“Ugh,” I said. “I’m having feelings about that. Feelings are gross!”
“Aren’t you a therapist?” My therapist asks, gently trying to coax me to shut the fuck up and sit with my feelings, as a good therapist does.
“Yes! And I’m a good therapist because I know feelings are gross!”
This disgust response was not one I’d ever felt so viscerally before this past year, but it’s one I recognize from my younger life. Something in me had learned to see my needs and vulnerabilities as shameful, disordered, and needing to be controlled and hidden as much as possible. When I was confronted with the necessity of caring for my feelings, it was often done with as much distance as I could muster, as though I was a disgusted caregiver trying to hold their breath as they rush through changing a baby’s diaper.
What seemed surprising to me was this resurgence, as I’d spent a number of years feeling enthusiastic about connecting with and caring for my feelings, embracing my needs, being vulnerable and sensitive and letting my sweetness emerge.
Letting down my intellectualizing, dismissive protectors was a tremendous risk and a scary effort, and I am so grateful I did and got to learn how joyful it is to be soft and loving. And I also got emotionally hurt, and many of my ideals about life and connection proved to have illusions attached to them, and COVID happened, and I retreated back into cynical defeat and detachment.
Which was okay, for a time, but I knew I didn’t want to live there either. There has to be a path between cynicism and naive vulnerability, and I am condemned to continue to seek it, though the seeking at times means having to find one of those edges if only to know I’ve gone too far in one direction.
Though you may not relate to my disgust response, I know there are many parts of us who similarly feel unhappy with having needs, vulnerabilities, and tender feelings. We tend to associate these with animals and children, those needy creatures, and identify ourselves with the wearied adults trying to get them to calm down so we can get a moment’s rest. Those parts of us feel embarrassed or exhausted by the needs they cannot quite accept or understand.
The beauty of our animal nature.
This style of distancing may be very intellectual, or cynical, or darkly humored, but there’s a tricky style that looks very much like a person who knows all the right things to do and say. They have a robust spiritual practice, or they read Oprah and Brené Brown religiously, and they can tell you with a smile and full eye contact how important vulnerability is to connection. All the while hiding their grossest feelings.
Brené Brown is actually quite a good role model for this problem, as her public persona has been consistently, brutally honest with her own journey around acceptance and shame. She does not allow herself or us to deify her as some shame-free enlightened person for whom vulnerability is easy.
Vulnerability is never easy. Even when we expand our “comfort zones” there is always more territory of discomfort to own or explore, and old pains and vulnerabilities that creep back in when we’re busy having other adventures.
Recently I’ve been listening to spiritual teachers, coaches, and even some therapists who seem to promise that if you work hard enough you’ll reach a state where you are fully healed and un-triggerable. Wouldn’t that be so wonderful?
Yet I think such aspirations are not only unrealistic but that they become a hindrance to healing and growth in time. We reach a point where we’re feeling the same old disgust and impatience with ourselves, but now it’s dressed up in more refined spiritual or psychological language that boils down to “I don’t want to deal with this!”
This mindset of healing is quite aggressive—that our needs and wounds must be uprooted, or transformed, or eradicated to reach a particular desirable state of consciousness. When we merge with this perspective, we tend to be uncharitable, condescending, and inhospitable to those parts of us that are younger, shyer, more tender, more unruly. We cannot meet our needs on their own terms, and so we cannot work with them.
What I am working on is helping my disgusted fixing parts to instead see all of myself as a garden where many things grow, and all these things contribute to the vitality of my ecosystem, and some things may be interfering with the growth of others. Nothing that grows here is a problem to solve, or broken, but it’s a creature that requires my curiosity to learn about and understand so that I can help it to thrive and help the larger garden to thrive.
Even my disgusted fixer part is a wonderful caretaker who can manage the higher level functions of the garden with expertise, and needs time to sit and relax and enjoy the sun for a while. Nothing helps him to relax better than being confronted by these needy creatures that remind me I’m not a machine, not an angel, not a disembodied spirit—I’m an animal that needs feeding and rest, fun and play, meaningful work and spacious emptiness.
There is nothing to be ashamed of when we can dwell in the entirety of our gardens.
Recently I’ve had cause to reflect on The Lord’s Prayer. As a former Catholic, I prayed it often, and recently I was struck by the phrase “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespassed against us.”
Younger me took this injunction to God as a goad to my sense of deep shame. I’d better forgive everyone quickly so that God forgives me for all my sin!
Having stepped away from that practice and returning to the text, the word “trespass” intrigues me. I do not know the original text, or what word was used here, or what it might have meant. But in the English language “trespass” has multiple meanings of crossing moral lines, causing injury, and encroaching on property that does not belong to us.
In contemporary popular psychology, this fits neatly with the harm as a crossing or violation of boundaries. Most violations of boundaries engender a harm: to break into someone’s house, to assault them without consent, to take up personal or emotional space and deny them the agency to set their own limits.
As an aside, though I am using “harm” generically here, I think it is deeply important that we make the effort to be specific in our naming of harms. Simply saying that a person has done harm is not workable. Workability may not be your goal, but if accountability is at all possible, it is worth being as clear as possible what the harms have been.
Of course, to deny forgiveness is not the same as to wish someone ill. Rather, it is denying a perpetrator the opportunity to feel absolved for their misdeeds. Forgiveness is, in part, an internal process, something that each of us arrives at on our own time and through our own means. To express that forgiveness out loud can certainly be healing, but it’s also an exercise that works for the benefit of the perpetrator. There is no honest healing in absolving someone who has done you harm if you don’t feel they deserve absolution from you.
If trespass is a metaphor for harm, then there is little merit in forgiving a trespasser who remains in your territory without your consent. Such forgiveness tends to be more from the self-preserving impulse of people pleasing, or “fawning,” to survive by trying to align one’s self with the will of the one who harms you.
When the harmer pressures the harmed into forgiveness or reconciliation, that’s often a sign that they still do not respect the harmed one, or understand the harm done. Reconciliation without genuine accountability from the harmer tends to set one up for being harmed again.
When the trespass is corrected—everyone is back within their own appropriate boundaries, and respecting each other’s—then the harmed person can have the space to work through their feelings and determine whether forgiveness or reconciliation is worthwhile.
Forgiveness is never owed, but the person harmed may one day find it to their benefit to forgive, if only to let go of the pain and anger, which can be their own hooks that keep us bound to the harmful person. Whether through vengeance, pleading, pleasing, or desperation, our efforts to repeatedly have our hurt recognized, validated, and understood by a person who repeatedly demonstrates their inability to do any of those things becomes a form of self-harm.
When I think of forgiveness, I think of accepting the person as exactly who they are, accepting myself for the ways I participated, and finding the right boundaries I need to have peace within myself and between myself and the one who hurt me.
Reconciliation is not required for forgiveness. You may decide reconciliation is the right move, or you may never welcome that person into your life again. Whatever brings you to peace and security is right.
And now I feel I can offer that forgiveness and want the same in return—for those hurts I cause to be forgiven in a way that allows space and distance needed for the hurt person to be at peace, and to make amends and take accountability as needed.
If the person who caused harm is struggling with not being able to control whether forgiveness and reconciliation will happen, the best practice would be to continue to work on themself and explore how their behavior contributed to these circumstances, and to respect the boundaries of the person they hurt. Eventually they may prove themselves to have become a safe and honorable person, but if all you can do is never cause that harm again, that would be a beautiful rose growing from the pile of manure of what happened between you.
Years ago, when The Dog Whisperer was having his era of fame, I saw an episode in which he was introducing a poorly socialized dog into his rehabilitative pack. It was a tense moment, where both pack and outsider made threatening gestures at each other, and as I remember it there was an implication that the pack might attack and destroy the outsider if it couldn’t relax and submit to connection. The pack was a unit of dogs with social cohesion, affection, and safety, and they weren’t going to let this stranger come in and screw it all up.
