Often we want to believe change will be direct and unproblematic—all I need to do is get the will and want aligned and then it’ll just happen. But when we find change harder to sustain than expected, or years later suddenly relapse in old upsetting patterns, we may struggle to know what to do. Shame is almost inevitable. “I thought things were different! I thought we were past this.”
An image of a Labyrinth carved in relief.
The image of the Labyrinth is widespread and often employed in reflecting upon the personal and spiritual journey. Though the Labyrinth itself is a direct path—if you keep walking in the same direction, you will eventually reach the center—it is subjectively quite meandering and indirect. We might seem to approach the goal, only to veer suddenly and find ourselves further than ever from it.
Each turn of the Labyrinth offers us the opportunity to see a new facet of the problem or the longing. What seems true is that we cannot escape those things that trouble us. We cannot eradicate what we despise; indeed, despising something only seems to intensify its power over us. Neither can we transcend our problems by minimizing the damage it does to us.
At the center of the Labyrinth might be a hoped-for experience, a sense of self and life that feels so potent and scary that parts of us pull us away as we get close. Often we feel we would rather just get rid of those fearful and hostile parts, yet we seem unable to do so. No amount of will eradicates them or suppresses them for long. No tyranny of mind or society has ever been able to extinguish the soul. Whatever we suppress will erupt, and the more vigorously suppressed it is, the more destructive will be its eruption.
Better to befriend these distractions, these upheavals. Everything seeks to be seen, named, and included. What is this part trying to offer me today? What fear or danger am I not acknowledging? What unmet need still lingers? What weakness in me needs strength training? What does resentment tell me about the burdens I carry that are not mine?
What if my belief about myself and the world is not an accurate map? What do those beliefs exclude? What if those beliefs are obscuring important information that could help me to understand the world better as it is, in a way that would help me be more effective and connected? What if these disruptions, as problematic as they are, arose to help me to see those flaws in my beliefs? What if this was all necessary so that I may truly know the center when I find it?
We turn a corner, individually and collectively, to look at old problems from a different angle. The dangers are real but so too is hope. Refusing the new angle by clinging to old beliefs will not serve.
In times of crisis, much becomes possible. Structures and patterns that once held a livable, or at least stable, status quo suddenly do not serve. Fear and panic arise, along with anger.
When faced with the intensity of these feelings and urgency of the situation, all of our fight/flight/freeze tendencies come to the fore. It’s easy to fall back into older, more established patterns of protection, though they’ve failed to serve us in the past. We want to stick our heads in our shells and wait for the storm to pass. We want to attack any and every apparent threat, unable to pause for a moment to relax, constantly on guard. Or, for some of us, we completely shut down, dissociate, or simply feel frozen on the spot.
Of course we miss even the illusion of safety and stability, and long for it to return. Some of us would do nearly anything to get it back, make any sacrifice, commit to any responsibility. It is one of the reasons that so much political and advertising language fosters a mentality of crisis. Whip up enough fear and urgency, stimulate that survival drive to flood your brain, and before long we find that we’ve permanently lost rights and opportunities we’d before taken for granted.
An image of a person, blurry, against a snowy backdrop, holding a sparkler that is burning down to their fingers. Photo by Jakob Owens
All of this happens in the personal world, too. The urge is to do whatever it takes to end the crises, even at the cost of our health and deepest values. Years ago, during the Great Recession, I spent months fixating on applying to jobs and freaking out about being forever unemployed. That was an old career, one I didn’t even like that much, but one that generated a modicum of stability and kept me from facing all my fears. I tolerated abusive behaviors from a boss because I didn’t want to lose even the minimum wage job I had. I felt about two days away from utter ruin.
Around that time, I decided I could use the energy of that crisis to “become more awesome.” I wasn’t sure exactly what I meant by that, only that it felt more productive than letting the crisis eat me from within. Therapy and daily spiritual practice supported me, as well as my partner and community. I realized that my old patterns of work, job seeking, money and self-management no longer served. Whether it was a temporary thing or permanent, the options either seemed to keep repeating unworkable behaviors or embrace the terror and instability to create something new. So I committed to the customer service job I had, and decided to go to school to get a new career.
