Anthony Rella, MA, LMHC

Category: Culture

  • Unbinding from Powerlessness, Rage, and Returning to Power

    Cynthia Wang of the Kellogg School at my alma mater, Northwestern University, has an academic interest in conspiracy thinking, and has engaged in a number of studies that have teased apart factors that influence the likelihood to conspiracy-mindedness. In a recent article, she suggests that people who feel disempowered or lacking in agency are more prone to finding conspiracies, both in the larger sense of what we think about as “conspiracy thinking” but also within their organizations. Wang’s prescription to address conspiracy mindedness is to work with the person to help them identify their goals and clear pathways to their goals, nurturing a sense of agency and personal control.

    Wang’s insight adds nuance to the suggestion that conspiracy thinking is a reaction against a world that feels discordant and beyond control, a way to establish control when agency feels far away. Jessica Stillman at Inc.com suggests Wang’s approach as a way of engaging with folks who have been enfolded into the QAnon conspiracy phenomenon, to help them think about goals and concrete steps they can take in their life.

    Overall, I agree that empowerment is a better move than arguing with the conspiracy itself. As we’ve learned through decades of research, once people form beliefs, those beliefs prove remarkably resilient even when they are factually disproven. Indeed there is evidence that arguing with someone’s belief using facts is more likely to reinforce that person’s belief than cause them to reflect and abandon it.

    Factually countering something like a conspiracy theory is like trying to weed dandelions by cutting them off at the stem. Unless we get all the way to the root, the dandelion will simply grow back. To be truly effective, we need to look to the roots, which requires a measure of compassion.

    What I find useful in such conversations is to recognize when we’ve become enmeshed in a battle for who defines reality and to pivot toward exploring the deeper motivations of the other person. The question I tend to use to do this pivot is some variation of, “(If all that you’re saying is true,) How does it affect you?” (The parenthetical comment is rarely spoken but for my own sake I remember that I am not necessarily embracing their reality.)

    When pivoting in this way, we need to commit to moving toward genuine curiosity and concern. Most people, I find, intuitively sense this is a disarming move and respond with some measure of wariness. If there’s a sense that there is an agenda to use the information against them, they’re not going to open up. In a sense, this pivot is about letting go of the effort to argue about realities and to become curious about what in the other person’s life is engendering the powerlessness that has made their reality attractive.

    If we can keep going, exploring where they feel powerless or stuck, we might be able to help simply by witnessing and caring about their feelings. Often this alone helps people to feel less isolated and overwhelmed, and helps them ground long enough to come up new ideas. You might ask if they’re interested in suggestions, or you might ask them more questions about where they feel stuck and if they have resources.

    What Wang suggests, and I find to be true, is that when we help address the underlying powerlessness, anger, and fear, and help each other find our own power, then the need for a grand theory of our powerlessness becomes less important. We also have opportunities to create solidarity with each other, or offer other suggestions for concrete actions that build power.

    Emotional Fatigue, Justice, and the Long Game

    The merit of learning approaches like Wang’s is that it gives us another way to intervene when we are advocating for change and encounter people who are extremely hostile or appear to inhabit a separate sphere of reality. When we cannot follow each others’ intellectual labyrinths, we can move into the territory of the heart and will, which tend to be more relatable and accessible.

    Debates about lizard people and time travel is not something I have any interest in, but I sure understand what it’s like to feel out of control and afraid about the way things are today. Instead of yelling at each other to think right or do better, we have an opportunity to help each other ground, remember what we want, and think about what paths are available to move toward that. From a public policy perspective, Wang’s insight points to the sense that much of our unrest today is rooted in a sense that our citizens do not know what is possible or how to pursue their goals.

    A green brick wall, attached to which is a surveillance camera. Photo by Edward Howell, courtesy of Unsplash.

    When I suggest this work, I hear from folks who are annoyed that I am asking them to do more emotional labor, especially with people who are harming them or seem bound to ignore them. In the case of QAnon, it is apparent that popular QAnon beliefs are retreads of long-running anti-Semitic tropes. The whole story of child sacrifice, sex cults, harvesting the blood of innocents to drink for their vitalizing powers, secret cabals of wealthy people—these get dragged out in different clothes during periods of social crisis to make Jewish people the scapegoats of larger tensions

    So am I asking Jewish people to be kind, thoughtful, and patient with QAnon supporters? No. I do not think anyone is obligated to coddle bigotry and scapegoating, especially not the people most impacted by it. And if someone has been striving to engage in the hard conversations and is feeling burnt out and tired of doing everyone else’s emotional work, I think it is better for the world if you focus on what restores your spirit and gives you strength and joy.

    In the long run, I have always been more interested in effectiveness than what feels emotionally satisfying. And sometimes being effective looks like “losing,” letting a battle go or end, not adding that parting shot, not jumping to the attack of every bit of misinformation or every baiting comment. Sometimes being effective means learning to let go of the noise of the ideology and redirect attention to the emotional and material roots from which these beliefs have grown.

    In working with misogynistic men, for example, it is not always effective to combat the misogynistic words directly. Instead, we may need to acknowledge and set aside the misogyny to seek out the unmet needs and feelings, the frustrations and the hurt. Once those deeper pains have been surfaced, we also discover the genuine urge for authentic connection, the genuine feelings of shame and guilt, and the possibility to help these men learn the skills they need to get these needs met for real.

    Another critique, related to the first, is that it is easier for privileged people to engage in the work of meeting a hostile person where they’re at and helping them identify their emotional needs, which is true. I would clarify by pointing toward why privilege makes it easier—it’s easy for people not directly impacted to set aside the aggression of the attack and go to the deeper need. It’s easier for me as a non-Jewish person to be patient in conversation when I am not at existential threat from anti-Semitism. All the more reason for me to be the one to do this, when I have the resources.

    I find the most persuasive conversations and movement happens when people can have honest conversations that are not polarizing, in which they feel heard and taken seriously—not necessarily their ideas, but the emotions beneath the ideas. I find these conversations really do not work in unmoderated public spaces like Facebook.

    And also I find these days it seems like you only get social justice credibility when you call people out in public spaces where others can see. A long-term, supportive yet confrontational kind of relating feels unfashionable and uncomfortable because it means that there are times we might choose to preserve the relationship instead of a direct attack, or to address things in private.

    For me, there are times I’ll wait until I sense the other person is open to hearing another perspective, and that could take a very long time. I do not always interrupt other people’s conversations and erode the relationship with arguments that are more likely to generate heat than light. I still make time to express my perspective in a space where I can set the frame for the conversation I want.

    And in the meantime, a part of me wonders what I would do if someone called me out in a public post and demand I account for my relationship with a person they consider problematic. My way of relating invites mistrust that we are simply collaborating with people like us, and that is a risk.

    Compassion is present, but compassion is not simply agreeing with everything a person says and making excuses because they’re having a hard week. What we see on the surface is not the entirety of the truth, and compassion gives us a pathway to the roots.

    I don’t believe public arguments and call-outs are intrinsically wrong. They are different tactics that serve different purposes, and have value in situations where a personal connection is impossible to establish or dangerous, or the community needs protection when the subject of the call-out has proven they cannot be accountable in good faith. Without strength, kindness loses its potency. But without kindness, strength is simple cruelty.

    Return to Power

    In conclusion, I feel Wang’s insight is applicable to many of us right now. Across the political spectrum, I see our extreme manifestations of terror, anger, and despondency as reactions to the instability of the ground on which we stand, and feeling a lack of agency in life. Sinking into the feelings of powerlessness and overwhelm, remembering your goals, and figuring out what concrete steps you can take toward your own goals have all become more important since the election of 2016, and since the pandemic almost a daily necessity. The problems facing us seem so huge and insurmountable that it crushes us.

    When we feel powerless, we are at risk of spinning out into anger, fear, and rage. We need to feel heard by someone who cares, who can then help us remember what agency we have in the world. If you can offer that to someone, that is wonderful. If you need that, think about who in your life might be able to offer that. If you cannot think of anyone, you might try the following:

    Notice your relationship to the ground. Notice how the ground is supporting you right now, and see if you can start slowing your breathing down. As you inhale, notice the tension you’re carrying in your body. Notice what feelings you’re having. As you exhale, see if you can let the ground take more of that tension. See if you can sink into that which you’re sitting upon and let it hold your weight. Notice your back.

    If you can, as you breathe in, imagine you can breathe into your belly center, our center of gravity and movement, a place of power in many traditions. Just breathe into your power, and let yourself be supported. Ask your body, what does it need right now? What would help?

    If an answer comes, see if you can make a plan to move toward that.

    If the answer seems impractical, ask yourself, how would I feel if I had this thing I need? And if you get an answer, imagine that you can breathe that feeling into your body. Imagine a time when you had that feeling, if needed, and see if you can give it room in yourself.

    Think about something you want, and one concrete step you could take today that could move you toward that want. Even if that want would be impossible to accomplish today, there could be one thing you do that moves you toward it. It could be an incredibly simple, small step. Do an Internet search about it. Find a book about it. The smallest step is the best step.

    If you can think of nothing else, look around your space for something you can clean, and clean it.

  • Rhythm and Discord: Conspiracy Thinking, Deep Troubles, and Anxiety

    When I had the lovely opportunity to participate in Patrick Farnsworth’s Last Born in the Wilderness podcast, he asked a question about conspiracy thinking. I answered from the perspective I had at the time, but in that conversation my perspective began to change.

    New insights often come through me through speaking and writing, things I had not considered until they were named, as though they lay in wait for their moment to slip through my very active analytical mind and startle me.  As we spoke, I said something about the idea of a world in total control was an illusion, but then I also, as an afterthought, noted that a world of total randomness was its own illusion.

    In my early days of training as a therapist, I gravitated toward an Existentialist tradition of therapy. In brief, very brief, my understanding of an Existentialist perspective is that anxiety is a response to apprehending the fundamental meaninglessness and chaos of the world. We clothe ourselves in stories of meaning, purpose, and control for comfort, but freedom requires the shedding of this control, that we may discover the meaning is generated within. Anxiety, as Kierkegaard said, is “the dizziness of freedom.”