Since learning about the consequences of chronic loneliness, I’ve found myself frequently thinking about that moment. People who have been lonely too long tend to be more on alert to signs that they’re going to be rejected, and they’re more likely to protect themselves in ways that end up being hostile or off-putting to others.
Those lonely people are desperate to connect, and terrified of the emotional pain of being rejected. But none of that is apparent from the outside except to those who have been through it or who are unusually emotionally sensitive and aware. From the outside, it looks like a person abruptly turning into an asshole without any clear reason. Or the lonely person abruptly canceling plans and severing relationships, or sending out aggressively self-deprecating comments that no one can argue away.
A pack of wolves playing in the snow.
I think about that outcast dog with its likely history of trauma and ostracism, so keyed-up and tense that it can’t relax and connect with the pack even if it that’s all it wants. It feels unfair that the pack would reject it for its struggles with rejection. But that comes from my own over-identification with the outcast dog. From the perspective of the pack, which had clearly absorbed and rehabilitated many dogs over the years, it could only tolerate so much resistance. Being too fixated in the anti-social consequences of chronic loneliness could threaten the coherence of the group.
When I was at my loneliest, I was also at my most toxic—self-righteous, condescending, withdrawing into stony silence when hurt, being self-consciously weird, making very cruel statements about myself as though that’s what others thought of me. Now I can see how much I was caught in my own suffering and setting up an obstacle course for anyone who was trying to connect with me, to keep myself safe, but that safety only perpetuated the loneliness.
I identified more with the lonely, misunderstood, bullied outcast, but as I found belonging I also participated in cruelly teasing other young folks at school who were more outcast than I. I regret that behavior now, and have since felt sensitive to the dangers and cruelty of those who belong against those who are experienced as different.
What disquiets me lately is considering the merits of protecting the boundaries of your group against people who cannot tolerate connection and participate meaningfully. The “lone wolf” shooters whose apparent loneliness and lack of purpose makes them vulnerable to turn their anger and hurt into murder. The person who always speaks up about how terrible the group is, and tears relationships apart with triangulation, but never accepts compromise and never comes to the meetings where you can actually address their problems.
Having spent years trying to build inclusive, equitable, just community, I believe that this will always be an aspirational project. There will always be more work to do, but also there is a way in which it is impossible to be a group that includes and accommodates every single person. Every group forms a culture, and part of being in that group means absorbing and being absorbed by its culture.
For example, some groups make plans and begin promptly at the time stated (at least, I imagine this must be true. Could you tell me where they are?) while others start their meetings when everyone shows up, even if that takes an hour. Neither of these are wrong in an objective way but both create their own inconveniences that you have to learn to live with if you want to be a part of things. Being an on-time person in a late group may mean learning how to be flexible, to accept this is how things will go, and to start planning for the lateness. Being a late person in an on-time group may mean learning how to organize yourself to get there on time, or to accept that you’re going to miss things. But it means learning to accept this is how the group works, it’s not personal to you, and you’ve either got to adapt or work really hard to change the group culture.
There is absolutely an unfairness when people who are struggling emotionally, socially, or mentally have difficulty connecting in a community that does not understand them. But it’s also unfair to expect everyone in your world to be prepared to be a therapist at a moment’s notice, to intuit the conflict happening inside and intervene in a way that means the lonely person feels totally safe and never has to take a risk. That does happen, once in a great while, and it’s absolutely beautiful. But the beauty is defined by its rareness.
We have to learn how to connect, and connection is a living, ongoing process of taking risks. We have to honor that risk-taking is hard and dangerous and we need to have a plan and resources for taking care of ourselves when the risks go poorly. But we also have to honor that nothing happens without our risk-taking. We can’t expect everyone we meet to know the right language to use that makes us feel safe, or that people will meet our needs without our having to ask for it, or that people will know or respect our limits without us standing up for them.
Reflections upon the eclipsed moon in Scorpio under the rays of Algol.
The other night, I dreamt I was in a game, and every time I was on the verge of progressing to a new level, I needed to remember everything that happened before. This happened multiple times, and in the dream I felt a sense of “Of course this is how it must be.” The review of what has been must occur moving to what is next.
After waking, it made me think about reports of near-death experiences and the now-pervasive trope of seeing one’s entire life in the moments before death. Then, surprisingly, it made me think of the role of witnessing in Internal Family Systems therapy.
In IFS our “parts” may be so developed and discrete that they have their own story, their own memories, their own experience of our life. One part of us, concerned with protecting ourselves against financial setbacks, carries formative moments of scarcity or fear, all the threats that could have or did take us down. Another part of us, carrying an essential terror of being abandoned, carries every moment that we were hurt or terrified and reached out for support but no one reached back.
Every time we felt alone in suffering, or learned to survive hardship, waits for us to be capable of returning to witness that pain. Our suffering deeply longs to be felt and understood fully; that’s why it seizes upon us in our weak moments when we don’t have the strength to push it away. Or it lashes out at loved ones, hoping they have the strength and capacity to hold it for us. But when we are too vulnerable to give it the caring attention it seeks, we only feel mired more deeply in it, and caught in the battle of those parts of us desperately trying to keep it hidden.
Our parts carry us in ways we forget to notice. Image of a hand sculpture holding up a tree trunk. Photo by Neil Thomas.
There’s no shame in any of this and no urgency—to witness suffering before we’re ready is not useful. Nor can we expect others to recognize this suffering for what it is when it arises, for it often reaches out in the guise of an accusation, an attack, an explosive reaction that seems far bigger than merited by the situation.
Sitting with the dream, and this work, I imagine there is a psychic law: a thing must be fully witnessed for it to become ready to surrender to transformation.
What is therapeutic is when we can separate out these wounded parts from a place of calm, supportive, wise listening, and then attend to them as they show us all the memories and feelings they’ve been carrying alone. When we can stay with it, the Self’s calm caring and understanding helps that part of us to finally feel understood, to feel deeply felt. Once it has been felt all the way through, it will let us know it’s ready to release that pain and move to the next level.
If I were to distill the essence of what I’ve found therapeutic, that in turn I offer to others, it’s that we must stop fixing ourselves and work instead on accepting ourselves. Most of us, however, come to therapy because our efforts to “fix” ourselves and our lives have not been working, and we feel a sense of urgency that we need to get our shit together soon. This urgency is useful to get us to work on ourselves, but then the last thing we want to hear is “Stop trying to fix yourself!”
What our “fixer” parts want is to resolve our problems while avoiding taking major risks, making significant and scary changes, or looking at the deeper roots of my distress. This is entirely understandable! If you can heal yourself without that work, why wouldn’t you? Unfortunately, there may come a point where the fixers are valiantly taking on a doomed task.
Imagine that there’s a heavy rainstorm, and you see a dam is starting to fall over. Our fixer parts see the superficial problem—the dam is falling over! They sense the urgency of the situation—if it fails, there’ll be a flood! And they go for the obvious answer—I’ll just prop it up!
To an extent, this works. So long as you never move or change, your fixer could hold the dam in place. But this effort is costly, and grows more so over time, especially when no one is working on the question of why the dam is falling over. And why would they, when the fixer’s got it handled?
To “fix” means to hold something in place. When we fix, we create superficial solutions to our problems, but we do not look at the roots of those issues. If we simply keep pushing our anger, our hopelessness, our exhaustion back up behind the dam, continuing to overwhelm it while we prop it up, does that serve us?
When my clients begin to work with fixer parts, they tend to imagine jugglers, plate-spinners, acrobats—people performing incredible, amazing, superhuman feats that are astonishing and completely unsustainable. Yet they’ll keep going until they die, no matter how exhausted they are, because what’s more terrifying is the not knowing what will happen if they stop. What if all the plates and balls fall to the ground? What if the dam falls over?
These fixer parts tend to live in a world of isolation, with no one else to help—no Self, no family, no friends, no community. If they’re aware of the existence of other people, our fixers may feel these other people are neglectful, unaware, hostile, or waiting for us to fail. What worsens this is that when we engage with other people from our fixer parts, they may feel themselves condescended to, pushed away, or disconnected—like we can’t handle them as anything but another problem to solve.