In times of crisis, structure loosens and becomes flexible. Those who have the will, the resources, or the support can make significant changes. Those who are the most effective seem the ones who are least hindered by clinging to what no longer works, who accept the instability and imminence of change and have a strong vision to promote. For these people, the emotions engendered by crisis become fertilizer and fuel.
Now is the time. Now is the time to root into your deepest values. Now is the time to branch into your most inspiring vision of possibility. Now is the time to stop spending your energy fighting on their terms, and speak boldly in your own words.
A woman with the dog. In the foreground is the poem by Deena Metzger: “There are those who are trying to set fire to the world. / We are in danger. / There is time only to work slowly. / There is no time not to love.”
Reading Carl Jung introduced me to a word that I love: enantiodroma – the tendency of things to change into their opposites. I find references to this tendency throughout literature, psychology, and spiritual writing. The Taoists in particular deeply explore this concept, and it arises even in Taoist-informed texts like The Art of War in which Sun Tzu uses oppositions as strategic approaches to conflict.
One such piece of advice is “When you surround an army, leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard.” The implication, as I understand it, is that an enemy driven too far to desperation, where defeat is certain and all hope of escape denied, has the potential to become a powerful nemesis. Too much weakness suddenly gains a strength and power that could cause severe damage to your forces.
A silhouetted surfer riding a wave. Photo by Tim Marshall
Too much strength, then, has the potential to become fragility. I think of this often when working with highly masculine clients. In our culture, what epitomizes masculinity is the hard muscle, the erect penis, the commanding presence, hardness and strength unyielding and unending. It is a lie, of course, an archetypal Masculinity which no one could wear indefinitely, and yet so many masculine and male people think they must.
Excessive exercise is harmful to muscular development. What helps us to become stronger is the time of rest after exercise, after tearing apart the muscles with effort—allowing them to rest and rebuild, reknit with greater strength. So too is it with all kinds of strength. We need places of rest, of vulnerability, places of comfort and ease. We cannot be in constant effort, strain, and growth.
Even more fragile is that form of power which insists upon itself and demands all recognize it, the kind of power that measures itself by how much people obey and yield to it. By this I speak of what Starhawk called power-over. It is power that cannot tolerate dissent, disagreement, or allow others to behave as they wish. It is the kind of power that would waste its energy attacking or incarcerating someone for an insult out of fear that if one person “gets away with it” then no one will respect it. It is the kind of power that would punish someone for failing to find him attractive rather than work to become a desirable person.
This power is brittle because it demands constant, unyielding obedience. It is inflexible. It cannot adapt and learn. Any crack in this illusion of control annihilates all of it. It must force its vision of reality upon the world and punish whatever does not cohere to the vision; and not learning the truth about the world and learning how to work with it.
There are attributes of masculinity worth cultivating within the wholeness of one’s Self: resilience; follow through; strength; setting aside pain to do what must be done; setting aside one’s interests to labor for the benefit of one’s family, clan, or community. But taken to excess, masculinity is fragile. It damages bodies and souls. It does not allow tears, intimacy, vulnerability, unguarded moments of connection. It does not allow recovery periods or being comforted. Unbalanced strength that becomes weakness.
I’m writing this post primarily for US citizens who think of themselves as white. In the past several weeks I’ve learned a lot of white citizens are excited for a political climate which is no longer controlled by “political correctness.” In these conversations, my understanding is that this means they feel safe to say what’s on their minds without worrying about unwanted consequences.
To some extent I think I understand the problem. These days it seems like a lot of folks get “called out” and “corrected” as though the only problem with saying certain words and concepts is that you’re not supposed to say them, or you have to use the correct language. What I want to write about today is about some of the underlying premises that get lost in Internet arguments.
Let’s start with a classic text, Huckleberry Finn. I was a precocious reader and read this novel a few times in my late childhood before being required to read it in high school. On my third reading, I believe I was about fifteen, I finally noticed a strange and unsettling subtext in this excerpt in a conversation between Huckleberry Finn and Aunt Sally (I censored a racial slur that refers to Black folk. The slur matters but still not one I feel like having on my site.):
“It warn’t the grounding—that didn’t keep us back but a little. We blowed out a cylinder-head.”
“Good gracious! anybody hurt?”
