Years ago, when The Dog Whisperer was having his era of fame, I saw an episode in which he was introducing a poorly socialized dog into his rehabilitative pack. It was a tense moment, where both pack and outsider made threatening gestures at each other, and as I remember it there was an implication that the pack might attack and destroy the outsider if it couldn’t relax and submit to connection. The pack was a unit of dogs with social cohesion, affection, and safety, and they weren’t going to let this stranger come in and screw it all up.
Since learning about the consequences of chronic loneliness, I’ve found myself frequently thinking about that moment. People who have been lonely too long tend to be more on alert to signs that they’re going to be rejected, and they’re more likely to protect themselves in ways that end up being hostile or off-putting to others.
Those lonely people are desperate to connect, and terrified of the emotional pain of being rejected. But none of that is apparent from the outside except to those who have been through it or who are unusually emotionally sensitive and aware. From the outside, it looks like a person abruptly turning into an asshole without any clear reason. Or the lonely person abruptly canceling plans and severing relationships, or sending out aggressively self-deprecating comments that no one can argue away.
A pack of wolves playing in the snow.
I think about that outcast dog with its likely history of trauma and ostracism, so keyed-up and tense that it can’t relax and connect with the pack even if it that’s all it wants. It feels unfair that the pack would reject it for its struggles with rejection. But that comes from my own over-identification with the outcast dog. From the perspective of the pack, which had clearly absorbed and rehabilitated many dogs over the years, it could only tolerate so much resistance. Being too fixated in the anti-social consequences of chronic loneliness could threaten the coherence of the group.
When I was at my loneliest, I was also at my most toxic—self-righteous, condescending, withdrawing into stony silence when hurt, being self-consciously weird, making very cruel statements about myself as though that’s what others thought of me. Now I can see how much I was caught in my own suffering and setting up an obstacle course for anyone who was trying to connect with me, to keep myself safe, but that safety only perpetuated the loneliness.
I identified more with the lonely, misunderstood, bullied outcast, but as I found belonging I also participated in cruelly teasing other young folks at school who were more outcast than I. I regret that behavior now, and have since felt sensitive to the dangers and cruelty of those who belong against those who are experienced as different.
What disquiets me lately is considering the merits of protecting the boundaries of your group against people who cannot tolerate connection and participate meaningfully. The “lone wolf” shooters whose apparent loneliness and lack of purpose makes them vulnerable to turn their anger and hurt into murder. The person who always speaks up about how terrible the group is, and tears relationships apart with triangulation, but never accepts compromise and never comes to the meetings where you can actually address their problems.
Having spent years trying to build inclusive, equitable, just community, I believe that this will always be an aspirational project. There will always be more work to do, but also there is a way in which it is impossible to be a group that includes and accommodates every single person. Every group forms a culture, and part of being in that group means absorbing and being absorbed by its culture.
For example, some groups make plans and begin promptly at the time stated (at least, I imagine this must be true. Could you tell me where they are?) while others start their meetings when everyone shows up, even if that takes an hour. Neither of these are wrong in an objective way but both create their own inconveniences that you have to learn to live with if you want to be a part of things. Being an on-time person in a late group may mean learning how to be flexible, to accept this is how things will go, and to start planning for the lateness. Being a late person in an on-time group may mean learning how to organize yourself to get there on time, or to accept that you’re going to miss things. But it means learning to accept this is how the group works, it’s not personal to you, and you’ve either got to adapt or work really hard to change the group culture.
There is absolutely an unfairness when people who are struggling emotionally, socially, or mentally have difficulty connecting in a community that does not understand them. But it’s also unfair to expect everyone in your world to be prepared to be a therapist at a moment’s notice, to intuit the conflict happening inside and intervene in a way that means the lonely person feels totally safe and never has to take a risk. That does happen, once in a great while, and it’s absolutely beautiful. But the beauty is defined by its rareness.
We have to learn how to connect, and connection is a living, ongoing process of taking risks. We have to honor that risk-taking is hard and dangerous and we need to have a plan and resources for taking care of ourselves when the risks go poorly. But we also have to honor that nothing happens without our risk-taking. We can’t expect everyone we meet to know the right language to use that makes us feel safe, or that people will meet our needs without our having to ask for it, or that people will know or respect our limits without us standing up for them.
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.
Many of us grow up burdened with the mandate to “be good”: moral, exemplary, worthy of praise and attention, and by extension deserving of what we want for ourselves. Yet alongside the demand to “be good” is the heavy burden of “being bad”: immoral, worthless, inferior, undeserving of what we want. We can also call this state “shame.”
Shame is a social emotion, though we experience it alone, because it is the emotion we feel when we’ve been exiled, cut off, or disappoint the people we want to be admired by. The threat of it is terrifying to us, who are innately a social species, especially as children who cannot survive alone. Once we’ve felt shame, we quickly start figuring out how to avoid experiencing it again. These moments, sometimes lightning-quick, lay the emotional foundation for what we understand as “goodness” and “badness” later in life.
Once when I was a really young kid, like six to eight, I was roughhousing with another boy my age in the back of a car. My grandmother, who was driving, snapped, “You two are like a couple of faggots. You can’t keep your hands off each other.” None of this meant anything to me—I didn’t know what a faggot was and what we were doing, I can now say, was normal play between boys that is actually good for long-term development.
If my grandmother was calmer or of a different generation, perhaps she would have calmly explained to us that our playing in the car was inappropriate and distracting her. But she said this other thing, and from that all I could internalize was that whatever we were doing was bad and, based on her tone, being a faggot must be bad too.
What’s relevant here is that what I learned in that moment could have become a structure to the rest of my life, if left unexamined. I could have built a whole personality around the idea that being a faggot was bad and boys touching other boys even in non-sexual play was bad—I see even younger men imposing that upon each other in Reddit threads. In my efforts to be “good” and avoid shame I could have rigidly avoided ever doing anything like that again. Then, in my efforts to be good, that shame would have ruled my entire life.
But at a certain point in life, that shame came into conflict with other things I began to learn about myself and the world. Life conspired to force me to open up those and other memories, feel the shame, and find the truth that dissolved the intensity of those feelings. Later in life, that same grandmother came to my commitment ceremony between myself and my husband. Her ideas about goodness evolved with time and experience.
I see in so many men I’ve worked with over the years—straight and queer, cis, trans, and nonbinary—a profound struggle between their desires to “be good” and all the instincts and urges and necessities of life that do not fit into “goodness.”
Even men who reject the religious and cultural constrictions of their families of origin may end up replacing one standard of goodness with another, while relating to it the same way. Instead of internalizing the teachings and wrestling with all the contradictions and paradoxes that are always present in every ideology and system of ethics, some of us cling to a rigid application of behavior and shame ourselves or others who deviate from it. I observe this often among white people and men who are early in their awakening to oppression and social justice.
One wants clarity and consistency to know how to be good, because the threat of being bad is so emotionally severe and may result in further kinds of exile: communities aligning against us because of harmful behavior, losing employment or relationships due to a heavy call-out. Yet these norms are in ongoing evolution and transformation, where behaviors that may once have been ignored or tolerated move into the category of unacceptable, and vice versa.
