In last week’s post, I railed against my pet peeve of the Tyranny of Positivity. After exploring what was so limiting and unhelpful about compelling each other to positivity, I decided now is an opportunity to explore a useful, if subtle, distinction. In some ways I contradict myself, railing against positive thinking and platitudes about believing in ourselves while still wishing to avoid the equally unhelpful dominion of negativity and indignation.

“Positivity” and “Negativity” are oppositions, which means they are conflicting facets of the same belief structure. To be beholden to one and reject the other is to be caught in the trap of both. Health and sanity might lie on the middle road between these poles, but even better might be to consider that the positive-negative belief structures impairs our ability to perceive reality as much as it helps us to form a coherent understanding of it. If I am desperately trying to look like I “have it all together” while someone I love is dying, my partner and I are having enormous problems, or something in my life is failing, then I am caught in the trap of positivity. If I insist on the misery of life when I am in good health, I have a home and food to eat, and I have people who care about me, then I am caught in the trap of negativity.

Real life is messy and rarely free of problems or blessings, and our minds get trained to focus on a few facets of life and ignore others. We have nothing to fear from being real. We can cultivate gratitude and connection to help us live more fully. (more…)

Lately, I and several brilliant thinkers I am lucky to encounter have been discussing the idea of being “enough.” Some of us experience a sense of vulnerability around the idea that we’re not enough, or that we’re too much.

• I’m not smart enough, attractive enough. I’m not a good enough lover. I don’t have enough money.
• I’m too emotional, too damaged, too ugly, too stupid.

These experiences of deflation or inflation suggest that some part of us gets identified with this quality of being inadequate, somehow wrong, somehow not quite compatible or capable of satisfying our wants and needs. (more…)

At some point in life, everyone needs help, and almost everyone gets an opportunity to offer it. Another thing humans like to do is build identities around certain aspects of our personalities, such as: the person in charge, the person who helps, the person who gives; or others being the person who is lost, the person who is helpless, the person who needs. If these opposing identities meet each other in different persons, this perfect match can quickly lead to toxicity, blame, resentment, and disempowerment. (If we can find these opposing qualities in ourselves, we can become more whole, more free, more resilient.)

Caritas, Stanisław Wyspiański

Let’s look at our attitudes toward giving and receiving help. Toward the end of this article, Shauna Aura Knight offers an example of the boss who attempted to give her a task, and when she asked clarifying questions, impatiently took the taskback and said he’d do it himself. I’ve been that person on both sides of the exchange. When I worked as a barista, we did high volumes and expected a lot out of each other. We also grappled with periods of high turnover, when trained employees left and untrained employees entered. Those of us who were trained and used to operating at a particular level of performance could get highly stressed by the feeling that we had to pick up the slack, maintain our usual level of service, and deal with the honest mistakes and ignorance of a new employee. It could get very difficult to patiently explain how to make a drink with a new employee when there was a line of customers out the door and a backlog of drinks. Sometimes the best choice was to simply put the employee in a position they could manage while a more experienced worker pushed through the rush.

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Something about indignation is enticing. Where there is a group of people, particularly an institution, there are pockets of indignation, complaining, and gossip. Groups within the group form, sometimes around a core of mutual disdain for a particular person or policy. When groups become too insulated, and feed on their indignation, they can stoke each others’ feelings of persecution, warranted or not.

Shared complaining has value. It can bring cohesion to a group and healing to its members. As a person who tends to think problems are in my mind, I can feel enormously relieved to discover that others share my concerns. Feeling included in a person’s confidence, to share their problems and secrets, can inspire feelings of self-worth, however temporary. These conversations can be opportunities to relieve emotional pressure, identify shared problems, and start to work toward solutions. Gossip can protect potential victims from abuses that are not otherwise being addressed, or transmit information that affects many people, although the information becomes quickly diluted, changed, and separated from the facts.
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This post breaks from my usual psycho-spiritual explorations of Self to addressing a material, social reality: the problem of incarceration in the United States of America. According to 11 Facts about America’s Prison Population, the current prison population has quadrupled since 1980, and a significant portion of that population are nonviolent drug offenders. Per Human Rights Watch:

“While accounting for only 13 percent of the US population, African Americans represent 28.4 percent of all arrests.  According to Bureau of Justice Statistics approximately 3.1 percent of African American men, 1.3 percent of Latino men, and 0.5 percent of white men are in prison.  Because they are disproportionately likely to have criminal records, members of racial and ethnic minorities are more likely than whites to experience stigma and legal discrimination in employment, housing, education, public benefits, jury service, and the right to vote.

Whites, African Americans, and Latinos have comparable rates of drug use but are arrested and prosecuted for drug offenses at vastly different rates.  African Americans are arrested for drug offenses, including possession, at three times the rate of white men.” [Emphasis added.]

Incarceration is one step in a cycle. People with criminal records are released from prison without income, without guaranteed housing, without guaranteed jobs, without substantively better skills and resources, and often with increased trauma as a result of their imprisonment. They get dropped back into the world and expected to participate in a culture that actively stigmatizes them. Criminal activity might be the only survival skill they know, the only skill available. Families and communities are decimated by the cycle of incarceration and recidivism. People in higher socioeconomic classes might have more resources to buffer these losses. For people in lower socioeconomic classes, these consequences can be catastrophic.

The war against drugs has eroded our civil liberties and significantly harmed people of color. Building and staffing prisons has become a for-profit enterprise that costs states $21,000-33,000 per year. We would do more to stabilize our communities if we spent that money on housing and services for offenders. Incarcerating offenders in violent, repressive systems with other offenders does not promote social wellness. Even Newt Gingrich called our prison system “graduate schools in criminality.”

This is not about eschewing justice and ignoring the harm done. This is about how Justice as a value and civic virtue has twisted against our better nature to perpetuate systems of social inequality, and how fear and systemic racism continue to feed off each other. When we focus on punishing offenders more than creating healthy, resilient communities, we perpetuate cycles of injustice, poverty, and racism. We can do better than this. Organizations already exist that are attempting to create societies without prisons. Even if you do not endorse the complete abolition of prisons, we need their voices to find some better way.