We cannot wait until we’ve solved every outer problem before we can take time for our own needs and wellbeing. And simply focusing on our own needs and wellbeing is its own bubble that again leads back to cruelty, apathy, and vulnerability to authoritarianism.
Spiritual practice is a stepping away from life for a period of time before re-engaging. We need both movements, to be able to step away and the intention to step back. It is like conflict with our loved ones. We need to be able to say we’ve reached our limit and need to take a break to gather ourselves, reflect, vent, and figure out what we need to do to resolve the conflict. Simply throwing more words, hurt, anger, and accusations upon each other is like adding too much wood to the fire and smothering it. We need space to breathe.
At the same time, if we say we need a break from the conflict and never come back to it, then we’ve added a different offense. We try to distract from the disrespect, hurt, and unmet needs but they do not go away, they simply linger and grow with resentment, waiting to burst out again in hot, explosive flame.
What we need is to say we are taking a break, and then to return and engage with a more sober and grounded mind. That is spiritual practice. Instead of sending the angry email, I go and spend ten minutes breathing and connecting to what is holy within me, and then I try to engage the angry email as a holy human person. The conflict needs to be dealt with, but I engage with my full self, and that changes how things unfold.
Spirituality is not about bypassing, it is about becoming more and more present and growing our Being in life. And noticing when we get distracted, and what we do to numb ourselves and make ourselves smaller, and then to return to that which grows presence.
