In this video, I discuss the need and benefits of looking at our beliefs about money, work, and material wellbeing in contrast with our deep longings about belonging and safety. In a time when we are being forced to reckon with these basic questions as a society, let’s take time to look inward and begin to find the personal and collective solutions to foster more resilience in creating the lives and communities we desire.
Lately I find myself having thoughts along the lines of, “How can we be such sophisticated monkeys who create so much beautiful art and innovative technology, and this is the society we’ve made?” How can I live in a country that seems to really pride itself on being a land of opportunity while, compared to other industrialized countries, the likelihood of social mobility is rather low? A country that prides itself on its virtue while still struggling to admit to our tendencies toward wealth inequality, gender-based and racial violence, and environmental harm.
The veil of cynicism is not enough to cover over despair, disappointment, hopelessness. These feelings point to our deepest longings and hopes that want to surface. Something in me, and I think many of us, believes—knows with a surprising certainty—that life can be different. Knows that we’ve been given false choices around what kind of life is available to us, what kind of resources, who is worthy of comfort and joy, who deserves health and protection.
That belief, that hope, runs into tension with those parts of us that feel disillusioned. Parts that remember feeling a deep sense of belonging that turned out to be conditional. Parts that remember the hurt we’ve experienced when we took risks and tried. Parts that fear if we question the values we’ve received, if we reject the society we’ve been given, we’ll lose our ground of connection. Parts that fear betraying our family legacies, even when those legacies carry harm.
These parts constrict in fear when we want to move toward faith and hope. These parts take in our ancestral legacies of seeking safety and security when we want to move toward possibility and freedom. We need to bring all of these parts of us into dialogue, to discover the new dream that is free of the old illusions, one in which we can pursue with hope and passion.
The veil of cynicism is not enough to cover over despair, disappointment, hopelessness. These feelings point to our deepest longings and hopes that want to surface. Something in me, and I think many of us, believes—knows with a surprising certainty—that life can be different. Knows that we’ve been given false choices around what kind of life is available to us, what kind of resources, who is worthy of comfort and joy, who deserves health and protection.
That belief, that hope, runs into tension with those parts of us that feel disillusioned. Parts that remember feeling a deep sense of belonging that turned out to be conditional. Parts that remember the hurt we’ve experienced when we took risks and tried. Parts that fear if we question the values we’ve received, if we reject the society we’ve been given, we’ll lose our ground of connection. Parts that fear betraying our family legacies, even when those legacies carry harm.
These parts constrict in fear when we want to move toward faith and hope. These parts take in our ancestral legacies of seeking safety and security when we want to move toward possibility and freedom. We need to bring all of these parts of us into dialogue, to discover the new dream that is free of the old illusions, one in which we can pursue with hope and passion.
Often we hope recovery from illness is as simple as fixing a single problem, but recovery through psychotherapy is less linear. It is more like crafting a stronger and more resilient net to catch us when we fall. Stitch by stitch.
Happy International Men’s Day! Here’s a brief shout out to all the men and masculine folk who are working on finding and creating meaning, freedom, love, intimacy, family, and community.
Men’s issues are important! Men are most likely to be the victims of physical violence and assault, and are most likely to be assaulted by other men.
We may not really acknowledge or think much about how much our interactions with each other are permeated by the threat of violence as it’s a scary and embarrassing reality to consider, but I suspect that’s one of many reasons why so many men have difficulty building and sustaining emotionally satisfying relationships with each other.
Men’s intimacy and belonging needs are important! When we struggle to build warm connections, community, and solidarity in our friendships, then we end up needing or expecting all these needs to be met by our partners.
Our needs for emotional support and physical touch become sexualized, because romantic/sexual relationships are the most socially acceptable way to get those needs met.
In other cultures—even in our own culture a century or more ago—it was normal and accepted for men to hold hands, hug, cuddle, and express deep emotional connection to each other. We look back now and assume those were homosexual relationships—and some certainly were!—but they weren’t necessarily!
It’s a lot of pressure to put on finding one person to meet all of those needs, whether we’re looking for straight or queer relationships, monogamous or polyamorous.
I hope we can continue to create more safety, trust, and freedom in giving and receiving affection in many different kinds of relationships for men and all people.