At some point in the process of maturation, it becomes important to let go of our clinging to “being good” and allow ourselves to explore the depths of shame and misunderstanding contained in that box that we label “being bad.” Because that box may contain many necessary tools for surviving in this world that got accidentally covered in the shit of shame: self-assertion, playfulness, ambition, kindness, caring, or leadership.
One of the consistent messages I’ve found in anti-oppression communities is that people who are not targets of a particular kind of oppression should defer to those who are in conversations about the oppression and that community, because we don’t have the perspective or experience to truly understand them or advocate for them. That remains to me a useful practice, reminding myself not to immediately dismiss perspectives that do not match my experience.
Yet we can take this challenge to the extreme of dismissing our own personal judgment and critical thinking, not doing the work of developing our own analysis, and at its very worst allowing ourselves to be disrespected, coerced, and hurt.
In a book I reviewed, Queer Magic: Power Beyond Boundaries, there is an essay in which a writer offers the suggestion that it is important spiritual work to learn to have sex with people that you do not find attractive. When I read that, I paused. Many spiritual practices involve subjecting ourselves to unpleasant or distasteful experiences to learn about ourselves and get freedom from our reactions. So I can see the merits of this practice when freely chosen by a person who wants to take on this as a discipline.
To be certain, there are cultural, political, and economic forces that have shaped what kinds of people get held up as standards of beauty and which are considered ugly. I see an invitation for reflection and getting curious about desires and feelings. Am I truly not attracted to this person or am I afraid of my desire for other reasons? Am I truly uninterested in this partner or do I feel guarded against being seen?
On the other hand, I have seen versions of this argument wielded in toxic iterations that suggest any kind of preference or exclusion of sexual partners is immoral. That is, to be a good person, you should have sex with anyone. This suggestion then makes the practice socially coerced rather than freely chosen. And I can tell you, there are people who have learned to have sex with people they’re not attracted to, either out of pity, fear, or coercion, and for these folks the path of liberation is being supported in saying no and moving toward the connections they desire.
Attraction is informed by these social influences, but also by deeper emotional forces within your own personal body, history, and psyche. The sexual ethics I hold dear is that haranguing, pressuring, and guilting a person into having sex with you has never led to a meaningful, loving, long-lived relationship. And if I strive not to guilt, pressure, or harangue others in our lives, I have the right not to accept that for myself.
For those seeking to be good within these conflicting messages, we will experience moments when our desires or boundaries will be judged by others, or we fear they will. So we might try to ignore those needs, but they tend to win out over the things we think we “should” want. The longer we go before accepting the truth, the more messy the situation becomes.
Rather than whether or not I am good, I think more useful questions are: “Am I being in integrity with myself? Am I causing harm?” Integrity means I am acting with respect to my whole self, everything I know about myself, even if I do not like it. If I am not attracted to a person, even after self-reflection and unpacking my feelings, that is a truth I need to honor.
Telling the truth may be painful, but worse would be faking a connection that’s not felt and all the suffering that goes with that—including all the ways we might end up sabotaging the relationship hoping the partner will leave first.
“Harm,” in my opinion, needs to be as clearly defined as possible so it can be rectified. To simply say, “I am causing harm,” feels akin to the box of badness. If my not wanting to have sex with a person causes them harm, I want to be clear about that so I can be accountable to whatever harm it is without violating my own boundaries in the process.
Perhaps what becomes clear is that it’s the way I communicate desire that is harmful. Being unattracted to a person does not mean they are unattractive. Being unattracted to this person does not mean disliking everyone in their group. I am not naming an objective truth about this person’s desirability, I am only what is true for me about my desire.
The more we are able to accept our own truth, the easier it is to see how every one of us has a subjective, but valid, truth. I can name my own truth then in ways that are cleaner, with less reckless hurt.
Yet even the kindness, firmest, most direct boundaries may be met with anger and hurt. What’s sticky is that when we want to be good, we want to find a way to have our guilt and shamed relieved by a person who’s hurt, angry, and doesn’t have the capacity or desire to caretake your feelings. It’s a sad, painful, difficult conversation for everyone, but it’s important, and it’s also important to learn how to step away when the conversation stops being generative.
The more free we can become of our need to be seen as good, the more room we have to discover what it’s like to be ourselves and practice our values.
This letter began after feeling provoked by a discussion about social justice and masculinity, and whether men and masculinity have been exiled by progressive culture. For much of my life I’ve been in some way troubled by the question of what is a man, what is masculinity, and whether I was either.
A long time ago I encountered the metaphor that the mind is like a blade, and one way to ensure its sharpness is to engage in debate and take on the challenge of constructing your argument for why you believe what you do, including the evidence supporting your position, and your answer to challenges and critiques. While the grating feels unpleasant, the friction is necessary to keep the mind sharp and clear. This kind of argument focuses on the quality of the ideas and the efficacy of their presentation, whether they seem to elicit truth. It’s not the deeply personal and accusatory tone that often joins what we think of as arguments these days.
A sword is not our only quality, and there are times when the blade needs to be tempered with the cup of understanding. This cup seeks to understand why the other person says, believes, feels, and acts the way they do. What’s become clear to me is every person’s actions make complete sense once you fully understand their context, and when we are able to achieve and demonstrate that understanding, we make possible real dialogue, change, and collaboration.
So both the cup and the blade are needed for being in relationship with others, but folks tend to favor one over the other, and need to make efforts to develop both.
At some point in my young life I really got a sense of the harm men and boys did to other people. Men in this culture tend to be most likely to perpetrate violence, and most likely to be victims of it.
I was bullied myself, and I saw my older sister being treated very poorly by the men she was dating, and I was too small to stand up for her but I internalized this injustice and was drawn toward the teachings of Feminism, which I thought could be freeing to all of us. I wanted a world without coercion or dominance in which we could each support each other in being the person we wanted to become.
This seed continued to grow as I became more conscious of the history of the United States and the harms done to the people who were here before we settled, the people we enslaved, and the people we used for cheap labor. So I felt a deepening and broadening of that call to throw off dominance and coercion. What’s become a dearly held belief is that each person, given both support and autonomy, will move toward their best.
So when we look at communities that are rife with poverty, violence, illness, and addiction, I tend to notice both a lack of support and a lack of autonomy. These communities tend to be economically deprived of opportunities and resources, and simultaneously controlled by people who do not live there and have little relationship with the people within them.
When I was younger and looking at these patterns, I with other white middle class people had a savior mentality, like these struggling communities were foundering in ignorance and needed help working through their problems. Now I see this as flawed thinking and a kind of oppressive behavior that offers support at the expense of autonomy.
So instead of imagining myself a savior of the poor and oppressed, I feel called to find the balance point between advocating for the support all communities need to let our innate capacities of autonomy and self-determination flourish. And I pay attention to those with power who seem to undermine that autonomy and self-determination.
I’ve been accused of hating men and that is simply not true. If I thought men and white people were evil and irredeemable then I would not be doing the work I do. What I am seeking is liberation. I often focus my attention on men and white people because I am both, not because I believe we are uniquely evil or toxic. My training has shown me that there are oppressors, collaborators, and resistors in every system and culture, and dominance and abusive violence is not unique or exclusive to any particular gender or race. If we have power but we are protected from the consequences of how we use power, we tend to become more sociopathic.
