Yet the news report said they were unearthing “the secret of the residential schools.”
And I started yelling at the television. “Secret from whom?”
This history was taught to me when I was a kid attending school from the late 1980s to 2000. In my elementary school in Indiana, around third or fourth grade, we had units on Indiana history. One section focused on the Native people. We would get little yellow booklets that told simple stories about what it was like to be a Native, how they fed and clothed themselves, what their daily lives were like, and how it was for them when the pioneers arrived. The next semester we learned about the pioneers. Those booklets were blue, and covered similar material from the pioneer perspective.
Even then, as a kid, I noticed out loud, “In the Indian stories the pioneers are the bad guys, but in the pioneer stories the Indians are the bad guys.” And it wasn’t lost on me that we were the descendants of those pioneers—not necessarily literally, through blood, but we were citizens of the nation those people built.
The country built by those pioneers and their descendants did not find satisfaction in its thirst for cheap land and cheap labor. They kept expanding westward, and made up theological-sounding justifications for why it was their right. They kept bringing people from other lands—forcibly through enslavement, or through exploitative immigration policies—to build the infrastructure and do to the manual labor needed to build great wealth—mostly for the wealthy, white, land-owning men.
But at some point, those of us who inherited this culture and nation-building decided to believe in our innocence. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, I occasionally would hear the expression that “America lost its innocence that day.” A quick investigation into collective memory—a Google search—shows that this same expression was often said referring to assassination of John F. Kennedy.
“America lost its innocence that day.”
What innocence did the United States have when this is its history? Our intelligence agencies have funded coups and insurgent armies in other countries. Was our innocence the naïveté that it could be done to us? Is that innocence worth preserving?
Years ago, in my undergraduate English days, Salman Rushdie came to campus and we had the opportunity to sit with him in a smaller conversation. I remember him wondering aloud why American writers didn’t write about empire. In my early twenties, confused, I wondered to myself, “How is America an empire?”
We have army bases across the world and territories under our control who did not willingly join us and have no democratic representation. We have prisons in other countries. And I didn’t know America was an empire.
Telling ourselves of our innocence is an amnestic, a spell to forget our history. When we are wrapped in the comforting blanket of our innocence, all we can see is our victimhood, and not our culpability. And those who would dare break the spell, try to take the blanket, face our rage.
We’re like the obnoxious kid in class who keeps poking the girl in front of him with a pencil and then has the audacity to be shocked when she finally turns around and slaps him. What’d I do to deserve that?
Confronting the truth of our history and our ancestors is medicine. Seeing our collective guilt and culpability need not destroy us our cause us to collapse in despair. It’s the truth that will set us free. It shows us that we are not powerless victims, not noble martyrs in a world that incomprehensibly hates us. We have power, and we’ve wielded that power in ways that have consequences.
Losing the lie of innocence means we get to finally grow up and become responsible adults in the community of all humans. It means the possibility of real solidarity and recognizing what truly are our common interests and values. All you have to lose is your ignorance.
Fire has much to teach us. The principles that inform building, tending, and ending fires extend beyond the practical into insights into our relationships with our own life energy and capacity to work toward goals.
If you’ve never built a fire yourself, you may think it’s easy. When there is drought and the land is parched, the plants and fallen wood dried-out, and some asshole throws a firecracker into a place without any ring of stone or brick to contain the flames—fires start easily, without control, and their damage is enormous. While wildfires serve the vitality of the larger ecosystem, they are destructive for our human perspective and purposes.
Most of us want a fire that can entertain us, bring us warmth, illuminate the darkness, cook our food, or burn what we no longer need. We want controlled, concentrated, manageable fire. The first skill is knowing the optimal conditions—when it’s wetter, for example, or when we can contain our fire in a stone circle, a fireplace, or a pit, and keep materials on hand to extinguish it if it threatens to leave the container.
Ingredients of a Campfire
When thinking about the materials for a fire, it’s important to know there’s a relationship between the amount of energy it takes to get something burning and the amount of energy it generates in being burnt. So a wadded up piece of newspaper is going to be easy to light, it’ll burn nice and pretty, but it’ll go out quickly if you add nothing else on top of it. A heavy log is the other end of the spectrum—it requires a lot of heat and energy to get going, but once it does it will last you a much longer time.
You can think of it as both “you need to expend energy to get more energy” and also that the more energy you need to expend, the more you’re likely to get from the effort. The first expenditure of energy is getting the spark, which may mean focused energy drawing a spindle through a bow against a plank of wood, or clacking metal or rock together, until you’ve got a spark.
The exception, of course, are the things we’ve designed to be easy-to-light—matches, lighters, fuel, firestarters, and logs soaked in combustible chemicals. If you’ve got any of these, you’ll need less energy to get going.
In firebuilding, the spectrum of materials is broken down into “tinder,” “kindling,” “fuel.” These are the spectrum of that ratio, from easiest to burn to hardest, and likewise from least energy output to most.
Paper, cardboard, pine needles, dried leaves, and tiny matchstick-sized wood all fall under tinder. Tinder is like sugar. Easy to reach for, very satisfying in the moment, but too much of leaves you burnt out and cranky.
What kinds of things do you enjoy doing that are like tinder? For me it could be scrolling on social media, watching a familiar favorite TV show, snacking, and other things I won’t name in public. Often, when clients and I are exploring their tinder activities, it tends to be the things we go to when we’re really exhausted or bored to get a bit of a boost. We’re looking for energy but it’s possible what we really need is a nap, or a glass of water.
Tinder isn’t bad, it’s useful, but if that’s all you’ve got then you’re going to be spending most of your time and energy heaping more atop the fire to keep it going.
So when building a fire, we start with tinder to get enough heat and energy to ignite kindling, which are thicker sticks the size of your fingers or slightly larger. These are like carbohydrates—also easy to burn, but more energy output. A fire of kindling still requires a lot of feeding to keep going, but it’ll burn longer than the tinder.
What kinds of things do you do that feel like kindling? Could be going out on a date, going to a concert, working out, or going for a hike. We’re all going to have different answers based on our ability, our skills, and our energy capacities. Once upon a time, going out to a bar felt like a tinder activity to me, but now leaving the house for any social activity requires some effort of hyping myself up and reminding myself it’ll be worth it.
If you want maximum heat with less effort, then you want your fire hot enough to start fuel—logs thicker than your arm. These beasts take a lot of energy and patience to get going, but they’ll reward you with hours of heat and light and require less constant tending. These are the fat cells of fire.
What kinds of things do you do that feel like fuel? For these I think of the range of bigger life tasks that require a great deal of effort and patience. Could be applying for new jobs, starting a degree, or deciding to learn a new skill.
There are so many things in my life that I value now which began as fuel tasks. When I was younger, I dreaded going to the gym and doing any kind of exercise, but when I was able to push through—even when it was miserable—I found that when I left I felt energized and happier, and glad I’d gone. Beginning a meditation practice, starting my own business, and learning a martial art have all offered me the same experience.
With experience and practice, all of these tasks have moved more into the “kindling” category, but it was not easy. That dread of beginning stayed with me for a long time with each task, but I also sensed what the experienced offered would make it worth it, and I left feeling better.
That’s the key—fuel gives you more energy than it demands. There are plenty of things that take more of our energy than it gives, and those are not fuel. In some cases, these might be obligations we must fulfill to make our fuel activities possible, but just as often they are habits we continue even though long ago they stopped feeding us and we’ve fallen into resentment.
What you want on top is kindling, pieces of wood that are thicker. Ideally you’d want a range of thicknesses, because the thickness and density of the wood is also its potential. The thicker the wood is, the longer and hotter it will burn, and the thickest logs are what we’d call fuel. But the thicker the wood is, the more energy and heat you need to ignite it. That’s why you can’t just throw a tree stump on top of a fire and call it good; you’ve got to split it into smaller pieces that will be easier to light, easier to store, and easier to use to feed the fire over time.
Shaping a Campfire
Heat rises. That’s the primary principle that informs everything about structuring and tending your fire. The second is that heat feeds heat.
When we’re starting cold, we want to build a fire by starting with lots of tinder, enfolding it with kindling, and then adding our fuel once it’s good and hot. A fire needs oxygen, so adding too much, too heavy, and too densely packed wood will smother it before it can get going. My favorite shape is to build a tent of kindling around a nest of tinder.
Too many of us, when we’re feeling low energy or stuck in life, expect ourselves to be able to fire up some heavy fuel. Then, when we fail, we think it confirms our fate as incompetent failures. But all it means is that we’ve added too heavy of fuel, too quickly, without awareness of these principles.
So if you’re starting cold and want more energy in your life, instead of making a huge commitment to a task like starting graduate school, try finding some tinder and kindling tasks that you can get started to build your enthusiasm and energy. Start with one new habit, like washing your dishes more often, and do that for a couple weeks until you add the second.