There’s a lot of great writing and thinking I’d recommend, particularly:
Angie’s video is about the figure Jordan Peterson himself, but also the ways leftists have ceded territory around maleness and masculinity to the right in ways that are unproductive.
In this video, I offer a few simple strategies for calming the nervous system to help stay focused, thoughtful, and resilient when doing the things that matter to us.
In a culture so focused on rugged individualism and competition as a measure of worthiness, it’s unsurprising that there is disgust toward victims.
When you have to succeed or fail on your own merits, and it’s considered a weakness to need support or the help of other people, then it becomes vitally important to feel that I’m strong, clever, and canny enough to avoid harm and find success. Other people can be weak, but I have to be strong, or else I’m vulnerable to harm and then I’m weak and people will walk all over me.
So when we’re taken advantage of, harmed, or made a victim, the pain of the experience itself worsens with shame, failure, and judgment. “How could you allow this to happen to yourself?” Which is a true sorrow, because it’s impossible to be on guard all the time, to always keep one’s self safe, to be aware of every possible angle by which someone in bad faith could harm or exploit you. It’s why we truly need community.
What’s worse, the attachment to believing one’s self strong becomes itself a vulnerability for victimization. The inability to tolerate accepting that I’ve been harmed or coerced, or that I saw the red flags and proceeded anyway, means sometimes it’s tempting to double down and convince myself that I’m choosing something. Or it’s painful to go ask for help and admit I’ve been harmed.
And even if we go ask for help, there’s no guarantee we won’t find people unwilling to believe our experiences, who will ridicule us, deny, dismiss, blame us, refuse to help us at our most vulnerable. In the United States, there is a culture of disgust toward victims.
Medusa, by Caravaggio
Of course, when it comes to the people in power or the people who adhere most strongly to this ideology of despising the weak and victimized—the ones who will deny your experience and ridicule you—they also have a shadow love for being victims. They will grab and lift up the slightest bit of victimization to shut down conversations and shift the frame from one person’s harm to another.
For these folks, it seems crucial to deny and make invisible one harm so that they can foreground their own. This tendency appears when folks deny sexual assaults, deny police violence, deny that the Holocaust ever happened. When I hear such denials, I’ve come to expect that within months if not minutes they will talk about how their group are the real victims.
In this mindset, victimhood is an all-or-nothing state, a trump card. If one is a genuine victim, then they should be coddled and catered to. Therefore they cannot accept the truth of another’s victimhood, but they crave the perceived power of that victim place.
Which brings me to white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Historically, this social arrangement included at least some expectation of protection for the marginalized from the powerful. That protection often came with violence and control of the marginalized who questioned the way of things, but those who went along were supposed to be safe. That arrangement has fully decayed.
As the foundations of the American empire begin to show their creaking, crumbling edges, we are facing a civil war in the soul of the United States and those of us within it. We see our legacy of violence and domination for the profit and wealth of the few, and we see the possibility for equality, fairness, and justice that have always been our aspirations. We see it within our daily souls.
I work with men, women, and enby folks, some of which have experienced harm, some of whom have perpetrated harm, and some of whom have both. I work with men who were raised to believe they were innately worthless and the only way to get love and respect from family and partners was to control and dominate the people around them. This domination and control intoxicates, in a way—feeling strong, feeling powerful, feeling better than is a pleasurable feeling; much more desirable than the undercurrent of shame and worthlessness that lies under the surface, ready to rise up at any sign of failure or weakness. It undergirds friendship, work, romantic relationship. It is exhausting and alienating and yet to surrender it can feel so terrifying and defenseless.
I work with men, women, and enby folks who have experienced being dominated, harmed, and violated by their parents, friends, colleagues, and occasionally strangers—but stranger violence is the least likely to occur. It’s the easiest to sensationalize and scapegoat because it feels better to imagine harm comes from an anonymous other than to understand it’s more likely to come from people we love and respect. When we experience harm, it leaves an imprint on the soul. We develop defenses and strategies to avoid that harm again. These limit the soul, these limit our potential for love and achievement. They physiologically alter the nervous system. They are exhausting and alienating and yet to surrender them can feel so terrifying and defenseless.