Carl Jung’s work showed me that owning both, my power and my capacity for cruelty and violence, is the path of becoming a whole person. Because we can be both caring, loving, powerful men and can cause harm. We can think of ourselves as nonviolent and non-confrontational, good caring people—men of the cup—but instead what we’ve done is outsourced our violence to men with guns who police our streets and fight in distant countries so we can have cheap oil.
Before we are willing to see our own wholeness, we imagine there is a division between innocence and guilt, that some people are innocent no matter what they do, and others are guilty before they’ve drawn their first breath. But healing that lie, seeing both my innocence and guilt, is power.
To be honest, the more I study gender in general, and men and masculinity in particular, the less certain I am of what “it” is. Gender is both profoundly real, personal, and viscerally felt—I recognize that now. Gender is also profoundly shaped by the political, economic, and social conflicts of our age. It’s both what I feel and think about myself and it’s the ways others treat me and what expectations they have of me simply by virtue of being male.
In recent years, having come more into my body and athletics, I’ve been spending more time with men and remembering the joys of it. There’s a playfulness in teasing that feels like a martial arts practice, learning how to hit each other hard enough to get attention but not hard enough to harm, while the teased person in turn practices how to deflect the attack and respond. This is when the work of the sword is joyful and connecting rather than separating.
This practice and exploration has cultivated a thought that still feels difficult to articulate, almost dangerous, because it’s incomplete. Much of my work is supporting accountability when appropriate, when we’ve caused harm. Yet I also see that we need to work on not participating in being harmed.
The last sentence is tricky and needs context. I know from experience that to hear such a sentiment can cause one to think, “Oh that means if I was hurt, I deserved it.” But what I mean is quite the opposite. None of us deserve to be hurt and harmed, or to stay in situations that demean and degrade us.
And yet often we do—for so many reasons. First, we may not recognize that we are being hurt or harmed. When we do, we may think we deserve it. Then when we learn we don’t, we may not know how to protect ourselves or trust that we can be okay if we get away. Part of our work in life is moving through each of those steps, learning the lessons we need to learn: how to recognize I’m being hurt, how to honor that I do not deserve it, and what skills and resources I need to be able to protect myself or leave the situation and be okay.
We might have all these skills and get hurt anyway. All strategies have a vulnerability that causes them to fail. But there’s something about knowing we did what we could to avoid or stop it that’s important. It tells ourselves that we matter. Even if it’s saying, “That hurts, stop it.” Even if it’s walking away from an impossible situation.
When I was growing up in the Catholic church, I internalized quite complex messages around forgiveness and guilt, salvation and damnation. The call to practice forgiveness was profound, an invitation to holiness and freedom. What I imagined this meant in practice was the capacity to endure all slights and indignities with grace and forbearance.
So I forgave others. Often before letting them know I was upset or hurt. And while I was smugly satisfied in my holiness for being so forgiving, my relationships were also quite distant and rigid. Some people experienced me as robotic and aloof. Then, when others didn’t practice the same automatic forgiveness, I had no idea what to do but please them, with resentment.
When I think on my younger self now, I see that what he saw as diligent holiness obscured his terror of confronting others, his aversion to disappointing or setting limits, and a fear of revealing that another person could hurt him. The religious practice gave what in Transpersonal psychology is called a “spiritual bypass,” the use of sacred teachings to suppress and avoid feeling pain and unpleasant emotion.
If we never allow loved ones to see our hurt and anger, resentment and distance is inevitable. There is not opportunities for loving care, for repairing hurts and strengthening communication, or for seeking out the roots of upsetting patterns. Not only do we carry our pains privately, we may inadvertently hide from them how much they matter to us, how much they affect us.
Five years ago I reached a point in which it became necessary to counter this by leaning into confrontation and conflict, saying aloud what I felt, how I was hurt, and what I needed. As I grew better at this, I further stopped automatically regarding another person’s hurt and reality as one to which I needed to surrender and caretake. I could stand up for myself and share my own reality as equal in validity. Relationships truly become beautiful and profoundly healing, effective, and connected when we are able to witness each other’s realities and their validity without sacrificing our own.
Yet there were people who could not “go there” with me. Certain relationships seemed to become unbalanced even while I was doing all this work to be accountable, honest, and direct. These folks might have said what I wanted to hear in the moment, but their behavior remained unchanged, and I kept feeling hurt in the same ways.
What became a tell for me was the vague apology: “I’m sorry for what happened the other day” now seems like it’s about disarming conflict rather than being accountable. It basically sounds like “It sucks you got upset for some reason.” Eventually I came to realize that I need clear, specific apologies. I need to hear what it is the person believes they did that was hurtful, their willingness to accept responsibility for that hurt, and an idea of the ways they were working to avoid doing it again.
Beside this realization is the clarity that claims of harm also need to be specific, clear, and actionable. Accusations of “doing harm” without these qualities feel muddied and confusing. There are absolutely times when all we can do is say “I was hurt” or “there was harm,” and we need time to get clear about the specifics. Taking that time to care for the upset and come to clarity about what wrong was done is worth doing. But if I cannot be sure what harm was done to me, it feels like a lot to expect another person to be clear on it, and make effective change.
After a year of COVID-19 lockdown and so much free time with my family at home, I notice the ways these grievances, now a few years old, continue to have an aliveness for me even when the people involved are no longer in my life. The common wisdom about letting someone live rent-free in my head applied, and it was because I was unable to get the closure and accountability I sought. Recently it’s occurred to me that I need to return to forgiveness, from a new perspective.
Forgiveness and acceptance go together, because forgiveness, as I understand it now, is about recognizing that we truly were doing all we were capable of doing. With accountability, there is an expectation that you or I can do better. To that end, in accountability I demonstrate respect by communicating boundaries, clarifying expectations, and working to build mutual understanding.
With forgiveness, it is clear this was the best we could do together, and expecting more from the relationship gives rise to greater hurt. To forgive is not to say that what happened was acceptable, or even that the relationship can or should be restored to what it was.
To forgive is a releasing of effort and expectation and separating ourselves out from the painful dynamic that could not find resolution. Rather than hoping to finally get witnessing, closure, revenge, or validation from the person who hurt me, I offer that fully to my own hurt and release the attachment.
To be forgiven truly is not about relieving the guilt of the one who caused harm, because guilt is an appropriate feeling when we are out of integrity with ourselves. Whether a person forgives us for hurting them or not, we have to do our own work to come into integrity.
Forgiveness, like grief, is always best when it’s on your schedule, and not rushed based on arbitrary social pressures or other people’s convenience. In deference to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, I’ve found that it may be easier to say, “I’m willing to forgive” rather than, “I forgive.”
What felt scariest about forgiveness was the fear that it meant I would let the person back into my life in the ways that would get me hurt again. Given that was my pattern, before I did the work to learn to have conflict, stand up for myself, and prioritize my own happiness and health, there was wisdom in not forgiving. Forgiveness is not an opioid to apply to any discomfort or suffering. We achieve it through the full experiencing of our hearts.