“No’m. Killed a n*****.”
“Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”
Did you notice? The text doesn’t dwell on this point at all, it moves into a comical and unrelated speech by Aunt Sally. If you didn’t notice, go back and think about Sally’s question and Huck’s response. Who counts as a “person”?
Dr. Joy DeGruy, author of the excellent Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome, provides an in-depth analysis in her talks about how cognitive dissonance was necessary for the United States to keep up the abominable practice of chattel slavery, and how the long-running practice of repairing cognitive dissonance continues to this day.
I think that excerpted dialogue illustrates it well: Aunt Sally is asking if any person got hurt. Huck knows that she means “white people” and says no, but he goes on to acknowledge the killing of a black person in the same breath. His mind appears to recognize both are actually people, but he has to deny it inwardly and out loud to perpetuate the systems of white supremacy and slavery that are in place. He and Aunt Sally collude on who they consider human, whose suffering counts, whose death matters.
Photo by Caju Gomes, courtesy of Unsplash.
Dehumanization is necessary for any form of oppression, violence, and human rights abuse. If the oppressing group did not make the victims inhuman then they would risk feeling empathy for them, would risk recognizing that their treatment is unfair and unjust (dare I say inhuman), and would become uncomfortably aware of how personal comfort and success hinges upon this maltreatment. When that conflict arises, as Dr. DeGruy notes, the oppressors learn to mask it, ignore it, justify it, but we can’t completely annihilate it.
Some years ago, I was working at a coffee bar downtown while also finishing my Master’s degree. I did a practicum working with homeless youth, many of whom would hang out near my coffee bar either asking for money or socializing because those were the few places available to them during the day. One day, I was taking my lunch and noticed that some of the youth I’d gotten to know were asking for money outside the window. They had a dog with them. Another person who worked in the store sat next to me and bemoaned, “I hate it when homeless people have dogs. I feel so bad for the dogs having to live like that. I wish I could adopt [the dogs].”
Did you notice? Who is a person to that coworker? Whose suffering matters? Not the human beings whose parents had thrown them out of the house, who had to ask for money on the street. In this case, it was the perceived suffering of the dog—an animal who is better suited for outdoor living due to having fur, an affinity for packs, and a scavenger palate that can survive on lots of different kinds of food. Perhaps this teaches us another dimension of cognitive dissonance—this person might have recognized and had momentary empathy for these humans, but instead directed it at the safer target of the dog. She could make the homeless people villainous by blaming them for making the dog live on the street, and not wonder about a society that does not protect and house all of its people.
My coworker was not a horrible person, just as Aunt Sally is not depicted as an evil shrew. Repairing cognitive dissonance actually makes people seem much happier and easier to hang around with. As long as you don’t challenge them and make them risk rethinking their dissonance, they seem quite lovely, generous, giving people. Instead it’s the people who call this out, who point to the dissonance and note that what we’re rationalizing is really awful—they bring up things we don’t want to face, so we don’t like them as much.
What gets excoriated as “being too politically correct” is the effort to make everyone a person and root out these dehumanizing tendencies in our culture. When we call people slurs, describe them as animals, dismiss their needs and pains, or justify their suffering, we make them less than human and thus easier for our society to continue oppressing. When the people we think of as our protectors kill unarmed Black teenagers, we look for ways to make that teenager a “thug”, less than human, and thus okay to kill.
The “exceptional minority” is no less rooted in this same tendency, by the way. If you assume everyone in a particular class is sub-human, but you point out and elevate one in particular as being “a credit” to their group, that remains complicit in the dehumanization and continues to prove it. “If only you acted like this one particular person we like, then we’d take your feelings seriously.”
If you’re wondering why I’m writing about this in my therapy blog—I do not believe we can separate out larger patterns of dehumanization from inner patterns of shame and worthlessness. I see, moreover, how dehumanization adds stress and emotional trauma to the lives of people of color, queer people, disabled people, and poor people. We need other people as mirrors, and if those mirrors constantly treat us as subhuman, then the effort it takes to keep up my sense of self is tremendous.
