The contemporary atmosphere of paranoia and conspiracism has frequently reminded me of my childhood in the 1990s when the Satanic Panic was vibrant and mainstream, with allegations of Satanic cults attempting to pervert and destroy society through secret messages encoded in Heavy Metal music and other media. There was also a terror of Satanic cults that kidnapped, assaulted, and ritually tortured or murdered babies and children. People in therapy might “discover” a “memory” of being ritually tortured in this way and accuse their parents.
None of this surfaced any real cults that engaged in this activity, and since then it’s become clear that such memories “reconstructed” in therapy are more a reflection of the secret wishes and biases of the therapist rather than a historical occurrence. (And all of which made us so collectively focused on the boogeymen that the children actually being molested in Catholic churches were missed.)
The recent resurgence of conspiracies of blood-drinking pedophiles secretly running the world and kidnapping children makes it hard not to reflect on those times. But paranoia even seems pervasive on the Left, though in a different form, as I read articles of people going to great lengths to indict people for harmful thinking with little evidence.
Often I’ve thought about my interest in loneliness a few years ago, when I learned that chronic loneliness leads to rejection sensitivity and paranoia. The person who has been too lonely too long starts to be so vigilant against social exclusion that they start to assume people are cruel or out to get them by default, making them more likely to interpret warm or neutral social interactions as signs of rejection. Frequently I wonder to what extent this past couple years of isolation, social distancing, and masking has contributed to this paranoid atmosphere.
Moments like these make me so grateful to live in a moment where I could go to my computer and type “red head christian demon exorcist from 90s” and be led to the Wikipedia page that validated this was a real memory and helped me find a linkthe full video of the debate between Christian exorcist Bob Larson’s and Satanists Zeena LaVey and Nikolas Schreck. (As a note, I will refer to LaVey and Schreck as the Satanists, but in this video they suggest it would be more appropriate to refer to them as Setianists who honor the Egyptian god Set, and my understanding is that since the filming of this debate both people have moved into different spiritual paths.)
Looking back, it seems daring and necessary for the Satanists would participate in this interview during the heat of the Satanic Panic. I admire the calmness with which they mostly sustained in weathering Larson’s challenges and at times aggressive questions. I also appreciate that Larson offered a measure of generosity in allowing them to articulate their points.
While he frequently interrupts the Satanists and throws out misleading claims, it’s an almost refreshingly civil and thoughtful debate compared to your average Internet discourse. The sour note comes in his intervening clips where he talks directly to the video viewing audience, portraying these folks as cartoon villains—clearly a canny entertainer who knows how to play to the sensationalism of his audience, and the Schreck and LaVey themselves don’t seem above knowing how to draw and keep attention for entertainment purposes.
In all honesty, I absolutely love thoughtful but strident debate between different perspectives of people who can show up with mutual respect. But when I remembered this the other day, before I found the video, I was surprised and confused. Why on earth would the Satanists subject themselves to dialogue in a venue hostile to them, with an audience completely unlikely to be curious or willing to listen? What a waste of time.
Yet, I realized, even decades later I remembered it. I remembered how their calmness and thoughtfulness came through in spite of the bluster and sensationalism. I remember as a kid thinking Larson’s attacks of them and depictions of their beliefs were clearly unfair, and revealed more about his agenda than theirs. Though I am not aligned with either of their theologies—referencing the distinction Schreck offers between Right and Left Hand paths, I’m a person who thinks both hands are perfectly good and you may as well make use of them—witnessing that conversation opened a door for my own path.
Hard, direct, civil, and respectful conversations with one’s adversaries is always exceptional. And I’ve seen myself and others like me ground down by the effort to be openhearted, curious, and firm in the face of sheer unwillingness to engage. And I’ve seen minor disagreements become increasingly polarized into irreconcilable gulfs because those conflicts could never be fully surfaced, named, and worked through in an effort to stay connected.
Lately, my heart has felt scaled over with familiar cynicism and the sense that history is a serpent that undulates left and right regardless of our best efforts, and there is nothing to do but to hold on. But remembering this debate, and realizing it has stayed with me all these years—that felt important. That feels like a reminder that our efforts matter and have impacts greater than we can know.
These days, I feel minimal interest in engaging in debate with folks on the Internet, and I’ve had to work on strengthening my capacity to stay engaged when in person with the people whom I can disagree with and stay connected. Yet I’m also no longer willing to engage in bad faith arguments or imagine I can persuade the people arguing with me directly.
What I’ve absorbed is the wisdom not to JADE – Justify, Argue, Defend, or Explain. Make your point, answer earnest questions, and offer a clarifying perspective if needed, then lay it down. Don’t make persuading or defeating your adversary a condition of victory.
To some extent, I see this in the Larson debate linked above. Frequently the Satanists are challenged to justify, argue, defend, or explain their beliefs and practices based on the basic assumptions of Christianity—”How can you believe that when the Bible tells us this?” Instead of accepting defeat by accepting those conditions, the Satanists remind the entire audience that the Bible is a book of mythology not relevant to their lives and not their foundation for truth.
To do otherwise—to attempt to argue with Christians using the Bible—implicitly concedes the terms of debate, as though accepting Christianity as the measure of morality by which everything must be justified. When that territory has been ceded, then you are already at a great disadvantage.
Standing firm in our beliefs and values, and having esteem in our own identities and traditions, mean we are under no obligation to justify it on other people’s terms. That’s the whole point of a secular democracy with separate religions.
Yet also there is no reason to shy away from vigorous debate, if you have the will and energy. Whether another person is persuaded is perhaps less important than whether we have honored ourselves and maintained our own dignity in the face of adversity.
The first time I heard about “being an ally” was during my undergraduate years in the early 2000s. “An ally” generally meant a person who is outside a particular group but supportive of the group’s needs and aims. Being a small community, we needed our straight allies to amplify our power and voices; though at times some of us felt resentful at the effort required to include and accommodate them in our spaces and work. Sometimes straight people took up space and demanded energy, attention, and accommodation that felt draining and unsupportive. When possible, it was a joy to have spaces where we didn’t have to consider straight people at all.
That tension between needing allies and resenting them seems to have evolved over the years as social justice discourse has transformed via the Internet and cultural change. Now the onus is on the ally to prove their allyship through demonstrating right understanding, not asking for validation or praise, knowing when to take up space and when to be quiet, not centering their own needs, not arguing with people in the group, and recognizing the diversity of opinions in the group.
The sharpest expression of these boundaries is something like: “We don’t need allies. We don’t need to spend the energy educating you or kissing your ass. If you want to be an ally, you need to do the work and not expect our validation or acceptance.” The call is essentially toward prioritizing the group’s interest and needs and falling in line or shutting your mouth if you’re not in the group. Which is, to be honest and clear, not an unreasonable boundary, and entirely appropriate for certain kinds of work.
But is ally the best word for that kind of relationship?
Being an ally doesn’t seem to be the same as being in alliance, wherein compelling common interest between groups makes cooperation mutually rewarding. When I became the Outreach Chair of my queer organization in the early 2000s, I took the call as an opportunity to build alliance, find common cause and common struggle with other political and identity-based student groups, which was easier when we didn’t default to centering white LGBTQ people and remembered that queer people are in every identity group.
