Category: Culture

Culture

A Dream of Power and Freedom from Control

by Anthony Rella
by Hanna Zhyhar

“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.”

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Culture

For Nice Guys Seeking Love and Lust

by Anthony Rella
Photo by Randy Jacob

“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.”

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Culture

Becoming Dissonant

by Anthony Rella
Pluto and Charon by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center is licensed under CC-BY-NC 2.0

“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. “

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Culture

Self-Care is Important, and It’s Not Enough, and You Don’t Need to Apologize for That

by Anthony Rella

“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.”

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Culture

Feelings are gross.

by Anthony Rella

Recently I’ve been listening to spiritual teachers, coaches, and even some therapists who seem to promise that if you work hard enough you’ll reach a state where you are fully healed and un-triggerable. Wouldn’t that be so wonderful?

Yet I think such aspirations are not only unrealistic but that they become a hindrance to healing and growth in time. We reach a point where we’re feeling the same old disgust and impatience with ourselves, but now it’s dressed up in more refined spiritual or psychological language that boils down to “I don’t want to deal with this!”

This mindset of healing is quite aggressive—that our needs and wounds must be uprooted, or transformed, or eradicated to reach a particular desirable state of consciousness. When we merge with this perspective, we tend to be uncharitable, condescending, and inhospitable to those parts of us that are younger, shyer, more tender, more unruly. We cannot meet our needs on their own terms, and so we cannot work with them.

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Culture

You Don’t Have to Be Miserable Because There is Suffering

by Anthony Rella

“But this moment is all we have. That’s a trite saying, said so many times, but it’s trite because it’s true and we have to keep reminding ourselves. Some horrors are happening and will happen regardless of whether we sit here and worry about it or feel upset.”

“Blocking out those horrors entirely doesn’t serve, because there is merit in standing against them and fighting. But fighting is a part of being alive; we’re not alive only to fight.”

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Culture

For Queer Men and Others Seeking Love and Lust

by Anthony Rella

As a therapist who frequently works with queer men and nonbinary folk on loneliness, longing, sex, and intimacy, I wanted to write down the advice and observations I most frequently offer. This is a series of mini-essays covering the confusion of lust and love; apps and hookup culture; etiquette around open relationships; self-respect in love; creating a good life when you don’t have a partner; and other topics.

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