When I’m the one dehumanizing others, I add tremendous stress to my ability to comprehend and deal with reality. I make it harder to give and receive support, and limit those potential sources of support. I learn how to deny and repress toxicity in my world, which means I’m doing it in me as well. I become less strong, less resilient, more fearful and guarded. I contribute to a world in which everyone’s personhood is in question, which means on some level I know mine to be as well, and those questions are only definitively answered by whomever is in power at any given time.
What makes you a person? If you were applying for a job, and the interviewer asked you that question, and you knew that your answer determined whether you were even a candidate for the job, how would you answer?
Continued Work
Identify a group or category of people about whom you feel fear, disgust, or anger. Think about what behaviors or qualities arouse these feelings in you.
Imagine yourself as a person who is behaving in that way. What would be necessary to get you to that point? Under what circumstances would that behavior or those qualities seem necessary, useful, or the only options available to you?
Do some reading about the group, particularly journalism or writing that is sympathetic to the group. Note what qualities or justifications these works highlight, whether they contradict or are simply different from your familiar associations. Notice what questions and conflicts arise in you. Notice when you want to make one group all good and one all bad—even if you attempt to switch categories.
For the next month, notice when you observe dehumanizing language or discussions about groups of people—any people. At least once a week, think about one particular group and the dehumanizing stories and images associated with them.
Ask yourself, “What gets hidden or dismissed when I view these people as not human?”
Ask yourself, “Who benefits from me seeing these people as not human?”
The following meditation arose during a book group I and a colleague led discussing Brené Brown’s The Gifts of Imperfection. In her chapter on cultivating calm and stillness, she defined calm as “creating perspective and mindfulness while managing emotional reactivity.” We thought it would be helpful to include an experiential exercise, and so I developed the following meditation.
An image of a hill, reflected very clearly in the water below. At the edge of the water are gathered some vehicles. Photo by Ivars Krutainis
As with many things, I think we often misunderstand concepts like calm, peace, stillness, and serenity as the absence of trouble. Instead, I think of all these things as emerging when we cultivate presence amidst our troubles.
Practicing calm and finding spaciousness is empowering and allows us to see possibilities where we might have only seen our worst fears. This practice helps us to be more pragmatic.
Some important caveats:
This is harder for some of us than others, and the difficulty is particularly contingent on whether we have any sense of safety or stability in life. Find it, wherever that might be, and build upon it.
At no point does this practice require dismissing the importance and reality of your troubles.
Calm is a surprisingly loaded word, as it is one often said to others as an order. “Calm down!” This is rarely helpful, often expressed in a way that’s dismissive. It is exceptionally unhelpful when what one really means is “I feel uncomfortable when you do or say that and I want you to stop.”
When we feel distressed, angry, or panicking, we instinctively want to pull others into our crisis and sometimes react very poorly to people who are able to keep themselves out of it and show calm. Yet we need that so much. It is a model and inspiration that helps us to disconnect from the panic and re-examine the conditions on the ground.
Emotions are contagious, and as a highly anxious person can stimulate anxiety around them, so too can a calm person help bring more calm to a situation, as Brown notes in the same chapter. When you feel a need to tell others to calm down, I invite you to practice calming yourself first.
At last summer’s Many Gods West conference in Olympia, Washington, I offered a workshop on discernment. In my spiritual communities, discernment is valued highly, yet I found few descriptions of how to engage in a discernment practice. One of the benefits of discernment is its cultivation of inner authority, so it is helpful that there is no “one true way” of discerning. I wanted to offer a practice and context to help people begin or deepen their own discernment.
This blog post is a very concise summation of my talk and includes a link to a recording of a meditation I led. If it is not clear already, I will speak of discernment as a psychospiritual practice. As you will see, I believe it is a useful practice for those who do not have a theistic or spiritual orientation. In this post, however, I will be including the spiritual dimension.
Discernment, according to Etymonline.com, comes from Old French and Latin roots and has connotations of sifting and separation. During my talk, I defined discernment as “judging without being judgmental,” and a participant approached me and pointed out the usefulness of the sifting metaphor to clarify the meaning behind that. When panning for gold, one sifts through the ore to separate out the desired mineral. The discarded ore is not “bad,” it simply does not pertain to the desired goal.
A discernment practice, then, cultivates our inner authority to tease apart the meaning of experience, to separate what is beneficial to our values and desires from what is not.
