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.
If you would like to support my work, you can get early access to my posts, including the opportunity to comment and dialogue with me, by becoming a patron on Patreon.
As the topic of what is or is not appropriate within civil discourse circulates the miasma of outrage that suffuses the Internet, I think on the days when I called for civil discourse within my smaller communities.
If you’re a fan of astrology, you might know that recently Uranus, the planet of revolutionary change and innovation, had until very recently spent the past seven years in Aries, the domain of self-assertion, leadership, and courageous and foolhardy impulsivity. As someone with Sun in Aries, I’ve come to appreciate that this sign carries with it a sort of perennial crankiness, impatience, and tendency to see disagreements or obstacles as a personal attack.
With this lens, I observe that Uranus in Aries presided over an era of increased mistrust and polarization, along with the increased politicization of identity. While this politicization has been widely noticed and critiqued on the Left—for example, the explosion in bespoke gender and sexual identities—the rise of “white identitarianism” and Men’s Rights activism on the Right, or the twin arising of “Blue Lives Matter” as an identity-based adversary of “Black Lives Matter,” suggests that the politicization of identity is not a unique feature of one political ideology.
Photo by Jonathan Harrison, courtesy of Unsplash
Perhaps there is relationship between so much emphasis on the validity and rights of identity and the Aries-flavored combativeness that has grown so much that jokes about a looming civil war feel more like gallows humor and less like referencing an absurd impossibilities. The language of “allyship” in identity-based movements carries this Aries flavor—a sense that we’re in a conflict, and you need to pick a side.
What seems noteworthy to me is that the language of allyship and identity-based conflicts places those in the position of allies in uncomfortable roles of practicing quiet discernment around ideological conflicts within those communities. There are valid yet conflicting guidelines in allyship, one for example being to trust and defer to those within the community that they know their experience; another being not to treat people within one identity group as a monolith who agree on everything.
Both of these are reasonable suggestions that are true for every human community—people are authorities on their own experiences, and there is always a diversity of opinion within groups. (In some groups that diversity gets tamped down under collective pressure for conformity, but you’ll find it coming out in unguarded moments of gossip or body-language.)
But for an ally who wants to support a particular community, at times they must decide which faction of a community to support. Any time a politicized identity gets put forth as though it has a coherent set of political interests and values, there’s going to be someone or many within that group who disagree and get let out of the picture. One might think of pro-war and anti-war veterans.
“Allyship” thus cannot be about uncritically and unequivocally supporting all members of one community. Within terms of politics and war, one’s allies are the people who are fighting against the same enemy. The Soviet Union and the United States were allies in World War II, and once they defeated their shared foe, became adversarial.
If I am to be an ally of a political community, then it behooves me to name the specific values, principles, and political goals that I want to achieve in alliance.
Without this personal work and distinction, without a sense of collective purpose, what we have are conflicting personal interests. That some of us lack that sense of discernment or ability to tolerate conflict is not necessarily a failing of the identity movements themselves—Black Lives Matter groups, for example, have advocated for white victims of police killings—but it does seem to get in the way of having honest conversations about what we’re for and what we need.
If you would like to support my work, you can get early access to my posts, including the opportunity to comment and dialogue with me, by becoming a patron on Patreon.
If reality is a hallucination created by the brain from our environment, biological processes, and learning history, then one cannot escape the questions of whether one’s apprehension of reality is correct, and to what extent that matters. While our neurosystem is able to build a coherent sense of “ego” that believes itself to be consistent across time and experience, practice in self-observation leads us to begin to see all the inconsistencies and vacillations that occur throughout at day.
My personal favorite these days is making plans. When I make plans, I feel excited about them—but they’re far away. When it’s time to do the plans, some days I spend the morning hoping they’ll be canceled. If they’re not and I do the plans, I usually end up thankful that I did. In these sentences I’ve used “I” to denote the brain-body-bucket that had all these experiences, but with so much vacillation there does not seem to be a consistent character to that “I”.