If you find you’re struggling and it feels hard, think of it as the energy you’re spending to get this fire going, and look at what you get in return when you’ve finished the task. If you’re losing more energy than you gain, that might be a sign that this task is a heavier fuel than you’re ready to burn, and see if you can find something lighter and closer to your energy capacities.
A Fire’s Rhythm of Life
Starting a fire is tricky and discouraging. More often than I care to recall, I’ve experienced the thrill of watching those first flames catch quick and bright and then the bitterness of watching them gutter out before coming to much of anything. By this, I also think of all the times I’ve tried to start a new group, or a new workshop, or get my communities excited about a new project. I think of all the pieces I’ve written that sparked no connection, and the year or two I spent building my private practice before enough clients noticed me that it became sustainable.
Starting a fire is hard! And what’s hardest is learning to intuit when a fire needs tending and when it needs to be left alone to do its work. We can lose a fire through neglect or smothering. In these learning stages we can only make choices and see what happens, then adapt.
That feels like a deep lesson, one that I can’t say I’ve fully learned. Fire teaches us that if we don’t interpret missteps and collapses as signs of divine judgment—if we can keep learning, adapting, and trying—eventually we’ll get a good fire going. But in experiencing the disappointments and failures of the work, eventually we may decide it’s not worth the effort.
If the fire is failing, we could try wadding up more tinder and using our breath to get the weak coals going again, so we can add more kindling on top and try to get momentum again. Perhaps we need to move the heavier logs away to give the fire more time to get stronger. Perhaps we need to spread things out so that the fire could breathe—if it’s too densely packed, it doesn’t have the oxygen it needs. Perhaps we need to push things closer together to concentrate our energy.
No matter how much teaching and instruction we receive, we can only learn through practice. Whether you’re trying to find a partner, start a business, write a novel, or organize a workshop, it’s rare to experience immediate, instant success without effort or failure. We may imagine there’s a right way to do things, and often there is, but on the ground it becomes clear that “the right way” itself contains thousands of smaller choices to make and actions to take. There may be no right or wrong choice to make, nor no action to take that guarantees success or failure. We simply have to make choices, see what happens, and adapt.
Eventually, however, we’ll get a good fire going with a strong bed of coals. All the lessons we’ve learned continue to apply, but now it’s less urgent and catastrophic. It’s an easier pace to tend the fire, and we can be decisive about when we want to feed it and when we want to cool things down. A good fire could burn for days, if not years, but it still requires presence, attention, and conscientiousness.
And, eventually, we may decide it’s time to end the fire. Perhaps we no longer have use of it, our we’re tired of the efforts of tending and want to get rest or do change focus. That’s when we show respect to ourselves, our environment, and the fire itself by making sure it’s completely extinguished so it can be safely left unattended. What’s left is nutrient-rich ash, which offers wonderful fertilizer for others’ growth.
Starting to practice consent can feel awkward and clunky, especially in the emotional intensity of the moment. People whose response to a sad story is to want to wrap you up in a giant bear hug may feel it’s awkward and cold to stop and first ask, “Do you want a hug?”
For them, getting wrapped up in a hug while having big feelings may be exactly the medicine they crave. For others, though—me, for example—when I feel upset and vulnerable, a giant hug feels smothering to me. My parts don’t hear “I love and care about your suffering,” what they hear is “Your sadness is too much for me and I need it to go away.”
This is made worse should I dare to say I don’t want the hug and the hugger feels rejected, upset, and hurt. Then the message I get is that my feelings and needs aren’t important and I need to put all that aside to make them feel better. Thanks for the support!
I get that for the other person it may be a genuine expression of love and caring, and to have that refused feels like a personal rejection. I also get that asking for consent feels cold and unromantic.
Our romantic ideal of love is a relationship in which we intuitively perceive and meet each other’s needs without having to talk about it. Not only is this unrealistic when we each have vastly unique terrains of what it means to love and be loved, it makes minor and inevitable miscues explode into huge questions about the relationship. Our immediate response isn’t: “Oh, this person doesn’t know I need a hug because they come from an emotionally distant family, so I’ll ask for what I need.” What we think is something like: “How could this person be so cruel as to deny me a hug when it’s so obvious I need one?”
It is possible to achieve that level of trust, understanding, and intuitive connection, but the important word here is achieve. We earn that through the efforts of lots and lots and lots of communication, asking for clarification, and growing in understanding of ourselves and our loved ones. Practicing consent gives us a structure and motivation to do this work, to be mindful to check in and make sure what we’re offering is what the other person wants.
Yet there are times when the person we want to love or care for is unable to be clear about what they need from us. When we reach out to loved ones and say, “Let me know what you need,” that expression of caring might not be enough to get an authentic answer. The person we want to support may not know what they need; may not know how to ask for what they need; or may feel shame and terror at the vulnerability of asking. These three states are obstacles for establishing consent. For the rest of this post, I’m going to discuss each obstacle and offer suggestions for ways we can work through that not-knowing and learn together what is needed.
I Don’t Know What I Need
Giving and receiving help is one of the ways we thrive as social beings.
There are hundreds of valid reasons why a person may not know exactly what they want or need. Many of us may have been raised to be self-sufficient and simply have no practice for asking for and receiving help. Many of us have not experienced families or communities that showed us what’s possible for mutual caring in times of crisis. Some of us may not understand our bodies or hearts well enough to know what “a need” is.
For you as the person wanting to help, you don’t need to know the backstory or the deep psychological root. What matters is simply that what they’re needing is help knowing what they need.
I notice this not-knowing often happens in moments of unexpected crisis or loss. When we have a crisis for the first time, we lack any kind of history to rely upon to help us think about what we need, and our brains are using a lot of resources to manage the emotional and logistical shock and overwhelm. There is both so much need and so little structure to identify the need, and we may simply go into whatever survival strategies are most familiar to us. Even when people we love and trust offer us help in this state, we may feel grateful but unable to identify anything they could do to help.
If you, the person wanting to help, can’t get traction with “What do you need?”, try asking a version of “How are you doing with all this? What’s been hard for you?” Try letting your loved one talk, let them know what you’re hearing, and give them time to open up and vent about the difficulties and hardships. After a while, you may be able to see places where you can suggest ways you could help: “Oh, your license expired? I’d be happy to drive you to the DMV next week so you can get it renewed, if you want.”
People who’ve experienced a similar kind of crisis tend to be really good at this because they’ve lived through it and have the benefits of hindsight to know what would’ve been nice for them. So they can be more assertive in offering a range of options of ways they could help, and let the person they want to support decide what they want: “I could bring a lasagne to your house, I could walk or your dog, I could help you clean the house, I could help you do paperwork.”
If the person is still unwilling or unable to accept the help, it’s okay to let them have a break and decide later if the want to come to you. If the person needs more help than you can give them, you might offer instead to help find more help. “I definitely want to make a lasagne for you tonight, and maybe after I could make one of those YouCaring sites to ask other people to help with the dog walking and house cleaning.”
I Don’t Know How to Ask for It
There are times when the person needing help does know exactly what they need but the act of asking is overwhelming. We may have heard messages throughout our lives that if you need help, you don’t deserve it; or that if you receive help from another person, they can hold it over your head to shame or manipulate you into doing whatever they want, indefinitely. You may have experienced a person helping you with resentment, or bringing up the help later to shut you down in a different conversation.
In these ways, asking for help feels quite dangerous. You may feel like asking for help means risking not having support when you “really need it,” so you have to be sure this crisis is worth it. With this mindset, we tend to make our problems smaller and miss opportunities for getting help.
Giving and receiving help is one of the ways we thrive as social beings. Being grateful to each other for the help we’ve received is a balm against resentment.
At the same time, if you as a person begin to resent others for how much they ask of you, it is your work to say no and set boundaries. Resentment is inevitable when you feel you must help out of obligation and have no option to say no or prioritize your own health.
Giving care to those who have cared for you is a part of healthy connection, but you don’t have to help hide the bodies at three in the morning when you have a job interview at nine.
If they really need your help, they can wait till your interview is done.
Shame and Terror of Vulnerability
Asking for what we really need is vulnerable and we risk being judged or ridiculed. We have so many reasons to be concerned about vulnerability, and often we’ve experienced moments of invalidation, ridicule, abandonment, or neglect in critical moments that give us reasons to avoid being that vulnerable again.
These intense feelings tend to reflect the world of the young person who lacks the power to take care of their own needs. Our parts that fear ridicule, abandonment, or neglect may still feel like small, dependent children who are unable to get their needs met.
Their responses make complete sense in this way, but also these parts may not recognize that we have grown and become older, wiser, more powerful, and more competent. This part may fear abandonment from a lover but be unable to recognize that you’re surrounded by family and friends who will be there for you even if this relationship ends.