    Doing therapy from this perspective, standing with my clients as we face the chasm of meaninglessness together, is both more harsh than I care to be these days, and paradoxically an expression of an archetypal Western meaning of heroism. We become the brave ones who face the storm to strengthen our inner fires and bring light to the world.

    For a time, I needed that truth. Like many twentysomethings I was paralyzed by the dread of making a “bad” choice while experiencing every obstacle as a sign that I was on the wrong path. As though there was a god watching who knew the right way but refused to come out and tell me what it was. Letting go of that story of external authority freed me to take ownership over my life.

    So when I talked to Patrick, I was coming from a mindset that the tendency to develop conspiracy theory — to see the world as ruled by hidden masters webbed together through occult alliance — was its own comforting story of order, though horrifying in its own way. Someone is in control, even if they are malevolent. As I spoke, however, I sensed my thinking was incomplete and preparing to shift.

    A man, whose head is cut off by the photo, appearing to enter a red door. Photo by Ty Williams, courtesy of Unsplash.com.

    For what we may call conspiracies—secret political operations that people in power lie about or cover-up—do happen. There are times that people in power do exert control and influence over the world through secret operations, as almost anyone in a Latin American or Middle Eastern or African country whose democratically elected leader was overthrown in a coup instigated or funded by the United States could tell you. People in power do lie and bring harm to the people for whom they are supposed to care, such as the Black men of the Tuskeegee Experiment, who were told they’d receive care for syphilis but were left untreated, so the disease’s full progression could be studied, even when a cure became available.

    It is also true that, in this world, our plans and efforts to control are frequently thwarted by circumstance, luck, fortune, the turning of history. One could keep drawing the perspective out, like a fractal, and see how those unfortunate incidents themselves emerge from the conditions of the moment—while not unleashed intentionally, they may arise inevitably, as our human influence on the climate feeds back into increasing the likelihood and intensity of natural disaster.

    Recognizing causality is not necessarily the same as being in control—like the alcoholic who is anticipating cirrhosis of the liver. They may know this will be the end of the path, but not when the damage will be severe enough to harm them, or past the point of recovery. They may intellectually know that drinking is harming them, but that knowing does not stop the parts of them that drink.

    It is also true that many strains of conspiracy theory emerge from and feed into anti-Semitism. Though this is not the focus of this essay, it cannot be overstated how often you scratch a conspiracy theory’s surface and find at its center anti-Semitic tropes that have re-emerged over centuries as new glosses on old stories attempting to pin all contemporary ills on Jewish people.

    The world is neither utter randomness and meaninglessness; nor is it completely ruled by totalitarian control. That is where our distress arises: the inescapable and uncontrollable coexistence of chaos and order.

    The Tension of Unpredictability and Maps of Knowing

    Once I spoke with a BDSM coach—stay with me here—about how one induces “catharsis” in a flogging scene. A top can purposefully guide their bottom toward an emotional outburst and release. It’s not the pain itself. If the top is flogging with a regular, metered rhythm, the bottom can relax and move into trance space.

    What guides catharsis is the execution of randomness and unpredictability. Striking the bottom at sporadic and changing intervals, switching intensities and even tools in such a way that the bottom cannot intuit a pattern and anticipate what’s coming.

    Our hearts beat in regular rhythm, our days and nights pass in predictable patterns. We can relax into these rhythms, which is adaptable in its way. Why waste energy stressing about problems that aren’t happening? The shelves are stocked with food, we have clean water, we have a daily routine of going to work and coming home. Any change would throw us into the stress of the unpredictable, and risks the emotional response that comes from feeling powerless and out of control.

    This insight was used to great effect in my home state’s pandemic response, where the Governor frequently telegraphed the changes that would happen a few days before they were enacted. Rather than us waking up to the news that restaurants were closed, we had time to mentally adjust to the change. To not have too much disruption at once. 

    Contrast this with the chaos of a hypothetical leader who makes decisions as though on impulse, announcing them on social media before even informing important stakeholders that a decision is in the works. Whether the mark of an intentional mastermind or an impulsive fool, the effect is the same—it creates tension and confusion, knocks others off balance. 

    We tense up when we don’t know what’s coming and don’t know how to prepare for what’s coming. Instinctively, when dissonance arises, we want to bring it back into rhythm. We seek entrainment, the process by which discordant systems bring each other into alignment.

    Should we have workable rhythms, we build upon them a theory of the world that explains how life works. But then we encounter disruption. A horrible, chaotic event whose trauma scars that sense of rhythm and regularity. Illness or personal catastrophe. A pandemic erupts. Someone goes into a school and murders children. It becomes harder to get a job, to pay rent, to go about one’s daily life.

    These events may be, in a personal sense, without meaning. It may look like complete discord that exposes a vulnerability in our theory of the world. Now we have to make sense of things to re-find a sense of rhythm. Upending and re-examining all of our beliefs about the world takes a great deal of energy. Far more efficient is to find a way to mentally explain, justify, or shift the event back into our existing theory.

    When one has a suspicion of corporate greed, political corruption, and a sense that those with power and money do not have the interests of the people at heart, those seeds could grow a variety of ideologies. Every advancement of medicine might look like a threat of encroachment and control. Or, the medicine itself might look good, but the profiteering corporation that limits access is evil. Or, we could see the disease as increasing dependency on the government, and even see the government having created it. Or, we could see the disease as a natural phenomenon but the government and private corporations colluding on maximizing profit and minimizing support to the people.

    The distress around the figure of the conspiracy theorist is, I think, twofold. The first is the unsettling experience of seeing that a person can inhabit a reality completely contrary to our own, while otherwise not being much different than we are. For the difference between the conspiracy theorist and the knowledgable historian is less obvious than is comfortable.

    Once, in casual conversation, I was stunned to learn a coworker believed the moon landing was staged. What unsettled me the most was her ease and how coherent her reasoning was. There was nothing to argue. It exposed the seams of my own believing. I’d never been to the moon. I don’t know anyone who has been to the moon. She and I had all the same evidence but came to different conclusions. In an objective sense, one of us must be right and the other wrong, but how could either of us prove it?

    A person holding a glowing orb that looks like the Moon. Photo by Drew Tilk, courtesy of Unsplash.com.

    To be in a world with so much information available demands that we develop sophisticated maps to organize and filter information. I literally cannot take the time needed to validate every truth claim about reality that undergirds my living. Some things I accept because it’s grounded in a context of knowledge that is workable to me, such as assuming my science teachers didn’t lie to me. Meeting a person who fundamentally rejects that context throws me into a state of tension. 

    How do I know what I know? What ruptures of knowing do I smooth over to make my life workable? How do my maps of knowledge obscure the ways my behavior is guided by instinct, conditioning, marketing, propaganda, or other forces? What if, as Patacelsus says, my ego story of why I make the decisions I make and believe what I believe are merely public relations campaigns to justify decisions that arose from deeper, instinctive domains of being?

    When I imagine a workable model of reality, one that can hold both chaos and order as realities that coexist, I think about listening to rap music while driving. There have been moments when, no matter how many times I’d listened to a song, I would have a moment of panic when I heard a police siren, suddenly sure I was about to pulled over for some offense I couldn’t understand in the moment.

    Then I’d look around and not see anyone behind me, and realize the siren was a sample in the song itself. “Why the hell would they do that?” I, a middle class white guy, often wondered. Now I see that what I experienced was a glimpse into the experience of the Black artist. A rhythm, and then the disruptive threat of the police.

    Rap, Hip Hop, and Industrial music do the aesthetic work of weaving together the discord and the beauty, the rhythm and the record scratch, of urban and industrial worlds .

    A Snake Devouring Itself

    What has struck me profoundly this year is how much this pandemic has amplified a profound ambivalence about modernity. For example—as social distancing and work from home mandates have made us more dependent upon technology, such that having a strong 5G network would be very helpful, there is a movement of suspicion and rejection of 5G. We can see parallel movements around vaccination and masking.

    It is almost like a social-psychic immune system instinctively recognizing and mobilizing against the intrusion of a foreign presence in the body. But is that intrusion a life-stealing parasite, threatening to destroy the whole system; or is it a life-saving replacement organ? One’s answer to this question necessarily determines how one feels about that immune system response.

    Our diagnosis of the illness encircles our imagination and limits what we would see as cure. Which brings us to the second troubling facet of the figure of the conspiracy theorist: if we inhabit such different foundational premises of the world, if our diagnoses and cures are fundamentally opposed, how can we find solution?

    Beneath our politicized conflicts are underlying, dare I say archetypal, tensions — anger at being dominated by another person’s will versus fear of being hurt by another person’s selfishness; excitement for the possibilities created by technology versus deep concern about technological disruptions to our natural organisms and ecosystems; the need for collective solidarity versus the risk of being exploited.

    These archetypes become embedded and expressed through the particular, through intellectual justifications and exercises that can continue indefinitely and never resolve the underlying tensions, which are embodied, emotional, and relational. In a sense, agreeing about the moon landing only matters if it affects our ability to trust each other and work together to find solutions to the problems before us.

    We need a container strong enough to separate out and hold the tension of these polarized forces, bring them into confrontation as equals that they may witness each other. From this confrontation comes the synthesis that moves forward. Not “finding a middle ground,” which tends to be an intellectual compromise that seeks to bypass the conflict. But rather for the edges to truly see each other, find what is valid about the other polarity’s concerns, both understanding and being understood, and in that process for the solution to emerge.

    Jungian therapy taught us to see the underlying archetypes from which these conflicts emerge, and turn toward the soul as the sacred container in which the tension of these opposites can give rise to the synthesizing force. 

    When it comes to our larger culture, the sacred containers could be those institutions of meaning and law that we share in common—the school, the research institute, the government, the court of law, the church—but in the current climate, those containers are neither shared nor well-sealed. With every chaotic shock that disrupts our rhythm, with every increasing catastrophe, we experience more emotional catharsis without containment. 

    These forces are greater than us, but as we are their hands and ears and feet and tongues upon the earth, they must act through us, through our own particularity. That gives us a power if we are able to slow ourselves down to see it. That gives us the opportunity to breathe and see how these serpents fight in our being, a moment of choosing, of finding the seams in our thinking and leaning into the discord rather than smoothing it over.