Image Description: A series of circles that flow into each other. The “Experience” circle points to “Meaning,” which points to “Action or Choice,” which points to “Outcome.” “Outcome” points back to “Meaning,” and is linked to “Experience,” as “Outcome” and “Experience” are essentially the same phenomena.
This image offers a conceptual model, drawing upon cognitive-behavioral models of experience and cognition, to help us discuss the practice of discernment. We all have Experiences, which are essentially neutral occurrences that of themselves do not have meaning. For example, an experience might include:
Having a strange twinge in your shoulder
Reading a friend’s Facebook post
Having a dream in which your deity communicates with you.
Meaning is what we understand about our Experience. This includes the pre-existing beliefs we have about ourselves and the world; our mood; the political climate; the weather; our previous interactions with others.
If I’ve had that twinge in my shoulder before, for example, and then threw my back out, that might influence the Meaning I make of the shoulder-twinge. “Uh oh.”
If I had a fight with my friend last night, that might shape the Meaning. “This post is about me!!!!!”
If I ascribe to a religious framework that discourages people from believing that gods can communicate directly, that might form the Meaning. “This is just a strange dream, or a misleading one.”
The Meaning we make of the Experience leads us to make a Choice or take Action.
“I’d better get a massage and see if I can avoid another back issue.” or “Oh, that twinge just lasted for a second and went away, I’m going to ignore it.”
“I’m going to post an angry, passive-aggressive response to this post!” or “It’s unlike my friend to be passive aggressive, I’m going to call and see if we’re cool.”
“I’m going to ignore this dream.” or “Maybe my god is talking to me, I’m going to follow the dream’s suggestions.”
An image of a thick mist, through which a town seems to be peeking. Photo by John Chavez.
Whatever Action we take (and inaction is an action), what happens next is the Outcome, which either reinforces our Meaning or challenges it.
If I get the massage and still throw my back out, I might question my understanding of the shoulder twinge.
If my friend tells me I’m overreacting, I might question a lot of things about my experience or the friendship.
If I follow the dream guidance and have an amazing experience, I might start to believe (or believe more deeply) that my god can talk to me via dreams.
Meaning moving into Action is where we practice Discernment. Too often we accept our premises of Meaning so rapidly that we take unconsidered or damaging actions. Alternately, we might divest our power of Meaning-making or Meaning-seeking by deferring to an outside authority.
Meaning is a deeply Existential concept, and to break it down in a blog post would be ill-advised. To keep things simple, I look at Meaning as beginning with my personal experience—the thoughts, emotions, and sensations I have, my history and personal associations—and then widening it out to larger circles of Meaning. Wider circles include political meanings, cultural messages, spiritual beliefs, and so forth.
St. Ignatius of Loyola, a Jesuit priest, developed a practice he called “discernment of spirits” after a long convalescence from illness. Essentially forced to spend hours with himself, Ignatius began observing the thoughts he had, and noticing that each thought engendered a feeling in his body. He began to categorize the feelings according to his own theological framework. To be very simple, some thoughts come from God and some from Satan, and he believed one could discern the origin of the thoughts by observing the quality of feeling.
For those of us who do not subscribe to dualistic religion, this framework is not useful. I acknowledge P. Sufenus Virius Lupos of Aedicula Antinoi for noting that this dualism might negatively influence how people in other traditions view discernment. We may need to take some time to name and define the possible influences upon us so that we can practice more effective discernment, engaging in what Anomalous Thracian calls “the three Ds“: distinctions, differentiations, and definitions.
I believe that Igntatius’s approach has merit, and have created a version inspired by his. I have included a fifteen-minute recording of the Discernment meditation. It begins by getting us deeply grounded in our bodies, and then invites us to observe our thoughts and notice the feelings they engender. In part two, I invite you to call to mind a spiritual teacher or other influential person in your life, to call their thoughts and actions to mind and observe the feelings they engender. In part three, I invite you to contact a spiritual ally and invite them to send you a message, so you can sense how that contact feels in your body.
When we’re really trying to step up and be our brightest and most powerful, we’re going to experience resistance. Parts of me love being bold and visible, and parts that absolutely hate it. While I continue to learn to be more outgoing and friendly in my public, there are days when I need to sit at home and read a book or play video games and not talk to people.