Our fixers are truly trying to help, and coming from a place of love, and isolation, and doing the best they can. But they may well be trying to hold together an edifice that is no longer serving anyone. What they do not know how to do is transform, which means not only letting go of fixing but embracing radical change.
“Radical” relates to the root of a thing. It is beneath our superficial story and mental efforts to hold together. Turning toward the roots requires what I call “acceptance practice” for lack of a better term at this time. In psychotherapy practice, it means going into the deeper levels of the consciousness, which lay within our bodies.
Our fixers experience our emotions, sensations, and behaviors as problems to solve or things to manage, but until we’ve learned how to accept our full experience and witness ourselves as we are, our fixers tend not to really understand these other parts. They have theories about the “problems” but we can tell it’s incomplete because the problems continue. All that “knowing” is intellectual and disconnected from the actual part of you that is responding and acting in those moments.
The dam metaphor, while strange, continues to be useful, because in the world of a fixer, we’re either in danger of being flooded by our emotions in a catastrophic, damaging way or we’re keeping our feelings at a firm distance with steel walls. The dam is an effort to control overwhelming emotion, but it’s also creating the overwhelm—stopping the natural movement and flow of emotion until it’s built up so much force that it’s overpowering.
Acceptance practice would be to let go of the dam and learn how to stay present even with the flow of emotions. With gratitude for our fixer parts for their incredible labor, we invite them to sit with us so that we can turn toward the emotional roots of our distress and listen to what they have to teach us.
This also means sitting with our multiplicity, able to recognize and allow all the conflicting thoughts and feelings that are a normal part of being a person. Instead of forcing ourselves into a coherent narrative and walling off what is contradictory, we can learn to accept every part of us as having a valid perspective to be witnessed.
With that witnessing and acceptance, the flow of intense feeling begins to diminish and become workable, and all those problems and conflicts begin to dissolve into what we might call a solution. As in chemistry, a solution is the result of various substances merging together; so too do the solutions of our distress come from allowing our conflicting thoughts and feelings to thaw, flow, and come together into a new perspective.
All of this is as simple and challenging as sensing into our bodies, where emotions live, and witnessing them from a place of calm and compassion. Then staying with them, listening and asking for more understanding, and letting clarity come to us.
While reading the New York Times‘s survey of therapists about the mental health crisis co-occurring with the COVID-19 pandemic, I could only nod my head. Even operating my own private practice I have noted the tremendous increase in demand for services beyond my capacity to meet it; the difficulty of finding therapists who are financially accessible to clients in need or even simply taking on new clients; the limits of my own capacity to meet the need; and the increased acuity in what my ongoing clients are dealing with in their own work.
I believe the ongoing transformation our culture is undergoing will continue to demand changes of mental healthcare, both what we think of as mental healthcare and how it works. Already Telehealth is becoming a normal way of delivering care rather than an inferior and exceptional method.
I find myself wanting to go back to basics. What is health? What is mental health? Our collective definitions of those words tend to base itself on a state of being conducive to surviving in a capitalist empire: capable of continuing to work and ideally producing children so we have future workers. On top of that foundation we lay all our dreams and fantasies of ecstatic life, a robust immune system that defeats all invaders, emotional intimacy that’s not threatening, wealth, and status with spiritual attainment.
The thing about that is, most of those expectations come from a world we no longer inhabit. So we are in a time of thick fog, trying to follow a path once suggested to us that we can no longer see. We can hardly feel confident about what we think is coming down the path.
From a trauma-informed perspective, all the ways that we respond to stress, confusion, and lostness are completely rational ways our system is trying to keep us going. Even the ones that feel shameful. And, as we know, those responses tend to have their own limitations. They’re about getting through the moment rather than stepping back to rethink the goal.
We need to get lower to the ground, to feel and sense our way through, until the fog clears and we can see again.
Since I cannot be a therapist to everyone, and you may have contacted thirty people who mostly didn’t call you back and you’ve given up on getting help, I wanted to offer you this ritual. It does not offer answers, or make everything okay, but it can support you in finding your way through.
In this audio file, the writer Anthony Rella reads aloud the next paragraphs in this article, and then at 2:45 guides you through the ritual. You may use it if you’d like the support, or you can print out the text of this article and refer to it as needed.
When you are in distress, overwhelmed, enraged, or at your limit—or feel yourself reaching that moment—I encourage you to take time to do this full ritual. Above is an audio recording if you want my voice to guide you through the steps, or you may print this text or copy it onto your device.
This ritual uses the five elements of the Western tradition: Air, Earth, Water, Fire, and Spirit. I am drawing upon my own spiritual practice, traditions, and training, and offer this to you with no expectation that you commit to any particular path. If you have familiarity with this kind of work you may notice that I guide you to move counter-clockwise, which is the direction of dispersal.
Try find a space where you can be undisturbed for twenty to thirty minutes. Turn off notifications on any devices and ask folks to leave you alone, unless they want to participate with you. You are encouraged to speak out loud with vigor if you can do that in your space, but “speaking” within your mind is okay if that’s what you need to do. I wrote this to be as accessible and simple as possible, but there is space to add more. You may, if you wish, add a representation of each element in the four directions named—a photo, a colored candle, an object that represents the element, and so forth.
The ritual is written for one person, but if you have co-participants, here are two possibilities: you could do the ritual as written together, having your own experiences. Or, you can take turns sharing and witnessing. For example, when working with air, one person could share out loud the stories of their distress, while the other person simply witnesses—not responding with comments, suggestions, or judgments, simply being with it. Then you can switch, where the witness speaks and the speaker witnesses.
I recommend you do the whole ritual the way I’ve presented at lease once before modifying it, but if you find any piece is inaccessible please make whatever changes are necessary. After you’ve done the whole ritual once, you may find one or two elements work well for you, and you can use them as needed.
Begin in the center of your space. Inhale and then exhale until your breath has completely emptied out three times, imagining as you exhale that you are sinking into the ground, which receives the weight of your burdens, stress, and tension.
Then begin square breathing: inhale for a count of four; hold for a count of four; exhale for a count of four; and then hold for a count of four. Return to this pattern of breathing throughout the ritual when you need to center or settle, but do not stress about doing it continuously, especially when speaking.
Say:
I who am the beauty and strength of the earth
made skin and bone, blood and fat and muscle,
call to those who would love and honor my need,
and send away any who would bring me harm;
may you find a place for your own ease.
Turn toward the east.Imagine there is a breeze blowing eastward, toward the rising sun or, if you like, another star in space. Tell the breeze your stories of distress, what burdens and bothers you, what brings you anxiety and fear. If you can, speak these out loud. Imagine the breeze carries these words from you into the light and heat of the sun.
When you feel complete, turn toward the north. Imagine your body is a snow-covered mountain at the top of the world. Notice any tension, pain, tightness, or constriction, or unpleasant sensations. Imagine the coolness of the snow sinking in to soothe your pains, or the melting waters carrying your burdens into the earth.
When you feel complete, turn toward the west. Invite into your awareness any emotions you are having, even if those emotions are numbness and emptiness. Imagine there is a river moving through you, and you can pour or allow these emotions to mingle and flow with the currents of that river moving toward the wide, deep, vast ocean, where there is space and room for every feeling. If it feels right, let yourself broaden and deepen to become the ocean.
When you feel complete, turn toward the south. Imagine a fire, and notice what kind of fire you imagine. Does it feel wild, big, and uncontained? If so, keep breathing and staying with this flame until it starts to settle and gather into something more manageable. If it feels cold, sluggish, or small, imagine that your breath can kindle and strengthen its flamesuntil it reaches a vitality that seems right to you. Imagine that you can offer the fire any burdens or beliefs you carry that feel draining, diminishing, or bring you to a sense of hopelessness. Watch as these burdens transform into living flame.