Lately I’ve begun a simple practice of noticing when my mind is caught up in rehashing old hurts, pausing, and saying to myself, “I am willing to forgive them for this.” What I say instead of “for this” is often interesting. Rather than forgiving the hurtful acts, I find myself naming the underlying vulnerability that led them to doing what they did. Rather than the specific lie, forgiveness for the shame that made lying seem necessary. Rather than for the cruelty, forgiveness for the terror that made them feel they had to protect themself.
And, too, I turn that forgiveness toward myself. Forgiveness for the ways I participated in the hurt. Forgiveness for the ways I became more reactive and hurtful in turn. Forgiveness for not listening to what was being communicated through actions, if not through words.
Once I truly began to forgive, I was able to grieve more deeply. Sweet and wonderful memories I’d forgotten resurfaced, and I could feel the sadness of having had and lost that connection. And having moved through that, I could see us as struggling humans rather than malicious beings.
And the lessons I’ve needed to learn settled more deeply into my heart. The knowing that I must protect myself as much as I risk my heart in love. Releasing the subtle efforts to control others even in ways that seem benign and “healing” rather than accepting them exactly as they are.
Whereas forgiveness once felt divine, now I see it as a consolation when the greater work of accountability and repair of relationship has failed. Yet even relationships that involve hurt, relationships that end, have gifts to offer us in growing toward self-mastery, intimacy, honesty, and genuine belonging.
When I used to teach mindfulness workshops to folks, the idea of practicing nonjudgmental awareness tended to be a lively topic. Isn’t it important to judge certain things and behaviors? Shouldn’t we judge when people are doing harm? Underneath this was often a feeling of threat by the idea that completely giving up all judgment would be making ourselves vulnerable to victimization, a very valid concern.
Engaging with these conversations helped me to refine what the practice meant to me.
As a therapist, what seems clear to me is that people heal when they can move past their shame to be witnessed and accepted as they are, and this healing leads to greater integrity. Few people enjoy their own suffering and find little relief when that suffering is met with contempt, even if it’s “deserved”. People make choices based on what they know, and often under stress those choices are short-sighted and create more suffering. Helping people to slow down and soothe the stress response helps them to access their executive functioning to better reflect on and make choices, and mindfulness practice is one way of doing this. Much of this would be easier if we lived in a society where people had access to healthcare, housing, and food as needed.
Things that get in the way of moving out of the stress response are emotional cruelty, physical violence, and a certain energy of scorn or contempt. All of these are essentially social threats that exacerbate shame and distress and make people more reticent to share their true feelings. What we often call “being judgmental” is this attitude of scorn or contempt, communicating a belief in some essential badness in a person for their choices rather than offering curiosity to understand why they are as they are.
In mindfulness practice, the primary work is to practice offering to ourselves that inner witnessing, kindness, and acceptance with presence. We notice our thoughts, feelings, and sensations, and the stories we tell about these things. We do not act on them, except to be with the practice and continue breathing.
When it comes to our behaviors, we may wish to make judgments, though it is helpful to move past a simplistic binary of “good” or “bad” and into a deeper reflection on how we feel about our behaviors and the consequences of our actions.
If you are an alcoholic, for example, you could practice nonjudgmental observation of the craving to drink, and in many ways that okayness makes it easier to be with the craving without doing anything about it, until it naturally passes. What could be not okay is having the drink, and it could be not okay because you know from history that having the drink leads to a whole host of unwanted consequences and harms to you.
Inner acceptance is the primary work that allows all of our conflicting parts to better work together. If we can offer that to others, that is lovely, but we cannot do that without boundaries, which requires judgment.
Here we approach the paradox that I’ve been mulling over for most of 2020. There are limits of nonjudgmental tolerance, and there are limits of judgmental rage, and we’re sitting in all of it. Whether you think masking is a government conspiracy or you think anti-maskers are dangerous sociopaths, we still have to be in the same space with each other and we cannot control each other.
Ruminating on how much you despise the other person’s beliefs and actions has very limited returns for one’s emotional equilibrium and wellbeing. At the same time, simply minding one’s business and not judging others’ actions may mean experiencing unwanted harms and risks.
For example, I have great compassion for whatever people living alone are doing to get through the pandemic emotionally. Some of them have a pod, some of them are hooking up with people, some of them are prioritizing family.
But if that person wants to come inside my house to hang out with me unmasked, then we encounter judgment and boundaries. I don’t think they are bad, but I have a risk management protocol that for me is doing reasonably okay at both helping me not to constantly ruminate every time I clear my throat (“This is it! I have COVID!”) while also not being utterly isolated. That protocol is a work in progress, but I need to have it, and it does not work for me to disrespect it. For us to meet, we would both have to renegotiate our boundaries and risks.
It is easy to be kind and nonjudgmental toward another person’s choices when the consequences do not impact our own wellbeing and stability. And when those consequences do impact us, it is not wrong to have judgment and boundaries about what we will accept.
This is one of the reasons why, even if you have a therapist friend or partner, you need your own therapist. In a social or intimate relationship we ideally meet to care for each other in a mutual way, to make decisions together that affect each other. A therapist has clearer boundaries and greater distance from the impact of your choices. Your professional therapist would not be personally hurt when you break relationships agreements. Your therapist lover would be.
The kind of judgment that comes with boundary-setting feels harsh and angry to those of us unused to it, and when we try it out we may err on the side of too much rigidity and anger after years of too much timidity. We may set those initial boundaries from a place of making it about ourselves, like their behavior is something they did to us. Often we may feel our own guilt about having the boundary, which may lead to more brittleness. These conversations tend to communicate more of the contemptuous judgments.
An image of a road on which is graffitied “Mask or Stay Home,” yet the graffiti is itself crossed out.
There are certain problems, such as a global pandemic, when we cannot escape being impacted by others’ choices. If you think COVID is a hoax, you still have to deal with the economic contraction of stay at home orders and people being unwilling to risk their health. If you diligently follow all the public health recommendations, you still may be impacted when the hospitals are filled up with active COVID cases. Collective navigation of what we judge, what we support, can only be done through collective process, but on a personal level we need to find what we can do for ourselves within that process.
It takes practice to get to a place of directness and dignity, and it may be surprising to learn that kindness and firmness need not be enemies but may indeed be very good friends. We do no one a service when we let ourselves be torn to shreds by our own caring and compassion. Firmness is also about being clear in what you are willing to offer and what expectations you have and accept. Kindness is also about not allowing people to disrespect and violate your boundaries in a way that will lead you to hate them if unchecked.
One practice I learned from the Reclaiming tradition was the work of establishing group agreements for communication and working together, in ways that respond to the group’s unique needs and desires. Ideally, one builds those agreements among the people present, but often people do not fully know how to articulate what helps them to feel safe and included. A lot of people have never been asked, or not thought much about it, or can only tell you what has gone wrong without being able to say what they need instead.
So as I’ve run workshops and groups I’ve found it useful to come up with my own proposal of the values of successful groups. From this I came up with a formula: “Respect yourself. Respect each other. Respect the work.”
These three components—Self, Each Other, Work—are like the Tarot’s Three of Pentacles: three gears that may spin together in a productive way that makes the whole greater than its parts. But if one or more parts gets stuck, it can truly shut down the whole.