But looking through that lens, it would be deeply problematic for one nation to demand all the accommodation and unflinching, unselfish support. I observed this personally later in life when I was in a meeting of LGBTQ spiritual and religious leaders talking about the need for interfaith work, with my Neopagan group.
One of the Christian leaders came to us and warmly invited us to attend their church services some time. Our clergy member thanked him, and similarly invited him to attend one of our seasonal rituals, and the Christian visibly blanched at the offer and never, to my acknowledge, showed.
That moment made clear to me that alliance requires mutuality. If one group expects us to extend ourselves for them, and makes no effort for us, why would we attend their services? The attitude did not suggest respect for us or an interest in collaboration—at best it was facile acceptance, at worst it was proselytizing. If there is not mutual effort and shared value, what is an alliance?
What’s become clear is that “ally” in activist rhetoric is almost without exception a term applied to people in a privileged group who support a more marginalized group. At best, it seems self-serving to call myself an ally—like virtue signaling, like calling myself your best friend—a term I need to earn rather than claim. And “being an ally” has connotations of meaning both “being a good person” and “prioritizing the comfort and needs of marginalized people over your own.”
As a therapist, it has become clearer to me over the years that a relationship without mutual benefit is a deeply unhealthy one. I have quietly sat with this concern that allyship is about self-sacrifice for the other without expectation of any gain or reward and made exceptions due to the enormous imbalance of historical economic, social, and cultural injustice. Yet I have also seen this dynamic play out to the detriment of all involved. Well-meaning white or straight or cisgender people who take this too literally and end up sacrificing too much, then becoming toxic.
To be clear: It’s not healthy for anyone to be consistently compromise their needs, wants, and desires for the benefit of another. It’s not healthy for marginalized people. It’s not healthy for privileged people. Such a relational dynamic leads to abuse, burnout, and toxicity.
I believe some allies overcorrect in response to marginalized people expressing frustrations or setting very healthy and reasonable boundaries in the crucible of social justice discourse and disembodied Internet communities. It is honestly no wonder that folks tire of being the representative and educator on behalf of their identity groups, expected to replicate the same scripts to dialogue with people who they don’t have any relationship with, who might not be acting in good faith, who have cousins and coworkers and random people who jump on the threads to add their bullshit, who come from such different lives that it’s not even possible to have a productive conversation without a lot of context-building.
“I don’t need to educate you” is a healthy personal boundary for those of us not being paid to do the work, and have other things to do with our time and energy.
When we’re dealing with a lot, including oppression, we have every right to have our boundaries and limits and refuse to extend ourselves in ways detrimental to our health. Those who want to be allies need to find their own boundaries and limits, and tend their own fields.
Through the Internet we are connected to more people than ever in human history, but at a distance that allows us to flatten and objectify each other. From the outside, allies seeking for guidance in being right and good look to these myriad and contradictory expressions of clarity, power, grief, frustration, rage, and powerlessness, and reshare them to show their understanding and support, which amplifies a message and makes it seem even bigger. It’s too easy to see a meme shared once or fifty times and begin to think of that as a universal truth coming from a group that has diverse perspectives and needs.
For a time, for example, I saw memes floating around calling upon allies to cut off their bigoted or Trump-supporting family members, calling into question the dedication of those who would not. A person who would make such a call, I imagine, really wants to know that the folks who call themselves allies are truly on their side and committed to their safety and well-being.
But if an ally truly did cut away all of their family, and all of their privilege, who would provide the emotional and material support their family offered? That marginalized person who makes it clear they’re not here to give you cookies for doing what’s right? Who’s already got enough to manage emotionally in life? A person who posted a meme who has no relationship with you in your day-to-day life?
Maybe those allies truly doing the work would luck into being welcomed by a new, socially just family, but I suspect most would not. More often, I expect, those allies who make themselves too at home in certain communities will find themselves firmly reminded that they’re merely guests.
I was once one of three men in a group of mostly white women talking about anti-racism. Knowing that often men take up a great deal of space I was mindful about how much I participated, while also noticing that many of the participants were very new to thinking about whiteness and anti-racism. At the end of the call, one of the women expressed her concern that men were taking up too much space.
Which left me confused—was she talking about me specifically? Or the other men? Or all of us together? Was her focusing on male participation a way of dealing with her discomfort of talking about her whiteness? Did we have agreements or facilitation that could’ve helped the men find boundaries of our participation, or were we supposed to guess? I would’ve appreciated direct feedback to know how much I needed to adjust my participation, but I was left feeling mildly unwelcome and confused.
When a perspective like this arises, the typical response is that privileged people need to do the work to figure out whether they’re being talked about or not, and anxiety or discomfort may be a sign of one’s own complicity. It’s not their job to explain if they meant you. Or, alternately, you should feel grateful they felt safe enough to share this in front of you.
While these perspectives make sense, what’s being asked for are sophisticated social skills that would be complicated by growing up in families that, for example, did not have consistent expectations or give you clear, actionable feedback. Or families where perhaps a behavior was okay one day and offensive another day with no explanation about the difference. Or families that avoided direct conflict but talked about you behind your back, or chastised you with vague statements that you needed to magically divine. Or families that simply froze you out or punished you when you did wrong.
If a person happened to experience any of those communication patterns, or others, then being anxious and confused in response to indirect feedback about a group they’re in is a totally normal and expected experience. Feeling defensive or angry may be less a sign of personal guilt and more a sign of being habitually blamed and attacked.
Since asking for clarity might be condemned as demanding emotional labor, the ally is left having to deal with this indirect feedback as best as they can, which usually ends up meaning using one of their maladaptive coping strategies they learned to navigate those confusing family experiences. Strategies such as shaming and policing anyone else who does something similar, or indiscriminately taking in all feedback and overfunctioning so that they’re always good and never bad, or getting defensive and attacking back, or questioning the expectations, or shutting down. All the behaviors that exhaust the targeted activists in the first place.
These aren’t alliances, with clearly contracted agreements and a process for working through disputes and conflict. Or perhaps it is an alliance, in that there’s not open war but rather tensions expressed indirectly or through proxies.
In What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition, author Emma Dabiri calls upon white people who care about racial and economic justice to find our own values and desires in this process. Not to see anti-racism as an act of charity or service we’re doing for another group, but to find its necessity in our own lives, families, and communities. To know what is at stake for us, so that we’re working for common cause.
For these and other reasons, I’ve stopped using the word “ally” to describe myself, and instead challenge myself to find my personal values and stakes in the work toward social and economic justice. I can prioritize my needs and desires appropriately, not trying to get them met by people with healthy boundaries but getting clear about which relationships are about shared values and which relationships are about emotional and material support. I don’t need to feel welcome or accepted in every space to recognize we have common interests, but I don’t have to sacrifice myself either.
It’s been important to me to move from the abstract and universal categories toward the specific and concrete, to my communities of people with whom I have relationships that can be negotiated and engaged with, where others may be willing to extend themselves to educate, challenge, affirm, or argue with me, but I can also give energy and value back. Mutuality is important to any healthy, thriving relationship—if we are constantly giving more than we receive, we are in danger.
Mother of all being and space, divided to give berth to face of shadow mirroring spark: two halves enfolded in your grace. Your children render limits stark— loving the light, hating the dark.
So we, burdened by excess light witness each brutal, daily fight— powerless to make them cease— but longing for the cooling night for dreaming of our soft bodies to drain our weariness in ease.