I encourage my clients in distress to make a list of three to five people to whom they can reach out for help when in need. Three to five is intentional. If you only have oner person, there’s a danger of overwhelming your support or having no one if they’re sick, unavailable, or otherwise unavailable.
With three to five people, though, there’s more room for consent and generosity without resentment. You don’t have to invest all your urgency into one person, and your support people can feel at ease knowing if they’re not available you’ve got more options for care.
First, of course, you have to admit it’s okay to have needs and that asking for help is worth the experience of shame and vulnerability. Asking for what we need may always feel like a risk, but we can practice getting more comfortable with taking the risk.
If you’re used to ignoring your needs or putting off hard conversations, you’ve probably experienced at least one moment of overwhelming emotion when it all comes out with explosive force. This feeling may be rage, or it may be despair, and its urgency and force breaks through all our barriers to vulnerability.
Unfortunately, that same force blasts the person we’re turning to for help. It can make a giant mess, which then reinforces the story that we can’t ask for help, which then leads to another build up of intensity that comes out in a blast.
If you like, think of this like a geyser or a firehose where all the accumulated tension suddenly erupts with power. A more earthy and relatable metaphor would be the explosive urgency of waiting too long to get to the bathroom when your body has an urgent need to expel whatever’s in it.
The temptation, when states of rage or despair are over, is to feel some relief and hope it never comes back. But these aren’t embarrassing or silly blips in consciousness to leave behind, these are expressions of deep needs gone unaddressed that require attention and care.
We need to learn to identify the subtler signs of the tension building within us before it finally explodes in rage or despair. Asking for what we need before the explosion feels much scarier, because we’re more present with the experience, but that presence also helps us in speaking up clearly and hanging out with the difficulties of the conversation.
What we need to practice is identifying the subtler signs of need that pop up before we get to the point of rage or despair. If we can start the conversation before we get there, then we tend to be better able to advocate for ourselves and handle the difficulties of the conversation.
If you’re still beginning to figure out your needs or who you can trust to support you, a reliable practice to help is to journal what’s going on with you. A paper or electronic journal is good, or using a voice recorder to dictate a memo. Anything to get what’s in your head outside of yourself so that you can come back to it later in a calmer state of mind and begin to explore what got you to that point.
Having begun this reflective work can be really grounding in thinking about could have helped with the upset—was I underslept? Did I have enough to eat? Was volunteering to help a friend move their house on my first day off in two weeks maybe more than my body could handle?
Along with the physical needs are also the emotional and relationship needs that we may need to address. Having a list helps in having those direct conversations. And we can return to our practice of consent by reaching out to the friend and asking, “Hey, I want to talk to you about some things that I feel vulnerable about in our relationship. When would be a good time?”
Taking the Risk
With all that we’ve explored about consent and support, we may find there are times when it’s fine to go ahead and do something for a person without asking. Yes, that contradicts everything I’ve written. As often as I’ve experienced intrusive and unwanted care, I’ve also experienced numerous moments when the person did accurately intuit what I might need and gave it to me without my asking.
When this going ahead and doing it really worked for me, the giver seemed to be aware and accepting of the risk they were taking.
They’re not doing something for me so that they can feel better about themselves, or less guilty, or whatever feelings they’re having about myself. The support was given without needing me to have a warm response for their own well-being. They did it because it felt right, and they didn’t punish me if I didn’t immediately like or accept what they offered. They didn’t bring it up later to guilt me. They didn’t get defensive. They did it, and let me decide what I wanted to do with it.
Being grateful to each other for the help we’ve received is a balm against resentment.
If I’m going to risk this, usually my first sign is noticing when the person I want to support keeps bringing up the same idea over and over, even when they’re seeming dismissive of it. “She offered me a hug, which felt so weird. Like, what’s a hug going to do? I can’t imagine a hug will make me feel better. A hug doesn’t bring my dad back from the dead. What’s the point of hugging?” There may well be a part of them that desperately wants a hug, and another part that feels mistrustful of the notion or afraid you’ll judge them if they admit they want it. In this case, it may put them at ease to hear your offer to hug them like it’s no big deal.
When I strongly suspect the person really wants help they keep rejecting, I’ll make it about me. “I get that you’re totally fine and don’t need anyone’s help. But tonight I’m going to make a shit ton of lasagne and I can’t eat it all, and I’ll feel guilty if I throw it away, so I’m going to leave a bunch at your house. You can do whatever you want with it, but it’d do me a big favor if you helped me get rid of it.”
In Closing
There’s not one right or best way to have feelings and want support, and practicing consent helps make sure that we’re giving the person we love the support they need. We achieve consent when everyone involved in an activity agrees to what is happening. At its best consent is explicit, voluntary, conscious, and mutual; especially when paired with respecting each other’s autonomy and self-authority in knowing what’s best for ourselves.
While it may feel awkward and unromantic, slowing down and getting consent offers the opportunity for greater closeness, understanding, and connection. Even when we struggle to know what we want or need, we can help each other in the learning.
During the long isolation of COVID-19’s first year, I noticed my mind become foggy and soft-edged. I fumbled with words and lost interest in most intellectual debates. At times I would be in mid-sentence and realize I’d lost the path to the end, and it would take long moments to recall what I meant to say.
The prospect of losing my mental faculties used to terrify me. As a kid without much physical prowess or social acumen, I gambled all my worth on intellect and the realm of the mind. To be the one who knew, the one with the sharpest and most decisive argument, were my positions of power. In the shadow of that power were all the moments of forgetfulness, ignorance, and incompetence—great horrors I tried to conceal from others.
My greatest fears were around losing my mind. Who would I be without my intellect and smartness? And though COVID brain is not nearly so severe as dementia or other cognitive disorders, these clear lapses in capacity might once have compelled me to begin some ridiculous daily routine of mental exercises to stave off forgetfulness.
Instead, I noticed myself feeling unbothered by my forgetting, and slightly relieved to realize I no longer worried about how smart I was. Sharing this with others, I’d say, “I’m not sure if this is maturity or decline.”
Commonly, the wise people in my life would say, ”Maybe it’s both.”
“No!” I’d protest, with futility. “It can’t be both!”
But of course it could be both. Maturation is a process of gain and loss. As we lose, for example, the energy and resilience of youth, we gain greater wisdom and efficacy. I’m thinking of an uncle who spent much of his life doing construction on houses. The last time I saw him was with a cousin my age, and a friend of my cousin’s who worked on projects with my uncle. The friend kept going on about how my uncle would take more breaks during their work, but he’d also accomplish more and work longer than both of them. What he may have lost in terms of energy, he’d gained in skill and efficacy.
Seeking is Lacking
What I’ve been gaining in my work is a greater sense of self-acceptance and the capacity to accept, acknowledge, and nurture all of my parts. And with that has come a decrease in the need to be the smartest guy in the room, to “prove myself” of having worth, and particularly to seek the approval of others.
That word, seek, carries a heavy burden. Our words for desire, both “want” and “need,” are rooted in a sense of lacking. Seeking implies an outward gaze, a searching for approval from a place of not having it. When I’d seek validation or approval from others, and didn’t get it, I would be thrown into a storm of self-doubt and frustration. In a state of seeking, moreover, the people who did validate and approve of me seemed less important than those who had not yet, or withheld approval.
What feels increasingly true for me is to expect validation and approval from the people most important to me in life. This isn’t to say I refuse criticism, concern, or disapproval. But in conflict and love I practice trying to understand how a person came to their position, and I look for the points they make that do seem valid and worth acknowledging.
This never means I think their entire framing and context is valid. For example, I’ve listened to folks raise concerns about vaccinations and found one or two points where I’ve thought, “That’s fair. I get why you’d be worried about that.” Those are the places where we can dialogue, but I’m not going to follow them into the wild speculations of their bizarre anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
Acknowledging what’s valid in another person’s perspective doesn’t weaken my own. People have a tendency to mirror what they’re receiving: when they feel genuinely heard and understood, they’re more willing to offer that in return. When they feel dismissed and belittled, they give it right back.
But I’ve also learned that there are times when a person feels heard and understood but still doesn’t make the effort to listen to my perspective. When I would let this rile me up, I gave too much ground in compromise, trying to placate them rather than insist I be treated with equal respect.
These days I am willing to offer validation but I also expect it in return. When in a conversation with a person who seems unable or unwilling to make effort in understanding what’s valid in my perspective, I waste less of my time trying to persuade them. Nothing about the urge to get them to understand me right now serves either of us. More and more, I acknowledge the impasse and say I need a break for both of us to chill out and reflect.
When I seek validation, I imagine a posture of leaning forward, reaching out, beginning to lose my balance in the effort to connect and be seen. When I expect validation, I feel myself leaning back into the support of my heels, grounded and centered, letting the other person move further away or closer.