The Three of Coins from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot
Respect Your Self
When we come into a group or community, we bring with us our unique stories, desires, needs, values, wounds, boundaries, and cultures. We have significant questions pertaining to personal comfort, belonging, and survival: “Is there a place for me here? Will I get my needs met? Will I be safe?”
Those questions are addressed by the confluence of the three coins, but the place where we have the greatest power is in Self. There is no group or relationship that will consistently and unfailingly anticipate and tend to all our wants and needs without communication and conflict. Self-responsibility is the right and obligation to observe and tend my wants and needs, and it is one important ingredient for interdependent, resilient communities.
Within the realm of self-responsibility:
Advocating for or addressing my physical needs and accommodations.
Communicating what I need.
Communicating and enforcing boundaries when I feel endangered or hurt.
Establishing the necessary amount of space and connection for engagement with self-respect.
Self-responsibility is not radical independence. It is the recognition that to be interdependent means I need to make some effort to make things work. That effort could be in self-adjustment and accommodating my needs, and it could be self-advocacy and communicating what accommodations I need.
The best example, to my mind, of an ethic of self-responsibility in groups is around bathroom use. When I was in elementary school through high school, I was in classroom settings in which adults exerted control over my body through determining when I could use the bathroom.
There were 5-10 minute windows in which it was allowed, and it was incumbent upon me to discipline my bathroom needs so they could only be met in those windows. If I had to go during class or on a road trip, typically I needed to ask permission very publicly and visibly, and then to submit to the adult’s decision of whether or not I would be allowed. None of the adults knew how it felt to be in my body.
Should my body need to use the bathroom in an unpermitted way, I found it exceedingly distracting and overwhelming. I internalized shame that it was somehow wrong of me to need to go in the middle of a lecture or group discussion, for example, but at the same time most of my energy would then go toward willing myself to be present and mitigate an even more embarrassing accident.
This practice disciplines us to be ready for workplaces where our bathroom use might be in some way monitored and controlled. Whether it’s working at a fulfillment center where that time gets docked from your pay, or working at an office where you get tacitly monitored and judged, it turns your own relationship with your own body into a site of external control that undermines your bodily autonomy.
Perhaps ironic or perhaps by design, this kind of authoritarian control is primarily necessary in work places where people do not feel invested or empowered in their work. When there is not a sense of collective ownership in the work being done, then those who are simply there to get a paycheck may be more prone to taking long breaks that are about avoidance rather than tending bodily needs. But exerting more discipline and control only reinforces that dynamic, disempowering and disinvesting.
When it comes to my groups, now that I’m a grownup, I tell people that if they need to go to the bathroom, they should just go. Whether we’re in the middle of something or not.
Respect Each Other
We affect and are affected by each other. When we are in a group of individuals trying to get along with each other, some measure of civility and norms are both inevitable and necessary.
The way a person talks to me really affects how well I am able to hear them, whether I have to manage my emotional upset or whether I can consider their perspective. In turn, whether I am truly listening and valuing their input affects their own feelings of safety and belonging.
We often have unique standards of what is okay to say to others versus what is okay for others to say to us. We often have double standards or convenient exceptions—it’s never okay to speak in this way, except this time the dude really deserves it. We often think we know what is going on inside other people but also have no way of fully understanding their inner context, and the assumptions we bring to an interaction shape how we behave.
If you understand a person’s inner world, their history, and their context, their behavior makes complete sense. But mostly we only understand our own contexts and judge others’ behavior from our contexts. It makes life pretty challenging.
Group norms and agreements help to bring a sense of coherence to the group. Norms need to allow for conflict and disagreement with guardrails of acceptable behavior. I can hear a lot of critical feedback from a person but if they use a certain word, or say things that imply they know my motivations and inner world, I find it very hard to set aside my defensiveness.
For me, an important group agreement is for people to only speak from their own experience. So instead of saying, “You blew off the meeting,” which tends to engender the urge to defend or make excuses, I find it more workable to hear someone say “I was really disappointed when you weren’t at the meeting.” This tells me what my impact was and is often enough to provoke my guilt and responsibility, along with my desire to be esteemed in the group, to act better in the future.
Respecting each other means treating every other person’s needs as being as valuable as our own, which again sometimes brings us to conflict when it appears that needs are incompatible or cannot coexist. Sometimes a group cannot be for every person, and has natural boundaries that exclude people. At the same time, if a group does not wrestle with issues of inclusion and exclusion, its insularity can lead to a whole manner of toxic internal problems and problems for the greater community.
Respect the Work
Respecting the work is about the group’s process and tasks. This could encompass the business of the organization and the necessary tasks to keep it functioning, like filing paperwork on time, making sure everyone knows when the meetings will happen, having clear agenda and a process by which people can participate, processes to ensure the work produced is ethical and of good quality.
When I am doing workshops that involve experiential practice, for example, respecting the work means engaging in those practices with what John Kabat-Zinn calls “skeptical curiosity.” Make doing the work a sincere experiment, neither expecting it to fix all your problems nor expecting it to fail and be a waste of time.
To expect miracles means that when the work gets hard we may consider it a failure. It also opens us up to abusive gurus and community dynamics, believing that someone out there has the Real Thing, the Magic Cure.
To expect failure more or less guarantees failure. Every process has problems, which is not an excuse to continually work to rectify those problems. But at the same time, we don’t get anywhere if we don’t engage with what’s here.
Respect for the work includes the ways communities govern themselves. Whether decisions get made by consensus, by voting, or by fiat from a leader—any of these might be fine if the other two conditions are met. A benevolent dictator who respects the needs and wants of every person under their care might be a workable system. Until they die, and the person who takes their place does not respect Self or Community.
I prefer to participate in communities where there is more direct engagement by consensus or voting, but in some situations I accept hierarchy. In my therapy practice, I am a benevolent dictator. I run my own ship, and I strive to set clear expectations and meet clients where they are at. I am accountable to my ongoing clients to try to surface and address problems as they arise—that is part of the task of therapy—but my limit is when my clients’ needs or problems seem to require that I compromise what I consider to be the process. In those situations, I consider it respectful to all of us to support my client in finding a clinician who is a better fit. Even in hierarchy, there must be respect for self and each other.
All this is to say, the work of the group is its own being that requires its own tending and attention. This is the function of business meetings, as tedious as they are, in which the group intentionally gathers to do the work necessary to maintain its functioning. When I am involved in an organization, I want clear expectations. I want to know how decisions are made. I want to know how I can be involved in decisions if I want to be. I want to know what processes are available if I have a grievance or want to change the organization.
If these processes are not clearly delineated and publicly accessible, then the community will quickly become riven by gossip, secrecy, power struggles, and general bullshittery as social status gets leveraged to make organizational change. A governing process should exist and work regardless of who participates or does not participate.
In one of my early communities that was consensus-based, we had meetings in which the ethic was—whoever shows up to the meeting is supposed to be here and gets to make the decisions for the group. There was otherwise no criteria for membership or clear boundaries around who was a member and who mattered. That meant the opinions of people who invested hours of work into community were treated as equally important as those of the person who came to the meeting because they’re currently dating or having sex with another person in the group.
