The contemporary atmosphere of paranoia and conspiracism has frequently reminded me of my childhood in the 1990s when the Satanic Panic was vibrant and mainstream, with allegations of Satanic cults attempting to pervert and destroy society through secret messages encoded in Heavy Metal music and other media. There was also a terror of Satanic cults that kidnapped, assaulted, and ritually tortured or murdered babies and children. People in therapy might “discover” a “memory” of being ritually tortured in this way and accuse their parents.

None of this surfaced any real cults that engaged in this activity, and since then it’s become clear that such memories “reconstructed” in therapy are more a reflection of the secret wishes and biases of the therapist rather than a historical occurrence. (And all of which made us so collectively focused on the boogeymen that the children actually being molested in Catholic churches were missed.)

The recent resurgence of conspiracies of blood-drinking pedophiles secretly running the world and kidnapping children makes it hard not to reflect on those times. But paranoia even seems pervasive on the Left, though in a different form, as I read articles of people going to great lengths to indict people for harmful thinking with little evidence.

Often I’ve thought about my interest in loneliness a few years ago, when I learned that chronic loneliness leads to rejection sensitivity and paranoia. The person who has been too lonely too long starts to be so vigilant against social exclusion that they start to assume people are cruel or out to get them by default, making them more likely to interpret warm or neutral social interactions as signs of rejection. Frequently I wonder to what extent this past couple years of isolation, social distancing, and masking has contributed to this paranoid atmosphere.

Moments like these make me so grateful to live in a moment where I could go to my computer and type “red head christian demon exorcist from 90s” and be led to the Wikipedia page that validated this was a real memory and helped me find a linkthe full video of the debate between Christian exorcist Bob Larson’s and Satanists Zeena LaVey and Nikolas Schreck. (As a note, I will refer to LaVey and Schreck as the Satanists, but in this video they suggest it would be more appropriate to refer to them as Setianists who honor the Egyptian god Set, and my understanding is that since the filming of this debate both people have moved into different spiritual paths.)

Looking back, it seems daring and necessary for the Satanists would participate in this interview during the heat of the Satanic Panic. I admire the calmness with which they mostly sustained in weathering Larson’s challenges and at times aggressive questions. I also appreciate that Larson offered a measure of generosity in allowing them to articulate their points.

While he frequently interrupts the Satanists and throws out misleading claims, it’s an almost refreshingly civil and thoughtful debate compared to your average Internet discourse. The sour note comes in his intervening clips where he talks directly to the video viewing audience, portraying these folks as cartoon villains—clearly a canny entertainer who knows how to play to the sensationalism of his audience, and the Schreck and LaVey themselves don’t seem above knowing how to draw and keep attention for entertainment purposes.

In all honesty, I absolutely love thoughtful but strident debate between different perspectives of people who can show up with mutual respect. But when I remembered this the other day, before I found the video, I was surprised and confused. Why on earth would the Satanists subject themselves to dialogue in a venue hostile to them, with an audience completely unlikely to be curious or willing to listen? What a waste of time.

Yet, I realized, even decades later I remembered it. I remembered how their calmness and thoughtfulness came through in spite of the bluster and sensationalism. I remember as a kid thinking Larson’s attacks of them and depictions of their beliefs were clearly unfair, and revealed more about his agenda than theirs. Though I am not aligned with either of their theologies—referencing the distinction Schreck offers between Right and Left Hand paths, I’m a person who thinks both hands are perfectly good and you may as well make use of them—witnessing that conversation opened a door for my own path.

Hard, direct, civil, and respectful conversations with one’s adversaries is always exceptional. And I’ve seen myself and others like me ground down by the effort to be openhearted, curious, and firm in the face of sheer unwillingness to engage. And I’ve seen minor disagreements become increasingly polarized into irreconcilable gulfs because those conflicts could never be fully surfaced, named, and worked through in an effort to stay connected.

Lately, my heart has felt scaled over with familiar cynicism and the sense that history is a serpent that undulates left and right regardless of our best efforts, and there is nothing to do but to hold on. But remembering this debate, and realizing it has stayed with me all these years—that felt important. That feels like a reminder that our efforts matter and have impacts greater than we can know.

These days, I feel minimal interest in engaging in debate with folks on the Internet, and I’ve had to work on strengthening my capacity to stay engaged when in person with the people whom I can disagree with and stay connected. Yet I’m also no longer willing to engage in bad faith arguments or imagine I can persuade the people arguing with me directly.