I like being kind and understanding others, but some days I feel cranky, sad, or despondent about the state of the world. I’m less gracious and forgiving of my own and other people’s stumbling. My old patterns of acting like a superior know-it-all threaten to step out. At times the cultural conditioning that I work against slip through, and I find myself saying something offensive and oppressive. All of these skills and perspectives I discuss in this series are in danger of going out the window, subtly or overtly.
Image of an owl who appears caught by a human hand. Photo by Zachary Bedrosian.
The thing about personal power is that we can offer both grace and accountability to these slippages. I take responsibility. I said or did something that goes against the person I want to be. I hurt someone and will make amends. I must also look at what lead up to that moment and sense what I needed that could have helped me to be my best self.
When we’ve been disrespected, pushed against the wall, given one too many excuses, or once again we’re getting criticism when we asked for help—that’s a time to step back and go to trusted allies. Those parts of us that are hurt and angry need time to speak and get their feelings out so we can go back into the situation in integrity.
In her classic book on behavioral psychology, Don’t Shoot the Dog, Karen Pryor discusses the phenomenon of tantrums that occur during training. When animals are struggling to learn a new skill, and not quite getting it, they will sometimes engage in erratic and frustrated behavior that looks to us like a tantrum. After clearing the anger, however, the animal is soon able to take on the skill. It might be that this is necessary for learning—my suspicion is that the anger both clears out long-building frustration around failure, as well as pushing our nervous systems to make the new connections.
For our purposes, we simply need to accept that our feelings exist, and matter, and sometimes we need places to indulge them so we can hear the deeper needs. We might need to let ourselves be sarcastic and say the awful thing, but in private, with people who know us and who will let us vent and then set us back on track. Otherwise we risk saying these things in public, with greater potential consequences. This is why people in marginalized communities need spaces for themselves, free of people from the dominant culture.
One of the problems of online discourse is that it blurs the boundaries between public and private. People might think that commenting on a friend’s blog or a locked Facebook post is an appropriately private place to do this venting, but this creates its own problems. We’re not always mindful about who can see our online posts, and we may think we’re talking to a small group of people who “get it” only to learn that folks are seeing our words without knowing the larger context. We look like assholes, instead of people venting during a difficult situation.
Less loyal “friends,” moreover, can easily screenshot these conversations and send them to the people from whom we were trying to keep these feelings. Email, as we increasingly know, is a similarly private communication that is no longer so private. Some might be willing to leverage these moments of rupture to cause damage and discredit enemies. Those of us who strive to be diplomatic need to be mindful when and where we do our necessary venting.
Diplomacy is not an easy road, and sometimes quite lonely. We bond with others through shared outrage and enmity against another group, yet it is the kind of bonding that is facile and requires regular feedings of anger and provocation. Diplomacy is a path of integrity, contemplation, and bridge-building. It is not for everyone, but I honor those who step into that role or try on some of these approaches in their communities.
Without strength, diplomacy is not much different than being a doormat. We end up placating people for the sake of placation, of a false peace that does not adequately address underlying problems. It’s the facile “I just want everyone to get along” instead of “I want there to be justice.”
Great leaders and reformers embrace displays of power to put their goals on the agenda and push them forward. Laborers engage in strikes to demonstrate their power and compel their employers to take their demands seriously. Civil Rights activists and anti-slavery abolitionists used every means at their disposal to protect the oppressed and demonstrate strength. Even Martin Luther King Jr., who is held up in mainstream culture for his nonviolent approach, said: “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”
Image of a stag in a forest. Photo b Teddy Kelley.
We need a willingness to stand tall and face the issues clearly and with power. We need to know our strength. Nonviolent protestors in the Civil Rights Movement practiced direct action and emotional self-control, as in they literally subjected themselves to emotionally stressful practice drills so that they were prepared to face the violence of the State. Their actions confronted the State with its injustice and compelled appallingly violent responses that engendered outrage and coverage which supported their causes. There was nothing passive about this.
I have seen people and organizations in positions of leadership, or people of the majority population, respond to challenges with complaining, defensiveness, and attitudes of victimization. The examples are almost too many to mention, but generally any time someone uses the phrase, “PC culture run amok,” that is an excellent opportunity to question this dynamic. What established structures of power and dominance have been challenged? Who is challenging them? How do those structures hurt the marginalized culture, and how does challenging them hurt the dominant culture?