    Not to accept each other’s intellectual reality, necessarily, but to find where our polarities agree—perhaps, as an example, that none of us want to feel controlled, and also none of us want to be put thoughtlessly at risk by another person’s stupidity. And if we find a space where those premises align, there is a foundation on which we can build.

    I have to honor the recent Last Born in the Wilderness conversation between Patrick and Bayo Akomolafe for spurring this continued thinking.

  • In Uncertainty, Return to Basics

    My Aikido dojo has been doing online practice classes since the lockdown began, a complex gift as it is such an embodied, connected practice; and yet some practice is better than no practice. In a recent class, Sensei had us do a basic staff strike, one I’d already practiced perhaps hundreds of times. “At this level of practice it should be a relief,” he said, like coming back to an old friend. comforting amidst the stressors of practicing at a higher level with greater intensity and depth.

    Foundational practices tend to be tedious and typically ones that enthusiastic beginners want to rush through on the way to getting to the real stuff. The glory stuff. The scary stuff. Yet it is these practices that never leave us, and make it possible to meet the demands of the heavy stuff. Basics never leave us. When we move into overwhelming complexity, we can return to them—for relief, but also as an opportunity to practice new depths, receive new teachings, and discover challenges we were too inexperienced to face before. In the basics are the entirety of the discipline.

    There is a practice I learned from my honored former spiritual teacher, which is available in their book Evolutionary Witchcraft, which has many variations. We use a cup of water, and intentional breathing. We identify that within us that needs cleansing, releasing, or forgiveness. We use toning of a sacred sound to enact that transformation.

    This is a practice I’ve also done perhaps hundreds of times and still am seeking to master. Recently I reflected on its components in the light of all that I’ve learned about the nervous system and the psyche since I first practiced it. Certain practices are found to soothe the stress response, bringing us to a state of calmness, such as toning or singing, drinking water, slowing down the breath, and consciously labeling our painful feelings. All of which is contained in this simple ritual.

    The explanation given as to how this practice “worked” was quite different from a discussion of vagal theory, with language that emerged from and reflected the spiritual and cultural context in which the practice was embedded. We have hundreds to thousands of practices like this, practices of our ancestors, which a post-“Enlightenment” rationalism dismissed as superstition, and now have “rediscovered” and packaged with fancier, scientific language. Now we talk about the vagal nerve, the parasympathetic nervous system, the hemispheres of the brain. Like it didn’t count until we could scientifically justify it.

    Even our current explanations as to why and how these practices “work” are wrong in some way that we’ve yet to discover. New paradigms will come that overturn our thinking and explanatory models. Yet no matter what we call it, or why we think it works, we’ll find that breathing slowly, soft gaze, drinking water, singing and chanting, dancing in community, and visualization affects us in a calming and enlivening way.

    We do not always have to understand intellectually how things work, or why they are, to benefit from the practice. Sometimes understanding emerges from engaging in the practice repeatedly, allowing it to teach us, watching how it shifts our experience. The practice always has something new to teach us.

    In a sense, our work is to both let the practice teach us, and to enliven the practice by passing it along with the language and knowing of the age in which we live.

    I am thinking of this, with great relief, in the midst of an existential crisis. The problems are enormous and overwhelming, greater than any one of us can solve, and right now the possibility of mass cooperation seems quite unlikely. I hear so many of us wondering what’s the point, why bother, and how we can meaningfully participate in this situation. I hear many of us hoping for there to be a clear answer and finding none.

    As a therapist, I’ve accumulated many tricks, pieces of sharp insight, and helpful knowings, and still there are times when sitting with a client and we reach a moment that feels so overwhelming and insoluble that we fall silent in the face of it. I feel both of us longing for a simple solution. And often, the best move is to return to a basic, foundational practice.

    For me, that is listening. Deeply. To seek understanding of the client, both who they are and where they struggle, on their own terms. Without that foundation of listening, attunement, and understanding, all the complex and exciting interventions fail.

    My greatest offering is to practice that deep listening, and in the listening and seeking to understand, a safety emerges that makes possible for the answers begin to unfold in their own time.

    It is a relief to return to the practice of simply listening, like reconnecting with an old friend. A friend who still has mysteries to teach and challenges to offer. The entirety of the therapeutic discipline is contained in learning to listen well. How do I know I am listening? How does the client know I am listening? What helps me to understand? What helps the client to feel understood? What emerges in that space when listening and understanding connect?

    You have your own work, your own disciplines that you follow, and I offer to you today the invitation to consider what your foundational practices are. What is a basic skill to which you can return? What can it teach you today about the work before you?

    If nothing else, remember that caring for yourself is a discipline and offers its own basics. Drinking enough water. Eating well. Sleep hygiene. Moving your body. Resting your body.

    A photo of a child in silhouette, playing a piano, by Kelly Sikkema, courtesy of Unsplash.com

  • Aggrieved Entitlement Syndrome

    For the consideration of the DSM*:

    This syndrome is marked by mild to severe psychological distress, anger, and antisocial behavior in response to encountering the boundaries, limits, and refusal of another person, whom will be referred to as “the target,” particularly when those boundaries, limits, and refusal challenge one’s perceived social superiority.

    AES is indicated when subject meets the following symptoms:

    1. Disregard for physical, emotional, social, or resource needs of others.
    2. Marked intolerance of stresses related to normal inconveniences such as waiting in line, experiencing an error in service, or hearing another person’s refusal in response to a request (such as asking for a date).
    3. Marked increases in reactivity when encountering a target’s emotional boundary or limitation, which may be expressed as one or more of the following:
      • Expressions of anger or contempt toward the targeted person, which may include dehumanizing language or accusations based in the target’s actual or perceived age, race, sex, gender identity, body type, class, or level of ability.
      • Requests to escalate complaints toward those with authority to harm the targeted person, including asking for a manager or calling the police.
      • Physically entering the space of the targeted person, raising one’s voice, physically striking or aggressing upon the target.
      • Publicizing one’s anger at the target to attempt to shame, humiliate, or hurt the target.
    4. Inability to tolerate and process feelings of shame, as evidenced by at least one of the following:
      • Inability to recognize responsibility for harm done to targeted person.
      • Refusal to apologize for antisocial behaviors.
      • Blaming antisocial behaviors on mental illness, medication, or other external factors.
      • Denial of one’s antisocial behaviors by claiming one cannot possibly be racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, ageist, or classist in contrast to statements made that evidence those attitudes.
      • Reframing self as victim of the form of discrimination or assault demonstrated through one’s own words and actions, including bouts of tearfulness when facing accountability for actions.
    5. These symptoms cause clinically significant distress for the target.
    6. The person demonstrating this dysregulation only evidences such behavior toward those they perceive to be socially, politically, or economically inferior; and not toward those they perceive to be equal to or greater to them in social power.

    *This is satire.

  • Post Break-Up Growth

    Heartbreak, loss, protracted and unwanted single-ness, and break-ups bring up the painful side of connection, when we are torn from intimacy and thrown back into autonomy. 

    We form attachments to people, we let them know us and become part of our lives, we form oxytocin bonds, and then we suffer the sundering of those attachments. Sometimes these break-ups are slow, and one person has had more time to prepare for it while the other feels blindsided. Sometimes they happen rapidly and take everyone by surprise, even if in retrospect it becomes obvious this was where things are heading. Sometimes they are circumstantial, sometimes behavioral. They suck.

    We all deal with break-ups differently, and we may deal with different break-ups differently. Some losses feel easy while others may be gutting.  Even for those of us who practice multiple relationships, break-ups may be surprising in their force and repercussions.

    While walking of labyrinth of maturation, we go through periods of looking outward for what we desire, and periods of turning inward to find what we desire, and each turn is a part of the same journey toward discovering and becoming our wholeness. It is true that people need people, and it is true that we can be self-possessed and learn to care for our needs. Discussing this, however, we tend to flatten out connection and autonomy and appear to bias one over the other, when truly it’s more a matter of applying the corrective influence when we become too unbalanced in one direction.

    The one constant companion in our lives is our Self, and the more we can love and care for our selves, the more resilience and generosity we can offer our loved ones. And the more support, love, and caring we can receive from our networks, the more able we are to love and care for self. Break-ups are an opportunity to turn back toward self and deepen our healing, self-love, and self-knowledge.

    Here are some ways we can practice loving ourselves and recentering in Self in ways that will support us as we heal and consider when we’ll be ready to try practicing this kind of love again:

    Lean on your supports, and spend quality time alone

    When any attachment is broken, we experience unique kinds of grief. Surprising thoughts and feelings may arise, or ones that are all too familiar. 

    When we’re less experienced in loving and losing, we may believe those thoughts too readily, thoughts like “Love is a lie,” or “I will always be alone.” As with any multiple choice test, any thought that involves the word “always” or “never” is probably false. But it is hard to uncouple those thoughts and the intensity of pain that we must feel to work through, and we may want the supportive witnessing of other loved ones.

    A break-up is a particular opportunity to look at the ways we’ve depended on this person to meet our social and emotional needs. So many needs for experiences like touch, emotional connection, validation, and togetherness become sexualized because we are led to believe that only sexual and romantic partners can fulfill those. 

    This is particularly true for men in this culture, who are subjected to such scrutiny when they have needs for physical or emotional connection, even when they try to meet their own sexual needs. In other cultures and points of history, men were able to be physically and emotionally affectionate with each other, holding hands while walking in public and writing impassioned letters to each other. 

    Photo by Priscilla du Preez courtesy of Unslpash

    But since at least I was a child none of that is acceptable without others insinuating there being a sexual or romantic component. This complicates the ways gay and straight men understand their own needs for belonging and connection. A desire for sex may simply be a feeling of loneliness and desire for any kind of connection. A genuine emotional connection could be mistaken for a potential romantic or sexual experience. 

    None of these forms of relationship, in practice, have obvious lines drawn between them. Ideally, the relationship would unfold between the individuals according to their wants, needs, and boundaries, and take the shape that supports them both. The problem is simply the inability to reflect upon what needs each kind of connection serves—what does sex mean to me? What kind of emotional support is meaningful? Whose validation “counts”? As we become clearer on our answers to these questions, it becomes easier to talk about these with others, and then to figure out what kind of relationship we’re having together. 

    When we’re not clear or not willing to discuss, then our relationships tend to be riddled with covert tests and games and deeply complex internal dramas that affect the unfolding of the relationship. 