What I’ve absorbed is the wisdom not to JADE – Justify, Argue, Defend, or Explain. Make your point, answer earnest questions, and offer a clarifying perspective if needed, then lay it down. Don’t make persuading or defeating your adversary a condition of victory.

To some extent, I see this in the Larson debate linked above. Frequently the Satanists are challenged to justify, argue, defend, or explain their beliefs and practices based on the basic assumptions of Christianity—”How can you believe that when the Bible tells us this?” Instead of accepting defeat by accepting those conditions, the Satanists remind the entire audience that the Bible is a book of mythology not relevant to their lives and not their foundation for truth.

To do otherwise—to attempt to argue with Christians using the Bible—implicitly concedes the terms of debate, as though accepting Christianity as the measure of morality by which everything must be justified. When that territory has been ceded, then you are already at a great disadvantage.

Standing firm in our beliefs and values, and having esteem in our own identities and traditions, mean we are under no obligation to justify it on other people’s terms. That’s the whole point of a secular democracy with separate religions.

Yet also there is no reason to shy away from vigorous debate, if you have the will and energy. Whether another person is persuaded is perhaps less important than whether we have honored ourselves and maintained our own dignity in the face of adversity.

The first time I heard about “being an ally” was during my undergraduate years in the early 2000s. “An ally” generally meant a person who is outside a particular group but supportive of the group’s needs and aims. Being a small community, we needed our straight allies to amplify our power and voices; though at times some of us felt resentful at the effort required to include and accommodate them in our spaces and work. Sometimes straight people took up space and demanded energy, attention, and accommodation that felt draining and unsupportive. When possible, it was a joy to have spaces where we didn’t have to consider straight people at all.

That tension between needing allies and resenting them seems to have evolved over the years as social justice discourse has transformed via the Internet and cultural change. Now the onus is on the ally to prove their allyship through demonstrating right understanding, not asking for validation or praise, knowing when to take up space and when to be quiet, not centering their own needs, not arguing with people in the group, and recognizing the diversity of opinions in the group.

The sharpest expression of these boundaries is something like: “We don’t need allies. We don’t need to spend the energy educating you or kissing your ass. If you want to be an ally, you need to do the work and not expect our validation or acceptance.” The call is essentially toward prioritizing the group’s interest and needs and falling in line or shutting your mouth if you’re not in the group. Which is, to be honest and clear, not an unreasonable boundary, and entirely appropriate for certain kinds of work.

But is ally the best word for that kind of relationship?

Being an ally doesn’t seem to be the same as being in alliance, wherein compelling common interest between groups makes cooperation mutually rewarding. When I became the Outreach Chair of my queer organization in the early 2000s, I took the call as an opportunity to build alliance, find common cause and common struggle with other political and identity-based student groups, which was easier when we didn’t default to centering white LGBTQ people and remembered that queer people are in every identity group.

From the perspective of global politics, countries in alliance might not particularly like each other, but depend upon the maintenance of their agreements for stability and prosperity. In a recent interview with Jeremy Scahill, Noam Chomsky offered an illustrative example of such an action, that of Mexico allowing Chinese military to gather on the borders of the United States. While there are political tensions between the United States and Mexico, there’s a common interest in not escalating tensions to the danger of a land war.

But looking through that lens, it would be deeply problematic for one nation to demand all the accommodation and unflinching, unselfish support. I observed this personally later in life when I was in a meeting of LGBTQ spiritual and religious leaders talking about the need for interfaith work, with my Neopagan group.

One of the Christian leaders came to us and warmly invited us to attend their church services some time. Our clergy member thanked him, and similarly invited him to attend one of our seasonal rituals, and the Christian visibly blanched at the offer and never, to my acknowledge, showed.

That moment made clear to me that alliance requires mutuality. If one group expects us to extend ourselves for them, and makes no effort for us, why would we attend their services? The attitude did not suggest respect for us or an interest in collaboration—at best it was facile acceptance, at worst it was proselytizing. If there is not mutual effort and shared value, what is an alliance?

What’s become clear is that “ally” in activist rhetoric is almost without exception a term applied to people in a privileged group who support a more marginalized group. At best, it seems self-serving to call myself an ally—like virtue signaling, like calling myself your best friend—a term I need to earn rather than claim. And “being an ally” has connotations of meaning both “being a good person” and “prioritizing the comfort and needs of marginalized people over your own.”