That’s no longer the way I want to practice community, but if that’s what you want, go for it. The difficulty arose from what I perceived to be a lack of confidence in and commitment to our process. People who did not come to the meetings voiced their angry criticisms over email, calling for decisions they weren’t present for to be undone or modified. And then we would violate our own process by allowing consensus decisions made at the meetings to be abandoned or undone. That doesn’t work! If decisions can always be undone or reversed on whim or because of a hurt feeling, then there is no process that can be relied upon to support the community. In a sense we end up stuck in process or always undoing and revising decisions around foundational practices.
Three Pentacles Spinning in Harmony
Once upon a time I believed there were intrinsically violent and destructive groups and ideologies, and others that were purely good and revolutionary. These days it seems to me that there are some that are absolutely violent and destructive, but many philosophies, religions, and practices that could be wielded for harm or healing. Or healing that entraps you in harm, like the self-help movement that turns into a cult. Or harm that leads to healing, like liberation theologies or the practice of what was once called “queering,” finding liberatory queer possibilities in heteronormative cultures.
What I have learned is that there are many kinds of transformative communities, and many ways ideologies can be wielded to opress or uplift, and every practice could work wonders, could create harm, or could simply be the wrong process for the task at hand. Life is really messy.
This framework of the three gears of respect may be a way of diagnosing whether a circumstance is harmful of helpful to you. When I am in this community, do I feel I respect myself? Do I respect the people around me, and feel respected by them? Do we have clear processes for doing our work, and can we engage in hard conversations about the work without it becoming personal and embittered?
And if there is struggle, where is it located? Is it hard to respect myself because we don’t respect each other? Is it hard to respect each other because the power dynamics are unclear and murky? Does it seem everyone respects each other but still I have no autonomy over myself? Does it seem like only one person really gets respect?
If it doesn’t work for everyone involved, it doesn’t work.
From writer, witch, and licensed therapist Anthony Rella comes a collection of short essays on emotions, boundaries, disappointment, guilt, hope, shame, intimacy, and connection. Written with the warm voice of a caring and patient friend, these essays help guide the reader to their own center where they can find power, balance, and joy not despite difficult moments and emotions, but because of them.
In the United States, we are passing through a threshold of change. At this moment no one is sure what will be on the other side, and it is possible that we will not know by tomorrow what is on the other side, and that it may take much longer than we like to know.
No matter who wins the government elections, we are still passing through other thresholds. We are in the midst of a pandemic. We are in the midst of an escalating climate crisis. We are having and raising children. We are taking care of the people who are living.
There is not going to be a singular event that determines history. An event is like a catalyst, like throwing active yeast into flour. An event sets reactions in motion that transform the matter into something else. The 9/11 attacks were one such event. The last election was another. The onset of coronavirus another.
We are periodically reminded of our limitations. How our lives are shaped by historical, political, and economic forces that we only have limited capacity to shape. But in truth, only some of us need this reminding. Many, many more have known this on a daily basis for their entire lives.
In our isolation this year, separated from loved ones and the familiar, many of us have fallen into despair and wondered what is the purpose of anything. Why set goals? Why dream of a future? Why keep showing up to the work?
And on a personal level, we don’t always know. There will always be setbacks and then unexpected moments of huge leaps forward. There will always be adversaries and people who find ways to corrupt what was beautiful and revolutionary, and people who will be corrupted by time and power and systems larger than the self.
Corruption is like mold, like rot, like ants creeping into the kitchen. It is an outcome of cleaning habits and environment. It is the natural world doing what it does, breaking down rigid form so it can feed new forms. And sometimes it breaks down things we love, and sometimes those things need to be broken down.
I do not have answers for us or promises of ease if you simply follow a protocol. My work is about helping others to know themselves and bring that fullness into their lives. None of that guarantees that others will treat that self with respect, but it gives us a much greater chance of finding what heals and empowers us.
Some battles will not end in our lifetimes. Even bigotries and fights we thought were settled seem to get stirred up anew when we least expect it. Each time they hurt, deeply. Not all of us will survive this time, as we know, not all of us have survived.
But.
Think about all the people from whom you have received inspiration, encouragement, or liberation. The book, the teacher, the relative, the friend who showed you something that you didn’t know was possible before. The person walking down the street wearing vibrant clothes that stuck out so much but showed you the enormous world that clothes could be. The person who showed you what kinds of relationships were possible. The writer who opened your mind to a revolutionary perspective.
If you have received a liberating fire in your life, consider that part of your work could be passing along that fire to someone else.
You might not even know all the ways you’ve done it. Perhaps it was when you told someone in public that you thought their joke was hurtful. Perhaps it was when you were just smiling and enjoying the beauty of the world.
There are so many little moments that are unfathomable. There are moments where you might have thought the opposite happened, when someone expressed anger or offense toward you, but it was because you pricked something deep within their souls that was longing to come forward. Something that scared them because they didn’t know it was possible to be you before, and because they didn’t know it was possible they didn’t know that they wanted it, and now that they know it’s possible and they want it they have to live with that knowledge like an itch that may eventually kindle into their own liberatory flame.
Our lives are valuable unto ourselves, and we are part of a web of people who pass the flame of light and aliveness to each other.
Meditation practice was something I’d attempted and failed several times over my late teens and early twenties, after reading a book by Lawrence LeShan that offered a rather straightforward, earnest, and very Western approach to starting a meditation practice. He made it sound simple and profound, though he was dismissive of the spiritual and supernatural trappings that came out of religious traditions in which meditation was taught.
Yet I would get stuck often, thinking that the busyness of my mind meant I was not meditating properly. And my discipline would flag quickly, and I’d give up, thinking it was something only a particular kind of person was able to do. It wasn’t until after I graduated college and started studying with a teacher who insisted on daily meditation as part of our practice that I was able to work through my resistance.
A resistance with many layers, a resistance that persists even after fifteen years of daily practice.
The main resistance was confusing the practice with the results. Those of us who are not taught meditation in a religious context are often drawn to it with promises of overall ease, health, relaxation, and stillness of mind. We think that this is what meditation is—to clear the mind and sit in blissful silence and ease.
It is not. And our attachment to those experiences becomes a barrier to both meditation itself and having those experiences. It’s very sad, believe me, and it’s not about you as a person. It’s a human struggle. There is a reason we have all these different ways of meditating and all these teachings about “monkey mind.” Our minds do not naturally lend themselves to silence and stillness. Nor do we get there through internal force.
There are many forms of practice to meditation, but whatever it is, the practice is simply the practice. Focus on the posture, focus on the breath, focus on the way your body moves or does not move, focus on the sounds in your environment, focus on this icon, focus on your inner state. Count your breathing. Imagine you are a mountain. Chant the name of the divine or this holy mantra and be with the sound you are making.
Notice when you get distracted and lose your practice. Return to the practice.
That’s it.
When we take on the discipline of meditating, we are immediately confronted with everything in us that refuses and fears silence, stillness, and emptiness. We notice everything within us that strives for control and is so afraid of not having it. We see within us all the qualities that those controlling parts suppressed—which could be some deeply unsettling experiences and memories that need therapeutic support.