So we, tense with constant sound— like voltage never finding ground— speak words devoid of any truth. Before all meaning has been drowned we pray your silence give us soothe and sharpen utterance’s tooth.
So we, running to keep ahead of swollen bellies bearing dread, see monsters in what makes us still— for they compel us to be wed to grief, sorrow, and pain until deceiving heroes’ blood is spilled.
So we, under compulsion of clock choking our needs within the lock of narrative, linear time, seek freedom, soaring as the hawk toward myth, where spirts prime and in eternal spirals climb.
So we, fearing our emptiness gorge ourselves on plenteous sensations to stifle lust— teacher waiting in readiness to guide us to whom we must our spacious of soul entrust.
In darkness may our light renew— twinned lovers who are not two— and push past this duality to honor the glory that is You, Great One whose vitality lay beyond mere morality.
If I were to distill the essence of what I’ve found therapeutic, that in turn I offer to others, it’s that we must stop fixing ourselves and work instead on accepting ourselves. Most of us, however, come to therapy because our efforts to “fix” ourselves and our lives have not been working, and we feel a sense of urgency that we need to get our shit together soon. This urgency is useful to get us to work on ourselves, but then the last thing we want to hear is “Stop trying to fix yourself!”
What our “fixer” parts want is to resolve our problems while avoiding taking major risks, making significant and scary changes, or looking at the deeper roots of my distress. This is entirely understandable! If you can heal yourself without that work, why wouldn’t you? Unfortunately, there may come a point where the fixers are valiantly taking on a doomed task.
Imagine that there’s a heavy rainstorm, and you see a dam is starting to fall over. Our fixer parts see the superficial problem—the dam is falling over! They sense the urgency of the situation—if it fails, there’ll be a flood! And they go for the obvious answer—I’ll just prop it up!
To an extent, this works. So long as you never move or change, your fixer could hold the dam in place. But this effort is costly, and grows more so over time, especially when no one is working on the question of why the dam is falling over. And why would they, when the fixer’s got it handled?
To “fix” means to hold something in place. When we fix, we create superficial solutions to our problems, but we do not look at the roots of those issues. If we simply keep pushing our anger, our hopelessness, our exhaustion back up behind the dam, continuing to overwhelm it while we prop it up, does that serve us?
When my clients begin to work with fixer parts, they tend to imagine jugglers, plate-spinners, acrobats—people performing incredible, amazing, superhuman feats that are astonishing and completely unsustainable. Yet they’ll keep going until they die, no matter how exhausted they are, because what’s more terrifying is the not knowing what will happen if they stop. What if all the plates and balls fall to the ground? What if the dam falls over?
These fixer parts tend to live in a world of isolation, with no one else to help—no Self, no family, no friends, no community. If they’re aware of the existence of other people, our fixers may feel these other people are neglectful, unaware, hostile, or waiting for us to fail. What worsens this is that when we engage with other people from our fixer parts, they may feel themselves condescended to, pushed away, or disconnected—like we can’t handle them as anything but another problem to solve.
Our fixers are truly trying to help, and coming from a place of love, and isolation, and doing the best they can. But they may well be trying to hold together an edifice that is no longer serving anyone. What they do not know how to do is transform, which means not only letting go of fixing but embracing radical change.
“Radical” relates to the root of a thing. It is beneath our superficial story and mental efforts to hold together. Turning toward the roots requires what I call “acceptance practice” for lack of a better term at this time. In psychotherapy practice, it means going into the deeper levels of the consciousness, which lay within our bodies.
Our fixers experience our emotions, sensations, and behaviors as problems to solve or things to manage, but until we’ve learned how to accept our full experience and witness ourselves as we are, our fixers tend not to really understand these other parts. They have theories about the “problems” but we can tell it’s incomplete because the problems continue. All that “knowing” is intellectual and disconnected from the actual part of you that is responding and acting in those moments.
The dam metaphor, while strange, continues to be useful, because in the world of a fixer, we’re either in danger of being flooded by our emotions in a catastrophic, damaging way or we’re keeping our feelings at a firm distance with steel walls. The dam is an effort to control overwhelming emotion, but it’s also creating the overwhelm—stopping the natural movement and flow of emotion until it’s built up so much force that it’s overpowering.
Acceptance practice would be to let go of the dam and learn how to stay present even with the flow of emotions. With gratitude for our fixer parts for their incredible labor, we invite them to sit with us so that we can turn toward the emotional roots of our distress and listen to what they have to teach us.
This also means sitting with our multiplicity, able to recognize and allow all the conflicting thoughts and feelings that are a normal part of being a person. Instead of forcing ourselves into a coherent narrative and walling off what is contradictory, we can learn to accept every part of us as having a valid perspective to be witnessed.
With that witnessing and acceptance, the flow of intense feeling begins to diminish and become workable, and all those problems and conflicts begin to dissolve into what we might call a solution. As in chemistry, a solution is the result of various substances merging together; so too do the solutions of our distress come from allowing our conflicting thoughts and feelings to thaw, flow, and come together into a new perspective.
All of this is as simple and challenging as sensing into our bodies, where emotions live, and witnessing them from a place of calm and compassion. Then staying with them, listening and asking for more understanding, and letting clarity come to us.
During the course of giving and receiving therapy it’s become clear to me that many of us live with an apparent paradox: on one hand, part of us is convinced we are a worthless piece of shit; on the other hand, a part feels extraordinarily burdened with great power and responsibility.
Perhaps that burden is “positive”—a sense of a great mission in life, or finding ourselves in a position where we are depended upon in ways that make us irreplaceable. That burden might also be “negative,” an exaggerated and sense of the ways we bring harm to others—”I ruin everything,” “I’m a burden to everyone in my life,” “I destroyed their life.” Either way, our story is of disproportionate power and influence and typically it only goes one way—no one can save me, but I must save everyone; I bring harm to everyone I know, though my sufferings are minimal.
Shame emerges like a scab that covers but never heals this wound of disconnection. Should our life experiences remind us of this fundamental alienation—being mocked or bullied, shamed or abused—we are thrown back into the overwhelming pain of it without the loving support that is its antidote.
In mainstream modern culture, many of us have been cut off from the stories of our ancestry, the rituals, and the cultural boundaries that give us a sense of who we are. Instead we have the secret story of being a nothing, a piece of shit, unlovable. This part of us sense we are on our own with our suffering and constantly seeking to find a relationship to heal this wound of not-belonging. The part of us that feels its inflated importance offers a compensation by finding a way to feel we belong, we matter, but still in a way that’s disconnected from the human need to give and receive love and support in mutual relationship.
Narcissistic abuse and cult indoctrination appeals to this wound by offering us the love and witnessing that we desperately crave. This “love bombing” tends to appeal more to the part of us that compensates for our emptiness through “I’m so important” stories. They look deep into your eyes, making you feel seen, and tell you about your beauty, your importance, your innate mission and glory in the world. To be so loved feels amazing. It’s like getting high off connection and your own brain chemicals.
So should our cult or abuser suddenly withdraw all that love and threaten your exile, it’s terrifying. People will give up their values, their wealth, and their lives to stay connected to that vein of love.
We cannot heal the wound of estrangement only through being told how beautiful and special we are all the time. We cannot run from our shame and fears of abandonment, because our pain is like a rubber band that will pull us back with the same energy we’ve used to try to escape. Freedom from our pain only comes when we turn toward it with friendliness, curiosity, and kindness.