As a therapist, it has become clearer to me over the years that a relationship without mutual benefit is a deeply unhealthy one. I have quietly sat with this concern that allyship is about self-sacrifice for the other without expectation of any gain or reward and made exceptions due to the enormous imbalance of historical economic, social, and cultural injustice. Yet I have also seen this dynamic play out to the detriment of all involved. Well-meaning white or straight or cisgender people who take this too literally and end up sacrificing too much, then becoming toxic.

To be clear: It’s not healthy for anyone to be consistently compromise their needs, wants, and desires for the benefit of another. It’s not healthy for marginalized people. It’s not healthy for privileged people. Such a relational dynamic leads to abuse, burnout, and toxicity.

I believe some allies overcorrect in response to marginalized people expressing frustrations or setting very healthy and reasonable boundaries in the crucible of social justice discourse and disembodied Internet communities. It is honestly no wonder that folks tire of being the representative and educator on behalf of their identity groups, expected to replicate the same scripts to dialogue with people who they don’t have any relationship with, who might not be acting in good faith, who have cousins and coworkers and random people who jump on the threads to add their bullshit, who come from such different lives that it’s not even possible to have a productive conversation without a lot of context-building.

“I don’t need to educate you” is a healthy personal boundary for those of us not being paid to do the work, and have other things to do with our time and energy.

Through the Internet we are connected to more people than ever in human history, but at a distance that allows us to flatten and objectify each other. From the outside, allies seeking for guidance in being right and good look to these myriad and contradictory expressions of clarity, power, grief, frustration, rage, and powerlessness, and reshare them to show their understanding and support, which amplifies a message and makes it seem even bigger. It’s too easy to see a meme shared once or fifty times and begin to think of that as a universal truth coming from a group that has diverse perspectives and needs.

For a time, for example, I saw memes floating around calling upon allies to cut off their bigoted or Trump-supporting family members, calling into question the dedication of those who would not. A person who would make such a call, I imagine, really wants to know that the folks who call themselves allies are truly on their side and committed to their safety and well-being.

But if an ally truly did cut away all of their family, and all of their privilege, who would provide the emotional and material support their family offered? That marginalized person who makes it clear they’re not here to give you cookies for doing what’s right? Who’s already got enough to manage emotionally in life? A person who posted a meme who has no relationship with you in your day-to-day life?

Maybe those allies truly doing the work would luck into being welcomed by a new, socially just family, but I suspect most would not. More often, I expect, those allies who make themselves too at home in certain communities will find themselves firmly reminded that they’re merely guests.

I was once one of three men in a group of mostly white women talking about anti-racism. Knowing that often men take up a great deal of space I was mindful about how much I participated, while also noticing that many of the participants were very new to thinking about whiteness and anti-racism. At the end of the call, one of the women expressed her concern that men were taking up too much space.

Which left me confused—was she talking about me specifically? Or the other men? Or all of us together? Was her focusing on male participation a way of dealing with her discomfort of talking about her whiteness? Did we have agreements or facilitation that could’ve helped the men find boundaries of our participation, or were we supposed to guess? I would’ve appreciated direct feedback to know how much I needed to adjust my participation, but I was left feeling mildly unwelcome and confused.

When a perspective like this arises, the typical response is that privileged people need to do the work to figure out whether they’re being talked about or not, and anxiety or discomfort may be a sign of one’s own complicity. It’s not their job to explain if they meant you. Or, alternately, you should feel grateful they felt safe enough to share this in front of you.

While these perspectives make sense, what’s being asked for are sophisticated social skills that would be complicated by growing up in families that, for example, did not have consistent expectations or give you clear, actionable feedback. Or families where perhaps a behavior was okay one day and offensive another day with no explanation about the difference. Or families that avoided direct conflict but talked about you behind your back, or chastised you with vague statements that you needed to magically divine. Or families that simply froze you out or punished you when you did wrong.

If a person happened to experience any of those communication patterns, or others, then being anxious and confused in response to indirect feedback about a group they’re in is a totally normal and expected experience. Feeling defensive or angry may be less a sign of personal guilt and more a sign of being habitually blamed and attacked.

Since asking for clarity might be condemned as demanding emotional labor, the ally is left having to deal with this indirect feedback as best as they can, which usually ends up meaning using one of their maladaptive coping strategies they learned to navigate those confusing family experiences. Strategies such as shaming and policing anyone else who does something similar, or indiscriminately taking in all feedback and overfunctioning so that they’re always good and never bad, or getting defensive and attacking back, or questioning the expectations, or shutting down. All the behaviors that exhaust the targeted activists in the first place.

These aren’t alliances, with clearly contracted agreements and a process for working through disputes and conflict. Or perhaps it is an alliance, in that there’s not open war but rather tensions expressed indirectly or through proxies.