At times our “I” becomes what Internal Family Systems would become “blended” with parts, each of whom have their own distinctive worlds and subpersonalities. That blending could be momentary or pervasive. At times I might be blended with a part that feels sensitive to rejection, and perceives in those around me all these signs of rejection. Maybe that part of me is right—these are little rejections. Or maybe it’s projecting its rejection fear onto others.
Either way, when that rejection-sensitive part runs the show, I’ll respond to these with all of my rejection “stuff.” These reactions often tend to foster greater experiences of rejection in me, either because they gravitate toward rejecting people or they wear down my loved ones into finally rejecting me. When in that rejection-sensitive part, we may have the same conversations with the same people, seeking the same reassurance that they’re not rejecting, but find the conversation never lands, which exhausts everyone.
These experiences of rejection, and all the thoughts and sensations that go with them, are in some sense actually occurring within the organism of the self. Whether the other person believes they are rejecting or not, the person “in” rejection experiences all the pain of it.
Where growth and maturation happens is whether that person can be with the pain but not identified as the pain—to see that what they feel is real and valid, but the story about the pain may not be. When we agree with the story, then we have to fix the story, but the story is not the pain. The story might be “My partner secretly hates me,” no matter how often the partner provides evidence to the contrary, until they get wearied of explaining themselves and show even the mildest moment of impatience that confirms the story for that part.
If we can be with the feeling without trying to fix the story, if we can get access to the consciousness that surrounds and is greater than the part, we are in touch with a greater selfhood that helps the pain of that part to move and heal. Perhaps this pain is activated by an actual rejection, perhaps not, but either way what we need to heal is presence and supportive people in our lives who can validate our feelings but give us space to work through the stories.
Jung often spoke of synchronicities, and the Jungian therapists I have worked with and admired often speak to these moments when we make contact with the greater Self and either heal or free ourselves from the complex, which seems to transform reality itself. After years of anger, I finally forgive my sibling, and then they call me out of the blue. I work through fear and decide I’m ready to step into power, and suddenly an opportunity arrives to do it.
Perhaps there is a mystical dimension of this, or perhaps having freed ourselves of that particular painful hallucination we are ready to see a greater field of reality. Perhaps these opportunities were already there and we weren’t ready to see it. Perhaps we live in a field of social energy and intuitively sense when openings arise. No matter what, it’s really cool when it happens.
Photo by Keagan Henman, courtesy of Unsplash
As the phenomena of “gaslighting” and “spiritual bypassing” become more popularly understood as a form of abuse, I find myself often reflecting on the relationship between these behaviors and the psychoanalytic defenses. Projection, repression, denial, bypassing, and other defenses may be said to be a form of self-gaslighting—constructing reality in a way that denies or mitigates certain troubling truths.
At the same time, these defenses lend themselves quite easily to deployment as gaslighting tools against people. I suspect that is one reason I see them less widely used in popular discourse. Popular connotations around the defenses are that such experiences are “not real” or not valid in a meaningful way. One can imagine the enlightened guru saying, “You’re just projecting your anger onto me!” after spending ten minutes telling you how shameful your behavior has been and how un-enlightened your objections are.
I notice that the intrapersonal, intrapsychic model of spiritual growth and development that seemed so prominent since the 1970s, which gave rise to The Secret, seems to be giving way in younger generations toward a more external attention to systems and abuses of power. Now talking about how freeing one’s self of a projection lead to a new job opportunity would be met with the valid counterpoint that focusing only on the internal process ignores the material systems in which one lives. To ignore this allows us too easily to blame people for “manifesting” their misfortunes and focus exclusively on the personal.
This is a view that Jung himself critiqued in his long essay “Answer to Job.” In this excerpt, Jung speaks of Job being allowed to suffer and have all of his wealth and family be destroyed, and then having his friends and family wonder what it was he must have done wrong to deserve such suffering:
“Job’s friends do everything in their power to contribute to his moral torments, and instead of giving him, whom God has perfidiously abandoned, their warm-hearted support, they moralize in an all too human manner, that is, in the stupidest fashion imaginable.”