Two Fish Swimming Apart But Tethered Together
In a sense, the seeking of approval and validation reveals a polarization within the Self. One part of me is afraid of being bad, worthless, wrong, stupid, or whatever harsh and shaming words apply to your particular constellation of fear. Another part wants to get away from this bad feeling by seeking the validation of my worthiness or goodness. Since my inner state is one of badness, the seeking feels that approval must come from outside myself.
Yet these two parts—the shame and the seeking—are like two fish, tethered together but swimming in opposite directions. When one pulls, the other pulls. The very act of seeking approval stirs up that part that believes I am not already “good,” who pulls back in terror that its “badness” will be seen. Perhaps, for a time, we find a stable situation in which we’re able to maintain a state of approval and feeling “good,” but that “bad” feeling thrashes under the surface, in anxiety dreams or moments of emotional overwhelm when we have a bad day.
The problem of “the pairs of opposites” in human psychology show up in so many spiritual and psychological traditions, particularly those in the Daoist, Buddhist, Hindu, and Jungian traditions. In my own Neopagan spiritual tradition, we speak of the Divine Twins as gods who embody of this fundamental tendency toward polarization.
Our perception and relationship with these Twins changes based on where we are in our psychospiritual process of awareness and maturation. When we think of ourselves as only singular, only one thing, we cannot accept the Twins within, and they are at war. We seek to identify with one of the Twins and cast the other out of ourselves into the world.
In this state, we often stay at the level of “good” and “bad.” Whatever I want to be is “good” and what I don’t want to be is “bad.” Some of us may identify with this goodness and see badness in the world; others of us may feel the other way around, seeing themselves as awful and others as virtuous and lovable.
For example, I often identified as a peacemaker, someone who tends toward harmony and compromise. In college, when my friends and I would sit around discussing which fictional characters we were, or what our superpowers would be, we said that my power was “anti-drama.” I had a tendency to be a peacemaker, to bring down the temperature of conflict.
Within this story is an implicit judgment of “drama” as self-evidently silly, irrational, and undesirable. Like I was this aloof, elevated being who has no time for the petty drama of other people. And that judgment also turned inward, dismissing my own hurts, angers, and upsets as petty, irrational, and insignificant.
Judgment is such an interesting phenomenon, because so many of us fear it while constantly enacting it on other people. My greatest fear was sharing why I was mad or hurt and someone else dismissing me as being a “drama queen”—making a big deal out of a small, silly, petty problem. So my judging parts became the gatekeeper of what was serious and what was dramatic. But in its protectiveness, it became zealous, and kept too much of my hurt stored in my inner world, and my relationships became more distant and robotic.
Conflict avoidance and peacemaking is a survival strategy I inherited and leaned on to navigate my unique life challenges. With such a rigid inner gatekeeper, I experienced a great deal of suffering and problems that could’ve been avoided by being direct and honest about my feelings. But parts of me were terrified of what could happen if I disappointed, angered, or hurt others.
Along with this was a tendency—which I now view as a compulsion—to involve myself in others’ conflicts—to mediate, not to take sides—while avoiding fighting my own battles. When I sensed the slightest bit of tension between others I noticed an urge to intervene, to lighten the mood, to explain what I think is going on, or to make apologies or excuses for others. At times, this is helpful—it can reduce tension and increase harmony, especially if I as a third party notice that conflict is coming from a miscommunication that’s easy to rectify. “I think what she meant to say is…”
Yet often it seemed to make the conflict bigger and more entrenched. At my most immature, I would talk one on one with people and try to make excuses for the other person, or share with one person why the other was upset. All this did was make people more distressed and angry, and interfered with the two people working out the conflict together. More and more I wonder if I created conflict out of what was merely tension.
Jung spoke of this as “enantiodroma,” the tendency for a thing to become its opposite, which he learned from Daoist thinking. For me, too much peacemaking and suppression of conflict actually stirred up drama. Imagining how a drama queen could become a peacemaker, I remember people in my life who had no problem bringing up grievances and slights when it affected them, but met my own hurts with a calm, dismissive, “Let’s put the past behind us.”
“The Peacemaker” and “The Drama Queen” now seem less to me like separate complexes and more two polarities of the same energy. When we think of polarization in terms of magnets, you may know from experience that trying to push together the same polarity on two magnets causes them to resist each other with increasing force, while opposing polarities come together with great intensity. When we identify with one end of a polarity, we may draw the opposing polarities out of others, and come together in a stable if too rigid embrace.
Only when we can hold both ends of the polarity within do we become free of the dance of attraction and repulsion. Or, rather, our dancing with polarities becomes freer. We can flip from one to the other, attracting or repelling at will. Meeting drama with drama might, indeed, work better for some of us. To take care of myself emotionally, to set boundaries, to make relationships work, I need to get a little dramatic, to get into conflict, and be a little messy while we work through our differences to see if we can establish a better harmony.
Increasingly these pairs of opposites seem less like antagonists and more two allies with different perspectives that can help us to find and walk the middle way. The Peacemaker becomes the part of me that values harmony, collaboration, and building relationships of mutual value. The Drama Queen becomes the part of me that cares about my own hurt and confusion and knows the only way to clarify these issues is through speaking up.
Often I think of a Buddhist story in which a student says to their teacher, “Master, sometimes I am confused by your teachings. When I come to you some days, you give me guidance that seems to contradict what you’ve said on other days.” The Master responds, “Imagine that you are walking along a narrow bridge, blindfolded, and drunk. When you start stumbling to the left, you risk falling off, so I shout out, ‘Go right!’ Then you stumble to the right, and risk falling off that side, so I shout, ‘Go left!’”
When we can witness our contradictions with equanimity, they become our own wise masters who keep us on the bridge. Should I move too much toward one, the other is there to call me back.
Non-Striving
Another teaching of these polarizations is that whatever posture we take toward the world is answered. Being too identified with the Peacemaker, I felt both overwhelmed by the extent of conflict in the world and a covert sense of superiority, like I was the only one mature enough to handle these conflicts. This superiority was condescending and disempowering toward others. I’ve never enjoyed people who treat me as incapable of handling my own problems. And it’s a trick that keeps me in this mindset that somehow I am responsible for other peoples’ problems. Not only does this guarantee endless, exhausting labor, it deprives others of the opportunities to work through their conflicts and discover the powers of self-advocacy and intimacy.
Stepping out of this idea that this world is a place that must be fixed, saved, or acted upon—this white savior fantasy of myself—has been liberating and brought with it a kind of cynicism. What is progress if every movement forward creates new problems and resistance? What is conservation if every restriction draws out resistance and rebellion?
Which brings me back to the weary teachings in the first chapter of Ecclesiastes, which I first read as a child:
All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again. All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them.
Certain experiences seem cyclical, fated, and ongoing in this world. Much of life is spent in hunger and desire, seeking to satiate those longings. Even when we do succeed in feeding those hungers, inevitably we crave more, or a new desire emerges.
No change is free of creating new complications. We gain new functions and possibilities while losing others. To imagine we can create a lasting, permanent, original change feels grandiose and inflating, which then plummets us into despair and hopelessness when we fail.
Yet stepping out of that grandiosity helps us reconnect with real power and vitality. Helping one person we know feels ennobling and gratifying. Solving all suffering is impossible. But solving specific problems is a fascinating experience. My Peacemaker imagined if he could simply help everyone calm down and work out their conflicts, he could rest, which made him resent conflict. But if it’s okay for there to be conflict—if conflict itself is not a problem that demands my constant effort—then I can rest deeply, and I can engage in what feels interesting or meaningful to me.
Is this maturation or decline? All along, whether people think I’m good or bad, I simply am. My needs exist whether I squash them for peace or raise them up like a burning torch and demand everyone pay attention. What has always felt most healing is presence, witnessing, and compassion. Finding that capacity within me that is neither polarity but able to contain and witness the both, with fondness. There is nothing to win, nothing to prove, nothing to fix. There is effort without effortfulness, action without striving, listening without passivity. Only the understanding that liberates and shows us the path of our greatest wholeness.
There is nothing to win, nothing to prove, nothing to fix.
There is effort without effortfulness, action without striving, listening without passivity.
Only the understanding that liberates and shows us the path of our greatest wholeness.
This morning I opened up my WordPress blog’s post history and saw five drafts that had been partially written and then abandoned, unpublished. Each one had a great deal of text and thinking out loud, risks taken and retracted, but the energy flagged and ultimately I decided to pull all the text onto a separate file and delete them, start fresh.
Such a process feels illustrative of my process in this period of time when life feels on such shaky ground that it’s unclear what path to chart. I’d taken time to reopen and experiment with seeing some clients in person for a glorious month this summer, and have now retreated back to all-Telehealth for the indefinite future—maybe a month, maybe a year?
Yesterday, talking to a friend about this, it became clear that it’s not helping to feel an urgency to decide this now. What I’m still missing is a clear set of criteria as to how I would evaluate when it’s right to go back to in-person.