In What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition, author Emma Dabiri calls upon white people who care about racial and economic justice to find our own values and desires in this process. Not to see anti-racism as an act of charity or service we’re doing for another group, but to find its necessity in our own lives, families, and communities. To know what is at stake for us, so that we’re working for common cause.

For these and other reasons, I’ve stopped using the word “ally” to describe myself, and instead challenge myself to find my personal values and stakes in the work toward social and economic justice. I can prioritize my needs and desires appropriately, not trying to get them met by people with healthy boundaries but getting clear about which relationships are about shared values and which relationships are about emotional and material support. I don’t need to feel welcome or accepted in every space to recognize we have common interests, but I don’t have to sacrifice myself either.

It’s been important to me to move from the abstract and universal categories toward the specific and concrete, to my communities of people with whom I have relationships that can be negotiated and engaged with, where others may be willing to extend themselves to educate, challenge, affirm, or argue with me, but I can also give energy and value back. Mutuality is important to any healthy, thriving relationship—if we are constantly giving more than we receive, we are in danger.

As Facebook is no longer a useful tool for reaching my audience, I am establishing a New Year’s intention to begin using my e-mail newsletters again.

My plan is to send out seasonal newsletters, though I may increase them to monthly if inspired. Each newsletter will include personal reflection on being a therapist and spiritual seeker in these times, a brief Tarot card reading, information about upcoming classes or publications, and links to works that I’ve enjoyed reading, watching, or hearing.

To sign up, pop your email in this:

Recently there was a commercial for a local news report on the legacy of the residential schools to which Native children were compelled to go, in which they were forced to learn English and assimilate into the United States culture, losing all traces of their indigenous cultures. This has been in the news lately due to the reporting about the Canadian residential schools, but the United States has its own very long history of using these schools as an adjunct to their project of colonizing the land and eliminating its original inhabitants.

Yet the news report said they were unearthing “the secret of the residential schools.”

And I started yelling at the television. “Secret from whom?”

This history was taught to me when I was a kid attending school from the late 1980s to 2000. In my elementary school in Indiana, around third or fourth grade, we had units on Indiana history. One section focused on the Native people. We would get little yellow booklets that told simple stories about what it was like to be a Native, how they fed and clothed themselves, what their daily lives were like, and how it was for them when the pioneers arrived. The next semester we learned about the pioneers. Those booklets were blue, and covered similar material from the pioneer perspective.

Even then, as a kid, I noticed out loud, “In the Indian stories the pioneers are the bad guys, but in the pioneer stories the Indians are the bad guys.” And it wasn’t lost on me that we were the descendants of those pioneers—not necessarily literally, through blood, but we were citizens of the nation those people built.

The country built by those pioneers and their descendants did not find satisfaction in its thirst for cheap land and cheap labor. They kept expanding westward, and made up theological-sounding justifications for why it was their right. They kept bringing people from other lands—forcibly through enslavement, or through exploitative immigration policies—to build the infrastructure and do to the manual labor needed to build great wealth—mostly for the wealthy, white, land-owning men.

But at some point, those of us who inherited this culture and nation-building decided to believe in our innocence. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, I occasionally would hear the expression that “America lost its innocence that day.” A quick investigation into collective memory—a Google search—shows that this same expression was often said referring to assassination of John F. Kennedy.

“America lost its innocence that day.”

What innocence did the United States have when this is its history? Our intelligence agencies have funded coups and insurgent armies in other countries. Was our innocence the naïveté that it could be done to us? Is that innocence worth preserving?

Years ago, in my undergraduate English days, Salman Rushdie came to campus and we had the opportunity to sit with him in a smaller conversation. I remember him wondering aloud why American writers didn’t write about empire. In my early twenties, confused, I wondered to myself, “How is America an empire?”

We have army bases across the world and territories under our control who did not willingly join us and have no democratic representation. We have prisons in other countries. And I didn’t know America was an empire.

Telling ourselves of our innocence is an amnestic, a spell to forget our history. When we are wrapped in the comforting blanket of our innocence, all we can see is our victimhood, and not our culpability. And those who would dare break the spell, try to take the blanket, face our rage.

We’re like the obnoxious kid in class who keeps poking the girl in front of him with a pencil and then has the audacity to be shocked when she finally turns around and slaps him. What’d I do to deserve that?