Judith Beheading Holofernes, by Caravaggio
Men are the most likely to commit violence—to each other, to women, to trans and nonbinary folks. I do not believe men are intrinsically violent. I do not believe white people are intrinsically racist. I believe patriarchy, white supremacy, and imperialism makes us monstrous. And we’re not going to get free until we—the people living right now—take responsibility for how those ideologies have rooted in our souls, shaped our hearts, and inform every level of how we structure our relationships and government.
We have to learn the weapons we’ve been taught to wield and learn how to put them down first.
It is unwise to think that the people who’ve grown up learning to fear us, to avoid upsetting us, to placate us at all costs for fear of violence—it’s unwise to expect them to put down their weapons and shields first.
We have to learn the weapons we’ve been taught to wield and learn how to put them down first.
If we want loving relationships, if we want real power, if we want to live in a society where we’re allowed to make mistakes without it meaning complete ruin—
We have to learn the weapons we’ve been taught to wield and learn how to put them down first.
There is a deep rage in the United States, and there are people—of all genders—who want to continue to silence that rage. Who are more worried about protecting the wealth and reputation of the powerful than they are about justice. Who cannot tolerate the stories of victims though they think themselves strong and powerful.
In Robert Sapolsky’s Behave, an impressive survey of studies and insights over years of research into human behavior and neurobiology, he reveals a curious and unexpected effect of oxytocin, the so-called “love hormone.”
Oxytocin is the name of the hormone our bodies generate when we’re experiencing loving connection. It is what helps us to feel that sense of bonding. Cuddling with a baby, a dog, a partner, a friend, all generate oxytocin.
We need and crave this oxytocin, in part because it helps us to make more effective use of the natural opioids in our system. The body produces opioids to both manage pain and increase feelings of ease and pleasure. Much of our pleasurable behaviors encourage our bodies to flood with opioids and dopamine, which we also crave. Without these opioids, we would be more sensitive to physical discomfort and ill at ease in life.
Evidence is suggesting that experiencing that opioid flood without oxytocin, or pleasure without loving bonds, means that we burn through the opioids faster and end up craving more and more for the same effect. Studies are indicating that the presence of oxytocin decreases the likelihood of developing tolerance and other behaviors associated with addiction.
In short, when we have loving social connections and regular cuddling, that improves our overall health and wellbeing and decreases the need for pleasure-seeking behaviors. When we share pleasurable behaviors with people we love, all the better.
So oxytocin is deeply needed, but what Sapolsky reveals is that it is also associated with increases in aggression and our bigotry. Surprise! You thought it was testosterone. Turns out, testosterone doesn’t necessarily make people more aggressive, it makes people more confident and assertive about their pre-existing tendencies. As Sapolsky says, if someone is inclined to be peacemaker, more testosterone will make them a more confident peacemaker. If someone is inclined to be an aggressive, coercive person, more testosterone will make them more willing to be that.
But holy shit, the revelation about oxytocin makes sense. Think of the deep bond between parents and children. Think of the wisdom about never getting between a mama bear and her cubs. When we love deeply, and bond with our loved ones, our need to protect them at all costs increases. We become fierce in staving off perceived threats to our people, our children, our beloved animals.
The important piece is “our.” Therein, I think, is the tendency for bigotry. Sapolsky discusses studies that show increases in oxytocin also increase antipathy toward whatever the person perceives as “Other.” As with testosterone, there does not appear to be an innate biological idea of what is “Other,” it depends on the person’s experiences of family and culture. It’s about what we define as “us” and “not-us.”
When I was a kid, I noticed how often kids would cluster into little cliques and form a sense of tribal identity. Not going so far as to create a name and a shared set of mythology and traditions—although some groups certainly had pieces of that—but you could get a clear sense of who was “in” and who was “out.”
“Golden Hug” by Helena Lopes, courtesy of Unsplash
But if you think about your own experiences with this, or your own noticing, you might think about how complex this “us” and “not-us” truly is. As kids, we were really cruel toward any kind of difference, especially in middle school. I was bullied as an outsider, and once I got my own group to be inside, I was cruel toward the outsiders of my group. We would find any kind of difference and mock it cruelly. I’m not going to name specifics of cruelty but neither would I sugarcoat it. We weren’t “woke.”