When you feel complete, sit in the center, facing any direction. Return to the square breath. On one inhale, imagine you can breath energy and support from the earth, through your body, and then exhale it up through your head into the sky. On the next inhale, imagine you can breathe expansion and clarity from the sky, through your body, and then exhale it into the earth. Follow this pattern for three or four cycles, and then shift, breathing earth and sky energy into your belly, then breathing it out from your heart, as though sending its energy in all directions.
Invite yourself to remember all the times you’ve helped others, been a support to them, or had the impact you wanted to have in the world. Try to notice what comes up without judgment, simply as information. Then, invite yourself to remember the times others have helped you, whether they are friends, loved ones, or strangers. Maybe some of these memories carry pain, and notice that, but try to stay with only attending to ways you’ve been helped.
Ask yourself to think of three people you could contact today to check on, connect with, or ask for support. Keep going until you’ve come up with three names, and write them down if necessary.
Offer gratitude to the elements in whatever way feels true to your heart, using words, gestures, breath, or even a smile. Then go and reach out to one of those three people.If they are not available, reach out to the next, and then the next.
Fire has much to teach us. The principles that inform building, tending, and ending fires extend beyond the practical into insights into our relationships with our own life energy and capacity to work toward goals.
If you’ve never built a fire yourself, you may think it’s easy. When there is drought and the land is parched, the plants and fallen wood dried-out, and some asshole throws a firecracker into a place without any ring of stone or brick to contain the flames—fires start easily, without control, and their damage is enormous. While wildfires serve the vitality of the larger ecosystem, they are destructive for our human perspective and purposes.
Most of us want a fire that can entertain us, bring us warmth, illuminate the darkness, cook our food, or burn what we no longer need. We want controlled, concentrated, manageable fire. The first skill is knowing the optimal conditions—when it’s wetter, for example, or when we can contain our fire in a stone circle, a fireplace, or a pit, and keep materials on hand to extinguish it if it threatens to leave the container.
Ingredients of a Campfire
When thinking about the materials for a fire, it’s important to know there’s a relationship between the amount of energy it takes to get something burning and the amount of energy it generates in being burnt. So a wadded up piece of newspaper is going to be easy to light, it’ll burn nice and pretty, but it’ll go out quickly if you add nothing else on top of it. A heavy log is the other end of the spectrum—it requires a lot of heat and energy to get going, but once it does it will last you a much longer time.
You can think of it as both “you need to expend energy to get more energy” and also that the more energy you need to expend, the more you’re likely to get from the effort. The first expenditure of energy is getting the spark, which may mean focused energy drawing a spindle through a bow against a plank of wood, or clacking metal or rock together, until you’ve got a spark.
The exception, of course, are the things we’ve designed to be easy-to-light—matches, lighters, fuel, firestarters, and logs soaked in combustible chemicals. If you’ve got any of these, you’ll need less energy to get going.
In firebuilding, the spectrum of materials is broken down into “tinder,” “kindling,” “fuel.” These are the spectrum of that ratio, from easiest to burn to hardest, and likewise from least energy output to most.
Paper, cardboard, pine needles, dried leaves, and tiny matchstick-sized wood all fall under tinder. Tinder is like sugar. Easy to reach for, very satisfying in the moment, but too much of leaves you burnt out and cranky.
What kinds of things do you enjoy doing that are like tinder? For me it could be scrolling on social media, watching a familiar favorite TV show, snacking, and other things I won’t name in public. Often, when clients and I are exploring their tinder activities, it tends to be the things we go to when we’re really exhausted or bored to get a bit of a boost. We’re looking for energy but it’s possible what we really need is a nap, or a glass of water.
Tinder isn’t bad, it’s useful, but if that’s all you’ve got then you’re going to be spending most of your time and energy heaping more atop the fire to keep it going.
So when building a fire, we start with tinder to get enough heat and energy to ignite kindling, which are thicker sticks the size of your fingers or slightly larger. These are like carbohydrates—also easy to burn, but more energy output. A fire of kindling still requires a lot of feeding to keep going, but it’ll burn longer than the tinder.
What kinds of things do you do that feel like kindling? Could be going out on a date, going to a concert, working out, or going for a hike. We’re all going to have different answers based on our ability, our skills, and our energy capacities. Once upon a time, going out to a bar felt like a tinder activity to me, but now leaving the house for any social activity requires some effort of hyping myself up and reminding myself it’ll be worth it.
If you want maximum heat with less effort, then you want your fire hot enough to start fuel—logs thicker than your arm. These beasts take a lot of energy and patience to get going, but they’ll reward you with hours of heat and light and require less constant tending. These are the fat cells of fire.
What kinds of things do you do that feel like fuel? For these I think of the range of bigger life tasks that require a great deal of effort and patience. Could be applying for new jobs, starting a degree, or deciding to learn a new skill.
There are so many things in my life that I value now which began as fuel tasks. When I was younger, I dreaded going to the gym and doing any kind of exercise, but when I was able to push through—even when it was miserable—I found that when I left I felt energized and happier, and glad I’d gone. Beginning a meditation practice, starting my own business, and learning a martial art have all offered me the same experience.
With experience and practice, all of these tasks have moved more into the “kindling” category, but it was not easy. That dread of beginning stayed with me for a long time with each task, but I also sensed what the experienced offered would make it worth it, and I left feeling better.
That’s the key—fuel gives you more energy than it demands. There are plenty of things that take more of our energy than it gives, and those are not fuel. In some cases, these might be obligations we must fulfill to make our fuel activities possible, but just as often they are habits we continue even though long ago they stopped feeding us and we’ve fallen into resentment.
What you want on top is kindling, pieces of wood that are thicker. Ideally you’d want a range of thicknesses, because the thickness and density of the wood is also its potential. The thicker the wood is, the longer and hotter it will burn, and the thickest logs are what we’d call fuel. But the thicker the wood is, the more energy and heat you need to ignite it. That’s why you can’t just throw a tree stump on top of a fire and call it good; you’ve got to split it into smaller pieces that will be easier to light, easier to store, and easier to use to feed the fire over time.
Shaping a Campfire
Heat rises. That’s the primary principle that informs everything about structuring and tending your fire. The second is that heat feeds heat.
When we’re starting cold, we want to build a fire by starting with lots of tinder, enfolding it with kindling, and then adding our fuel once it’s good and hot. A fire needs oxygen, so adding too much, too heavy, and too densely packed wood will smother it before it can get going. My favorite shape is to build a tent of kindling around a nest of tinder.
Too many of us, when we’re feeling low energy or stuck in life, expect ourselves to be able to fire up some heavy fuel. Then, when we fail, we think it confirms our fate as incompetent failures. But all it means is that we’ve added too heavy of fuel, too quickly, without awareness of these principles.
So if you’re starting cold and want more energy in your life, instead of making a huge commitment to a task like starting graduate school, try finding some tinder and kindling tasks that you can get started to build your enthusiasm and energy. Start with one new habit, like washing your dishes more often, and do that for a couple weeks until you add the second.
If you find you’re struggling and it feels hard, think of it as the energy you’re spending to get this fire going, and look at what you get in return when you’ve finished the task. If you’re losing more energy than you gain, that might be a sign that this task is a heavier fuel than you’re ready to burn, and see if you can find something lighter and closer to your energy capacities.
A Fire’s Rhythm of Life
Starting a fire is tricky and discouraging. More often than I care to recall, I’ve experienced the thrill of watching those first flames catch quick and bright and then the bitterness of watching them gutter out before coming to much of anything. By this, I also think of all the times I’ve tried to start a new group, or a new workshop, or get my communities excited about a new project. I think of all the pieces I’ve written that sparked no connection, and the year or two I spent building my private practice before enough clients noticed me that it became sustainable.
Starting a fire is hard! And what’s hardest is learning to intuit when a fire needs tending and when it needs to be left alone to do its work. We can lose a fire through neglect or smothering. In these learning stages we can only make choices and see what happens, then adapt.