On a personal level, the complaining, defensiveness, and victimization make sense. Few of us experience ourselves as numb to criticism. Privileged folks in general do not understand what it’s like not to have their privilege. As an analogy, I worked as a barista for about four years. Sometimes during the course of a work day I spilled water upwards of 200 degrees Fahrenheit on my skin. Toward the end of my tenure, I was able to respond quickly, shake off the pain of it, and keep doing my job. My skin had toughened and my nerves dulled. My skin had become inured to the pain. Now that I have the privilege of working a job that’s not manual labor, in which I am not regularly subjected to these minor trauma, I would be more sensitive and reactive.
Privileged and powerful people feel sensitive, hurt, and outraged because we do not experience ourselves as powerful. Oddly enough, however, we project our hurt and outrage onto the challenging person and say they’re the one who’s being “too sensitive” since their criticism upsets us. On the most cynical level, it is an effort to co-opt the experienced of the oppressed to shore up one’s place. Either way, it is generally counterproductive and disrespectful to all involved.
We all have potential for strength and power, particularly when joined in community. It is worth taking stock of your assets, strengths, and allies. What are you good at? Speaking up, identifying problems, building relationships? What is something that you consider a weakness that you’d like to develop? What practices could strengthen that weakness? How is that weakness useful at times? Who’s in your corner? Who would provide you direct and trustworthy feedback? What practices do you have to care for yourself? What resources do you need?
To bolster our strength, we also need safe spaces to feel vulnerable and vent our frustrations. This will be the topic of the next post.
Treating people with curiosity, dignity, and respect
On the Internet, some folks behave as though acting tough, forceful, snarky, and condescending is an effective tactic for changing someone’s perspective. Like shame and alienation, these are tools with potent, toxic, and limited effects. Applied skillfully, they have some efficacy. Often they simply communicate disrespect and dismissiveness, which fosters bad will.
Here’s a big idea that I am not the first person to suggest: we respond well when others treat us with dignity and respect. This extends to being regarded as a person who is capable of making informed choices, who has a valid perspective arrived at thoughtfully, and who is capable of being held accountable. Each of these are double-sided: We have a valid perspective, in that we all perceive a piece of truth; that does not mean our understanding of the truth is absolutely correct. We are equal parts right as well as misguided, poorly informed, or outright wrong.
If you and I have radically different understandings of a subject, it is likely that each of our perspectives make sense from our unique positions and experiences of the world, but that does not mean one perspective is truth. It is as much capable of being wrong as being right. Being held accountable means no one is above criticism or scrutiny; you can question my words and behavior when they seem incongruous with my stated beliefs.
What challenges communication is when you attack my character for that incongruity, or condescend to me as though I’m too stupid to understand my incongruity. We all have blind spots. A loving community brings attention to those blind spots with concern, caring, and dignity. They make an effort to understand my unique position and experience of the world, where my choices and my behavior make sense. That doesn’t mean they agree with it or coddle it.
When my choices and behaviors are causing harm or running counter to what I say I want, a diplomatic step would be to approach me with an attitude of good faith. Speak to me as though I am doing my best to live according to my values. Point out the difference between my words and actions with curiosity. “You say you love women, but you are leaving misogynistic comments on that woman’s blog. How does that line up for you?”
https://unsplash.com/?photo=f37RWPdmon4Photo by Patrick Tomasso.
This approach takes people at their word and invites them to step into their best selves. What aids this is taking the “one-down” position, the willingness to express confusion and curiosity which is, again, a position of good faith. It suggests that I believe you are actually doing your best to live in line with your values and one of us is making a mistake. Even if I believe you’re the one making the mistake.
This empowers us to point out moments of incongruity, conflict, and confusion without heavily shaming or attacking the character of the other person. It comes from a willingness to be wrong. Perhaps if we understood their position better, we’d realize that it was our confusion. If their answers, however, fail to make sense; dismiss the incongruity; misdirect; respond defensively; or outright become aggressive and hostile toward us; then they are behaving in bad faith and we may respond appropriately.