But it was inconsistent. If a kid was part of our crew but had an identifiable difference, that kid got teased—but if anyone else teased them then the whole crew became protective. In the movie Mean Girls there’s a lot of great examples of this, but the one that springs to mind is how two characters share a joke about one of them being “Too gay to function.” When that joke gets spread out among the school, she says, “That’s only okay when I say it!”
White people who get really confused about when it’s okay to say “the n-word” would intuitively understand why certain jokes and references are okay from loved ones but really offensive when coming from outside their group. That’s a normal human experience. We can be this way with each other because we share these bonding moments that give us a sense of loving connection. You are not part of our group so when you say it, it feels hostile at worst, unwelcome at best.
Thinking about all of this has brought me to some intriguing and troubling questions about bigotry, tribalism, and the emergence of Fascism.
The faces of white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia, fascism, dominionism—they’re all so friendly! With the unapologetic embrace of such oxytocin-fueled love and bigotry, these folks freely build families and networks that feel so accepting, so comforting, so friendly to those seeking connection and meaning in a rather isolating and dehumanizing world. At least, to those who are part of the “us.”
But then, the “us” contains its own tensions when the qualifications for inclusion are rigid and shaming. If your in-group has exacting expectations for behavior, appearance, and norms, and you do not fully match those, then the threat of social and physical violence looms under the surface. These expectations even extend to honorary “us”-es, people who do not actually match the qualifications but appear to accept their place in the hierarchies. White slave masters loved their slaves who outwardly appeared to embrace their roles, making them an honorary “us” but never completely “us.”
If we for whatever reason do not match the rigid expectations of being in-group, and are unwilling to accept the inferior place in the hierarchy, then we experience the threat of withholding of love, expulsion from the group, or violence. Staying silent and acquiescing leads to a slow psychic death, feeling like we are looking through the windows of a beautiful warm home while we stand freezing and hungry outside.
Speaking up and fighting leads to blistering displays of hostility and fear. The oxytocin bond is complicated for the rest of the “us”—if you aren’t fully in-group, if you are part of the family but also part of the out-group, then it would make sense that the protective fierce loving bond must also reckon with this—either by kicking out the threat or changing ideas about who is part of the group and who is other.
For those of us who do the work of unpacking bigotry and questioning these dynamics, however, struggle to include that deep bonding and sense of togetherness. We see ourselves as allies but not members of a collective community.
A Facebook post by Drew Merrill, which states: the left: it’s not my job to educate you, instead read this huge corpus of literature that suspiciously corresponds to what a high-end university education in the humanities and social sciences would give u, or navigate extremely complex social spaces that require highly-tuned social intelligence to survive their byzantine norms and conventions (also everyone hates everyone else and is ready to eat them alive for social capital) the right: here’s my pamphlet on who is and is not a human, take ten and give one to all your friends, if you want to hear more hit me up any time
At a certain stage of racial identity development, for example, white anti-racists feel outside of the white communities that they find problematic, and also feel constantly on guard around each other and people of color. They might find community among white allies but even within that world there are often dynamics of social dominance and exclusion as white people aspire to “wokeness” and tear down anyone who is off the script.
Indeed, my observation is that “woke” white people can police each other more rigidly and with less forgiveness than most people of color would toward them. It is a way we carry our cultural legacy and wounding into our anti-racist work.
We struggle to define a tribal—for lack of a less problematic word—identity that would foster such deep love and acceptance. When we begin to feel ourselves coalescing into that kind of bond, then all those fears about inclusion and exclusion arise—as they must, I suspect, for any such bond necessarily excludes someone.
I remember the day that I noticed my sense of tribal affiliation was changing. I’d been working as a case manager for homeless folks and folks ensconced in the legal system—a relatively brief tenure in my career but one that continues to impact me. I was at the gym on the treadmill where one of the TVs played an episode of COPS.
As I watched, I saw a segment in which police officers approached a car where a man was sleeping behind the wheel. The cops woke up the man and demanded to know what he was doing, demanded he open his window. He took too long—by their reckoning—to respond, and then they pulled him out of the car and handcuffed him. He explained that he was having a fight with his partner and had taken some time to rest and work through it. The cop expressed sympathy but explained the guy was going to jail for the night.
I don’t know all the laws. I’ve never been a cop. But at no point in that vignette did anyone actually accuse him of committing a crime. At no point did he endanger anyone. He was sleeping in his car, and then he was arrested because he didn’t open his window fast enough. All of these behaviors are things I’ve done at some point in my life—driving off in a car, sitting quietly for some alone time.