That feels like a deep lesson, one that I can’t say I’ve fully learned. Fire teaches us that if we don’t interpret missteps and collapses as signs of divine judgment—if we can keep learning, adapting, and trying—eventually we’ll get a good fire going. But in experiencing the disappointments and failures of the work, eventually we may decide it’s not worth the effort.
If the fire is failing, we could try wadding up more tinder and using our breath to get the weak coals going again, so we can add more kindling on top and try to get momentum again. Perhaps we need to move the heavier logs away to give the fire more time to get stronger. Perhaps we need to spread things out so that the fire could breathe—if it’s too densely packed, it doesn’t have the oxygen it needs. Perhaps we need to push things closer together to concentrate our energy.
No matter how much teaching and instruction we receive, we can only learn through practice. Whether you’re trying to find a partner, start a business, write a novel, or organize a workshop, it’s rare to experience immediate, instant success without effort or failure. We may imagine there’s a right way to do things, and often there is, but on the ground it becomes clear that “the right way” itself contains thousands of smaller choices to make and actions to take. There may be no right or wrong choice to make, nor no action to take that guarantees success or failure. We simply have to make choices, see what happens, and adapt.
Eventually, however, we’ll get a good fire going with a strong bed of coals. All the lessons we’ve learned continue to apply, but now it’s less urgent and catastrophic. It’s an easier pace to tend the fire, and we can be decisive about when we want to feed it and when we want to cool things down. A good fire could burn for days, if not years, but it still requires presence, attention, and conscientiousness.
And, eventually, we may decide it’s time to end the fire. Perhaps we no longer have use of it, our we’re tired of the efforts of tending and want to get rest or do change focus. That’s when we show respect to ourselves, our environment, and the fire itself by making sure it’s completely extinguished so it can be safely left unattended. What’s left is nutrient-rich ash, which offers wonderful fertilizer for others’ growth.
Starting to practice consent can feel awkward and clunky, especially in the emotional intensity of the moment. People whose response to a sad story is to want to wrap you up in a giant bear hug may feel it’s awkward and cold to stop and first ask, “Do you want a hug?”
For them, getting wrapped up in a hug while having big feelings may be exactly the medicine they crave. For others, though—me, for example—when I feel upset and vulnerable, a giant hug feels smothering to me. My parts don’t hear “I love and care about your suffering,” what they hear is “Your sadness is too much for me and I need it to go away.”
This is made worse should I dare to say I don’t want the hug and the hugger feels rejected, upset, and hurt. Then the message I get is that my feelings and needs aren’t important and I need to put all that aside to make them feel better. Thanks for the support!
I get that for the other person it may be a genuine expression of love and caring, and to have that refused feels like a personal rejection. I also get that asking for consent feels cold and unromantic.
Our romantic ideal of love is a relationship in which we intuitively perceive and meet each other’s needs without having to talk about it. Not only is this unrealistic when we each have vastly unique terrains of what it means to love and be loved, it makes minor and inevitable miscues explode into huge questions about the relationship. Our immediate response isn’t: “Oh, this person doesn’t know I need a hug because they come from an emotionally distant family, so I’ll ask for what I need.” What we think is something like: “How could this person be so cruel as to deny me a hug when it’s so obvious I need one?”
It is possible to achieve that level of trust, understanding, and intuitive connection, but the important word here is achieve. We earn that through the efforts of lots and lots and lots of communication, asking for clarification, and growing in understanding of ourselves and our loved ones. Practicing consent gives us a structure and motivation to do this work, to be mindful to check in and make sure what we’re offering is what the other person wants.
Yet there are times when the person we want to love or care for is unable to be clear about what they need from us. When we reach out to loved ones and say, “Let me know what you need,” that expression of caring might not be enough to get an authentic answer. The person we want to support may not know what they need; may not know how to ask for what they need; or may feel shame and terror at the vulnerability of asking. These three states are obstacles for establishing consent. For the rest of this post, I’m going to discuss each obstacle and offer suggestions for ways we can work through that not-knowing and learn together what is needed.
I Don’t Know What I Need
Giving and receiving help is one of the ways we thrive as social beings.
There are hundreds of valid reasons why a person may not know exactly what they want or need. Many of us may have been raised to be self-sufficient and simply have no practice for asking for and receiving help. Many of us have not experienced families or communities that showed us what’s possible for mutual caring in times of crisis. Some of us may not understand our bodies or hearts well enough to know what “a need” is.
For you as the person wanting to help, you don’t need to know the backstory or the deep psychological root. What matters is simply that what they’re needing is help knowing what they need.
I notice this not-knowing often happens in moments of unexpected crisis or loss. When we have a crisis for the first time, we lack any kind of history to rely upon to help us think about what we need, and our brains are using a lot of resources to manage the emotional and logistical shock and overwhelm. There is both so much need and so little structure to identify the need, and we may simply go into whatever survival strategies are most familiar to us. Even when people we love and trust offer us help in this state, we may feel grateful but unable to identify anything they could do to help.
If you, the person wanting to help, can’t get traction with “What do you need?”, try asking a version of “How are you doing with all this? What’s been hard for you?” Try letting your loved one talk, let them know what you’re hearing, and give them time to open up and vent about the difficulties and hardships. After a while, you may be able to see places where you can suggest ways you could help: “Oh, your license expired? I’d be happy to drive you to the DMV next week so you can get it renewed, if you want.”
People who’ve experienced a similar kind of crisis tend to be really good at this because they’ve lived through it and have the benefits of hindsight to know what would’ve been nice for them. So they can be more assertive in offering a range of options of ways they could help, and let the person they want to support decide what they want: “I could bring a lasagne to your house, I could walk or your dog, I could help you clean the house, I could help you do paperwork.”
If the person is still unwilling or unable to accept the help, it’s okay to let them have a break and decide later if the want to come to you. If the person needs more help than you can give them, you might offer instead to help find more help. “I definitely want to make a lasagne for you tonight, and maybe after I could make one of those YouCaring sites to ask other people to help with the dog walking and house cleaning.”
I Don’t Know How to Ask for It
There are times when the person needing help does know exactly what they need but the act of asking is overwhelming. We may have heard messages throughout our lives that if you need help, you don’t deserve it; or that if you receive help from another person, they can hold it over your head to shame or manipulate you into doing whatever they want, indefinitely. You may have experienced a person helping you with resentment, or bringing up the help later to shut you down in a different conversation.
In these ways, asking for help feels quite dangerous. You may feel like asking for help means risking not having support when you “really need it,” so you have to be sure this crisis is worth it. With this mindset, we tend to make our problems smaller and miss opportunities for getting help.
Giving and receiving help is one of the ways we thrive as social beings. Being grateful to each other for the help we’ve received is a balm against resentment.
At the same time, if you as a person begin to resent others for how much they ask of you, it is your work to say no and set boundaries. Resentment is inevitable when you feel you must help out of obligation and have no option to say no or prioritize your own health.
Giving care to those who have cared for you is a part of healthy connection, but you don’t have to help hide the bodies at three in the morning when you have a job interview at nine.
If they really need your help, they can wait till your interview is done.
Shame and Terror of Vulnerability
Asking for what we really need is vulnerable and we risk being judged or ridiculed. We have so many reasons to be concerned about vulnerability, and often we’ve experienced moments of invalidation, ridicule, abandonment, or neglect in critical moments that give us reasons to avoid being that vulnerable again.
These intense feelings tend to reflect the world of the young person who lacks the power to take care of their own needs. Our parts that fear ridicule, abandonment, or neglect may still feel like small, dependent children who are unable to get their needs met.
Their responses make complete sense in this way, but also these parts may not recognize that we have grown and become older, wiser, more powerful, and more competent. This part may fear abandonment from a lover but be unable to recognize that you’re surrounded by family and friends who will be there for you even if this relationship ends.
I encourage my clients in distress to make a list of three to five people to whom they can reach out for help when in need. Three to five is intentional. If you only have oner person, there’s a danger of overwhelming your support or having no one if they’re sick, unavailable, or otherwise unavailable.