There is no simple answer to whether one is projecting or being gaslit, at least not at present. In a sense, I believe we tend to project onto people who have something in them that we can “hang” that projection onto—meaning there is a little both/and. But then we could also say that to be gaslit, we must allow ourselves to receive the gaslighting—a little both/and.
That both/and is not wholly helpful in working through circumstances on the ground. If one is actively being gaslit, then stopping one’s internal gaslighting is a necessary and healthy step toward breaking away from the abusive relationship. If one is actively projecting, then recognizing the validity of one’s projections but also finding the psychic roots of the projection is a necessary and healthy step toward having a mature relationship with others.
We need both, and we need to fumble our way toward competency in both. We need validating, supportive, safe relationships, and we need internal self-awareness and ability to discern. We need to take risks in having scary communications, and we need clear boundaries. We need the awareness that we live in a context, and we need to remember that we only know that context through our subjectivity.
If you would like to support my work, you can get early access to my posts, including the opportunity to comment and dialogue with me, by becoming a patron on Patreon.
Cosmology inform psychology. What we believe about the universe’s nature and purpose, if any, affects our base understanding of our own purpose and nature.
Before getting into a “nature versus nurture” digression, I simply want to say that the debate has been roundly dismissed as too reductive to be useful. Humans have a nature that is enculturated and those factors are constantly interacting with each other and pushing personal and collective evolutions.
Cosmology, then, is one of those cultural factors that comes out of an observation of the nature of the cosmos and the human, but also leads to teachings and practices that shape both the human and nature.
Mainstream religions appear to have a fairly established, unshakeable cosmology to those of us who do not pay very close attention. It is easy to paint with a broad brush and say, for example, Christianity has a very specific cosmology that one can understand by reading the Bible and taking it literally. This is, of course, specific to one subset of Christianity. Over the millennia in which the followers of Christ have been active, thinking about the nature, purpose, and direction of the universe has been itself unfolding and changing, with conflicts and deliberation within and between sects.
In my early days as a spiritual seeker, I wanted to know the Truth about the universe. I still, in fact, feel that as a desire, though increasingly I see that as a very costly desire that does not necessarily lead one to have a happier, healthier, or wealthier life of itself. My Catholicism of origin provided one particular cosmology that included teachings which appeared to exclude me, and I went on a path of spiritual seeking—looking at many religious and philosophical frameworks to find what teachings they had to offer.
Here I’d note—each religious and philosophical framework arises from its own unique history and cosmology, often coming from a specific cultural, historic, and geographic framework, and responding to the needs and adaptations of those peoples. The belief that one could look at multiple frameworks and find a meta-narrative of “universal” spiritual truth is, itself, a position that comes from a Western cosmology.
Not only a Western cosmology, but one that is hard now to separate from the political needs of empires. The early Romans would take the indigenous gods of the lands they invaded and bring those gods to Rome, formally declaring that the conquered peoples’ gods are now also Roman gods. When Christianity became the dominant Roman religion, the Catholic church modified this practice by incorporating indigenous practices, images, and deities into its own framework in a multiplicity of ways. Some now laugh and say that Christianity has all these “pagan” practices, like decorating evergreen trees at Christmastime, unknowing. This was by design. The Holy Roman Empire blended its culture with its conquered peoples’ cultures.
After the Enlightenment, when Western minds became convinced there was a universal truth that we could arrive at through reason and science, the practices of empire shifted from that of adopting and blending to instead imposing and forcing assimilation. The cosmology became that Christianity or Western Science were the “truth” and it was beneficial to the conquered peoples to have their “primitive” practices erased and replaced with this framework.
“God is Real,” photo by Martin Jernberg
Later reactions to this erasure of indigenous cultures that were unwilling to break entirely from the dominant mold instead shifted toward the rhetoric of universal truths that transcend cultures, and conveniently those universal truths tended to correspond to Western ideas and practices. Jung’s theory of the archetypes and collective unconscious is one such model, which was at its time radical in its willingness to consider indigenous and non-Christian myths as equally valid with Christian myths, but also in some ways became problematic as people inspired by the theory started to create correspondence charts and argue that all female-bodied goddesses of sex and love across history and culture were all basically the same sort of homogenized Venus archetype.