I think of this as “inviting you to step into your best self” because at this stage it doesn’t matter what either of us think about your motivations. You might be behaving in a shady way, or I might think you are, but I am giving you an opportunity to either rectify that or prove to me how my perception is wrong. If you decide to act in your best self, that is a winning scenario for both us.
Some folks might have a problem with this, pointing out that people behaving well in the short-term due to pressure is not the same as getting them to align with a greater principle. We can’t “trust” them to be well behaved from now on. That’s not untrue. My older sister has taught me much about politics, though our values and political leanings differ these days. She came home from college and got me to read Machiavelli’s The Prince as well as his less well-known writings that are pro-democracy. She once told me that politics was about getting people to do “the right thing for the wrong reasons.”
I approach the world with what I think of as a cynical optimism, that we all have aspirational values of which we fall short. We need community to support us in staying consistent. This is why transparency and oversight matter. When what we believe and what we see don’t line up, we find ways to rectify, justify, or dismiss the difference. When held accountable, when seen, when scrutinized, we can no longer afford to repair the cognitive dissonance. We must alter our behavior to align with our beliefs, or our beliefs to align with our behavior. Either way, we become more congruent.
Taking the one-down position of curiosity is dangerous, as sometimes I can be so gentle or mild that the challenge is lost. The other person either thinks they can ignore me, or doesn’t see the confrontation. Even in a diplomatic position, I want to examine the situation with both eyes, both ears, both of whatever I have available: the part of me that sees the best in others, and the part of me that sees the worst. Diplomacy requires strength as much as curiosity, which is the subject of the next post.
Respecting differences, and identifying underlying shared values
One interesting way to examine polarization—people defining themselves as enemies to each other—is to look at the underlying similarities. Opposites exist in relationship to each other, and have some kind of connecting similarity. For example, what is the opposite of a dog? If I said “the sky,” you would likely disagree. It feels wrong. Several people might have their own opposites for a dog but I suspect most people’s opposite is also a pet, probably a mammal, and most likely a cat.
In a polarizing conversation, we tend to want to find ways to sharply differentiate our position or “side” from the other. Sometimes that means giving up territory that hurts our case in the long run, makes us vulnerable to critique and is actually inaccurate or incomplete. This is what happens when we get more caught up in what we’re against than what we’re for.
Image of a snow fox surrounded by snow. Photo by Jonatan Pie.
For example, if your side advocates for the imprisonment of puppies and the giving of free ice cream to children on Sundays, I might in my rage declare all puppies should be free and children shouldn’t get free ice cream. I actually don’t have a problem with the ice cream, I simply have a hard time agreeing with someone who would imprison puppies so wantonly. The problem is, the other side gets to point out how awful I am for denying ice cream to children, and how dare I put puppies ahead of human beings?
This tendency contributes to making excuses for bad behavior on the part of people on our “side,” which further weakens our position and harms personal integrity. We might point to the problematic teachings of one religion and make excuses for the problematic teachings of our own. Another facet of this is when people feel discouraged by being stereotyped and let themselves be seduced into acting out, thinking,“If you believe I’m that way, then I might as well be that way.”
Ceding values and strengths to define ourselves more sharply in opposition interferes with any ability to work together. Authentic differences in opinion and approach, however, are important and should not be erased. We grow from sharing a diversity of perspectives and finding workable agreements. To some extent, we need strong voices to move our communities in a particular direction. Where we go awry is when we lose patience with being in relationship to the other “side.”
An example: when discussing mass incarceration and policing, we have strong voices pushing for complete abolition of the prison system and police, as well as strong voices advocating for the consolidation and strengthening of those systems. When I am talking with someone on the other side of the issue, it feels important to recognize when we have underlying shared dreams: one possibility might be peaceful communities in which people can live and work without violence. From that perspective, I can explain why I think mass incarceration and “Broken Windows” policing undermines the goal of healthy communities, and why instead investing in the strengthening and autonomy of communities of color promotes that goal.
Even when we do not share values, it builds good faith to make an effort to understand why the other side thinks and feels as they do. This does not require agreeing with them, simply acknowledging that their choices make sense given their perspective and experience. It is about treating people with dignity and respect, which is the topic of the next post.