    All this to say, when a breakup occurs, you might consider reaching out to your support network for the kinds of comfort and connection you got from your ex. Even better, reach out to as many people as you can, and think of new people with whom you might want to deepen a relationship.

    Reaching out for emotional support when one is already in pain is very scary, so take some time to identify what those fears are and how you can help that scared part of you plan for risks. You might be afraid of being disappointed, that a person won’t be available to you when you need them. You can make a plan for how to care for yourself when disappointed, but you also might consider that this is an argument to reach out to even more people. 

    Adults have a variety of valid reasons why they cannot be emotionally available to each other the moment a person needs the connection—so if you can reach out to five people and connect with the one who can be available, or if you can reach out and schedule time when your person is able to emotionally available, that is going to help decrease the likelihood of disappointment.

    Along with that, plan time to be with yourself in an emotionally present way. You might decide to spend an evening alone to journal, or a weekend day going on a walk. Think about the things you enjoyed doing that perhaps fell by the wayside with your partner in your life, and see if you can pick those back up. Think about things you’ve always been curious about, and see if you can make time to do it.

    Sometimes people struggle to love and spend time with themselves because of the dreaded fear that this means they are a “loser” or some other variation of being a social failure. Certainly this time is going to require you be present with your pain and these stories, but you might be surprised at how gentle it ends up being.

    Consider instead that you are spending time with the one person who is truly going to be here with you for you your entire life. You might not like that person right now. You might not even know them that well. You might be afraid of them, and have good reason to think they won’t be there for you. At the same time, you can begin building trust in yourself, getting to know yourself, discovering what you appreciate about yourself.

    One possibility is that you may well grow in confidence, self-love, and self-acceptance, which will make your life a lot easier. Another possibility is that you begin to engage in a life you truly enjoy, and increase the likelihood of meeting other people who also enjoy the same things. Then you will find friends and partners who match the life you want, rather than worrying about matching your life to the friends and partners you want.

    Photo by Neil Thomas, courtesy of Unsplash.com

    Cultivate what your ex provided for you

    One implication of Jung’s psychological conception of the Self and its complexes is that we are all capable of wholeness, or are already whole but identified with only small parts of ourselves and blind to the rest. 

    In my adult life, I’ve worked with this suggestion as a practice for finding what in me is unbalanced or missing and working to develop it—or, in many cases, helping my other parts get out of the way for that innate capacity to emerge. “Individuation,” Jung’s name for his process of psychological maturation, actually means “becoming whole” and not “becoming unique and separate” as one tends to assume today, although the process includes both experiences. For it seems that becoming whole doesn’t mean that we all end up the same, exactly, but that we discover the mixture of wholeness that we are. 

    Those whom we desire and whom we hate are mirrors of the wholeness that we are but are as yet unable to own. It’s the enormity of feeling that tends to be a clue. The person who gets under my skin within minutes of seeing them, or the person that I start feeling awkward and insecure around, or the person that I fall madly in love with—I may start by seeing something in them that I despise, admire, or love, but these qualities are also within me.

    We seek to become whole through seeing in others what we want to own for ourselves, or are reluctant to own. In the cases of intense anger and hatred, spending time looking at the ways I practice the same quality or participate in the undesired patterns is how I become whole. When I find someone particularly condescending, a know-it-all, robotic, aloof—I’m skewered. It’s not that I need to like them, but if I can start having more kindness for the ways I’m a know-it-all, I’ll be less irritated by fellow know-it-alls and even better able to stop myself when I fall into the habit. 

    When we have loving acceptance for our parts, our parts begin to trust us more, and so we develop a practice of deep relationship that looks on the outside like control. When we strive to control ourselves, our parts cannot trust us to listen or consider their needs, and so we develop a practice inner conflict that looks on the outside like self-sabotage.

    When it comes to breaking up with our beloveds—or, for that matter, crushes on people we’re too activated to do anything about—it’s worth taking time to explore what it was we desired in them. Why did this person of all the billions of people in the world get me so wound up? What did they give me that I’ve been wanting so badly? 

    This might all be really heady, and your answers might be “sex,” “we went to the gym,” or “I liked their parents.” That’s a fine place to start. Keep going deeper – what did I like about doing this together? What was different about being with them versus another person? What qualities did that experience have? How did it feel?

    This is another process that could be done multiple times and take time to unfold, and will be different as we grow into different relationships. For me, I’ve often found it difficult to relax and have a good time, and I’ve tended to cling to people who seemed especially fun and spontaneous and prioritized enjoyment. I value my steadiness and discipline, so I’ve never been able to fully embrace their ways of being. But after one break-up, I reflected on the ways I loved my partner for taking me to concerts and theater shows, and started making more efforts to track bands I wanted to see live and buy tickets.

    We can and ideally will do this practice in long-term committed relationships as well, for that is one of the ways that we mature together. When we’re still with our partners, it’s easier for us to continue leaning on them to provide the quality we want for balance—but that starts to get wearying and problematic, especially when they’re leaning back. 

    If one partner always feels like they have to be the steady, unemotional “rock,” and another partner feels like they have to bring the passion, intimacy, and enthusiasm, both may begin to feel stuck and resentful in their roles. The passionate ones usually would love to see more enthusiasm from their rocks, and the rocks often would love to trust that they don’t have to be the one to hold it together all the time. 

    What’s scary is that our relationships tend to become less stable when one, or ideally all partners begin to integrate the unowned qualities. Reliable scripts no longer work. Old agreements are up for renegotiation. As our identities are invested in being a certain way, and we learn that we could be many ways, it’s normal to spend time wondering who we really are, and if we chose our partners based on stories that no longer apply.

    When we can do this work in partnership, it feels slower and messier, but each partner becomes freer to grow in a new way, and potentially together they can mature into stronger partnership and new adventures. When we do this after a break-up, we have more ground and freedom to direct our growth and consider the kinds of partners we want in the future. If there’s a pattern that keeps playing out, doing this work could help you break out of that pattern into something new—or help you to realize when you are starting the pattern again with someone new.

    Often I think of this image of partners leaning on each other. If everyone is leaning on each other, there is a collapse when one partner needs to step away. If everyone is pulling away from each other but trying to stay connected by holding hands, again a collapse occurs when one wants to step away or even move closer. But if each partner can support themselves and then reach out to hold hands, there are more options for movement while staying connected.

    Most of us cannot imagine giving ourselves the kind of loving, kind acceptance that we hope our partners will give, and it does take practice and support to develop. We all experience feelings of loneliness and relationship ruptures that require self-reflection, whether we have one partner we spend all our time with, or multiple partners with whom we can connect. We learn the practice of loving ourselves through experiencing being loved, but cultivating this ability to love ourselves as deeply and skillfully as the love we desire is worth at least one hundred partners.

    Create a version of the story in which you are okay

    In a process of grief and especially when there is heartbreak and sorrow, we tend to create a story about what happen. Frequently several stories, contradicting and painful, in which we seek to identify what went wrong. This is a highly productive practice in that it helps us to create structure around our pain and distill the lessons that will help us live into a better future, but we can also get stuck in stories of blame and pain that do not have much room for growth.

    Sad pug is sad, photo by Matthew Henry courtesy of Unsplash

    When our young ones are hurt, they want to find blame. If we think of this as a normal developmental thing, it makes sense. Children need some sense of order and causality for safety, and in the process of learning to navigate the world start coming up with stories and rules to make sense of things. This tends to involve blame, making things someone’s fault. 

    Blame itself goes both directions. Either it’s your fault or my fault. That’s the other hallmark of young thinking, that simple dualism. As adults, we may be able to understand that life is more complicated. We might watch two of our beloved friends’ relationship collapse and understand that both have valid reasons to be mad at the other but feel like it’s impossible to take “a side.” That blame and side-taking is a young need, and in its way it’s valid—my young parts need to know that people will have my back if I need them. 

    My adult self, however, knows that when my relationship with a loved one falls apart, I still have to figure out how to coexist in the same world as them. Our friends and interests may continue to overlap, or simply living in the same town means we’ll run into each other again. For people in very small communities or subcultures, asking people to take sides could be very destructive or backfire horribly. 

    In the process of healing from a breakup, we may need to begin with a blaming story. If you’re like a lot of people I know, you’re likely to go through a lot of blaming stories, sometimes cycling through several in ten minutes. It’s all his fault, if only he’d done this instead of that. But then he only did that because I was so mean to him, so it’s my fault. But then that was actually a lie, I found it, because he did that before I was mean to him so it’s his fault. 

    This process is really painful and confusing and helps us to really look at what we may call our “parts.” Rather than trying to come up with the “real story” right away, you might consider taking time to journal all these different stories and letting those different parts have their perspectives heard.

    “A part of me feels angry and lied to.”

    “A part of me is desperate for her to take me back and wants to call and beg her right now.”

    “A part of me is relieved that I never have to see them again.”

    Allowing and acknowledging this multiplicity may feel scary and overwhelming at times, but it’s a lot more normal than we think, and giving ourselves permission to have contradictory reactions is deeply soothing. It helps us stop feeling a sense of urgency that we have to figure out “the truth” or “the right answer” and take action. It is, in fact, learning not to take sides within my own internal battles, but to listen to each part of me and understand and validate the feeling, while allowing all these other parts to have validity as well.

    Over time, as we tell these stories, we may begin to arrive at a kind of narrative that is more nuanced and less reactive. It gives us space to have our valid feelings about what happened, but it also creates possibilities for growth and different actions in the future. Blaming feels powerful but may put us in a state of powerlessness—if it’s all something you did then I don’t have any influence. And if it’s all my fault then I don’t have any grace or space to have boundaries. But when I can be honest about how we all participated, I don’t have to own everything that happened, but I can take ownership of my piece of it.

    This story might begin to look like, “I noticed early on that she wasn’t always honest and up front about her feelings, but I thought if I could be kind and patient then she’d start to open up and trust me more. But I wasn’t honest with her about how much I didn’t feel I could trust her, so I started asking these annoying and intrusive questions and had less and less patience with her, so she became even more guarded.” 

    It’s worth checking out our stories with trusted friends or professional supporters who are able to listen in a way that’s nonjudgmental and on our side but also supports our accountability. There are ways we can take blame or responsibility for things that are simply unacceptable, especially when on the receiving end of hurtful and abusive behavior.