In my country, the descendants of colonizers experience the collective wounding of estrangement from that knowing that many of us came to this land through exile, incarceration, enslavement, or the desire to dominate and extract wealth. We made sure to sunder the people who were here before us from their deep belonging to place, and strove to destroy their bodies and cultures to make way for our rampant seeking of wealth.
Those of us who inherited the privileges and benefits of this conquest experience a collective splitting of healthy self-pride. Culturally, our inflation manifests as “the Chosen One” archetype that recurs throughout our most popular stories—Star Wars, Harry Potter, and the vast majority of superhero stories.
In these stories, a particular person is marked out as special and separate from their peers, often gifted with powers and burdened with responsibilities. Perhaps a god blessed them, or a freak accident transformed them, or an ancient prophecy foretold them, but there tends to be an inflated sense of importance granted to their lives. So much is given to them and so much is expected—if you’re so powerful, then how can you let there be suffering in the world? Or you are the only one who can stop this great evil from unfolding.
One of my personal favorites during my adolescence and twenties, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, explicitly uses “Chosen One” rhetoric. Buffy is one in a lineage of Vampire Slayers who have been uniquely gifted with strength and skills while burdened with the responsibility to fight vampires and other evils and protect the world until one dies and another is activated.
Buffy is frequently ambivalent about this calling, which she experiences as a trauma that threatens to rob her of the experiences of normal adolescence. At times she runs away; other times she steps into it with so much force that she shoves away her friends and loved ones who would help her.
That essential sense of separation is intrinsic in the Chosen One archetype; that they may be surrounded by support and yet the burden is theirs alone. They must make the hard choices and offer their bodies as sacrifice for the survival of the world.
In Buffy Season 7, when the series explodes the myth by bringing in more young women who are next in line to be “Chosen Ones” once the Slayer dies, one of the non-slayer friends calls out Buffy’s inflation:
And it’s automatically you. You really do think you’re better than we are.But we don’t know. We don’t know if you’re actually better. I mean, you came into the world with certain advantages, sure. I mean, that’s the legacy.But you didn’t earn it. You didn’t work for it. You’ve never had anybody come up to you and say you deserve these things more than anyone else. They were just handed to you. So that doesn’t make you better than us. It makes you luckier than us.
Buffy the vampire slayer, season 7, episode 19.
This speech explicitly links the Chosen One narcissism to an experience of unearned privilege. When given so much by circumstances beyond our personal control, it is difficult not to develop this complex schism of wanting to believe all this unearned wealth and power is a sign of one’s unique specialness. To compensate, we may give ourselves an inflated mission—like white Americans going to Africa to “teach” the people who live there a “better way to live” when those white people have no idea themselves how to live in Africa.
Yet within that remains the paradox, for the privileged heir knows what they have was not gotten from their own labor, that they’ve never had to struggle the ways others do, and may well be incapable of success without what’s been given. A wealthy heir exemplifies this, but to some extent that is in the psyche of many of us who grew up in a time of relative wealth and stability, with parents who had money or education, in a country that was built for us on the blood and labor of others.
This article came out while I wrote this post, and it’s informative to read Whedon’s own words through the lens of the paradox I’ve been exploring here. For the purposes of this discussion, I will limit my discussion to the part of his behavior that Whedon owns and, at the close of the interview, celebrates: that of a micro-managing perfectionist who rejects the insights of his actors into their characters, and their own ad-libbing, instead demanding they say the lines he wrote in the ways he wants them said.
The Chosen One is intrinsically anti-democratic. Not even a king or queen who must listen to their people and tend to their needs for fear of uprising, the Chosen One is celebrated for their stubbornness, refusal to compromise, and ability to cut away anyone who threatens their mission.
Contemporary Chosen One narratives may trouble this by surrounding the character with allies and showing how important those relationships are to survival. And yet few completely escape the paradox: that the Chosen One is more important and knowledgeable than everyone else, and yet simultaneously the one who suffers the most for others’ sake.
Yet we are neither saviors nor worthless pieces of shit. Both emerge from rootlessness and a disconnection from the families or communities that share wisdom, resources, and support. When we don’t have stories of our ancestors to tell us who we are, or collective stories and rituals of belonging to tell us who we are—when we’re compelled to move from our hometowns for economic necessity, or because we have experienced a true exile because of something about ourselves—then our sense of who we are rests on a foundation of shame.
When we are caught up in this trap and allow ourselves to fall into the spell of over-working and self-sacrifice, then resentment, burnout, and martyrdom are guaranteed. Feeling a sense of moral superiority is the consolation prize for not being able to attend to your own needs and happiness.
And, ironically, it’s a prize that’s hard to let go of. There’s nothing harder, I’ve found, in toxic work situations than to have a resentful and burned-out colleague who clearly hates what they’re doing and has contempt for everyone in the organization but also has nothing else in their life to bring them meaning. Even when you directly tell them to stop working so hard, to let go of the responsibility, to let us fail and struggle, they will refuse and still blame you.
Even though it makes them miserable, to step away from that responsibility is to face how much they’ve sacrificed of their own needs and happiness would whelm them in grief and shame. Better to think I’m chosen and special than to risk the vulnerability of asking for what I need from other people.
Often in religious teachings we hear a variation of the insight that a part of our humanity is not of this world. We come from another place—a spark of God, or souls trapped in disconnection and reincarnation. In this life, we are caught between the harshness of living in this world and the compulsive parts of us that are fixated on survival and power on one hand; and the parts of us that remember and long for that other idealized experience on the other hand.
Along with that sense of spiritual otherness is often a greater purpose to our daily experiences. Rather than simply making money, shitting, and washing clothes until we die, we are also here to bring light into the world; to repair what was destroyed; to prepare ourselves to return to divine oneness; to honor the gods and spirits and keep them alive.
These stories are life-affirming and help us to endure and give meaning to the challenges of life, and in established and skillful traditions these teachings are balanced with practices to tame and ground our egos into humble, right-sized connection. Yes, we are all carrying a spark of the divine within us, and what we do in this life matters, so it’s worth making the effort to show up and be who you are. And, we are all little specks of dust in the larger cosmos, our lives barely a fraction of a second in the lifespan of the universe.
Holding that both/and is deeply freeing and relaxing, especially when we can find connection and belonging with people who love and understand us. Everyone has agency and the capacity to spiritually awaken if that is their path, even when we personally disapprove of their choices and want better for them. So we focus on our own work, which is enough for one lifetime, and allow others to discover their own paths. Otherwise we harm them by imposing a path upon them, and harm ourselves by wasting our time not doing our own work.
We get to be humans among other humans, all of us struggling and learning from each other and caught up in the same tides that flow through our history and culture. No one of us is Chosen to stop the apocalypse; we are all playing our part in the unveiling.
While reading the New York Times‘s survey of therapists about the mental health crisis co-occurring with the COVID-19 pandemic, I could only nod my head. Even operating my own private practice I have noted the tremendous increase in demand for services beyond my capacity to meet it; the difficulty of finding therapists who are financially accessible to clients in need or even simply taking on new clients; the limits of my own capacity to meet the need; and the increased acuity in what my ongoing clients are dealing with in their own work.