More people than I are struggling with their own variations of this problem. Over the weekend, I was excited to finally see a live performance that was supposed to take place a year ago and was rescheduled due to COVID. This morning, I got news that another performance that had been delayed will be, again, delayed indefinitely.
Disappointments feel easier to bear when I don’t put all my weight on one plan. My has historically been to put too much meaning on a few choices and so, if it collapsed, I would interpret that as a sign of Fate condemning me. “If I don’t get this job, I can’t get any job.” “I was looking forward to this concert, and now I can’t go, so that means I can’t have any joy in life.”
I’ve known people who, comparatively, seem to be resilient and adaptive as hell in the face of disappointments. Their relationships, housing, or jobs implode—sometimes all at once—but they’re brilliant at starting over. Hardly a week passes from holding their hand through the shock before they’re saying they have a new job, a new place to live, they’re in an exciting new relationship. What they seem to have, that I lacked, is a faith in their capacity to start over and rebuild what they loved.
To be sure, there’s a cost. What I have, that they seem to lack, is the capacity to persevere and maintain through upheavals, conflicts, and hard moments. When there’s a conflict, a setback, or a hard patch, I stay committed to working through things with a faith that we can make it better. I’m not as quick to run away, which is a strength that also is a problem in situations where I should be leaving.
Often I think of this when we talk about things like “healthy” behaviors. “Healthiness” when it comes to mental, emotional, and behavioral health has come to have the quality of a shaming, contentless buzz-word. Health is a relative state of integrity, and all of our strategies for surviving and thriving have strengths and costs and consequences. The question is whether our current state of being is supporting the life we want; if we’re interested in growth and finding out what more we can experience and become; or whether the costs of our ways of living are so great that it’s worth the effort of working on one’s self.
Lately I’ve been reflecting on the ideas of Fate and Fortune, both archaic in their ways, and counter to the dominant threads of the United States culture of wellness, spirituality, and positive thinking. “Fortune” is a god who doles out gains and losses according to her own inscrutable whims; who indeed brings misfortune and wealth to life regardless of one’s innate worthiness or goodness. One might attempt to appease the god and bring her to your side through offerings, prayers, and asks for aid without a guarantee of receiving it.
What is more common now is the concept of “Success,” who is less of a distinct god and more a confluence of Protestant and New Thought teachings that suggest one can almost guarantee and invite privileges if one simply has the correct behavior, moral integrity, or mindset. While this comes with a relationship to some outer deified construct—whether it be God or “the universe”—success comes about through our own individual effort and merit, and misfortune likewise suggests a failure on our parts.
Neither concept fully integrates the systemic approach that’s become more full in our consciousness, that some of us are born into conditions and cultures that will makes our paths smoother and our falls less catastrophic regardless of individual effort. Yet “Fortune,” at least, indicates that there is no meaningful difference between the person born into privilege and the person born into marginalization. Neither is better than the other, simply put into circumstances that they must contend with or benefit from in the course of life.
This weekend I began to consider the possibility that “Fate” and “Fortune” have a dialectic relationship with each other.
Fate seems to be a drive from within. Fate is found in what consistently troubles me as much as it is what, when I truly accept it, makes my life more smooth. I think of clients who receive a diagnosis of a chronic illness. When they resist and hate the illness, it causes them great suffering. When they accept it, and begin doing the work necessary to maintain their health with the illness, life goes more smoothly. They may never be “healed” and restored to who they were before the illness, but the illness becomes integrated.
We may cultivate a freedom of will in relationship to Fate, but the conditions of our lives, heritage, cultures, and souls press us to move toward a particular way of being. The extent to which we resist this Fate makes us more battered by it, dragging along behind its inexorable forward drive. The extent to which we accept and embrace this Fate gives us more freedom and creativity in how we work with it.
I imagine the relationship between Fate and Fortune as being like a rock in a tumbler, slowly polished into a beautiful, smooth stone. Fate may be that which needs to be expressed and lived from our being. Fortune simply sets the terrain in which that Fate is discovered and shaped.
The thing is, regardless of how much we accept and live our Fate, Fortune remains a capricious force. Why didn’t I get sick all these times but got sick this time? Why are there people who are cautious who still get sick with the disease, while there are others who flaunt masks and vaccinations and social distancing guidelines but remain apparently uninfected? Why do some die and others emerge relatively unscathed?
All of these questions have answers we may come to understand with time and research. But in our day-to-day living, when do not yet have these answers, we are looking at the mountain from the perspective of the ant. That is how it is to experience Fortune: to be at the mercy of a pattern we cannot comprehend or control.
If it is within my Fate to be a writer, and I write, then all I can do is create a practice of creativity and put my work into the world. What happens to it is ruled by Fortune. Once in a while, a piece of writing may go viral and draw a lot of attention. Often, pieces I might consider more meaningful or important might be wholly overlooked. There are practices I can learn around marketing to gain and keep a person’s attention, but even then there’s much beyond our control.
And as we may get lifted up high, Fortune may also abruptly throw us to the ground. To be seen and celebrated makes us visible, and visibility is also what puts us in danger of cancelation. Think of all those old social media posts that emerge when a person comes into a measure of fame and success. No one cared enough about them to cancel them before they were successful, although apparently they cared enough to remember and track their Tweets.
All of which is to say, right now COVID-19, social unrest, and the extreme weather events of climate change may be the relationship between both Fortune and Fate. Through our distress, conflict, disease, and suffering, we are being invited to look at all the structures of our society and lives that made these experiences inevitable. Disease has emerged from the shadows, and now we must look at what in those shadows makes us vulnerable, and what those shadows have to teach us about our Fate as a species, as a nation, as communities, as families, as individuals.
Many of us grow up burdened with the mandate to “be good”: moral, exemplary, worthy of praise and attention, and by extension deserving of what we want for ourselves. Yet alongside the demand to “be good” is the heavy burden of “being bad”: immoral, worthless, inferior, undeserving of what we want. We can also call this state “shame.”
Shame is a social emotion, though we experience it alone, because it is the emotion we feel when we’ve been exiled, cut off, or disappoint the people we want to be admired by. The threat of it is terrifying to us, who are innately a social species, especially as children who cannot survive alone. Once we’ve felt shame, we quickly start figuring out how to avoid experiencing it again. These moments, sometimes lightning-quick, lay the emotional foundation for what we understand as “goodness” and “badness” later in life.
Once when I was a really young kid, like six to eight, I was roughhousing with another boy my age in the back of a car. My grandmother, who was driving, snapped, “You two are like a couple of faggots. You can’t keep your hands off each other.” None of this meant anything to me—I didn’t know what a faggot was and what we were doing, I can now say, was normal play between boys that is actually good for long-term development.
If my grandmother was calmer or of a different generation, perhaps she would have calmly explained to us that our playing in the car was inappropriate and distracting her. But she said this other thing, and from that all I could internalize was that whatever we were doing was bad and, based on her tone, being a faggot must be bad too.
What’s relevant here is that what I learned in that moment could have become a structure to the rest of my life, if left unexamined. I could have built a whole personality around the idea that being a faggot was bad and boys touching other boys even in non-sexual play was bad—I see even younger men imposing that upon each other in Reddit threads. In my efforts to be “good” and avoid shame I could have rigidly avoided ever doing anything like that again. Then, in my efforts to be good, that shame would have ruled my entire life.
But at a certain point in life, that shame came into conflict with other things I began to learn about myself and the world. Life conspired to force me to open up those and other memories, feel the shame, and find the truth that dissolved the intensity of those feelings. Later in life, that same grandmother came to my commitment ceremony between myself and my husband. Her ideas about goodness evolved with time and experience.
I see in so many men I’ve worked with over the years—straight and queer, cis, trans, and nonbinary—a profound struggle between their desires to “be good” and all the instincts and urges and necessities of life that do not fit into “goodness.”
Even men who reject the religious and cultural constrictions of their families of origin may end up replacing one standard of goodness with another, while relating to it the same way. Instead of internalizing the teachings and wrestling with all the contradictions and paradoxes that are always present in every ideology and system of ethics, some of us cling to a rigid application of behavior and shame ourselves or others who deviate from it. I observe this often among white people and men who are early in their awakening to oppression and social justice.
One wants clarity and consistency to know how to be good, because the threat of being bad is so emotionally severe and may result in further kinds of exile: communities aligning against us because of harmful behavior, losing employment or relationships due to a heavy call-out. Yet these norms are in ongoing evolution and transformation, where behaviors that may once have been ignored or tolerated move into the category of unacceptable, and vice versa.
At some point in the process of maturation, it becomes important to let go of our clinging to “being good” and allow ourselves to explore the depths of shame and misunderstanding contained in that box that we label “being bad.” Because that box may contain many necessary tools for surviving in this world that got accidentally covered in the shit of shame: self-assertion, playfulness, ambition, kindness, caring, or leadership.