    Part of the work we are doing is learning to identify our habits of blame and get feedback on what responsibility we are taking or not taking which ideally would happen with the person in question but often does not. Hearing “you did nothing wrong, this is all on them” is useful and appropriate at times, and we can accept that and continue to dig for a place where we can grow.  

    What’s most important is that we tell a story in which we can be okay in the wake of the collapse. A story like “love isn’t real” or “people will always hurt me” is not a story of okayness, though it may be one we have to tell for a while. A story like, “I got hurt, but I’m okay now,” may be one that takes more work to believe, but we can keep working on it our whole lives.

    Be gentle with yourself

    After writing this, and before its scheduled post date, I had a conversation with a person grieving a break-up who wondered how long the process would take. Writing this post is, in its way, an effort to give us something to “do” while time does its natural process of helping us to heal. It may give the illusion that we can speed up the process, which is wrong but in a way it is right.

    What we can best do is get out of the way of our psyche’s natural tendency toward healing. If all we did was sit in quiet, loving witness, watching our inner conflicts and pain without turning away and without trying to do anything, we could watch ourselves naturally repair and grow. This is very difficult for most of us.

    Trying to “do” or “fix” may end up slowing our process down. When we rush into another relationship, or we try yet again to have a conversation with our exes to get closure but end up re-enacting the toxic communication patterns, we are in some ways getting in our own way. Trying too hard to rush the healing process. But totally checking out and numbing also gets in the way of healing.

    These practices suggested above are, in their ways, practices to help us get out of the way of our own healing. In this recent conversation, I thought of what happens when I pinch a nerve. Part of my body goes numb or loses functioning, which is quite distressing, and may last a lot longer than I want. The parts of me that get nervous I’ve ruined myself or will never get the functioning back may want to obsess about repairing the problem, but there is only so much that can be done.

    While doing whatever therapies are relevant, we still learn to live with the numbness and reduced functioning. One day, I may notice that I haven’t noticed the pinched nerve in a while. Something that caused so much grief sort of disappeared when I wasn’t paying attention. Healing from heartbreak is like that, too. It’s so present, inescapably so at times, and then one day we realize we don’t remember the last time we thought about it.

    Striving for a definitive resolution, unfortunately, does not work. Patience and continuing to live does.

  • Self-Love for Men

    NOTE: This is a post that’s going to talk about masturbation, porn use, and the practices of “edging” and use of substances like poppers to facilitate longer masturbation sessions.

    I do not specialize in sex therapy or behavioral addictions but I have completed courswork in the diagnosis and treatment of both, and I am a person who supports people who want to find what is healthy sexuality for themselves, many of whom are in recovery.

    The diagnostic constructs of “sex addiction” and “porn addiction” are contested, particularly in factions between sex therapy and addictions professionals, and these conflicts have escalated in ways that I find frankly unprofessional and baffling, and we lose a lot because of the polarization. My position is that I am pro-consensual sex, I am not anti-porn, and I also find there are people with sexual behaviors that feel problematic, compulsive, or destructive to them and need help working through this regardless of what we call it.

    Men who have become habituated to constant masturbation, anonymous sex, sex on meth, or masturbation while watching porn or using poppers report to me that it can feel very difficult to enjoy or even imagine having sex without those supports. What is discussed here may be one component to support recovery in conjunction with working with a trusted sex therapist or behavioral addiction counselor who will listen to you and work with you to define and work on your recovery goals. For some, this discussion may not work in alignment with your recovery needs and goals, and I encourage you to stay with what does.

    Lately I suspect that many men, and likely others, do not really practice enjoying themselves sexually. What most of us do is “jerk off,” either as a habitual routine thing or a repetitive, hours-long epic experience that involves porn and ritual acts to try to maximize orgasm. Jerking off serves many functions: tension release, dealing with arousal, or avoiding uncomfortable things we’d otherwise feel we need to do.

    I’m not involved in communities that practice “NoFap” or “No Nut November” but what I do know about them, I think there are some places where we might agree. The kinds of masturbation that we tend to do may end up being deadening, time-wasting, and diminishing. Green Day sung about this in their song “Longview” in which the singer describes an apathetic, listless, declining life that’s momentarily interrupted by the thrill of masturbating, “bite my lip and close my eyes / take me away to paradise” and then dropping back into boring, deadened monotony.

    The rituals of watching porn, using poppers or otherwise getting high and edging for hours may be thrilling the first time or two but may quickly fall into the time-wasting habits that end up separating ourselves from our sexuality. Often I think of a maxim from the Jackie Chan breakout film, Drunken Master, in which the young Chan is apprenticed to learn a style of martial art that draws upon the fluid and adaptive movements of a severely intoxicated person, both to confuse the enemy and to deliver effective blows. At times, to practice the art, the apprentice drinks to intoxication, but always must contend with his Master’s warning—”Water floats, but also capsizes boats.”

    While perhaps not everyone will appreciate the relevance of deep wisdom from a comedy/martial arts film, this phrase has often spoken to me of the tender balance of walking the middle way of substance use. We gravitate to them because they open us up beyond our regular behaviors and judgments, allowing us to have experiences we wouldn’t otherwise. Yet the line between floating and capsizing is quite hard to discern and easy to cross.

    Porn is not a substance in the same way as alcohol or poppers, yet to me looking at it as such offers interesting insights. Porn may be a fun way to stimulate desire and expand our erotic imaginations, and it may also become something that takes over our sexuality and fills us with unrealistic expectations that make it difficult to enjoy the un-choreographed and un-edited realities of sex with other people.

    Lots of men I think have gone through periods of problematic behavior that may not rise to the level of an addiction or dependence. One question that I find really useful is to think about a behavior that you do on a regular basis, and then tell yourself that this week you won’t do it once. Notice how you feel. If you feel anxious, afraid, angry, uncomfortable, or otherwise wonder how that would even be possible, it is worth exploring deeper what purpose this behavior is serving and if it’s in some way keeping you from being the person you want to be.

    I couldn’t think of an image that wouldn’t seem excessively lurid for this post, so I did a search on “sensual cactus” and got this picture. You are welcome. Photo by Lieselot. Dalle courtesy of Unsplash.com.

    All of this is different than the kind of sexual self-experience I’m wanting to talk about, in which you take time to be with yourself, to really experience yourself without distractions or intoxicants, to find out what your body likes sexually, what kinds of fantasies you have, what kind of touch is pleasing to you. This kind of self-sex is about connection and presence.

    I define connection as being about being fully and consciously present in my body, with my experience, and able to be with you being fully and consciously present in your body, with your experience. Harder than it sounds. This connection becomes possible with the supports of confidence, vulnerability, and relational safety, all of which are supported by embodying those with and for myself. If I know with confidence that I will be okay no matter what happens, and all my feelings are okay, and that I can protect myself if needed and care for myself if needed—or that I have people available to support me with all this—then I can be fully present and connected.

    When it comes to sex and our bodies, some of us get glimpses of that state of being when we’re children who haven’t yet internalized all the conflicting messages of sex in our cultures. When we simply have bodies that have all these sensations and we’re curious about them and they don’t “mean” anything. Eventually, most of us lose contact with this state of innocence and presence as we’re taught a whole host of ways we’re supposed to think and feel about our bodies under threat of shaming judgment, ridicule, or exile.

    All of these messages and the emotions that go with them still live in our bodies and affect our relationships with them. Yet the sexual need exists, for many of us, and seeks satisfaction one way or the other. For some of us, we don’t desire sex and believe that we are supposed to want it. These and other influences may cause us to find solace in ritual, porn, substance use, and so forth.

    What does this do to the way we pay attention to and experience ourselves? This is something perhaps worth exploring for yourself for the next few weeks. When you are having sex, where is your attention? When you masturbate, where is your attention? What do you notice? What do you attend to? Are you focused solely on rubbing your genitals until they hit the joy buzzer? Are you constantly clicking on different videos trying to find the right one, or just barely avoid getting the right one, to hit the buzzer? Is your attention so much on the porn or the fantasy that you’re not really in your body?

    When I am feeling sexually connected and really enjoying it, I feel that my attention is in my body and able to take in a range of sensations. When I feel stressed or pressured to perform, my attention is usually on my partner’s body and the parts of me that are worrying about whether they’re having a good time. In a state of connection with another person who can hold the connection, there is this beautiful exchange of pleasure and energy and fun.

    Exploring this state of self-sex is both simple and highly challenging, as most simple tasks are. Take time, alone, to be sexual with yourself. Find a comfortable spot where you can be relaxed and uninterrupted and consider having no screens in the same room as you. Do this sober, without porn or poppers or other external intoxicants.

    Then explore touching your body, noticing what kinds of touch your body enjoys. Engage with yourself sexually the ways you desire to be engaged, in whatever ways are practical—using your actual imagination helps with this. Try to stay in your body and take in the sensations you’re giving yourself. 

    Notice what comes up and what gets in the way. Whatever it is, those things affect your sexual relationship with others too, in some form. Consider journaling about these afterword.

    You don’t have to do this all the time, but consider doing it occasionally. This could help us be more aware of when and why we’re using other substances for sex, and help us to better understand whether that enhances or detracts from the experience. Again, this is not about saying whether one’s regular habits are “healthy” or not, but helping you to know when you’re connected to yourself or not.

    This practice will be uncomfortable for a lot of people. Straight men in particular get exposed to a number of weird messages about sex that on one hand make it this really important thing that they have to get all the time and on the other hand make it really hard to actually enjoy. Really taking pleasure in being sexual with one’s self without the mediating influence of porn seems to be provocative. There may be internalized beliefs that one is low-status or a “loser” if they’re not having sex with another person. One fear that occasionally comes up is it’s somehow “gay” for a straight man to enjoy his own body.

    Neither of these really make that much sense and seem steeped in an insecure adolescent fear of being judged and outcast and so preemptively accusing others of what one fears he is. What would be wrong with practicing desiring ourselves to the extent we want to be desired?