I believe the ongoing transformation our culture is undergoing will continue to demand changes of mental healthcare, both what we think of as mental healthcare and how it works. Already Telehealth is becoming a normal way of delivering care rather than an inferior and exceptional method.
I find myself wanting to go back to basics. What is health? What is mental health? Our collective definitions of those words tend to base itself on a state of being conducive to surviving in a capitalist empire: capable of continuing to work and ideally producing children so we have future workers. On top of that foundation we lay all our dreams and fantasies of ecstatic life, a robust immune system that defeats all invaders, emotional intimacy that’s not threatening, wealth, and status with spiritual attainment.
The thing about that is, most of those expectations come from a world we no longer inhabit. So we are in a time of thick fog, trying to follow a path once suggested to us that we can no longer see. We can hardly feel confident about what we think is coming down the path.
From a trauma-informed perspective, all the ways that we respond to stress, confusion, and lostness are completely rational ways our system is trying to keep us going. Even the ones that feel shameful. And, as we know, those responses tend to have their own limitations. They’re about getting through the moment rather than stepping back to rethink the goal.
We need to get lower to the ground, to feel and sense our way through, until the fog clears and we can see again.
Since I cannot be a therapist to everyone, and you may have contacted thirty people who mostly didn’t call you back and you’ve given up on getting help, I wanted to offer you this ritual. It does not offer answers, or make everything okay, but it can support you in finding your way through.
In this audio file, the writer Anthony Rella reads aloud the next paragraphs in this article, and then at 2:45 guides you through the ritual. You may use it if you’d like the support, or you can print out the text of this article and refer to it as needed.
When you are in distress, overwhelmed, enraged, or at your limit—or feel yourself reaching that moment—I encourage you to take time to do this full ritual. Above is an audio recording if you want my voice to guide you through the steps, or you may print this text or copy it onto your device.
This ritual uses the five elements of the Western tradition: Air, Earth, Water, Fire, and Spirit. I am drawing upon my own spiritual practice, traditions, and training, and offer this to you with no expectation that you commit to any particular path. If you have familiarity with this kind of work you may notice that I guide you to move counter-clockwise, which is the direction of dispersal.
Try find a space where you can be undisturbed for twenty to thirty minutes. Turn off notifications on any devices and ask folks to leave you alone, unless they want to participate with you. You are encouraged to speak out loud with vigor if you can do that in your space, but “speaking” within your mind is okay if that’s what you need to do. I wrote this to be as accessible and simple as possible, but there is space to add more. You may, if you wish, add a representation of each element in the four directions named—a photo, a colored candle, an object that represents the element, and so forth.
The ritual is written for one person, but if you have co-participants, here are two possibilities: you could do the ritual as written together, having your own experiences. Or, you can take turns sharing and witnessing. For example, when working with air, one person could share out loud the stories of their distress, while the other person simply witnesses—not responding with comments, suggestions, or judgments, simply being with it. Then you can switch, where the witness speaks and the speaker witnesses.
I recommend you do the whole ritual the way I’ve presented at lease once before modifying it, but if you find any piece is inaccessible please make whatever changes are necessary. After you’ve done the whole ritual once, you may find one or two elements work well for you, and you can use them as needed.
Begin in the center of your space. Inhale and then exhale until your breath has completely emptied out three times, imagining as you exhale that you are sinking into the ground, which receives the weight of your burdens, stress, and tension.
Then begin square breathing: inhale for a count of four; hold for a count of four; exhale for a count of four; and then hold for a count of four. Return to this pattern of breathing throughout the ritual when you need to center or settle, but do not stress about doing it continuously, especially when speaking.
Say:
I who am the beauty and strength of the earth
made skin and bone, blood and fat and muscle,
call to those who would love and honor my need,
and send away any who would bring me harm;
may you find a place for your own ease.
Turn toward the east.Imagine there is a breeze blowing eastward, toward the rising sun or, if you like, another star in space. Tell the breeze your stories of distress, what burdens and bothers you, what brings you anxiety and fear. If you can, speak these out loud. Imagine the breeze carries these words from you into the light and heat of the sun.
When you feel complete, turn toward the north. Imagine your body is a snow-covered mountain at the top of the world. Notice any tension, pain, tightness, or constriction, or unpleasant sensations. Imagine the coolness of the snow sinking in to soothe your pains, or the melting waters carrying your burdens into the earth.
When you feel complete, turn toward the west. Invite into your awareness any emotions you are having, even if those emotions are numbness and emptiness. Imagine there is a river moving through you, and you can pour or allow these emotions to mingle and flow with the currents of that river moving toward the wide, deep, vast ocean, where there is space and room for every feeling. If it feels right, let yourself broaden and deepen to become the ocean.
When you feel complete, turn toward the south. Imagine a fire, and notice what kind of fire you imagine. Does it feel wild, big, and uncontained? If so, keep breathing and staying with this flame until it starts to settle and gather into something more manageable. If it feels cold, sluggish, or small, imagine that your breath can kindle and strengthen its flamesuntil it reaches a vitality that seems right to you. Imagine that you can offer the fire any burdens or beliefs you carry that feel draining, diminishing, or bring you to a sense of hopelessness. Watch as these burdens transform into living flame.
When you feel complete, sit in the center, facing any direction. Return to the square breath. On one inhale, imagine you can breath energy and support from the earth, through your body, and then exhale it up through your head into the sky. On the next inhale, imagine you can breathe expansion and clarity from the sky, through your body, and then exhale it into the earth. Follow this pattern for three or four cycles, and then shift, breathing earth and sky energy into your belly, then breathing it out from your heart, as though sending its energy in all directions.
Invite yourself to remember all the times you’ve helped others, been a support to them, or had the impact you wanted to have in the world. Try to notice what comes up without judgment, simply as information. Then, invite yourself to remember the times others have helped you, whether they are friends, loved ones, or strangers. Maybe some of these memories carry pain, and notice that, but try to stay with only attending to ways you’ve been helped.
Ask yourself to think of three people you could contact today to check on, connect with, or ask for support. Keep going until you’ve come up with three names, and write them down if necessary.
Offer gratitude to the elements in whatever way feels true to your heart, using words, gestures, breath, or even a smile. Then go and reach out to one of those three people.If they are not available, reach out to the next, and then the next.
As Facebook is no longer a useful tool for reaching my audience, I am establishing a New Year’s intention to begin using my e-mail newsletters again.
My plan is to send out seasonal newsletters, though I may increase them to monthly if inspired. Each newsletter will include personal reflection on being a therapist and spiritual seeker in these times, a brief Tarot card reading, information about upcoming classes or publications, and links to works that I’ve enjoyed reading, watching, or hearing.
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Yet the news report said they were unearthing “the secret of the residential schools.”
And I started yelling at the television. “Secret from whom?”
This history was taught to me when I was a kid attending school from the late 1980s to 2000. In my elementary school in Indiana, around third or fourth grade, we had units on Indiana history. One section focused on the Native people. We would get little yellow booklets that told simple stories about what it was like to be a Native, how they fed and clothed themselves, what their daily lives were like, and how it was for them when the pioneers arrived. The next semester we learned about the pioneers. Those booklets were blue, and covered similar material from the pioneer perspective.