During my first few months of meditation practice, not only did I notice my busy mind, I became increasingly aware of how much tension I carried in my body. I was in my early twenties and would never have called myself a tense person. I imagined myself to be a go-with-the-flow kind of guy. I was praised for it.
Once, on a field trip in high school, I was waiting in line for food and a woman blatantly cut in front of me. I said nothing. My Catholic school teachers noted this and stopped me to praise me for my virtuous patience. In truth, I was utterly terrified of upsetting anyone in my life, and suppressed all my anger and all my wants and needs to be as small as possible. Now, I do not consider that to be patience, but rather allowing myself to be disrespected.
Patience might look like engaging in the conflict with as much kindness for myself and the woman as possible. Or it might be choosing to allow the cutting and being with my upset. What I did was less of a problem than the way I was when I was doing it.
Meditation teaches patience because it is the practice of patience. It is the practice of feeling one’s full experience, letting go of the controls, and staying with the discomfort of practice. And it is through this engagement that I discovered how much anger and tension was in my body. Letting go of the mental efforts to control my inner experience, I felt how that effort was embodied in the tightness of jaw, the tension in my joints.
One amazing morning I was sitting and noticed that my right leg was tensed and lifted slightly off the ground. As I noticed this, I noticed that this leg had always been, almost instinctively. And as I noticed this, I noticed I could allow my leg to relax so that my knee rested on the ground and I was not holding myself up so much.
Later, as a group we were all sitting together for longer than I usually would on my own. Group meditation practice for me offers a greater sense of stillness than I can find on my own, though I find this to be a reciprocal practice. The more I practice, the more stillness I offer the group, and the more stillness I am able to receive. My whole body began to tremble. It was unsettling but I kept breathing. Later, I asked my teacher about it, and I’m not sure they fully knew the answer but they offered that it sounded like an infusion of power into my being.
Fifteen years later, I think this is true. Stillness and discipline creates space for power to enter into my being. And, concurrently, I believe this shuddering to be a somatic release of tension and buried stress. This experience does not happen often these days, but when it does, I notice it tends to come after periods of time in which I felt particularly disconnected and avoidant. When I’ve spent a lot of time doomscrolling and checking out of my body. When my sitting practice feels shallow and twenty minutes go by with me feeling “I” wasn’t there. Then, some beautiful mornings, I show up ready to engage in the practice, and the shuddering happens. Afterward, I feel like I’m here. My body is touching the earth. I am connected with the people in my life.
It’s as though something in me was trying to hold its breath and get through the hard stuff. Breath-holding is something we instinctively do when we’re anxious. It’s a kind of bracing for impact, and in some ways it’s a way of trying to skip over the hard stuff. Like if I simply stop breathing then what happens won’t hurt so much, and when it’s over I can breathe again.
In meditation, the part of us able to endure the hard stuff comes to ground and the breath-holding parts get to relax. Like an adult shows up who can handle things and let the other parts of us take a break.
Much has been written of spiritual bypassing, which is very much a problem of people turning their spiritualities into shields against reality and their “enlightenment” into cruelty. The problems of spiritual bypassing in New Age and white spiritual communities seems to have flourished in the way so many of them have proven fertile ground for QAnon’s anti-Semitic conspiracies.
We struggle, I think, to balance our Western teachings around knowing and protecting the Self while also remembering we belong to a whole that is greater than us. To hold sacred both our joy and our grief, our kindness and our anger, our stillness and our action. When we cannot hold both, we see them as enemies and must take a side that divides us against ourselves and makes us brittle.
We need boundaries and connection. Conflict is ongoing and the work of justice will be ongoing. We cannot wait until we’ve solved every outer problem before we can take time for our own needs and wellbeing. And simply focusing on our own needs and wellbeing is its own bubble that again leads back to cruelty, apathy, and vulnerability to authoritarianism.
Spiritual practice is a stepping away from life for a period of time before re-engaging. We need both movements, to be able to step away and the intention to step back. It is like conflict with our loved ones. We need to be able to say we’ve reached our limit and need to take a break to gather ourselves, reflect, vent, and figure out what we need to do to resolve the conflict. Simply throwing more words, hurt, anger, and accusations upon each other is like adding too much wood to the fire and smothering it. We need space to breathe.
At the same time, if we say we need a break from the conflict and never come back to it, then we’ve added a different offense. We try to distract from the disrespect, hurt, and unmet needs but they do not go away, they simply linger and grow with resentment, waiting to burst out again in hot, explosive flame.
What we need is to say we are taking a break, and then to return and engage with a more sober and grounded mind. That is spiritual practice. Instead of sending the angry email, I go and spend ten minutes breathing and connecting to what is holy within me, and then I try to engage the angry email as a holy human person. The conflict needs to be dealt with, but I engage with my full self, and that changes how things unfold.
Spirituality is not about bypassing, it is about becoming more and more present and growing our Being in life. And noticing when we get distracted, and what we do to numb ourselves and make ourselves smaller, and then to return to that which grows presence.
In the course of therapy, sometimes we reach a point in which one’s mental and emotional struggles are so overwhelming that it’s time, or past time, to consider the option of taking psychiatric medication. When I was growing up, psychiatric medication experienced a sort of revolution with the popularization of antidepressants such as Prozac and treatments for ADHD such as Ritalin. As is often the case when new technology and medication bursts onto the scene, some people run toward it with great enthusiasm, while others wring their hands in fear over what it will do to us as a species.
When I was a depressed teenager considering medication, I listened to those arguments and my older Internet friends who passed their concerns along to me, and it made me resistant to trying. The fears they expressed, which I sat with, were that psychiatric drugs would strip us of our individuality or turn us into numb little sheep incapable of producing anything creative, beautiful, original, or courageous. Other concerns were that treating depression with medication put the blame solely internally—that it was me and my bad attitude that was the problem, not my circumstances.
Fortunately, psychiatric medication has increasingly lost its stigma over the years and become more normalized, but these fears and concerns persist, and they often show up when people deep in their emotional suffering are invited to explore taking medication as an option.
Before I go further, I want to clarify that I am a Master’s-level mental health clinician with no training in prescribing medications to care for mental and emotional distress. Thus I am not able to advise you on whether you should take medications or what to take. I can provide certain factual data supported by scientific evidence. And I can support you in how you think about and decide whether to take medication.
As I’ve gone through my own journeys as a person and a therapist, I continue to think there are legitimate questions and skepticism around the psychiatric model of care, and at the same time there are very clear merits to treatment that should not be dismissed outright. When one is deep in emotional turmoil, stuck for a long time, there is no shame in taking medication as a part of one’s treatment plan. Psychotherapy is about learning to swim in the waters of the soul, but if you’re drowning, that is not the time to learn how to swim. The priority is to stop drowning.
Yet concerns persist for those considering it: Am I becoming dependent on a bunch of chemicals? Will I lose what makes me me? Will I become numb and disconnected from reality? Am I betraying my authenticity?
Concern: Chemicals
A contradiction often unacknowledged by those concerned about becoming dependent on medication, often voiced as “chemicals,” is that they usually are already using substances to deal with their mental and emotional problems. Indeed, they’re often using drugs and alcohol, or behaviors like sex, shopping, gambling. What they’re not using are drugs prescribed by a trained physician or nurse practitioner, in an accountable and collaborative relationship.