    Is the desire to be approved of by your friends interfering with your ability to get to know yourself and really learn to understand what you like and desire, and enjoy being in your own body? Do your friends need to be involved with what you do alone in your own time? Wouldn’t being able to care for your own sexual needs help you to feel more confident, at ease, and less desperate when finding someone else to share yourself with? If you’re still a teenager, your friends don’t have to know, and if you’re an adult man, now’s your opportunity to take the wheel of your life back. 

    It’s also worth noting that some reasons are religious prohibitions on masturbation and sex outside of a committed relationship, and if those are your values, I assume you would not be interested in this exercise and wish you well. If you are curious about another way to think about the spiritual relationship between sex, life force, and self you might consider reading my book.

    In recent years, certain groups have promoted abstaining from masturbation altogether as a way to increase testosterone, gain self-mastery, or increase motivation to get out of the house and look for partners. There is certainly merit to this approach as well—conscious abstinence or conscious engagement are both ways of helping us know ourselves, cultivate will, and build confidence. Self-sex ideally would not be the center of one’s life at the expense of other important facets of ourselves. What’s important to me is that we’re abstaining or engaging with an intention, not because masturbation is “bad” for some vague reason.

    Sensual cactus!!! Photo by David Sola courtesy of Unsplash.com.

    My one concern about abstaining from masturbation to motivate seeking partners is that I think men would be well-served to consider horniness as a state of intoxication under which they are less likely to make clear-headed choices. (Note: I am not suggesting this as a literal scientific or legal truth, although I would be curious to see research on the matter.) Men make a lot of choices we later regret when horny, especially when horny and tired, lonely, drunk, stoned, or otherwise intoxicated. We may be less likely to hold our boundaries and standards or more likely to pressure others and disregard their boundaries.

    There is a common wisdom that one should not go to the grocery store while hungry because you’re more likely to buy food you’ll later wish you hadn’t, and to be honest I advise men to use the same guidelines when using apps or going to bars while horny. If you’re looking for sex, go for it. If you’re looking to have fun and meaningful connection, might as well take care of yourself first. 

    This idea of horniness as a state of intoxication brings us back, again, to being intentional in relating to ourselves sexually. Whether abstaining and harnessing that energy toward other tasks, or engaging to make sure we have meaningful and pleasurable experiences, these willful acts help us to feel more loving and appreciative of ourselves, and more confident. All of these qualities are great to have whether we’re in committed partnerships or on our own. Rather than pinning all our hopes for sexual and romantic fulfillment on other people, when we cultivate this for ourselves, we’re actively creating the life we want.

  • We Heal When We Feel Our Guilt

    Witnessing as healing, as vengeance

    Once, a person I saw as a mentor hurt me. Our relationship had begun in a friendly, amiable, affirming way, but over time began to feel coercive and pressuring. Wanting to protect his feelings, I gently refused and expressed discomfort when he asked things of me I did not want to do, and in response he said the right things, but his actions showed my boundaries would not be respected. The situation felt intolerable, particularly as a person who easily sees the best in others and has a tendency toward people-pleasing to avoid conflict.

    When we were about to spend time together, I would rehearse the ways I would stay centered and focus our interactions on what I liked about our relationship, but in person I felt my boundaries and concerns dissolving under the very skills and expertise that I wanted to learn. Walking away, I felt good and told myself I was okay with everything that happened, but within an hour I would fall into anxious nervousness, shame, and wondering how to avoid this happening again. A part of me saw him as holding an enormous charisma that overrode my will, and it was hard to shake though I used every tool I could. Every tool except for telling others what was happening outside of my closest people.

    Eventually I broke off contact, but later ended up in another shared community space. I told myself I would be fine, but I felt wracked with shame and a quavering sense of terror every time we inadvertently made eye contact or had to speak. With the support of my therapist, I began telling my story to others. This validation of the ways I’d been manipulated helped me to ground myself in recognizing what was happening wasn’t okay and to see how much I had been doing to protect this person’s feelings at the expense of my own.

    A confluence of circumstances created the opportunity for the two of us to have a facilitated confrontation. It was the kind of restorative justice process that is dreamt-of and so hard to accomplish. We showed up, and the facilitator was both skilled and aware of how power skews what seems like a neutral relationship. I told my story, and the facilitator met my ex-mentor’s deflections and dismissal with firm, kind accountability and encouragement. 

    As I watched, I saw my ex-mentor’s countenance start to soften, and tremble, as his defenses against pain relaxed and he began to feel his guilt and shame over what happened. At the same time, I felt my own heart lighten as I became unburdened of all I carried. I walked into the process trembling in fear, and walked away feeling joyful, light, and free. There was no more for me to carry, no desire for further retribution, nothing.  

    The seed of vengeance may simply be in the longing for having one’s hurt witnessed and validated by the person who caused us harm. An instinctive knowing that this could bring healing and relief. But so rarely are those who have caused harm able to bear the feeling of their own guilt and shame. Instead they defend against it, minimize it, reject it, or compel others to hold it. Lacking that outlet for healing witnessing, vengeance becomes that venomous instinct to cause them a hurt that will match the hurt we feel, escalating rather than healing discord. 

    A person facing away from the camera, head down, holding a flower over their shoulder. Photo by Hadis Safari.

    What we want and what we owe

    Perhaps the fear of guilt is that it aligns with a sense of obligation that is greater than the gratification of our own wants and needs. The feeling invites us to reckon with the conflict between others’ needs and expectations and our own desires. So much goes back to power and its uses. Guilt is that which weaves us into just and beloved community. Guilt knits communities together, and it may be wielded abusively by someone with power and authority who feels threatened by the needs of another. We may give a gift out of love, and then use that gift as a hook later when we feel angry or scared, as a way of coercing the person to take care of us. 

    Guilt may be an inner prophet who calls us out when we’re out of integrity and need to make rectifications. It is appropriate to feel guilt for committing, participating in, or allowing harm or injustice to occur. Guilt spurs us to make things right and grow as people. Yet those who cannot tolerate guilt may demand forgiveness as though it’s owed to them, and crumble when it’s not given. Such a demand asks the harmed person to do their emotional work for us rather than letting us suffer and work through our own guilt.

    Meanwhile, many of us have been trained not to allow others to feel guilty, ashamed, or in pain. We are all too ready to spare them their guilt and remorse, consoling ourselves with a story about our strength or virtue. Forgiveness may be granted before the offense is even known. When we hesitate to take on the pain ourselves, we feel our own pang of guilt. We may tell the story that by letting them be accountable and feel their guilt, we are torturing them. Yet all we are doing is letting them feel their own feelings.

    Ironically, in those moments, if everyone involved was willing to simply practice feeling their own guilt and allow each other space, there would be greater healing than the urgent efforts to fix and shut down pain.

    As animals who crave connection, we seek it through its many guises: approval, love, sex, enmity, vilification. At times it does not matter what the connection is, whether it feels good or awful, so long as it exists and we know we exist. Shame, however, is an emotion of disconnection. It is the emotion that tells us we have been severed from the group and are in danger of death, social or otherwise. 

    As we’ve learned thanks to Brené Brown, Shame says, “I am bad,” while Guilt says, “I’ve done something wrong.” Yet in our flattening, moralizing way, the overculture of the United States collectively believes that only bad people do bad things, and therefore to feel guilty is to prove the story of shame. This is to our detriment. We are all capable of causing hurt and harm, and likely will at some point in life. When we cannot tolerate the guilt and repair process of hurting another, our hurting tends to escalate. Defenses against feeling guilt render us more indifferent to others’ suffering.

    In a cyclical model of time and development, metaphors of spiraling and pendulums are useful for contemplating how growth occurs. We turn into one direction until we’ve gone as far as we can, until it begins to hurt and impede our growth, and continue curving to the other side of the polarity. 

    One possible journey: We experience pain when we’ve hurt someone in the process of following our own desires, and start feeling a sense of guilt whenever a “selfish” impulse arises. Over time, however, we find ourselves hemmed in by guilt and always prioritizing the wants and needs of others from that feeling of obligation, setting aside parts of us. Eventually we feel the chafing of making ourselves smaller for the comfort and satisfaction of others, and reject guilt, shame, and obligation in favor of prioritizing ourselves. 

    Another possible journey: We see the smallness in the lives of people around us who submit themselves to relationships that look painful and loveless, and vow to put ourselves first. We deny and refuse anyone who expresses hurt or upset with us, fearing the loss of autonomy and control, until one day we hit a limit. Perhaps we feel utterly alone, with no one special in our lives. Perhaps we are held accountable in a painful and undeniable way, that fantasy of independence shattering when the harm we’ve caused finally catches us. Eventually we begin listening to that guilt and longing for connection, learning how to remain ourselves and respect the needs and feelings of others.

    We reach the edges and continue curving back, each oscillation becoming more refined and skillful. Soon those vibrations seem almost invisible from the outside as we gain greater mastery and inner complexity, learning we always have a range of responses to every moment, and each response offers a gift and a limitation.

    A spiral staircase with lights hanging down the center. Photo by Ryan Searle.

    Autonomy and intimacy

    So long as we treat emotions as things done to us, injected into us, we allow ourselves to be under the power of others. At the same time, we are capable of feeling others’ feelings and taking them into ourselves, and experienced and instinctive manipulators know how to find the people who will do this for them. In the swinging between autonomy and intimacy, we have all we need within us to practice discernment between what to give and what to retain.

    Start within. Start breathing and imagine you find the core of aliveness, the belly center that gathers in your vitality, your passion and will, the core in which the fires of life burn. This is the center that has been with you since you were a feral child taking pleasure in the brightness of the colors of the sky and grass, disgusted with the textures of food, who played and kissed with innocence. Sense how that is in you today.

    Imagine you find the core of relationship, the heart center that gives and receives social connection, that feels the web of relationships and your place within it, that senses how others feel toward you and you toward them. This energy reaches out into your environment with breath, communicating yourself into the world, and draws that connection back into yourself as guidance. The emotional field is the field of relationship, and this is the center that knows how to navigate this realm. Sense how that is in you today.

    Find the core of potential, the head center that receives knowledge from the visible and invisible worlds, that gathers it into the cup of the skull and filters it through the nervous system. Here is the throne of that which we may call the higher self, the deep self, that which can see further and broader and deeper. That which sees the bigger picture, sees what is possible, that can bring us into radical, intentional, and beautiful action. Sense how that is in you today.