Even then, as a kid, I noticed out loud, “In the Indian stories the pioneers are the bad guys, but in the pioneer stories the Indians are the bad guys.” And it wasn’t lost on me that we were the descendants of those pioneers—not necessarily literally, through blood, but we were citizens of the nation those people built.
The country built by those pioneers and their descendants did not find satisfaction in its thirst for cheap land and cheap labor. They kept expanding westward, and made up theological-sounding justifications for why it was their right. They kept bringing people from other lands—forcibly through enslavement, or through exploitative immigration policies—to build the infrastructure and do to the manual labor needed to build great wealth—mostly for the wealthy, white, land-owning men.
But at some point, those of us who inherited this culture and nation-building decided to believe in our innocence. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, I occasionally would hear the expression that “America lost its innocence that day.” A quick investigation into collective memory—a Google search—shows that this same expression was often said referring to assassination of John F. Kennedy.
“America lost its innocence that day.”
What innocence did the United States have when this is its history? Our intelligence agencies have funded coups and insurgent armies in other countries. Was our innocence the naïveté that it could be done to us? Is that innocence worth preserving?
Years ago, in my undergraduate English days, Salman Rushdie came to campus and we had the opportunity to sit with him in a smaller conversation. I remember him wondering aloud why American writers didn’t write about empire. In my early twenties, confused, I wondered to myself, “How is America an empire?”
We have army bases across the world and territories under our control who did not willingly join us and have no democratic representation. We have prisons in other countries. And I didn’t know America was an empire.
Telling ourselves of our innocence is an amnestic, a spell to forget our history. When we are wrapped in the comforting blanket of our innocence, all we can see is our victimhood, and not our culpability. And those who would dare break the spell, try to take the blanket, face our rage.
We’re like the obnoxious kid in class who keeps poking the girl in front of him with a pencil and then has the audacity to be shocked when she finally turns around and slaps him. What’d I do to deserve that?
Confronting the truth of our history and our ancestors is medicine. Seeing our collective guilt and culpability need not destroy us our cause us to collapse in despair. It’s the truth that will set us free. It shows us that we are not powerless victims, not noble martyrs in a world that incomprehensibly hates us. We have power, and we’ve wielded that power in ways that have consequences.
Losing the lie of innocence means we get to finally grow up and become responsible adults in the community of all humans. It means the possibility of real solidarity and recognizing what truly are our common interests and values. All you have to lose is your ignorance.
Fire has much to teach us. The principles that inform building, tending, and ending fires extend beyond the practical into insights into our relationships with our own life energy and capacity to work toward goals.
If you’ve never built a fire yourself, you may think it’s easy. When there is drought and the land is parched, the plants and fallen wood dried-out, and some asshole throws a firecracker into a place without any ring of stone or brick to contain the flames—fires start easily, without control, and their damage is enormous. While wildfires serve the vitality of the larger ecosystem, they are destructive for our human perspective and purposes.
Most of us want a fire that can entertain us, bring us warmth, illuminate the darkness, cook our food, or burn what we no longer need. We want controlled, concentrated, manageable fire. The first skill is knowing the optimal conditions—when it’s wetter, for example, or when we can contain our fire in a stone circle, a fireplace, or a pit, and keep materials on hand to extinguish it if it threatens to leave the container.
Ingredients of a Campfire
When thinking about the materials for a fire, it’s important to know there’s a relationship between the amount of energy it takes to get something burning and the amount of energy it generates in being burnt. So a wadded up piece of newspaper is going to be easy to light, it’ll burn nice and pretty, but it’ll go out quickly if you add nothing else on top of it. A heavy log is the other end of the spectrum—it requires a lot of heat and energy to get going, but once it does it will last you a much longer time.
You can think of it as both “you need to expend energy to get more energy” and also that the more energy you need to expend, the more you’re likely to get from the effort. The first expenditure of energy is getting the spark, which may mean focused energy drawing a spindle through a bow against a plank of wood, or clacking metal or rock together, until you’ve got a spark.
The exception, of course, are the things we’ve designed to be easy-to-light—matches, lighters, fuel, firestarters, and logs soaked in combustible chemicals. If you’ve got any of these, you’ll need less energy to get going.
In firebuilding, the spectrum of materials is broken down into “tinder,” “kindling,” “fuel.” These are the spectrum of that ratio, from easiest to burn to hardest, and likewise from least energy output to most.
Paper, cardboard, pine needles, dried leaves, and tiny matchstick-sized wood all fall under tinder. Tinder is like sugar. Easy to reach for, very satisfying in the moment, but too much of leaves you burnt out and cranky.
What kinds of things do you enjoy doing that are like tinder? For me it could be scrolling on social media, watching a familiar favorite TV show, snacking, and other things I won’t name in public. Often, when clients and I are exploring their tinder activities, it tends to be the things we go to when we’re really exhausted or bored to get a bit of a boost. We’re looking for energy but it’s possible what we really need is a nap, or a glass of water.
Tinder isn’t bad, it’s useful, but if that’s all you’ve got then you’re going to be spending most of your time and energy heaping more atop the fire to keep it going.
So when building a fire, we start with tinder to get enough heat and energy to ignite kindling, which are thicker sticks the size of your fingers or slightly larger. These are like carbohydrates—also easy to burn, but more energy output. A fire of kindling still requires a lot of feeding to keep going, but it’ll burn longer than the tinder.
What kinds of things do you do that feel like kindling? Could be going out on a date, going to a concert, working out, or going for a hike. We’re all going to have different answers based on our ability, our skills, and our energy capacities. Once upon a time, going out to a bar felt like a tinder activity to me, but now leaving the house for any social activity requires some effort of hyping myself up and reminding myself it’ll be worth it.
If you want maximum heat with less effort, then you want your fire hot enough to start fuel—logs thicker than your arm. These beasts take a lot of energy and patience to get going, but they’ll reward you with hours of heat and light and require less constant tending. These are the fat cells of fire.
What kinds of things do you do that feel like fuel? For these I think of the range of bigger life tasks that require a great deal of effort and patience. Could be applying for new jobs, starting a degree, or deciding to learn a new skill.
There are so many things in my life that I value now which began as fuel tasks. When I was younger, I dreaded going to the gym and doing any kind of exercise, but when I was able to push through—even when it was miserable—I found that when I left I felt energized and happier, and glad I’d gone. Beginning a meditation practice, starting my own business, and learning a martial art have all offered me the same experience.
With experience and practice, all of these tasks have moved more into the “kindling” category, but it was not easy. That dread of beginning stayed with me for a long time with each task, but I also sensed what the experienced offered would make it worth it, and I left feeling better.
That’s the key—fuel gives you more energy than it demands. There are plenty of things that take more of our energy than it gives, and those are not fuel. In some cases, these might be obligations we must fulfill to make our fuel activities possible, but just as often they are habits we continue even though long ago they stopped feeding us and we’ve fallen into resentment.
What you want on top is kindling, pieces of wood that are thicker. Ideally you’d want a range of thicknesses, because the thickness and density of the wood is also its potential. The thicker the wood is, the longer and hotter it will burn, and the thickest logs are what we’d call fuel. But the thicker the wood is, the more energy and heat you need to ignite it. That’s why you can’t just throw a tree stump on top of a fire and call it good; you’ve got to split it into smaller pieces that will be easier to light, easier to store, and easier to use to feed the fire over time.
Shaping a Campfire
Heat rises. That’s the primary principle that informs everything about structuring and tending your fire. The second is that heat feeds heat.