With three to five people, though, there’s more room for consent and generosity without resentment. You don’t have to invest all your urgency into one person, and your support people can feel at ease knowing if they’re not available you’ve got more options for care.
First, of course, you have to admit it’s okay to have needs and that asking for help is worth the experience of shame and vulnerability. Asking for what we need may always feel like a risk, but we can practice getting more comfortable with taking the risk.
If you’re used to ignoring your needs or putting off hard conversations, you’ve probably experienced at least one moment of overwhelming emotion when it all comes out with explosive force. This feeling may be rage, or it may be despair, and its urgency and force breaks through all our barriers to vulnerability.
Unfortunately, that same force blasts the person we’re turning to for help. It can make a giant mess, which then reinforces the story that we can’t ask for help, which then leads to another build up of intensity that comes out in a blast.
If you like, think of this like a geyser or a firehose where all the accumulated tension suddenly erupts with power. A more earthy and relatable metaphor would be the explosive urgency of waiting too long to get to the bathroom when your body has an urgent need to expel whatever’s in it.
The temptation, when states of rage or despair are over, is to feel some relief and hope it never comes back. But these aren’t embarrassing or silly blips in consciousness to leave behind, these are expressions of deep needs gone unaddressed that require attention and care.
We need to learn to identify the subtler signs of the tension building within us before it finally explodes in rage or despair. Asking for what we need before the explosion feels much scarier, because we’re more present with the experience, but that presence also helps us in speaking up clearly and hanging out with the difficulties of the conversation.
What we need to practice is identifying the subtler signs of need that pop up before we get to the point of rage or despair. If we can start the conversation before we get there, then we tend to be better able to advocate for ourselves and handle the difficulties of the conversation.
If you’re still beginning to figure out your needs or who you can trust to support you, a reliable practice to help is to journal what’s going on with you. A paper or electronic journal is good, or using a voice recorder to dictate a memo. Anything to get what’s in your head outside of yourself so that you can come back to it later in a calmer state of mind and begin to explore what got you to that point.
Having begun this reflective work can be really grounding in thinking about could have helped with the upset—was I underslept? Did I have enough to eat? Was volunteering to help a friend move their house on my first day off in two weeks maybe more than my body could handle?
Along with the physical needs are also the emotional and relationship needs that we may need to address. Having a list helps in having those direct conversations. And we can return to our practice of consent by reaching out to the friend and asking, “Hey, I want to talk to you about some things that I feel vulnerable about in our relationship. When would be a good time?”
Taking the Risk
With all that we’ve explored about consent and support, we may find there are times when it’s fine to go ahead and do something for a person without asking. Yes, that contradicts everything I’ve written. As often as I’ve experienced intrusive and unwanted care, I’ve also experienced numerous moments when the person did accurately intuit what I might need and gave it to me without my asking.
When this going ahead and doing it really worked for me, the giver seemed to be aware and accepting of the risk they were taking.
They’re not doing something for me so that they can feel better about themselves, or less guilty, or whatever feelings they’re having about myself. The support was given without needing me to have a warm response for their own well-being. They did it because it felt right, and they didn’t punish me if I didn’t immediately like or accept what they offered. They didn’t bring it up later to guilt me. They didn’t get defensive. They did it, and let me decide what I wanted to do with it.
Being grateful to each other for the help we’ve received is a balm against resentment.
If I’m going to risk this, usually my first sign is noticing when the person I want to support keeps bringing up the same idea over and over, even when they’re seeming dismissive of it. “She offered me a hug, which felt so weird. Like, what’s a hug going to do? I can’t imagine a hug will make me feel better. A hug doesn’t bring my dad back from the dead. What’s the point of hugging?” There may well be a part of them that desperately wants a hug, and another part that feels mistrustful of the notion or afraid you’ll judge them if they admit they want it. In this case, it may put them at ease to hear your offer to hug them like it’s no big deal.
When I strongly suspect the person really wants help they keep rejecting, I’ll make it about me. “I get that you’re totally fine and don’t need anyone’s help. But tonight I’m going to make a shit ton of lasagne and I can’t eat it all, and I’ll feel guilty if I throw it away, so I’m going to leave a bunch at your house. You can do whatever you want with it, but it’d do me a big favor if you helped me get rid of it.”
In Closing
There’s not one right or best way to have feelings and want support, and practicing consent helps make sure that we’re giving the person we love the support they need. We achieve consent when everyone involved in an activity agrees to what is happening. At its best consent is explicit, voluntary, conscious, and mutual; especially when paired with respecting each other’s autonomy and self-authority in knowing what’s best for ourselves.
While it may feel awkward and unromantic, slowing down and getting consent offers the opportunity for greater closeness, understanding, and connection. Even when we struggle to know what we want or need, we can help each other in the learning.
During the long isolation of COVID-19’s first year, I noticed my mind become foggy and soft-edged. I fumbled with words and lost interest in most intellectual debates. At times I would be in mid-sentence and realize I’d lost the path to the end, and it would take long moments to recall what I meant to say.
The prospect of losing my mental faculties used to terrify me. As a kid without much physical prowess or social acumen, I gambled all my worth on intellect and the realm of the mind. To be the one who knew, the one with the sharpest and most decisive argument, were my positions of power. In the shadow of that power were all the moments of forgetfulness, ignorance, and incompetence—great horrors I tried to conceal from others.
My greatest fears were around losing my mind. Who would I be without my intellect and smartness? And though COVID brain is not nearly so severe as dementia or other cognitive disorders, these clear lapses in capacity might once have compelled me to begin some ridiculous daily routine of mental exercises to stave off forgetfulness.
Instead, I noticed myself feeling unbothered by my forgetting, and slightly relieved to realize I no longer worried about how smart I was. Sharing this with others, I’d say, “I’m not sure if this is maturity or decline.”
Commonly, the wise people in my life would say, ”Maybe it’s both.”
“No!” I’d protest, with futility. “It can’t be both!”
But of course it could be both. Maturation is a process of gain and loss. As we lose, for example, the energy and resilience of youth, we gain greater wisdom and efficacy. I’m thinking of an uncle who spent much of his life doing construction on houses. The last time I saw him was with a cousin my age, and a friend of my cousin’s who worked on projects with my uncle. The friend kept going on about how my uncle would take more breaks during their work, but he’d also accomplish more and work longer than both of them. What he may have lost in terms of energy, he’d gained in skill and efficacy.
Seeking is Lacking
What I’ve been gaining in my work is a greater sense of self-acceptance and the capacity to accept, acknowledge, and nurture all of my parts. And with that has come a decrease in the need to be the smartest guy in the room, to “prove myself” of having worth, and particularly to seek the approval of others.
That word, seek, carries a heavy burden. Our words for desire, both “want” and “need,” are rooted in a sense of lacking. Seeking implies an outward gaze, a searching for approval from a place of not having it. When I’d seek validation or approval from others, and didn’t get it, I would be thrown into a storm of self-doubt and frustration. In a state of seeking, moreover, the people who did validate and approve of me seemed less important than those who had not yet, or withheld approval.
What feels increasingly true for me is to expect validation and approval from the people most important to me in life. This isn’t to say I refuse criticism, concern, or disapproval. But in conflict and love I practice trying to understand how a person came to their position, and I look for the points they make that do seem valid and worth acknowledging.
This never means I think their entire framing and context is valid. For example, I’ve listened to folks raise concerns about vaccinations and found one or two points where I’ve thought, “That’s fair. I get why you’d be worried about that.” Those are the places where we can dialogue, but I’m not going to follow them into the wild speculations of their bizarre anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
Acknowledging what’s valid in another person’s perspective doesn’t weaken my own. People have a tendency to mirror what they’re receiving: when they feel genuinely heard and understood, they’re more willing to offer that in return. When they feel dismissed and belittled, they give it right back.
But I’ve also learned that there are times when a person feels heard and understood but still doesn’t make the effort to listen to my perspective. When I would let this rile me up, I gave too much ground in compromise, trying to placate them rather than insist I be treated with equal respect.