One of the consistent messages I’ve found in anti-oppression communities is that people who are not targets of a particular kind of oppression should defer to those who are in conversations about the oppression and that community, because we don’t have the perspective or experience to truly understand them or advocate for them. That remains to me a useful practice, reminding myself not to immediately dismiss perspectives that do not match my experience.
Yet we can take this challenge to the extreme of dismissing our own personal judgment and critical thinking, not doing the work of developing our own analysis, and at its very worst allowing ourselves to be disrespected, coerced, and hurt.
In a book I reviewed, Queer Magic: Power Beyond Boundaries, there is an essay in which a writer offers the suggestion that it is important spiritual work to learn to have sex with people that you do not find attractive. When I read that, I paused. Many spiritual practices involve subjecting ourselves to unpleasant or distasteful experiences to learn about ourselves and get freedom from our reactions. So I can see the merits of this practice when freely chosen by a person who wants to take on this as a discipline.
To be certain, there are cultural, political, and economic forces that have shaped what kinds of people get held up as standards of beauty and which are considered ugly. I see an invitation for reflection and getting curious about desires and feelings. Am I truly not attracted to this person or am I afraid of my desire for other reasons? Am I truly uninterested in this partner or do I feel guarded against being seen?
On the other hand, I have seen versions of this argument wielded in toxic iterations that suggest any kind of preference or exclusion of sexual partners is immoral. That is, to be a good person, you should have sex with anyone. This suggestion then makes the practice socially coerced rather than freely chosen. And I can tell you, there are people who have learned to have sex with people they’re not attracted to, either out of pity, fear, or coercion, and for these folks the path of liberation is being supported in saying no and moving toward the connections they desire.
Attraction is informed by these social influences, but also by deeper emotional forces within your own personal body, history, and psyche. The sexual ethics I hold dear is that haranguing, pressuring, and guilting a person into having sex with you has never led to a meaningful, loving, long-lived relationship. And if I strive not to guilt, pressure, or harangue others in our lives, I have the right not to accept that for myself.
For those seeking to be good within these conflicting messages, we will experience moments when our desires or boundaries will be judged by others, or we fear they will. So we might try to ignore those needs, but they tend to win out over the things we think we “should” want. The longer we go before accepting the truth, the more messy the situation becomes.
Rather than whether or not I am good, I think more useful questions are: “Am I being in integrity with myself? Am I causing harm?” Integrity means I am acting with respect to my whole self, everything I know about myself, even if I do not like it. If I am not attracted to a person, even after self-reflection and unpacking my feelings, that is a truth I need to honor.
Telling the truth may be painful, but worse would be faking a connection that’s not felt and all the suffering that goes with that—including all the ways we might end up sabotaging the relationship hoping the partner will leave first.
“Harm,” in my opinion, needs to be as clearly defined as possible so it can be rectified. To simply say, “I am causing harm,” feels akin to the box of badness. If my not wanting to have sex with a person causes them harm, I want to be clear about that so I can be accountable to whatever harm it is without violating my own boundaries in the process.
Perhaps what becomes clear is that it’s the way I communicate desire that is harmful. Being unattracted to a person does not mean they are unattractive. Being unattracted to this person does not mean disliking everyone in their group. I am not naming an objective truth about this person’s desirability, I am only what is true for me about my desire.
The more we are able to accept our own truth, the easier it is to see how every one of us has a subjective, but valid, truth. I can name my own truth then in ways that are cleaner, with less reckless hurt.
Yet even the kindness, firmest, most direct boundaries may be met with anger and hurt. What’s sticky is that when we want to be good, we want to find a way to have our guilt and shamed relieved by a person who’s hurt, angry, and doesn’t have the capacity or desire to caretake your feelings. It’s a sad, painful, difficult conversation for everyone, but it’s important, and it’s also important to learn how to step away when the conversation stops being generative.
The more free we can become of our need to be seen as good, the more room we have to discover what it’s like to be ourselves and practice our values.
In spring of 2020 a global crisis—you may be familiar with it—compelled me to move my practice entirely to Telehealth. This transition was not smooth. Maintaining focus and connection in therapy was draining and brought up a number of unexpected feelings and thoughts. As a therapist I’d cultivated a discipline of meditative focus on the client, minimizing all the distractions in my room so I could keep practicing returning to connection. But with my laptop I had a relationship characterized by divided focus and multi-tasking.
One day, in a very embarrassing moment, a client called me out about not being present in an important moment, and I realized I needed to get my shit together. I turned toward colleagues for advice and, as I found what worked for me, facilitated a series of workshops for therapists having similar struggles. This writing offers the insights I’ve taken away from this work, for others who might need them.
Cookie the Pom
Hard Focus
A teacher from whom I learned ceremonial drumming introduced me to the concept of “hard focus.” Hard focus works to push away all distractions from that which it wants to center. In this state of being, one’s focus of concentration is narrow, constrained, and stressed.
Imagine encountering a rattlesnake in the middle of a casual walk, and rousing that snake to its alert and threatening posture. The kind of attention you might pay to this rattlesnake would be hard focus. Of greatest importance is tracking the snake and keeping safe. Your senses may be less attentive to other environmental cues, your body may be tense, and it’s likely you would not be daydreaming about other things or enjoying a conversation with a good friend on the phone.
Hard focus connects to the stress state, when our sympathetic nervous system is activated and primed to react to threats. Even in situations of safety, practicing a hard focus—like trying learn a new skill under great pressure or studying for a test—cues the body to activate the stress state. This is useful to an extent, but it also contains a flaw known as “target fixation,” when our body instinctively moves toward whatever is the center of our focus.
A race-car driver attempting to navigate around a flaming pile of cars would not stare at the cars to ensure safety, as it would mean steering subtly toward them. To be safe, one needs to focus on the safe part of the road, where you want to go, while being aware of the danger.
With hard focus and the stress state, people tend to become ungrounded and lose their posture. Often clients talking about scary or upsetting experiences will unconsciously lift their feet from the ground, like their bodies are trying to draw inward or withdraw from the difficult feelings. Or else the body might begin to tilt toward the stressful stimuli, like how our heads may bend toward the screens when engaged in an online argument.
So the tendency toward hard focus goes with losing groundedness, stability, and the capacity for calm reflection and seeing the larger context. From my understanding of neurobiology, this state seems feels very much related to the left hemisphere of the brain’s capacity to analyze, pick apart, and focus on details, cut off from the right hemisphere’s capacity to look holistically at what is happening and maintain perspective.
Should one spend a day trying to do therapy in this stress state, it’s inevitable that one would end the day feeling more exhausted and more caught up with our parts of self that are afraid of getting it wrong or feel they have something to prove. We can feel so distressed by both our urgency to connect to the client and the constant reminder of the client’s physical absence that we struggle to relax and actually connect.
Wow, I upset myself writing that.
So with all this happening through the screen, now we’re adding complex mental tasks like at a person’s face, reading memes, filtering through a wall of text, crafting appropriate responses. We begin to lose contact with the body and environment and get pulled more into this mental world of the Internet.
Screens and Stress
Screens now connect us, for good and ill, to so many important areas of life—relationships, work, politics, information, self-care and survival needs, all of which are rife with threats that activate our nervous system. A notification that you received a text message from a particular name could spiral you into panic before you’ve even opened the message. Casually scrolling through social media to catch up with friends could go quickly awry when one of them posts a confusing meme that seems to disagree with your core values. Anything you post online could be screenshotted and sent to be used against you in the future.
At the same time, apps and social media encourage us to multitask, check out, and click impulsively rather than slow down into deliberate focus. One could spend hours literally cycling through the same three to six apps with very little stimulation, while the blue light activates the brain.
The confluence of all this within the same object turns the phone or laptop into a symbol of both activation and dissociation: a source of stress and the stress-reliever.
For a time, I wondered if reading text itself invites a left-brained hard focus. That might be true, but in practice I’ve discovered that reading a book is soothing in a way that screens are not. Reading a book for pleasure is enjoyable in part because at no point do you risk the book demanding instant feedback from you with threats to your livelihood and relationships.
You may feel deeply called out and seen by a book, and you may feel your beliefs attacked by a book, but the book is unlikely to post your reactions to social media or call your boss. The book is not going to yell at you for missing a text it sent you hours ago. Reading a book or watching television are not exactly passive, but it is boundaried and personal the way screens are not.
Urgency, hard focus, stressed states then prime us, when reading social media, to look for content that further causes us stress. Often I use the metaphor of wearing colored glasses to illustrate what happens to us in emotional states: it’s like we see the world through glasses that have a red tint, so everything appears red. If I view the world as threatening, then my lenses see everything tinged with that emotional color. When I feel hurt, lonely, or angry, I’m more likely to see a social media post I would’ve otherwise found benign as a very personally targeted call-out. In my stress, I may overlook an important word that changes the entire meaning of the post.