When we’re starting cold, we want to build a fire by starting with lots of tinder, enfolding it with kindling, and then adding our fuel once it’s good and hot. A fire needs oxygen, so adding too much, too heavy, and too densely packed wood will smother it before it can get going. My favorite shape is to build a tent of kindling around a nest of tinder.
Too many of us, when we’re feeling low energy or stuck in life, expect ourselves to be able to fire up some heavy fuel. Then, when we fail, we think it confirms our fate as incompetent failures. But all it means is that we’ve added too heavy of fuel, too quickly, without awareness of these principles.
So if you’re starting cold and want more energy in your life, instead of making a huge commitment to a task like starting graduate school, try finding some tinder and kindling tasks that you can get started to build your enthusiasm and energy. Start with one new habit, like washing your dishes more often, and do that for a couple weeks until you add the second.
If you find you’re struggling and it feels hard, think of it as the energy you’re spending to get this fire going, and look at what you get in return when you’ve finished the task. If you’re losing more energy than you gain, that might be a sign that this task is a heavier fuel than you’re ready to burn, and see if you can find something lighter and closer to your energy capacities.
A Fire’s Rhythm of Life
Starting a fire is tricky and discouraging. More often than I care to recall, I’ve experienced the thrill of watching those first flames catch quick and bright and then the bitterness of watching them gutter out before coming to much of anything. By this, I also think of all the times I’ve tried to start a new group, or a new workshop, or get my communities excited about a new project. I think of all the pieces I’ve written that sparked no connection, and the year or two I spent building my private practice before enough clients noticed me that it became sustainable.
Starting a fire is hard! And what’s hardest is learning to intuit when a fire needs tending and when it needs to be left alone to do its work. We can lose a fire through neglect or smothering. In these learning stages we can only make choices and see what happens, then adapt.
That feels like a deep lesson, one that I can’t say I’ve fully learned. Fire teaches us that if we don’t interpret missteps and collapses as signs of divine judgment—if we can keep learning, adapting, and trying—eventually we’ll get a good fire going. But in experiencing the disappointments and failures of the work, eventually we may decide it’s not worth the effort.
If the fire is failing, we could try wadding up more tinder and using our breath to get the weak coals going again, so we can add more kindling on top and try to get momentum again. Perhaps we need to move the heavier logs away to give the fire more time to get stronger. Perhaps we need to spread things out so that the fire could breathe—if it’s too densely packed, it doesn’t have the oxygen it needs. Perhaps we need to push things closer together to concentrate our energy.
No matter how much teaching and instruction we receive, we can only learn through practice. Whether you’re trying to find a partner, start a business, write a novel, or organize a workshop, it’s rare to experience immediate, instant success without effort or failure. We may imagine there’s a right way to do things, and often there is, but on the ground it becomes clear that “the right way” itself contains thousands of smaller choices to make and actions to take. There may be no right or wrong choice to make, nor no action to take that guarantees success or failure. We simply have to make choices, see what happens, and adapt.
Eventually, however, we’ll get a good fire going with a strong bed of coals. All the lessons we’ve learned continue to apply, but now it’s less urgent and catastrophic. It’s an easier pace to tend the fire, and we can be decisive about when we want to feed it and when we want to cool things down. A good fire could burn for days, if not years, but it still requires presence, attention, and conscientiousness.
And, eventually, we may decide it’s time to end the fire. Perhaps we no longer have use of it, our we’re tired of the efforts of tending and want to get rest or do change focus. That’s when we show respect to ourselves, our environment, and the fire itself by making sure it’s completely extinguished so it can be safely left unattended. What’s left is nutrient-rich ash, which offers wonderful fertilizer for others’ growth.
Starting to practice consent can feel awkward and clunky, especially in the emotional intensity of the moment. People whose response to a sad story is to want to wrap you up in a giant bear hug may feel it’s awkward and cold to stop and first ask, “Do you want a hug?”
For them, getting wrapped up in a hug while having big feelings may be exactly the medicine they crave. For others, though—me, for example—when I feel upset and vulnerable, a giant hug feels smothering to me. My parts don’t hear “I love and care about your suffering,” what they hear is “Your sadness is too much for me and I need it to go away.”
This is made worse should I dare to say I don’t want the hug and the hugger feels rejected, upset, and hurt. Then the message I get is that my feelings and needs aren’t important and I need to put all that aside to make them feel better. Thanks for the support!
I get that for the other person it may be a genuine expression of love and caring, and to have that refused feels like a personal rejection. I also get that asking for consent feels cold and unromantic.
Our romantic ideal of love is a relationship in which we intuitively perceive and meet each other’s needs without having to talk about it. Not only is this unrealistic when we each have vastly unique terrains of what it means to love and be loved, it makes minor and inevitable miscues explode into huge questions about the relationship. Our immediate response isn’t: “Oh, this person doesn’t know I need a hug because they come from an emotionally distant family, so I’ll ask for what I need.” What we think is something like: “How could this person be so cruel as to deny me a hug when it’s so obvious I need one?”
It is possible to achieve that level of trust, understanding, and intuitive connection, but the important word here is achieve. We earn that through the efforts of lots and lots and lots of communication, asking for clarification, and growing in understanding of ourselves and our loved ones. Practicing consent gives us a structure and motivation to do this work, to be mindful to check in and make sure what we’re offering is what the other person wants.
Yet there are times when the person we want to love or care for is unable to be clear about what they need from us. When we reach out to loved ones and say, “Let me know what you need,” that expression of caring might not be enough to get an authentic answer. The person we want to support may not know what they need; may not know how to ask for what they need; or may feel shame and terror at the vulnerability of asking. These three states are obstacles for establishing consent. For the rest of this post, I’m going to discuss each obstacle and offer suggestions for ways we can work through that not-knowing and learn together what is needed.
I Don’t Know What I Need
Giving and receiving help is one of the ways we thrive as social beings.
There are hundreds of valid reasons why a person may not know exactly what they want or need. Many of us may have been raised to be self-sufficient and simply have no practice for asking for and receiving help. Many of us have not experienced families or communities that showed us what’s possible for mutual caring in times of crisis. Some of us may not understand our bodies or hearts well enough to know what “a need” is.
For you as the person wanting to help, you don’t need to know the backstory or the deep psychological root. What matters is simply that what they’re needing is help knowing what they need.
I notice this not-knowing often happens in moments of unexpected crisis or loss. When we have a crisis for the first time, we lack any kind of history to rely upon to help us think about what we need, and our brains are using a lot of resources to manage the emotional and logistical shock and overwhelm. There is both so much need and so little structure to identify the need, and we may simply go into whatever survival strategies are most familiar to us. Even when people we love and trust offer us help in this state, we may feel grateful but unable to identify anything they could do to help.
If you, the person wanting to help, can’t get traction with “What do you need?”, try asking a version of “How are you doing with all this? What’s been hard for you?” Try letting your loved one talk, let them know what you’re hearing, and give them time to open up and vent about the difficulties and hardships. After a while, you may be able to see places where you can suggest ways you could help: “Oh, your license expired? I’d be happy to drive you to the DMV next week so you can get it renewed, if you want.”
