“When you commit to a change in attitude, you are probably not going to “feel” any different for a while. It is more like putting on a different mask at first. You might wake up as cranky, sore, and easily irritated as you did yesterday. But if you have resolved to meet this day with an attitude of patience or courage, then you will practice holding those experiences differently than you did yesterday when you flailed and complained. “
Reflections of a Gender Affirming Therapist
Thoughts from a twenty-year witness to the transgender culture wars.
Poem: A God Offers the Choice of Three Paths
A poem about the paths of will, desire, and longing.
The Resentment of Finally Getting What You Needed
“If you’ve been around activists for a long time, you might have noticed an oddity when they start getting success. When people finally are ready to hear their message, or show up newly awakened to problems and ready for direction and guidance.
Sometimes, that activist who’s been at it so long doesn’t respond in kind with gratitude or enthusiasm. Sometimes, they respond with resentment, bitterness, and a kind of collapse. Sometimes, they’re pissed at the newer people for taking so long to see the issues. Sometimes, they’re utterly unwilling to continue the work of educating.
This sucks for the folks new to the work, who could use the mentorship and wisdom of the ones who have been on the journey for a while. It sucks when we blast our new would-be allies and co-collaborators with more hostility than we’d direct at our adversaries. It feels unfair, and disillusioning, and may alienate new folks or lead them to marginalize the cranky elder.”
A Dream of Power and Freedom from Control
“I see power and control as two ends of a spectrum. Power is the embodied knowing that I can influence my inner and outer worlds toward my safety and meeting my needs and desires. That when I know what I need, I can get it. That when I need something to stop, or to start, I can make it happen.
The efforts to exert control over another, and the acceptance of another’s control, both require the giving away of power. Controller and the controlled are hooked to each other, like the two Piscean fish, unable to swim without pulling the other along.
We may imagine that the control of abusers, dominators, and authoritarians gives them freedom, but in practice they are unable to tolerate dissent or the normal conflicts of adult relationships and engage in compulsive moves to reassert control. Similarly, we tend to imagine the passive controlled victim who utterly surrenders, but in practice even the most assaulted person has all manner of ways in which rebellion, resistance, undermining, and sabotage emerge. Humans are creatures who can never be fully tamed, even unto themselves.”
For Nice Guys Seeking Love and Lust
“The reason the Nice Guy strategy fails tends to come down to underlying shame about yourself, your passivity, and your inability to tolerate another person’s boundaries. The loneliness you’re trying to cure through romantic connection becomes your greatest hindrance. Loneliness is true suffering, it is incredibly painful, and makes us more sensitive to rejection from the people with whom we want to connect.”
Becoming Dissonant
“On a broader cultural level, I believe we are witnessing this unfolding in the polarization and fights over disinformation and who controls the story continues. We talk about it as right versus left, which is itself an attempt to reduce dissonance by making simple dichotomies, and it is also a reflection of the weakening of a cultural ego. Those former arbiters of culture—a shared religion, a shared valuation of certain sources of news, even trust in the government—seem to be struggling to find a unifying story to smooth out inconsistencies.
Perhaps it relates to the United States’s Pluto return, in which the wandering star Pluto has returned to the position it inhabited when the United States emerged as its own national entity. In Western modern astrology, Pluto draws out what has been psychologically repressed, particularly those uncivil energies of the will to power at the expense of harmony.
My sense is that Pluto’s movements demand a confrontation of dissonance and recognition that old ego stories no longer serve, but have become too restrictive, too much at odds with these buried drives, and those stories need to be shed so that we can grow large enough to encompass our multitudes and find a new story.
Or there might just be death. “
We’re Never Greater than Our Basics
In therapy recently, this kept coming up for me in conversation with some clients around ambivalence toward “being basic.” We may want to feel our problems are so unique and complex that they could not possibly have basic solutions. We may feel belittled by attending to the basics. We may be so lost in the complexity that we would not begin to know which basic to grasp.
These responses make so much sense, especially when we’ve spent years struggling to get help, attention, or care for our struggles, and have wrestled with them, alone and misunderstood. It’s like walking onto the mat and being attacked with a flurry of punches and kicks with no instruction as to how to respond, and then being criticized when you find your own instinctive survival solution of collapsing or flailing your arms or running away in terror.
Our problems are incredibly complex, and the basics alone are not enough to master them, but what Aikido has offered me is the wisdom to meet and engage with the complexity until I can find a basic I can use to bring the situation back into harmony.
Only Connect
A recent opportunity to see the contemporary play Nonsense and Beauty, about Edwardian British author E.M. Forster, inspired me to return to my English major…
Self-Care is Important, and It’s Not Enough, and You Don’t Need to Apologize for That
“The backlash to Self-care originates, as is often the case, in its over-popularization and watering down. Important practices become touted as cure-alls, and any threat they posed to the political or economic order quickly becomes neutralized once absorbed into it.
So the transformative practices of simply sitting and doing nothing but breathing and observing one’s self, or of taking a break from hustling and consumption to relax in a warm bath, feed back into the atomizing culture of making each individual responsible for their own stress and the management of it.”