I felt so angry on behalf of the man in the car. And then, in the next vignette, some cops similarly pulled over a man for no apparent reason, then he got out of the car and ran. I found myself cheering for him, hoping he’d get away. That’s when I knew things had changed. Once I would have viewed the police as protectors and these men as predators. After spending time being a case manager and supporter of men of color trying to navigate the legal system, my heart had bonded with them and begun to view the police as the out-group.
It’s difficult to detangle the emotional-hormonal instincts toward bonding and then the more intellectual, rational capacity to think according to laws and principles. Depending on where we stand, some blending of both will go into understanding the scenarios I discussed above.
We easily minimize or excuse the actions of those within the “us” and then exaggerate and vilify the actions of those who are “not-us”. We hear occasional stories of highly conservative, anti-abortion folks who secretly seek or pay for abortions. But their need for abortions are always special exceptions, which fail to elicit any kind of sympathy or understanding for anyone else who has the need. We also see those who are more liberal who might have sympathized when Obama and Clinton turned away refugee children from the border now apoplectic when a Republican oversees the same behavior. We rationalize our principles when they threaten our belonging.
Any kind of path forward toward a community of love and justice must contend with the craving for and shadows of that intense oxytocin connection. We need a sense of belonging and emotional safety. We truly need a shared sense of meaning and humanity to access the kinds of fierce connection and devotion that build strong communities of love. We need that sense to be accessible and intuitive, rooted in a shared symbology that speaks to our mythological natures.
The title is in part a reference to a song by Roisin Murphy, “Overpowered“
Many of us feel wearied by constant outrage and long for imagined days of civil conversation, but anger is energy. When people feel provoked or angry, they engage. As a person who tends toward diplomacy and equanimity, I also often gravitate toward provocative folks to challenge and inspire me. As it turns out, being too balanced is its own imbalance.
I notice that I can say things very similar to those provocative folks without stirring much conflict at all. At times, I can assuage conflict by restating things in terms that folks can actually hear and contemplate. This is powerful for building relationships and trust, but one consequence is that at times there’s very little obvious response. Meanwhile, a friend of mine can post one sentence on Facebook and start fifty arguments. There is very obvious response and engagement.
Anger is energizing and exciting. When there is anger, there is a will to take action. It is healthy and constructive to feel anger and let that anger move one’s self to an important conversation, a constructive action, a meaningful confrontation, a firm boundary.
Anger also gets stuck and reactive, and shuts processes down. When there is anger without respect or safety, folks tend to harden in their defensive positions and become more polarized. As I’ve allowed myself to feel my anger more, I’ve found myself saying things I don’t fully believe, defending positions I don’t really agree with, simply because I felt attacked and there was no space for nuance.
When feeling under attack, it’s easy to withdraw in a sense that someone must be right and someone must be wrong. If I acknowledge even the slightest bit of doubt, nuance, or self-questioning in these moments, I feel a fear that will be used against me to discredit my entire position. Mistrust is high, and I feel tempted to respond by discrediting the other person’s position entirely.
This polarization is unworkable in a relationship or civil society. No relationship lasts when partners are unwilling to accept influence from each other. No one person or position can be right about everything, and neither does being wrong about some things does not automatically mean you’re wrong about everything.
What we need is anger with vulnerability. To honestly express our conflicts, wants, and needs, without personal attacks, and respecting that each of us comes from a different experience and that we all want to work together for mutual benefit—those conflicts move us forward into greater alliance.
Photo by Chris Sabor, courtesy of Unsplash
Yet these conversations do not work if everyone does not show up with the same vulnerability and good faith commitment. What often happens is that those in the less powerful position repeatedly do the work of extending themselves, being understanding, being kind, muting their anger to comfort the feelings of the more powerful person or group, and then still get shut down, marginalized, or ignored by the more powerful.
It is love that brings us together, a love that enfolds all the conflict and disparities we experience. Love as the willingness to show up, humble ourselves, listen, and speak honestly. Love as the trust that we will be heard and respected. Love as the knowing that my wants and needs are equal in importance to yours, though they may be very different, and a desire for us all to win together.
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