The concern about putting chemicals in one’s body may be a gloss over more nuanced concerns, but on its face it is incomplete. We are always putting chemicals in our body. Our mood and thoughts are shaped as much by the food we eat and the water we drink as they are by whatever else we put in our bodies.
The irony is how often these unprescribed drugs reinforce and complicate problems. Alcohol is a depressant, but one frequently turned to by depressed people. Methamphetamines and opioids are chemicals that some bodies need support manufacturing, but taking them ad hoc from your friend behind the gas station is quite a different experience than taking them in a collaborative relationship with a prescribing physician who is informed about the secondary effects they may have on your body.
Within these concerns is I think a mistrust of pharmaceuticals as “manufactured” or corporate-promoted chemicals with a bias toward “natural” things as being intrinsically better for us. About this, conversations are being had. But we may also again not notice the contradictions and unexamined assumptions we make. What does “nature” really mean? What does it mean for something to be processed or synthesized? Fermentation is a natural process, but alcohol in the form we consume it is not found in the wild. Nicotine is a plant whose overconsumption can really hurt our lungs and hearts, and depending on the brand of cigarettes, it may get paired with a whole host of other chemicals.
Nature is a place of wonder and majesty, and a great deal of the natural world is fatal to humans. Our whole experience has been about navigating this ongoing tension, finding ways to make a safe place for ourselves and transform nature into what benefits us.
Concern: Authenticity
It is so strange that having mental or emotional distress often requires us to become little philosophers grappling with the big questions when all we may want is to get through the day without a panic attack. Who am I? What is authenticity? Am I my mental illness?
Increasingly the word “authenticity” feels unhelpful to me, for I experience all of us as tiny worlds of rich, diverse, and contradictory parts of self. At the same time, there is something true about it. We can feel when we are not being ourselves—when all of our relationships are based on a facade that feels exhausting to maintain. When we are hiding from everyone in our life something true about ourselves, something about which we feel shame. That shame-based hiding of parts of self is I think what authenticity points toward. It’s not that the facade is not who I am, but it is only one part of me, and every part of me wants to be loved.
I’ve noticed that this fear around losing authenticity seems particular to people suffering mood disorders such as depressive or Bipolar conditions. Very few folks experiencing intense anxiety and panic tend to identify with those parts of themselves in a protective way. Nevertheless, there is something about these mood states that do feel important, valuable, and sometimes the idea of medicating feels like abandoning those parts of us.
This is a concern worthy of holding in awareness and paying attention to while you’re trying medications. It’s not one with a simple answer, but one that can only be explored by trying and staying in relationship with your care providers. In some cases, I’ve observed people feeling like the medication helps them to be more of themselves—they start to see how their manic or depressive parts took so much oxygen that there was little space for other parts of them. In some cases, folks seem to feel they can hold their moods more effectively, but the moods do not totally go away. In some cases, people feel numb and detached and decide this is a sign the particular medication is not right for them.
Given our unique histories with authority, mental health providers and medical caregivers, we may not trust them to act in a way that’s collaborative and supporting our own health goals. We may fear that they’ll medicate us in a way that makes us numb, placated sheep, trying to kill our uniqueness and originality.
These concerns are not irrational, and your concerns and desires should be included in any relationship you have with a health provider. If you are working with a medical provider you do not trust to listen to you, take your needs seriously, and support your health goals, then you have every right to be suspicious. I hope you are able to address that with your provider or find someone who is a better fit.
It is appropriate to have some skepticism of any treatment. Assuming any kind of therapy or practice is the solution to all your problems is itself a big problem. At best, this ungrounded hope sets you up for disappointment that may lead you to give up too quickly when things get hard. At worst, the attitude makes you susceptible to snake oil peddlers and cult leaders willing to exploit your suffering for their profit and ego.
Concern: Independence
Trying psychiatric medication complicates our notions of independence in a few ways, one of which was addressed in the topic of “Agency” with regard to collaborating with medical providers versus deciding for one’s self what to do.
The other complication is, I think, rooted in a Western notion of the ego that is incomplete. We have this bias of thinking that “Who I am,” my uniqueness, is this specific quality that needs to be protected from the devouring forces of the external world. On the other side of this idea is a fear that becoming dependent on something we cannot make ourselves, like a drug, means that we’ll be helpless and easily victimized.
It’s very humbling to consider the possibility that our very experience of reality and truth may be determined by factors we cannot choose and manage alone, like our neurobiology, our diet, our environment, political realities, emotional contagion from the people around us, the historical age in which we live, our culture. If you believe in spiritual realities, you might add a whole host of other unconscious and unchosen influences.
With all that we’ve been learning about the body and the Self in the past century, it’s clear to me that the Self is ecological, a microbiome within larger biomes. We’re a meatsack with a running nervous system, but we also house all manner of bacteria in our digestive system that weren’t made from our bodies or our DNA. And if they’re not doing well, they can really affect our mood. And without them, we’re screwed.
For some, taking a psychiatric medication feels like an admission of defeat. They believe that strength and self-control means being able to dominate one’s mental and emotional states through sheer internal will. Yet I believe this to be a distortion of the nature of will. Will is more about how we do things than what we do. To decide to take a medication to offset the brain’s tendency to absorb too much serotonin, for example, is an act of will. It is making a conscious choice to utilize one’s available options toward one’s own goals, and requires consistent practice and follow-through.
Conclusion: Health
One aspect that becomes clear in these conversations is the painful way that morality gets blended with health, diminishing both. When we make the choice to use medication or not a commentary on our moral worth or virtue, we are in a bind that ironically means we care more about others’ judgments of us than our own wellbeing.
If it works for you, if it makes your life better and moves you toward your health goals, who cares? That person who is judging you for needing medication? What do they know? Do they have to live with your brain every day?
Illness is a natural state of the body, and much is beyond our control in terms of what tendencies we inherit toward physical and mental or emotional health. “Healthy” has become another word we substitute as a moralizing judgment on behavior, with rarely any clear foundation in science or grounded in the context of the individual’s actual health needs.
There is no objective criteria for “health” that is universally agreed upon, and seeking such may not be useful. What is useful is identifying your health goals, and using those to evaluate what supports and interventions move you toward them. If you are satisfied with your health, then whatever structures you set up are working for you, whether that’s eating vegan and jogging daily, or whether that’s seeing three different therapists a week and taking meds twice a day.
If your goal is to not think about suicide every day, you could try all kinds of things, including medication. There’s no one answer. For some people, certain medications increase suicidality, so that outcome would be unhelpful. Maybe it turns out taking dance classes was the better move. Maybe it turns out all you needed was Prozac for a few months. Maybe you just need a space away from oppressive assholes and be surrounded by people who love you. Maybe you need all of these things and medications.
You get to decide what your health goals are, and you deserve to work with people who will help you think through all your options and find the right choices that work for you. Unfortunately, that can be a long process of trial and error even under ideal circumstances, and just the process of putting together a good health team may be a challenge.
Whether you choose to try medication or not is your decision, but let it be your decision. Let it be an option that you consider fully.