    Imagine a circle around you that contains all you know yourself to be, all that is your responsibility. Imagine that as a cellular wall, a membrane, a fence, a bubble through which we can take in what we need and push out what does not belong to us.

    With this connection, let us return to guilt and shame. That connection of the fires of the belly, who knows my innate worthiness, and the chalice of the head, which can see further, helps us to look at the matters of heart and connection with more discernment, self-compassion, and dignity. Without the head and the belly, those ruled by the heart center may be wholly subsumed by concerns about others’ opinions and approval.

    Too often feeling guilt causes us to crumble and feel as though we must utterly abase ourselves for forgiveness or reject the accusations of harm. Again, guilt bound to shame, a combination that says “I am bad because I did something bad.” When this story is alive, we feel our worthiness and capacity for future happiness are based on the forgiveness and opinion of the person we’ve harmed. Which, you might think would make us more inclined to be kind to them, but more often than not elicits all the defensiveness, denial, controlling, seducing, and further gaslighting that only compounds the harm.

    Let your guilt be here fully, in your sphere. Let yourself know that no one owes you forgiveness or the opportunity to make amends. This guilt belongs to you, it is telling you who you are and what you are capable of. More importantly, it tells you who you want to be. What does your guilt say to your belly? Your heart? Your head?

    When we struggle with harming others we can feel at a constant impasse. “I want to be better but I keep fucking up!” We may get anxious and overwhelmed, afraid our friends and family will get exhausted by our failures and walk away from us. What we may not recognize is that it’s our avoidance of guilt and defensiveness that is the most alienating. The capacity for forgiveness is quite expansive when the guilty person demonstrates genuine remorse, contrition, respect for the hurt person’s healing process, and commitment to change. 

    All of this is helped by simply feeling our own guilt, before doing anything about it, and while we work to make amends. Pain spurs us to change, and guilt is a pain that says what we are doing is unacceptable. We have no reason to grow when we assuage, avoid, or numb our pain. 

    Those who have been harmed do not owe, and cannot be expected to provide, kindness. Some may be able to offer that, but spend much energy protecting and supporting one’s own hurt. Pressuring someone to provide forgiveness or kindness to assuage your guilt only compounds the hurt and slows down the outcome you want. Better to slow down, express remorse, and give the hurt person the space and power to determine how they want to interact with you in the future, what they want from you.

    In the meantime, we can work on listening to the lessons of our guilty feelings and continue to grow and live our lives.It is impossible and unwise to stop living entirely while processes of accountability unfold, but it is useful to get support from a class, a community, a support group, or trusted friends and mentors to help us work through our conflicting thoughts and feelings and figure out what boundaries are appropriate. Even better if these supports are not people who unfailingly take our side and tell us we’ve done nothing wrong, but who help us to sort through our behaviors and figure out how we can do better.

    Finding our place within collective and ancestral legacies

    I grew up a white person in a country built with on the supremacy of white people, and lived in a Midwestern state that at one point actively embraced the politics of the Ku Klux Klan. So I was surrounded by explicit and implicit racist thought and action, some of which I recognized. Yet even when I actively rejected white supremacy, I was not fully aware of the extent to which racism informed my words and actions. When my friends of color started to push back and call me out, I did not respond graciously. I made it harder on them. I dismissed their experiences or focused on my own feelings rather than acknowledging the hurt.

    Over time, I realized those who called me out were acting in self-care for themselves and respect for me. They cared enough about themselves to not let me be a shithead around them all the time, and they cared enough about our relationship to invite me to work on it and change rather than walking away. Many, I suspect, did walk away. 

    Listening to my guilt rather than defending, taking time to stew on my feelings and try to see things from their perspective, helped me to radically reorient my humanity. I aspired to be a person who is kind, just, and in integrity, and guilt showed me how far apart was the distance between that ideal and the ways I’d been practicing relationship. It continues as a spiral process of progress, regression, curiosity, discovery, hurt, regret, and accountability.

    Most of us living in the United States who are not one hundred percent Native or the descendent of enslaved people owe our existence to the forcible taking of land, property, and personhood of others. We benefit from hurt that continues to live in the bodies of the descendants of those harmed, in the inequities of policing, income, wealth, and access to healthcare, clean water, food, and safety. Yet those that benefit most from this wonder, “Why should I feel guilty?” 

    If I were given a beautiful painting, and then learned that painting had been stolen from someone else, that would be a complex ethical issue. Perhaps I myself did not do the crime, but now I know the crime has been done and harm exists, and I have an opportunity to participate in rectifying it or continue perpetuating it. To admit that we do feel guilt means knowing that our pleasures and eases have been paid in blood. We confront in stark terms the depths of conflict between personal comfort and satisfaction and that which we owe to others.

  • International Men’s Day 2018

    Happy International Men’s Day! Here’s a brief shout out to all the men and masculine folk who are working on finding and creating meaning, freedom, love, intimacy, family, and community.

    Men’s issues are important! Men are most likely to be the victims of physical violence and assault, and are most likely to be assaulted by other men.

    We may not really acknowledge or think much about how much our interactions with each other are permeated by the threat of violence as it’s a scary and embarrassing reality to consider, but I suspect that’s one of many reasons why so many men have difficulty building and sustaining emotionally satisfying relationships with each other.

    Men’s intimacy and belonging needs are important! When we struggle to build warm connections, community, and solidarity in our friendships, then we end up needing or expecting all these needs to be met by our partners.

    Our needs for emotional support and physical touch become sexualized, because romantic/sexual relationships are the most socially acceptable way to get those needs met.

    In other cultures—even in our own culture a century or more ago—it was normal and accepted for men to hold hands, hug, cuddle, and express deep emotional connection to each other. We look back now and assume those were homosexual relationships—and some certainly were!—but they weren’t necessarily!

    It’s a lot of pressure to put on finding one person to meet all of those needs, whether we’re looking for straight or queer relationships, monogamous or polyamorous.

    I hope we can continue to create more safety, trust, and freedom in giving and receiving affection in many different kinds of relationships for men and all people.

    There’s a lot of great writing and thinking I’d recommend, particularly:

    Pat Mosley – International Men’s Day in 2018

    Angie Speaks – Jordan Peterson

    Angie’s video is about the figure Jordan Peterson himself, but also the ways leftists have ceded territory around maleness and masculinity to the right in ways that are unproductive.

  • End Patriarchy Now

    In a culture so focused on rugged individualism and competition as a measure of worthiness, it’s unsurprising that there is disgust toward victims.

    When you have to succeed or fail on your own merits, and it’s considered a weakness to need support or the help of other people, then it becomes vitally important to feel that I’m strong, clever, and canny enough to avoid harm and find success. Other people can be weak, but I have to be strong, or else I’m vulnerable to harm and then I’m weak and people will walk all over me.

    So when we’re taken advantage of, harmed, or made a victim, the pain of the experience itself worsens with shame, failure, and judgment. “How could you allow this to happen to yourself?” Which is a true sorrow, because it’s impossible to be on guard all the time, to always keep one’s self safe, to be aware of every possible angle by which someone in bad faith could harm or exploit you. It’s why we truly need community.

    What’s worse, the attachment to believing one’s self strong becomes itself a vulnerability for victimization. The inability to tolerate accepting that I’ve been harmed or coerced, or that I saw the red flags and proceeded anyway, means sometimes it’s tempting to double down and convince myself that I’m choosing something. Or it’s painful to go ask for help and admit I’ve been harmed.

    And even if we go ask for help, there’s no guarantee we won’t find people unwilling to believe our experiences, who will ridicule us, deny, dismiss, blame us, refuse to help us at our most vulnerable. In the United States, there is a culture of disgust toward victims.

    Medusa, by Caravaggio

    Of course, when it comes to the people in power or the people who adhere most strongly to this ideology of despising the weak and victimized—the ones who will deny your experience and ridicule you—they also have a shadow love for being victims. They will grab and lift up the slightest bit of victimization to shut down conversations and shift the frame from one person’s harm to another.

    For these folks, it seems crucial to deny and make invisible one harm so that they can foreground their own. This tendency appears when folks deny sexual assaults, deny police violence, deny that the Holocaust ever happened. When I hear such denials, I’ve come to expect that within months if not minutes they will talk about how their group are the real victims.

    In this mindset, victimhood is an all-or-nothing state, a trump card. If one is a genuine victim, then they should be coddled and catered to. Therefore they cannot accept the truth of another’s victimhood, but they crave the perceived power of that victim place.

    Which brings me to white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Historically, this social arrangement included at least some expectation of protection for the marginalized from the powerful. That protection often came with violence and control of the marginalized who questioned the way of things, but those who went along were supposed to be safe. That arrangement has fully decayed.

    As the foundations of the American empire begin to show their creaking, crumbling edges, we are facing a civil war in the soul of the United States and those of us within it. We see our legacy of violence and domination for the profit and wealth of the few, and we see the possibility for equality, fairness, and justice that have always been our aspirations. We see it within our daily souls.

    I work with men, women, and enby folks, some of which have experienced harm, some of whom have perpetrated harm, and some of whom have both. I work with men who were raised to believe they were innately worthless and the only way to get love and respect from family and partners was to control and dominate the people around them. This domination and control intoxicates, in a way—feeling strong, feeling powerful, feeling better than is a pleasurable feeling; much more desirable than the undercurrent of shame and worthlessness that lies under the surface, ready to rise up at any sign of failure or weakness. It undergirds friendship, work, romantic relationship. It is exhausting and alienating and yet to surrender it can feel so terrifying and defenseless.

    I work with men, women, and enby folks who have experienced being dominated, harmed, and violated by their parents, friends, colleagues, and occasionally strangers—but stranger violence is the least likely to occur. It’s the easiest to sensationalize and scapegoat because it feels better to imagine harm comes from an anonymous other than to understand it’s more likely to come from people we love and respect. When we experience harm, it leaves an imprint on the soul. We develop defenses and strategies to avoid that harm again. These limit the soul, these limit our potential for love and achievement. They physiologically alter the nervous system. They are exhausting and alienating and yet to surrender them can feel so terrifying and defenseless.