The paradox is that there are red things. We can’t pretend there aren’t red things. But if we confuse the lenses with reality itself then we’ll react to everything as though it’s red and miss the nuance and the possibility of other colors.
So how does one navigate being aware of threats and risks while also focusing on the desired goal? This is what we’d call “soft focus.” In a soft focus, our attention is gentler and more expansive, taking in as much information as possible in an open way. After reading this sentence, take a moment to look away from the screen toward a blank wall or a sunny window, and try to pay attention to what’s happening at the edges of your peripheral vision for ten breaths.
What you experienced, especially toward the last half of those breaths, is a softer focus. You may notice it’s hard to fixate on what’s at the corners of your peripheral vision but also simultaneously you take in more visual information than you would simply focused on what’s in front of you. With practice, there’s greater capacity to hold a center and take in the whole circumference of your awareness.
For some of us, letting our gaze soften feels scary, like we’re losing control, because we’re used to the stress response as a safety mechanism. Yet in some ways we become safer with this soft focus, more aware of what’s happening around us and with a greater range of potential responses.
We also tend to feel much, much calmer. Stress states are self-perpetuating. The more tense you become, the more narrow your focus will be. The more narrow your focus, the more likely you are to be in states of worry, anxiety, upset, anger, or fear. What I’ve learned in doing trauma therapy for almost a decade is that our physiological stress response and what we might call our psychological stress response—our thoughts and memories—mutually encourage each other.
What this means, in part, is that learning how to calm the stress in your body goes a long way to soothing psychological distress. Breathing deeply, into your belly, while looking at the corners of your vision is calming. Breathing in, clenching your muscles, and then breathing out while unclenching is calming. These skills are simple and available to you right now, without you having to solve all your issues, which is so wonderful. The downside is that they require practice and it’s easy to forget about them when we get caught up in our psychological distress. So ideally we would work both ends of this for the greatest freedom.
Grounding and Centering
Put your feet on the ground or on a footrest, whatever allows your feet to make full contact so that your body can feel the support and stability of the ground.
Sit back in your chair. What I do is focus on my breathing and, as I exhale, let my center of gravity shift back into my core. Often it feels like I’m sinking more into my tailbone and pelvis, not so much leaning forward. Roll your shoulders up and back as though you’re tucking them into your upper back. Let the top of your head lift up and your chin tilt slightly down.
Periodically check in to remember that you are in a body. Let your chair, floor, or posture be a physical reminder of your embodied presence.
Softened Gaze
Frequently, during sessions or video calls, look away from the screen. Either notice the edges of your peripheral vision for several breaths, or if you can, look off into the distance. I may look slightly above the video camera in my computer so that it appears I am offering eye contact while I am resting my eyes.
If you have headphones on, this is also an opportunity to focus on the sound of the other person’s voice. What I find is that when I look at the screen, I am aware of the absence of my client. But when I focus on the voice, I feel much closer to them—their voice is so close to my ears, and I can attune to subtle information coming through their word choice, tone, and speed.
Tuning In
Jungian psychologists speak of the “intersubjective field,” which is a construct representing the ways we inhabit interpenetrating psychic spaces at all times. You have your subjective experience, as do I, and we are enfolded in the larger subjectivity of our shared cultures, our shared regions and nations.
None of us is able to maintain a wholly objective perspective—nor would that necessarily be desirable. What we do have is a big soup of all of our different experiences, each of us activating ourselves and each other. The fear I feel might not be mine, it might be yours, but for whatever reason you’re unable to feel it.
Working with this frame means in part listening to my experience with the same curiosity as I would a client’s, and to be curious if what’s present for me is echoing what may be happening for them. What’s tricky is that it may be dressed up in my own issues—like chewing on an insult paid to me five years ago—but if I step out of the content and look at the process, there may be gold. “Oh, I’m feeling distracted and irritable. I wonder if that’s happening for the client.”
In summary, what I’ve learned is that trying to connect by screens is much harder than relaxing into my body and experience and trusting that connection is happening. Trusting allows me to relax my gaze, open up to all the information available to me with curiosity, and meet everything with calmness and curiosity.
This requires a certain amount of practice and diligence, but I find myself more effective and less exhausted having done the work.
The Gaze of the Sage
When practicing a soft, grounded, open focus, I am reminded often of depictions of the masters of spiritual and martial art traditions over the centuries. Their eye gaze often appears unfocused and distant, though they perceive so much. Or a spiritual being might have one eye clouded or covered, signifying their perceptions of the spiritual realms while the other eye perceives the physical.
Image of Odin the Wanderer by Georg von Rosen
In this state we are calm, open, engaged, though we take life less personally. It is a difficult state to sustain, as so many of our parts want to focus on particulars, and our stress and wounding tends to bring us back to that hardness.
I am mindful, too, that my focus in this post has been on the screens but that none of this has happened in a vacuum. While adjusting to Telehealth, all of us were living through a global pandemic and civil unrest, which would be more than enough to engender stress and hard focus for survival.
We are still working through the stress and reactivity of this. Recently I was on a walk in my neighborhood and saw some kids had chalked the ground with the words “all lives matter.”
Immediately I felt a tightening, an anger response, as a part of me now associates that particular phrase as a sign of ideological disagreement and threat. Yet as I kept breathing, I reminded myself that this was written by children. Responding to them with the anger and harshness I felt would not have served anyone.
As I kept breathing, I noticed that when I took off my red-tinted-glasses, I did not disagree with the phrase itself, only when it was used in particular contexts. In hard focus, however, we stop attuning to the context in which the present is happening and instead bring forward the context of all our related past experiences.
The work remains: to honor our wounds and stressors and be mindful of dangers while bringing our attention to where we want to go in the present.
Now that you’ve finished this, I encourage you to once again take ten breaths attuning to the edges of your vision with your feet touching the ground—or if that doesn’t work for you, whatever you can feel that connects to the gravity that anchors you to the earth.
This letter began after feeling provoked by a discussion about social justice and masculinity, and whether men and masculinity have been exiled by progressive culture. For much of my life I’ve been in some way troubled by the question of what is a man, what is masculinity, and whether I was either.
A long time ago I encountered the metaphor that the mind is like a blade, and one way to ensure its sharpness is to engage in debate and take on the challenge of constructing your argument for why you believe what you do, including the evidence supporting your position, and your answer to challenges and critiques. While the grating feels unpleasant, the friction is necessary to keep the mind sharp and clear. This kind of argument focuses on the quality of the ideas and the efficacy of their presentation, whether they seem to elicit truth. It’s not the deeply personal and accusatory tone that often joins what we think of as arguments these days.
A sword is not our only quality, and there are times when the blade needs to be tempered with the cup of understanding. This cup seeks to understand why the other person says, believes, feels, and acts the way they do. What’s become clear to me is every person’s actions make complete sense once you fully understand their context, and when we are able to achieve and demonstrate that understanding, we make possible real dialogue, change, and collaboration.
So both the cup and the blade are needed for being in relationship with others, but folks tend to favor one over the other, and need to make efforts to develop both.
At some point in my young life I really got a sense of the harm men and boys did to other people. Men in this culture tend to be most likely to perpetrate violence, and most likely to be victims of it.
I was bullied myself, and I saw my older sister being treated very poorly by the men she was dating, and I was too small to stand up for her but I internalized this injustice and was drawn toward the teachings of Feminism, which I thought could be freeing to all of us. I wanted a world without coercion or dominance in which we could each support each other in being the person we wanted to become.
This seed continued to grow as I became more conscious of the history of the United States and the harms done to the people who were here before we settled, the people we enslaved, and the people we used for cheap labor. So I felt a deepening and broadening of that call to throw off dominance and coercion. What’s become a dearly held belief is that each person, given both support and autonomy, will move toward their best.
So when we look at communities that are rife with poverty, violence, illness, and addiction, I tend to notice both a lack of support and a lack of autonomy. These communities tend to be economically deprived of opportunities and resources, and simultaneously controlled by people who do not live there and have little relationship with the people within them.
When I was younger and looking at these patterns, I with other white middle class people had a savior mentality, like these struggling communities were foundering in ignorance and needed help working through their problems. Now I see this as flawed thinking and a kind of oppressive behavior that offers support at the expense of autonomy.
So instead of imagining myself a savior of the poor and oppressed, I feel called to find the balance point between advocating for the support all communities need to let our innate capacities of autonomy and self-determination flourish. And I pay attention to those with power who seem to undermine that autonomy and self-determination.