In truth, these practices are of benefit to the dominating cultural group. The practice of homogenizing multiple goddesses to a Venus archetype is not so much damnation of archetypal theory, which I find far more nuanced in practice, as it is the homogenizing and assimilating needs of modern empire. To strip away multiplicity, pluralism, and conflict is to make a diverse set of peoples more manageable.
To believe one group with political, economic, and military superiority has a universal belief system or structure that needs to be brought to ignorant people is to override those peoples’ particular cosmologies that teach them that their relationship with their land, language, and practices are deep and sustaining and worth protecting at all costs. Thus when a white developer wishes to build on a piece of land sacred to indigenous people, for example, their claims to meaning, rooted in their own cosmologies, get ridiculed or pushed aside in favor of the need for profit, or growth.
Sadly, the loss of a cosmology rooted in connection with the divine or with the natural world has left the primary driver of Western culture as essentially profit and growth at all costs.
Some of us are prone to inhabiting multiple cosmologies, or required to cultivate their own from the multiplicities available. This has been my experience for the past ten years, still believing in a transcendent “Truth” that I could find in every spiritual tradition, even knowing the limitations and problems of that. I feel a constant tension of sensing contradictions within different cosmologies and attempting to reconcile them within and for myself. This is along with being a white Western man who believes that the scientific method is a valid and useful form of inquiry into the nature of the physical world, though not as useful as phenomenological inquiry when one wishes to explore the realm of meaning and psychology.
Cosmology is of particular interest to me for those who do any kind of deep spiritual work and seeking of gnosis, the knowledge of spiritual mysteries. People who want to be dismissive of others’ cosmologies often imply that all other cosmologies are “made up,” invented, without fully appreciating that all cosmologies are made up. But “made up” implies a certain slapdash lack of discipline that does not really create an effective, compelling cosmology.
Insofar as it applies to a spiritual worldview, we live in a field of mystery in which most contact with the intangible, ineffable dimensions of reality occur through the medium of the imagination. Far from being easy to dismiss, the imagination has enormous power over our bodies and lives. Imagine arguing with your partner, and before long you’ll find your body tensing up in stress. Your body reacts to the imagined scene as though it’s truly happening. More interesting, though you might be imagining both sides of the argument, you might notice that not everything you imagine comes from conscious deliberation. You don’t sit and think, “What might my partner say in this situation?” Your imagined partner comes up with responses almost on their own.
Much spiritual work relies upon and deepens this capacity of ours, to envision or en-sense scenes and occurrences that are not physically happening to us. Such daydreams are the shallowest level of this capacity, closest to the ego consciousness, but the capacity extends into our unconscious dreamstates where the content arises wholly on its own without our intentional directing. As those who work with their dreams can attest, these seemingly random images and events often communicate their own kind of meaning, a broader and deeper perspective lacking from the waking ego awareness.
Between the shallow daydream and the unconscious dream is a state that is called trance in certain Neopagan traditions. Being in trance is like being Alice in Wonderland; the waking ego retains its consciousness and coherency but moves into a world of intriguing beings and fantastic scenes that are so suffused with meaning and depth as to be almost inscrutable except upon reflection. Those met in the trance journey offer profoundly important insights, some of which are easy to apprehend, some of which take years and years before they finally make sense.
For some, the trance state is being in the deep unconscious of the Self. Others believe they are out of the personal Self and in the transpersonal realm, interacting with autonomous beings. I think this is the realm in which the personal contents of the Self interface with those ineffable realms.