    Judith Beheading Holofernes, by Caravaggio

    Men are the most likely to commit violence—to each other, to women, to trans and nonbinary folks. I do not believe men are intrinsically violent. I do not believe white people are intrinsically racist. I believe patriarchy, white supremacy, and imperialism makes us monstrous. And we’re not going to get free until we—the people living right now—take responsibility for how those ideologies have rooted in our souls, shaped our hearts, and inform every level of how we structure our relationships and government.

    We have to learn the weapons we’ve been taught to wield and learn how to put them down first.

    It is unwise to think that the people who’ve grown up learning to fear us, to avoid upsetting us, to placate us at all costs for fear of violence—it’s unwise to expect them to put down their weapons and shields first.

    We have to learn the weapons we’ve been taught to wield and learn how to put them down first.

    If we want loving relationships, if we want real power, if we want to live in a society where we’re allowed to make mistakes without it meaning complete ruin—

    We have to learn the weapons we’ve been taught to wield and learn how to put them down first.

    There is a deep rage in the United States, and there are people—of all genders—who want to continue to silence that rage. Who are more worried about protecting the wealth and reputation of the powerful than they are about justice. Who cannot tolerate the stories of victims though they think themselves strong and powerful.

    David and Goliath, by Caravaggio

  • Oxy-Toxins Flowing: On Belonging and Bigotry

     In Robert Sapolsky’s Behave, an impressive survey of studies and insights over years of research into human behavior and neurobiology, he reveals a curious and unexpected effect of oxytocin, the so-called “love hormone.”

    Oxytocin is the name of the hormone our bodies generate when we’re experiencing loving connection. It is what helps us to feel that sense of bonding. Cuddling with a baby, a dog, a partner, a friend, all generate oxytocin.

    We need and crave this oxytocin, in part because it helps us to make more effective use of the natural opioids in our system. The body produces opioids to both manage pain and increase feelings of ease and pleasure. Much of our pleasurable behaviors encourage our bodies to flood with opioids and dopamine, which we also crave. Without these opioids, we would be more sensitive to physical discomfort and ill at ease in life.

    Evidence is suggesting that experiencing that opioid flood without oxytocin, or pleasure without loving bonds, means that we burn through the opioids faster and end up craving more and more for the same effect. Studies are indicating that the presence of oxytocin decreases the likelihood of developing tolerance and other behaviors associated with addiction.

    In short, when we have loving social connections and regular cuddling, that improves our overall health and wellbeing and decreases the need for pleasure-seeking behaviors. When we share pleasurable behaviors with people we love, all the better.

    So oxytocin is deeply needed, but what Sapolsky reveals is that it is also associated with increases in aggression and our bigotry. Surprise! You thought it was testosterone. Turns out, testosterone doesn’t necessarily make people more aggressive, it makes people more confident and assertive about their pre-existing tendencies. As Sapolsky says, if someone is inclined to be peacemaker, more testosterone will make them a more confident peacemaker. If someone is inclined to be an aggressive, coercive person, more testosterone will make them more willing to be that.

    But holy shit, the revelation about oxytocin makes sense. Think of the deep bond between parents and children. Think of the wisdom about never getting between a mama bear and her cubs. When we love deeply, and bond with our loved ones, our need to protect them at all costs increases. We become fierce in staving off perceived threats to our people, our children, our beloved animals.

    The important piece is “our.” Therein, I think, is the tendency for bigotry. Sapolsky discusses studies that show increases in oxytocin also increase antipathy toward whatever the person perceives as “Other.” As with testosterone, there does not appear to be an innate biological idea of what is “Other,” it depends on the person’s experiences of family and culture. It’s about what we define as “us” and “not-us.”

    When I was a kid, I noticed how often kids would cluster into little cliques and form a sense of tribal identity. Not going so far as to create a name and a shared set of mythology and traditions—although some groups certainly had pieces of that—but you could get a clear sense of who was “in” and who was “out.”

    A photo of four people facing a sunset, holding each other.
    “Golden Hug” by Helena Lopes, courtesy of Unsplash

    But if you think about your own experiences with this, or your own noticing, you might think about how complex this “us” and “not-us” truly is. As kids, we were really cruel toward any kind of difference, especially in middle school. I was bullied as an outsider, and once I got my own group to be inside, I was cruel toward the outsiders of my group. We would find any kind of difference and mock it cruelly. I’m not going to name specifics of cruelty but neither would I sugarcoat it. We weren’t “woke.”

    But it was inconsistent. If a kid was part of our crew but had an identifiable difference, that kid got teased—but if anyone else teased them then the whole crew became protective. In the movie Mean Girls there’s a lot of great examples of this, but the one that springs to mind is how two characters share a joke about one of them being “Too gay to function.” When that joke gets spread out among the school, she says, “That’s only okay when I say it!”

    White people who get really confused about when it’s okay to say “the n-word” would intuitively understand why certain jokes and references are okay from loved ones but really offensive when coming from outside their group. That’s a normal human experience. We can be this way with each other because we share these bonding moments that give us a sense of loving connection. You are not part of our group so when you say it, it feels hostile at worst, unwelcome at best.

    Thinking about all of this has brought me to some intriguing and troubling questions about bigotry, tribalism, and the emergence of Fascism.

    The faces of white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia, fascism, dominionism—they’re all so friendly! With the unapologetic embrace of such oxytocin-fueled love and bigotry, these folks freely build families and networks that feel so accepting, so comforting, so friendly to those seeking connection and meaning in a rather isolating and dehumanizing world. At least, to those who are part of the “us.” 

    But then, the “us” contains its own tensions when the qualifications for inclusion are rigid and shaming. If your in-group has exacting expectations for behavior, appearance, and norms, and you do not fully match those, then the threat of social and physical violence looms under the surface. These expectations even extend to honorary “us”-es, people who do not actually match the qualifications but appear to accept their place in the hierarchies. White slave masters loved their slaves who outwardly appeared to embrace their roles, making them an honorary “us” but never completely “us.”

    If we for whatever reason do not match the rigid expectations of being in-group, and are unwilling to accept the inferior place in the hierarchy, then we experience the threat of withholding of love, expulsion from the group, or violence. Staying silent and acquiescing leads to a slow psychic death, feeling like we are looking through the windows of a beautiful warm home while we stand freezing and hungry outside.

    Speaking up and fighting leads to blistering displays of hostility and fear. The oxytocin bond is complicated for the rest of the “us”—if you aren’t fully in-group, if you are part of the family but also part of the out-group, then it would make sense that the protective fierce loving bond must also reckon with this—either by kicking out the threat or changing ideas about who is part of the group and who is other.

    For those of us who do the work of unpacking bigotry and questioning these dynamics, however, struggle to include that deep bonding and sense of togetherness. We see ourselves as allies but not members of a collective community.

    A Facebook post by Drew Merrill, which states:
    the left: it’s not my job to educate you, instead read this huge corpus of literature that suspiciously corresponds to what a high-end university education in the humanities and social sciences would give u, or navigate extremely complex social spaces that require highly-tuned social intelligence to survive their byzantine norms and conventions (also everyone hates everyone else and is ready to eat them alive for social capital)
    the right: here’s my pamphlet on who is and is not a human, take ten and give one to all your friends, if you want to hear more hit me up any time

    At a certain stage of racial identity development, for example, white anti-racists feel outside of the white communities that they find problematic, and also feel constantly on guard around each other and people of color. They might find community among white allies but even within that world there are often dynamics of social dominance and exclusion as white people aspire to “wokeness” and tear down anyone who is off the script.

    Indeed, my observation is that “woke” white people can police each other more rigidly and with less forgiveness than most people of color would toward them. It is a way we carry our cultural legacy and wounding into our anti-racist work.

    We struggle to define a tribal—for lack of a less problematic word—identity that would foster such deep love and acceptance. When we begin to feel ourselves coalescing into that kind of bond, then all those fears about inclusion and exclusion arise—as they must, I suspect, for any such bond necessarily excludes someone.

    I remember the day that I noticed my sense of tribal affiliation was changing. I’d been working as a case manager for homeless folks and folks ensconced in the legal system—a relatively brief tenure in my career but one that continues to impact me. I was at the gym on the treadmill where one of the TVs played an episode of COPS.

    As I watched, I saw a segment in which police officers approached a car where a man was sleeping behind the wheel. The cops woke up the man and demanded to know what he was doing, demanded he open his window. He took too long—by their reckoning—to respond, and then they pulled him out of the car and handcuffed him. He explained that he was having a fight with his partner and had taken some time to rest and work through it. The cop expressed sympathy but explained the guy was going to jail for the night.

    I don’t know all the laws. I’ve never been a cop. But at no point in that vignette did anyone actually accuse him of committing a crime. At no point did he endanger anyone. He was sleeping in his car, and then he was arrested because he didn’t open his window fast enough. All of these behaviors are things I’ve done at some point in my life—driving off in a car, sitting quietly for some alone time.

    I felt so angry on behalf of the man in the car. And then, in the next vignette, some cops similarly pulled over a man for no apparent reason, then he got out of the car and ran. I found myself cheering for him, hoping he’d get away. That’s when I knew things had changed. Once I would have viewed the police as protectors and these men as predators. After spending time being a case manager and supporter of men of color trying to navigate the legal system, my heart had bonded with them and begun to view the police as the out-group.

    It’s difficult to detangle the emotional-hormonal instincts toward bonding and then the more intellectual, rational capacity to think according to laws and principles. Depending on where we stand, some blending of both will go into understanding the scenarios I discussed above.

    We easily minimize or excuse the actions of those within the “us” and then exaggerate and vilify the actions of those who are “not-us”. We hear occasional stories of highly conservative, anti-abortion folks who secretly seek or pay for abortions. But their need for abortions are always special exceptions, which fail to elicit any kind of sympathy or understanding for anyone else who has the need. We also see those who are more liberal who might have sympathized when Obama and Clinton turned away refugee children from the border now apoplectic when a Republican oversees the same behavior. We rationalize our principles when they threaten our belonging.

    Any kind of path forward toward a community of love and justice must contend with the craving for and shadows of that intense oxytocin connection. We need a sense of belonging and emotional safety. We truly need a shared sense of meaning and humanity to access the kinds of fierce connection and devotion that build strong communities of love. We need that sense to be accessible and intuitive, rooted in a shared symbology that speaks to our mythological natures. 

    The title is in part a reference to a song by Roisin Murphy, “Overpowered“