People who’ve experienced a similar kind of crisis tend to be really good at this because they’ve lived through it and have the benefits of hindsight to know what would’ve been nice for them. So they can be more assertive in offering a range of options of ways they could help, and let the person they want to support decide what they want: “I could bring a lasagne to your house, I could walk or your dog, I could help you clean the house, I could help you do paperwork.”
If the person is still unwilling or unable to accept the help, it’s okay to let them have a break and decide later if the want to come to you. If the person needs more help than you can give them, you might offer instead to help find more help. “I definitely want to make a lasagne for you tonight, and maybe after I could make one of those YouCaring sites to ask other people to help with the dog walking and house cleaning.”
I Don’t Know How to Ask for It
There are times when the person needing help does know exactly what they need but the act of asking is overwhelming. We may have heard messages throughout our lives that if you need help, you don’t deserve it; or that if you receive help from another person, they can hold it over your head to shame or manipulate you into doing whatever they want, indefinitely. You may have experienced a person helping you with resentment, or bringing up the help later to shut you down in a different conversation.
In these ways, asking for help feels quite dangerous. You may feel like asking for help means risking not having support when you “really need it,” so you have to be sure this crisis is worth it. With this mindset, we tend to make our problems smaller and miss opportunities for getting help.
Giving and receiving help is one of the ways we thrive as social beings. Being grateful to each other for the help we’ve received is a balm against resentment.
At the same time, if you as a person begin to resent others for how much they ask of you, it is your work to say no and set boundaries. Resentment is inevitable when you feel you must help out of obligation and have no option to say no or prioritize your own health.
Giving care to those who have cared for you is a part of healthy connection, but you don’t have to help hide the bodies at three in the morning when you have a job interview at nine.
If they really need your help, they can wait till your interview is done.
Shame and Terror of Vulnerability
Asking for what we really need is vulnerable and we risk being judged or ridiculed. We have so many reasons to be concerned about vulnerability, and often we’ve experienced moments of invalidation, ridicule, abandonment, or neglect in critical moments that give us reasons to avoid being that vulnerable again.
These intense feelings tend to reflect the world of the young person who lacks the power to take care of their own needs. Our parts that fear ridicule, abandonment, or neglect may still feel like small, dependent children who are unable to get their needs met.
Their responses make complete sense in this way, but also these parts may not recognize that we have grown and become older, wiser, more powerful, and more competent. This part may fear abandonment from a lover but be unable to recognize that you’re surrounded by family and friends who will be there for you even if this relationship ends.
I encourage my clients in distress to make a list of three to five people to whom they can reach out for help when in need. Three to five is intentional. If you only have oner person, there’s a danger of overwhelming your support or having no one if they’re sick, unavailable, or otherwise unavailable.
With three to five people, though, there’s more room for consent and generosity without resentment. You don’t have to invest all your urgency into one person, and your support people can feel at ease knowing if they’re not available you’ve got more options for care.
First, of course, you have to admit it’s okay to have needs and that asking for help is worth the experience of shame and vulnerability. Asking for what we need may always feel like a risk, but we can practice getting more comfortable with taking the risk.
If you’re used to ignoring your needs or putting off hard conversations, you’ve probably experienced at least one moment of overwhelming emotion when it all comes out with explosive force. This feeling may be rage, or it may be despair, and its urgency and force breaks through all our barriers to vulnerability.
Unfortunately, that same force blasts the person we’re turning to for help. It can make a giant mess, which then reinforces the story that we can’t ask for help, which then leads to another build up of intensity that comes out in a blast.
If you like, think of this like a geyser or a firehose where all the accumulated tension suddenly erupts with power. A more earthy and relatable metaphor would be the explosive urgency of waiting too long to get to the bathroom when your body has an urgent need to expel whatever’s in it.
The temptation, when states of rage or despair are over, is to feel some relief and hope it never comes back. But these aren’t embarrassing or silly blips in consciousness to leave behind, these are expressions of deep needs gone unaddressed that require attention and care.
We need to learn to identify the subtler signs of the tension building within us before it finally explodes in rage or despair. Asking for what we need before the explosion feels much scarier, because we’re more present with the experience, but that presence also helps us in speaking up clearly and hanging out with the difficulties of the conversation.
What we need to practice is identifying the subtler signs of need that pop up before we get to the point of rage or despair. If we can start the conversation before we get there, then we tend to be better able to advocate for ourselves and handle the difficulties of the conversation.
If you’re still beginning to figure out your needs or who you can trust to support you, a reliable practice to help is to journal what’s going on with you. A paper or electronic journal is good, or using a voice recorder to dictate a memo. Anything to get what’s in your head outside of yourself so that you can come back to it later in a calmer state of mind and begin to explore what got you to that point.
Having begun this reflective work can be really grounding in thinking about could have helped with the upset—was I underslept? Did I have enough to eat? Was volunteering to help a friend move their house on my first day off in two weeks maybe more than my body could handle?
Along with the physical needs are also the emotional and relationship needs that we may need to address. Having a list helps in having those direct conversations. And we can return to our practice of consent by reaching out to the friend and asking, “Hey, I want to talk to you about some things that I feel vulnerable about in our relationship. When would be a good time?”
Taking the Risk
With all that we’ve explored about consent and support, we may find there are times when it’s fine to go ahead and do something for a person without asking. Yes, that contradicts everything I’ve written. As often as I’ve experienced intrusive and unwanted care, I’ve also experienced numerous moments when the person did accurately intuit what I might need and gave it to me without my asking.
When this going ahead and doing it really worked for me, the giver seemed to be aware and accepting of the risk they were taking.
They’re not doing something for me so that they can feel better about themselves, or less guilty, or whatever feelings they’re having about myself. The support was given without needing me to have a warm response for their own well-being. They did it because it felt right, and they didn’t punish me if I didn’t immediately like or accept what they offered. They didn’t bring it up later to guilt me. They didn’t get defensive. They did it, and let me decide what I wanted to do with it.
Being grateful to each other for the help we’ve received is a balm against resentment.
If I’m going to risk this, usually my first sign is noticing when the person I want to support keeps bringing up the same idea over and over, even when they’re seeming dismissive of it. “She offered me a hug, which felt so weird. Like, what’s a hug going to do? I can’t imagine a hug will make me feel better. A hug doesn’t bring my dad back from the dead. What’s the point of hugging?” There may well be a part of them that desperately wants a hug, and another part that feels mistrustful of the notion or afraid you’ll judge them if they admit they want it. In this case, it may put them at ease to hear your offer to hug them like it’s no big deal.
When I strongly suspect the person really wants help they keep rejecting, I’ll make it about me. “I get that you’re totally fine and don’t need anyone’s help. But tonight I’m going to make a shit ton of lasagne and I can’t eat it all, and I’ll feel guilty if I throw it away, so I’m going to leave a bunch at your house. You can do whatever you want with it, but it’d do me a big favor if you helped me get rid of it.”
In Closing
There’s not one right or best way to have feelings and want support, and practicing consent helps make sure that we’re giving the person we love the support they need. We achieve consent when everyone involved in an activity agrees to what is happening. At its best consent is explicit, voluntary, conscious, and mutual; especially when paired with respecting each other’s autonomy and self-authority in knowing what’s best for ourselves.
While it may feel awkward and unromantic, slowing down and getting consent offers the opportunity for greater closeness, understanding, and connection. Even when we struggle to know what we want or need, we can help each other in the learning.