It is as though we approach the unknowable mystery of reality with a set of plastic action figures that correspond to our best guesses of the personalities contained within that unknowable mystery—guesses which may have emerged from traditions passed along for centuries, the wisdom of teachers, our own dreams, our popular cultures. The figures are our cosmology. Perhaps for a time we play with the toys ourselves, having conversations with them and miming responses that come from a profound but still personal part of ourselves that we could not access any other way. (Raven Kaldera originated the idea of internal mental “sock puppets” that one speaks with in lieu of the actual gods, a metaphor that I am adapting here.)
At a certain point, however, the figures begin to move and speak themselves. Or figures we didn’t consciously bring show up. Or the figures explain how they’re actually the wrong action figures, or need to be modified. This is the moment when something greater than our waking egos, perhaps greater than the Self itself, have finally noticed us and decided to work with us, using the cosmological language we have available. Superman might show up to dispense wisdom, but it does not necessarily mean Superman is a real god. It may mean that whatever qualities you associate with Superman are meaningfully related to whatever entity or part of self is showing up as Superman. Too stringent an adherence to an inherited model may lead one to rigidly ignoring important gnosis that wants to come through when the toys come to life and begin giving you information that goes against what you’ve been taught.
In my early days, I thought the kind of traditions that were formed entirely out of spiritual wisdom and revelation were the valid ones, and those that appeared to be constructed from pre-existing models such as the Tree of Life were more fake. I’ve since come to think that was a limited and unfortunate view. For spirit communications are notoriously vague and misleading, and simply receiving information from a spirit does not guarantee that the the information is relevant, usable, or even that the spirit knows what they’re talking about.
Having a clearly defined model does seem to help us focus our inquiry and frequencies to invite only the kind of aid and information that corresponds to the specific issue or topic we want to work with. In Western esoteric traditions, a wand is a symbolic tool of fire in some traditions and a tool of air in other traditions. Contemplation reveals that in some ways the wand meaningfully teaches us something about air, or meaningfully teaches something about fire. The blade, similarly, offers us meaningful but different lessons about air or fire. Finding the “correct” tool for the element is less important than sincerely engaging with the associations one has, so that those toys have a language we understand that they can use for communication.
It is the practice of holding a wand with the intent of it being a tool of fire, with the further intent of Fire corresponding to qualities such as will, vitality, purpose, and value, that makes the tool psychologically and spiritually effective. In the book It, the children of Derry are able to defeat a monster who uses their fears against them by harnessing imagination and intent with confidence. The original movie shows this when one of the children sprays his inhaler at the monster while saying, “This is battery acid you slime!” In doing so, he hurts the monster.
This touches the polarities of meaning and meaninglessness. In a sense, this piece of stick is meaningless until infused with meaning. Yet rational and scientifically minded folks, as well as those who believe there is objective Truth that is knowable and unitary, might see this as a sign that the stick remains meaningless. If its meaning is conditional, how could it be valuable? Yet if there is only one correct meaning known to a small group of elect, that too seems lacking in value for the rest of us.
My thinking these days is that the world of inner meaning, both psychological and spiritual, follow different laws than the world of outer objects and relationships. What is true internally—if I believe something hard enough, it can change my consciousness to experience it as though it were true—does not work on the external level, where we have to do more work to manifest a reality, and that manifestation is subject to so many variables outside control.
Where I see errors between the psychospiritual on one hand versus the materialist-rational on the other hand is believing that either the inner laws or the outer laws must be true. If waving a stick in the air could not generate a physical fire, then it must not be true that there is an inner meaning of Fire that one can evoke. Simultaneously, so much spiritual bypassing is about believing that changing one’s inner experience will automatically and universally lead to material changes in ways that do not really work for most people in the world.
That said, invoking qualities of Fire in my self, or praying to my god for their strength and support, makes a material difference within my experience of self and the world, which may lead me to show up differently. Strange acausal experiences occur, which Jung called “synchronicities,” that feel as though they are confirming and guiding my inner experiences in a way that feels like a larger intelligence is organizing my life. There are moments when the inner and outer worlds blur, and yet I wonder if that blurring arises when we have clearly delineated the boundaries between the two and learned the proper skills and interventions for each.
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