I’ve been accused of hating men and that is simply not true. If I thought men and white people were evil and irredeemable then I would not be doing the work I do. What I am seeking is liberation. I often focus my attention on men and white people because I am both, not because I believe we are uniquely evil or toxic. My training has shown me that there are oppressors, collaborators, and resistors in every system and culture, and dominance and abusive violence is not unique or exclusive to any particular gender or race. If we have power but we are protected from the consequences of how we use power, we tend to become more sociopathic.
Carl Jung’s work showed me that owning both, my power and my capacity for cruelty and violence, is the path of becoming a whole person. Because we can be both caring, loving, powerful men and can cause harm. We can think of ourselves as nonviolent and non-confrontational, good caring people—men of the cup—but instead what we’ve done is outsourced our violence to men with guns who police our streets and fight in distant countries so we can have cheap oil.
Before we are willing to see our own wholeness, we imagine there is a division between innocence and guilt, that some people are innocent no matter what they do, and others are guilty before they’ve drawn their first breath. But healing that lie, seeing both my innocence and guilt, is power.
To be honest, the more I study gender in general, and men and masculinity in particular, the less certain I am of what “it” is. Gender is both profoundly real, personal, and viscerally felt—I recognize that now. Gender is also profoundly shaped by the political, economic, and social conflicts of our age. It’s both what I feel and think about myself and it’s the ways others treat me and what expectations they have of me simply by virtue of being male.
In recent years, having come more into my body and athletics, I’ve been spending more time with men and remembering the joys of it. There’s a playfulness in teasing that feels like a martial arts practice, learning how to hit each other hard enough to get attention but not hard enough to harm, while the teased person in turn practices how to deflect the attack and respond. This is when the work of the sword is joyful and connecting rather than separating.
This practice and exploration has cultivated a thought that still feels difficult to articulate, almost dangerous, because it’s incomplete. Much of my work is supporting accountability when appropriate, when we’ve caused harm. Yet I also see that we need to work on not participating in being harmed.
The last sentence is tricky and needs context. I know from experience that to hear such a sentiment can cause one to think, “Oh that means if I was hurt, I deserved it.” But what I mean is quite the opposite. None of us deserve to be hurt and harmed, or to stay in situations that demean and degrade us.
And yet often we do—for so many reasons. First, we may not recognize that we are being hurt or harmed. When we do, we may think we deserve it. Then when we learn we don’t, we may not know how to protect ourselves or trust that we can be okay if we get away. Part of our work in life is moving through each of those steps, learning the lessons we need to learn: how to recognize I’m being hurt, how to honor that I do not deserve it, and what skills and resources I need to be able to protect myself or leave the situation and be okay.
We might have all these skills and get hurt anyway. All strategies have a vulnerability that causes them to fail. But there’s something about knowing we did what we could to avoid or stop it that’s important. It tells ourselves that we matter. Even if it’s saying, “That hurts, stop it.” Even if it’s walking away from an impossible situation.
In my twenties I was involved with a religious community that did a lot of heavy ritual work. One of the first lessons they taught and emphasized was the importance of grounding before and after a ritual. When opening up one’s consciousness to larger-than-mundane potential, un-groundedness could leave one vulnerable to overwhelm, nasty energy infiltration or emotional contagion, or avoidable accidents.
When I came into the therapy world, I thought grounding was one of those “out-there” spiritual concepts that would be too weird for Western psychology, but I was surprised to find it deeply integrated into a number of practices and methodologies. Many trauma therapists intuitively or explicitly called for it.
In the kinds of spiritual communities that are deeply New Age flavored and exalt the psychic realms, some folks expressed at best ambivalence toward groundedness. There was a sense that being too grounded means you’re not connected to the spiritual world, unable to hear or sense or connect with the greater-than-mundane beings with whom we share reality. And yet there were the people who were so deeply wedded to that realm and those beings that they seemed utterly flummoxed by the daily work of living in this world.
Among Christians I’ve heard a saying, “Too heavenly minded to be of any earthly good.” There’s a lot of wisdom here, and while those Christians might not appreciate my extending this to include people who only wear purple because it activates the crown chakra, I see the relevance.
Yet this separation between heaven and earth truly only seems to exist within particular cultures. It’s not the “truth,” not a splitting we have to heal anywhere but within our own bodies, practices, and communities. For in my practice, the more deeply grounded I become in my body, the more I become aware of that which is beyond the Self.
As I’ve taught in my spiritual discernment workshops, what we might call spirits are experienced through the body and emotions as much as through an esoteric ritual text. My friend, essayist and firebrand Rhyd Wildermuth, recently reminded me that as recently as the Victorian era, emotions were considered to be qualities that came upon us from without. We were seized by “a spirit of despair” rather than being despair.
Incidentally, this notion of emotions as “a spirit” seems deeply implicated in the demonstrable realities of emotional contagion, and connects us back to the cultural memory of animism that our mechanistic, materialistic cultural threads are embarrassed to acknowledge. Then there are people like Dare Sohei who are more deeply working that vein in ways that seem strikingly parallel to and ahead of my thinking.
In the practice of Internal Family Systems, we can find these spirits within our bodies, and separate them out from consciousness, and come into dialogue with them. The more deeply we can practice this, the more clearly these parts become apparent and are able to communicate the truths and gifts they have to offer.
Without groundedness, however, we have no anchor for the Self to be with and hear what these sprits offer. We’ve been born into these bodies and experience the world through all of the senses and truths they can receive. Our bodies can do things the gods cannot, and that is our gift and our curse. It is why there are gods who love and desire us, and it is also why we feel so often far from them.
To become grounded, however, means to be of and with the body, and to experience life through the body. We are capable of these astounding capacities to separate from our bodies, or knot them up in confusion and fear, and these separations are gifts from those spirits trying to protect the Self from annihilation, yet they also inhibit the Self from achieving its full potential.
Panic, for example, is the experience of a part of us that is ungrounded and terrified. Our panicking parts tend to live outside the present, either in a past horror we experience, or a feared future we fear is coming to pass. When the panic rises, we tend to want to move away from it, contain it, stuff it down, but that leaves the panicking part at the edges, alone in its terror.
When we can ground and feel the body that is greater than the panic, and stay slow, stay present, stay breathing, we can gently invite the panic into that body and groundedness. We can help the panic to feel our slowness of breath. We can help the panic to feel the stability of the ground through our feet. We can help the panic to feel supported, loved, and held by our bodies, which can help that part become calm enough to then take in the truth of the reality it’s in, rather than the terror of the reality it fears.
So grounding is always a useful practice, to make bodies into temples that the spirits may visit.
“For this reason the experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego.” – C.G. Jung
For 15 years I have been a daily meditator, with some disruptions, after years of approaching and running away from meditation. What finally helped me to connect with the practice was realizing that I had an faulty expectation: I believed that my mind had to be utterly still and quiet for it to count as “meditation.”
Instead, sitting practice confronted me with how much my mind lacked in stillness and quiet, and the discomfort I felt in being with my full experience. Deciding this meant I couldn’t do it, I walked away until I found a teacher. And then I realized: seeing with clarity the busyness of my mind is a validation that I was meditating.
The practice is not to be calm and quiet, the practice is to notice and return to breathing. Over and over again. A paradox of meditation is that when we are too attached to quiet or calm as outcomes, we are cultivating an essential nonacceptance of our experience, and it is this nonacceptance that troubles and disturbs the mind.
One of the teachers with whom I meditate speaks of the pail of water, and allowing its contents to settle. “Trying” to make the water settle only disturbs it more. Simply waiting and allowing the water to settle is all one can do.
Even still, after years of practice, I find myself frustrated with the busyness of mind and getting caught up in my thoughts. My judging parts say I “should be further along” in self-mastery.
A few weeks ago, sitting with a group, I noticed that part of me that was so frustrated at the lack of stillness, and realized, “This part of me that wants quiet is so loud.”
Imagine a child accidentally spilling a glass of water, and then you yelling at the child, “I WANT SOME PEACE AND QUIET!” And now the child is upset and agitated. You’ve cultivated more disturbance than you would have simply allowing the water to be spilled.
I was still trying to push away parts of myself and parts of my experience, instead of being with them. An idea of “mastery” suggests a superlative will, that a spiritual person of power has such control over one’s experiences that they are never disturbed unless they wish it to be so. This concept carries with it much blame and baggage that causes us to miss the mark.
The opposing reflection of this idea of mastery might be a kind of divine victimhood, a complacency in accepting that nothing may be controlled and there is no will, we are simply being suffering things happening to us at all times and to be at peace with that.
When the Master and the Victim stand, however, between them lies the path. Discipline and surrender cease to be in conflict and instead become the guardrails that support us in staying on the bridge. We surrender to what is, and we practice.
Since that noticing, my sitting practice has deepened. I find myself returning to a strong posture and feeling the sweat of effort, and I find all the parts of me that want attention are present but able to sit with me. And, indeed, I feel quieter.
Image of a wooden bridge extending across a ravine, with guardrails on each side.