These days I am willing to offer validation but I also expect it in return. When in a conversation with a person who seems unable or unwilling to make effort in understanding what’s valid in my perspective, I waste less of my time trying to persuade them. Nothing about the urge to get them to understand me right now serves either of us. More and more, I acknowledge the impasse and say I need a break for both of us to chill out and reflect.
When I seek validation, I imagine a posture of leaning forward, reaching out, beginning to lose my balance in the effort to connect and be seen. When I expect validation, I feel myself leaning back into the support of my heels, grounded and centered, letting the other person move further away or closer.
Two Fish Swimming Apart But Tethered Together
In a sense, the seeking of approval and validation reveals a polarization within the Self. One part of me is afraid of being bad, worthless, wrong, stupid, or whatever harsh and shaming words apply to your particular constellation of fear. Another part wants to get away from this bad feeling by seeking the validation of my worthiness or goodness. Since my inner state is one of badness, the seeking feels that approval must come from outside myself.
Yet these two parts—the shame and the seeking—are like two fish, tethered together but swimming in opposite directions. When one pulls, the other pulls. The very act of seeking approval stirs up that part that believes I am not already “good,” who pulls back in terror that its “badness” will be seen. Perhaps, for a time, we find a stable situation in which we’re able to maintain a state of approval and feeling “good,” but that “bad” feeling thrashes under the surface, in anxiety dreams or moments of emotional overwhelm when we have a bad day.
The problem of “the pairs of opposites” in human psychology show up in so many spiritual and psychological traditions, particularly those in the Daoist, Buddhist, Hindu, and Jungian traditions. In my own Neopagan spiritual tradition, we speak of the Divine Twins as gods who embody of this fundamental tendency toward polarization.
Our perception and relationship with these Twins changes based on where we are in our psychospiritual process of awareness and maturation. When we think of ourselves as only singular, only one thing, we cannot accept the Twins within, and they are at war. We seek to identify with one of the Twins and cast the other out of ourselves into the world.
In this state, we often stay at the level of “good” and “bad.” Whatever I want to be is “good” and what I don’t want to be is “bad.” Some of us may identify with this goodness and see badness in the world; others of us may feel the other way around, seeing themselves as awful and others as virtuous and lovable.
For example, I often identified as a peacemaker, someone who tends toward harmony and compromise. In college, when my friends and I would sit around discussing which fictional characters we were, or what our superpowers would be, we said that my power was “anti-drama.” I had a tendency to be a peacemaker, to bring down the temperature of conflict.
Within this story is an implicit judgment of “drama” as self-evidently silly, irrational, and undesirable. Like I was this aloof, elevated being who has no time for the petty drama of other people. And that judgment also turned inward, dismissing my own hurts, angers, and upsets as petty, irrational, and insignificant.
Judgment is such an interesting phenomenon, because so many of us fear it while constantly enacting it on other people. My greatest fear was sharing why I was mad or hurt and someone else dismissing me as being a “drama queen”—making a big deal out of a small, silly, petty problem. So my judging parts became the gatekeeper of what was serious and what was dramatic. But in its protectiveness, it became zealous, and kept too much of my hurt stored in my inner world, and my relationships became more distant and robotic.
Conflict avoidance and peacemaking is a survival strategy I inherited and leaned on to navigate my unique life challenges. With such a rigid inner gatekeeper, I experienced a great deal of suffering and problems that could’ve been avoided by being direct and honest about my feelings. But parts of me were terrified of what could happen if I disappointed, angered, or hurt others.
Along with this was a tendency—which I now view as a compulsion—to involve myself in others’ conflicts—to mediate, not to take sides—while avoiding fighting my own battles. When I sensed the slightest bit of tension between others I noticed an urge to intervene, to lighten the mood, to explain what I think is going on, or to make apologies or excuses for others. At times, this is helpful—it can reduce tension and increase harmony, especially if I as a third party notice that conflict is coming from a miscommunication that’s easy to rectify. “I think what she meant to say is…”
Yet often it seemed to make the conflict bigger and more entrenched. At my most immature, I would talk one on one with people and try to make excuses for the other person, or share with one person why the other was upset. All this did was make people more distressed and angry, and interfered with the two people working out the conflict together. More and more I wonder if I created conflict out of what was merely tension.
Jung spoke of this as “enantiodroma,” the tendency for a thing to become its opposite, which he learned from Daoist thinking. For me, too much peacemaking and suppression of conflict actually stirred up drama. Imagining how a drama queen could become a peacemaker, I remember people in my life who had no problem bringing up grievances and slights when it affected them, but met my own hurts with a calm, dismissive, “Let’s put the past behind us.”
“The Peacemaker” and “The Drama Queen” now seem less to me like separate complexes and more two polarities of the same energy. When we think of polarization in terms of magnets, you may know from experience that trying to push together the same polarity on two magnets causes them to resist each other with increasing force, while opposing polarities come together with great intensity. When we identify with one end of a polarity, we may draw the opposing polarities out of others, and come together in a stable if too rigid embrace.
Only when we can hold both ends of the polarity within do we become free of the dance of attraction and repulsion. Or, rather, our dancing with polarities becomes freer. We can flip from one to the other, attracting or repelling at will. Meeting drama with drama might, indeed, work better for some of us. To take care of myself emotionally, to set boundaries, to make relationships work, I need to get a little dramatic, to get into conflict, and be a little messy while we work through our differences to see if we can establish a better harmony.
Increasingly these pairs of opposites seem less like antagonists and more two allies with different perspectives that can help us to find and walk the middle way. The Peacemaker becomes the part of me that values harmony, collaboration, and building relationships of mutual value. The Drama Queen becomes the part of me that cares about my own hurt and confusion and knows the only way to clarify these issues is through speaking up.
Often I think of a Buddhist story in which a student says to their teacher, “Master, sometimes I am confused by your teachings. When I come to you some days, you give me guidance that seems to contradict what you’ve said on other days.” The Master responds, “Imagine that you are walking along a narrow bridge, blindfolded, and drunk. When you start stumbling to the left, you risk falling off, so I shout out, ‘Go right!’ Then you stumble to the right, and risk falling off that side, so I shout, ‘Go left!’”
When we can witness our contradictions with equanimity, they become our own wise masters who keep us on the bridge. Should I move too much toward one, the other is there to call me back.
Non-Striving
Another teaching of these polarizations is that whatever posture we take toward the world is answered. Being too identified with the Peacemaker, I felt both overwhelmed by the extent of conflict in the world and a covert sense of superiority, like I was the only one mature enough to handle these conflicts. This superiority was condescending and disempowering toward others. I’ve never enjoyed people who treat me as incapable of handling my own problems. And it’s a trick that keeps me in this mindset that somehow I am responsible for other peoples’ problems. Not only does this guarantee endless, exhausting labor, it deprives others of the opportunities to work through their conflicts and discover the powers of self-advocacy and intimacy.
Stepping out of this idea that this world is a place that must be fixed, saved, or acted upon—this white savior fantasy of myself—has been liberating and brought with it a kind of cynicism. What is progress if every movement forward creates new problems and resistance? What is conservation if every restriction draws out resistance and rebellion?
Which brings me back to the weary teachings in the first chapter of Ecclesiastes, which I first read as a child:
All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again. All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them.
Certain experiences seem cyclical, fated, and ongoing in this world. Much of life is spent in hunger and desire, seeking to satiate those longings. Even when we do succeed in feeding those hungers, inevitably we crave more, or a new desire emerges.
No change is free of creating new complications. We gain new functions and possibilities while losing others. To imagine we can create a lasting, permanent, original change feels grandiose and inflating, which then plummets us into despair and hopelessness when we fail.
Yet stepping out of that grandiosity helps us reconnect with real power and vitality. Helping one person we know feels ennobling and gratifying. Solving all suffering is impossible. But solving specific problems is a fascinating experience. My Peacemaker imagined if he could simply help everyone calm down and work out their conflicts, he could rest, which made him resent conflict. But if it’s okay for there to be conflict—if conflict itself is not a problem that demands my constant effort—then I can rest deeply, and I can engage in what feels interesting or meaningful to me.
Is this maturation or decline? All along, whether people think I’m good or bad, I simply am. My needs exist whether I squash them for peace or raise them up like a burning torch and demand everyone pay attention. What has always felt most healing is presence, witnessing, and compassion. Finding that capacity within me that is neither polarity but able to contain and witness the both, with fondness. There is nothing to win, nothing to prove, nothing to fix. There is effort without effortfulness, action without striving, listening without passivity. Only the understanding that liberates and shows us the path of our greatest wholeness.
There is nothing to win, nothing to prove, nothing to fix.
There is effort without effortfulness, action without striving, listening without passivity.
Only the understanding that liberates and shows us the path of our greatest wholeness.
Many of us grow up burdened with the mandate to “be good”: moral, exemplary, worthy of praise and attention, and by extension deserving of what we want for ourselves. Yet alongside the demand to “be good” is the heavy burden of “being bad”: immoral, worthless, inferior, undeserving of what we want. We can also call this state “shame.”
Shame is a social emotion, though we experience it alone, because it is the emotion we feel when we’ve been exiled, cut off, or disappoint the people we want to be admired by. The threat of it is terrifying to us, who are innately a social species, especially as children who cannot survive alone. Once we’ve felt shame, we quickly start figuring out how to avoid experiencing it again. These moments, sometimes lightning-quick, lay the emotional foundation for what we understand as “goodness” and “badness” later in life.
Once when I was a really young kid, like six to eight, I was roughhousing with another boy my age in the back of a car. My grandmother, who was driving, snapped, “You two are like a couple of faggots. You can’t keep your hands off each other.” None of this meant anything to me—I didn’t know what a faggot was and what we were doing, I can now say, was normal play between boys that is actually good for long-term development.
If my grandmother was calmer or of a different generation, perhaps she would have calmly explained to us that our playing in the car was inappropriate and distracting her. But she said this other thing, and from that all I could internalize was that whatever we were doing was bad and, based on her tone, being a faggot must be bad too.
What’s relevant here is that what I learned in that moment could have become a structure to the rest of my life, if left unexamined. I could have built a whole personality around the idea that being a faggot was bad and boys touching other boys even in non-sexual play was bad—I see even younger men imposing that upon each other in Reddit threads. In my efforts to be “good” and avoid shame I could have rigidly avoided ever doing anything like that again. Then, in my efforts to be good, that shame would have ruled my entire life.
But at a certain point in life, that shame came into conflict with other things I began to learn about myself and the world. Life conspired to force me to open up those and other memories, feel the shame, and find the truth that dissolved the intensity of those feelings. Later in life, that same grandmother came to my commitment ceremony between myself and my husband. Her ideas about goodness evolved with time and experience.
I see in so many men I’ve worked with over the years—straight and queer, cis, trans, and nonbinary—a profound struggle between their desires to “be good” and all the instincts and urges and necessities of life that do not fit into “goodness.”
Even men who reject the religious and cultural constrictions of their families of origin may end up replacing one standard of goodness with another, while relating to it the same way. Instead of internalizing the teachings and wrestling with all the contradictions and paradoxes that are always present in every ideology and system of ethics, some of us cling to a rigid application of behavior and shame ourselves or others who deviate from it. I observe this often among white people and men who are early in their awakening to oppression and social justice.
One wants clarity and consistency to know how to be good, because the threat of being bad is so emotionally severe and may result in further kinds of exile: communities aligning against us because of harmful behavior, losing employment or relationships due to a heavy call-out. Yet these norms are in ongoing evolution and transformation, where behaviors that may once have been ignored or tolerated move into the category of unacceptable, and vice versa.
At some point in the process of maturation, it becomes important to let go of our clinging to “being good” and allow ourselves to explore the depths of shame and misunderstanding contained in that box that we label “being bad.” Because that box may contain many necessary tools for surviving in this world that got accidentally covered in the shit of shame: self-assertion, playfulness, ambition, kindness, caring, or leadership.
One of the consistent messages I’ve found in anti-oppression communities is that people who are not targets of a particular kind of oppression should defer to those who are in conversations about the oppression and that community, because we don’t have the perspective or experience to truly understand them or advocate for them. That remains to me a useful practice, reminding myself not to immediately dismiss perspectives that do not match my experience.
Yet we can take this challenge to the extreme of dismissing our own personal judgment and critical thinking, not doing the work of developing our own analysis, and at its very worst allowing ourselves to be disrespected, coerced, and hurt.
In a book I reviewed, Queer Magic: Power Beyond Boundaries, there is an essay in which a writer offers the suggestion that it is important spiritual work to learn to have sex with people that you do not find attractive. When I read that, I paused. Many spiritual practices involve subjecting ourselves to unpleasant or distasteful experiences to learn about ourselves and get freedom from our reactions. So I can see the merits of this practice when freely chosen by a person who wants to take on this as a discipline.
To be certain, there are cultural, political, and economic forces that have shaped what kinds of people get held up as standards of beauty and which are considered ugly. I see an invitation for reflection and getting curious about desires and feelings. Am I truly not attracted to this person or am I afraid of my desire for other reasons? Am I truly uninterested in this partner or do I feel guarded against being seen?
On the other hand, I have seen versions of this argument wielded in toxic iterations that suggest any kind of preference or exclusion of sexual partners is immoral. That is, to be a good person, you should have sex with anyone. This suggestion then makes the practice socially coerced rather than freely chosen. And I can tell you, there are people who have learned to have sex with people they’re not attracted to, either out of pity, fear, or coercion, and for these folks the path of liberation is being supported in saying no and moving toward the connections they desire.
Attraction is informed by these social influences, but also by deeper emotional forces within your own personal body, history, and psyche. The sexual ethics I hold dear is that haranguing, pressuring, and guilting a person into having sex with you has never led to a meaningful, loving, long-lived relationship. And if I strive not to guilt, pressure, or harangue others in our lives, I have the right not to accept that for myself.
For those seeking to be good within these conflicting messages, we will experience moments when our desires or boundaries will be judged by others, or we fear they will. So we might try to ignore those needs, but they tend to win out over the things we think we “should” want. The longer we go before accepting the truth, the more messy the situation becomes.
Rather than whether or not I am good, I think more useful questions are: “Am I being in integrity with myself? Am I causing harm?” Integrity means I am acting with respect to my whole self, everything I know about myself, even if I do not like it. If I am not attracted to a person, even after self-reflection and unpacking my feelings, that is a truth I need to honor.
Telling the truth may be painful, but worse would be faking a connection that’s not felt and all the suffering that goes with that—including all the ways we might end up sabotaging the relationship hoping the partner will leave first.
“Harm,” in my opinion, needs to be as clearly defined as possible so it can be rectified. To simply say, “I am causing harm,” feels akin to the box of badness. If my not wanting to have sex with a person causes them harm, I want to be clear about that so I can be accountable to whatever harm it is without violating my own boundaries in the process.
Perhaps what becomes clear is that it’s the way I communicate desire that is harmful. Being unattracted to a person does not mean they are unattractive. Being unattracted to this person does not mean disliking everyone in their group. I am not naming an objective truth about this person’s desirability, I am only what is true for me about my desire.
The more we are able to accept our own truth, the easier it is to see how every one of us has a subjective, but valid, truth. I can name my own truth then in ways that are cleaner, with less reckless hurt.
Yet even the kindness, firmest, most direct boundaries may be met with anger and hurt. What’s sticky is that when we want to be good, we want to find a way to have our guilt and shamed relieved by a person who’s hurt, angry, and doesn’t have the capacity or desire to caretake your feelings. It’s a sad, painful, difficult conversation for everyone, but it’s important, and it’s also important to learn how to step away when the conversation stops being generative.
The more free we can become of our need to be seen as good, the more room we have to discover what it’s like to be ourselves and practice our values.