Confronting the truth of our history and our ancestors is medicine. Seeing our collective guilt and culpability need not destroy us our cause us to collapse in despair. It’s the truth that will set us free. It shows us that we are not powerless victims, not noble martyrs in a world that incomprehensibly hates us. We have power, and we’ve wielded that power in ways that have consequences.

Losing the lie of innocence means we get to finally grow up and become responsible adults in the community of all humans. It means the possibility of real solidarity and recognizing what truly are our common interests and values. All you have to lose is your ignorance.

This morning I opened up my WordPress blog’s post history and saw five drafts that had been partially written and then abandoned, unpublished. Each one had a great deal of text and thinking out loud, risks taken and retracted, but the energy flagged and ultimately I decided to pull all the text onto a separate file and delete them, start fresh.

Such a process feels illustrative of my process in this period of time when life feels on such shaky ground that it’s unclear what path to chart. I’d taken time to reopen and experiment with seeing some clients in person for a glorious month this summer, and have now retreated back to all-Telehealth for the indefinite future—maybe a month, maybe a year?

Yesterday, talking to a friend about this, it became clear that it’s not helping to feel an urgency to decide this now. What I’m still missing is a clear set of criteria as to how I would evaluate when it’s right to go back to in-person.

More people than I are struggling with their own variations of this problem. Over the weekend, I was excited to finally see a live performance that was supposed to take place a year ago and was rescheduled due to COVID. This morning, I got news that another performance that had been delayed will be, again, delayed indefinitely.

Disappointments feel easier to bear when I don’t put all my weight on one plan. My has historically been to put too much meaning on a few choices and so, if it collapsed, I would interpret that as a sign of Fate condemning me. “If I don’t get this job, I can’t get any job.” “I was looking forward to this concert, and now I can’t go, so that means I can’t have any joy in life.”

I’ve known people who, comparatively, seem to be resilient and adaptive as hell in the face of disappointments. Their relationships, housing, or jobs implode—sometimes all at once—but they’re brilliant at starting over. Hardly a week passes from holding their hand through the shock before they’re saying they have a new job, a new place to live, they’re in an exciting new relationship. What they seem to have, that I lacked, is a faith in their capacity to start over and rebuild what they loved.

To be sure, there’s a cost. What I have, that they seem to lack, is the capacity to persevere and maintain through upheavals, conflicts, and hard moments. When there’s a conflict, a setback, or a hard patch, I stay committed to working through things with a faith that we can make it better. I’m not as quick to run away, which is a strength that also is a problem in situations where I should be leaving.

Often I think of this when we talk about things like “healthy” behaviors. “Healthiness” when it comes to mental, emotional, and behavioral health has come to have the quality of a shaming, contentless buzz-word. Health is a relative state of integrity, and all of our strategies for surviving and thriving have strengths and costs and consequences. The question is whether our current state of being is supporting the life we want; if we’re interested in growth and finding out what more we can experience and become; or whether the costs of our ways of living are so great that it’s worth the effort of working on one’s self.

Lately I’ve been reflecting on the ideas of Fate and Fortune, both archaic in their ways, and counter to the dominant threads of the United States culture of wellness, spirituality, and positive thinking. “Fortune” is a god who doles out gains and losses according to her own inscrutable whims; who indeed brings misfortune and wealth to life regardless of one’s innate worthiness or goodness. One might attempt to appease the god and bring her to your side through offerings, prayers, and asks for aid without a guarantee of receiving it.

What is more common now is the concept of “Success,” who is less of a distinct god and more a confluence of Protestant and New Thought teachings that suggest one can almost guarantee and invite privileges if one simply has the correct behavior, moral integrity, or mindset. While this comes with a relationship to some outer deified construct—whether it be God or “the universe”—success comes about through our own individual effort and merit, and misfortune likewise suggests a failure on our parts.

Neither concept fully integrates the systemic approach that’s become more full in our consciousness, that some of us are born into conditions and cultures that will makes our paths smoother and our falls less catastrophic regardless of individual effort. Yet “Fortune,” at least, indicates that there is no meaningful difference between the person born into privilege and the person born into marginalization. Neither is better than the other, simply put into circumstances that they must contend with or benefit from in the course of life.

This weekend I began to consider the possibility that “Fate” and “Fortune” have a dialectic relationship with each other.

Fate seems to be a drive from within. Fate is found in what consistently troubles me as much as it is what, when I truly accept it, makes my life more smooth. I think of clients who receive a diagnosis of a chronic illness. When they resist and hate the illness, it causes them great suffering. When they accept it, and begin doing the work necessary to maintain their health with the illness, life goes more smoothly. They may never be “healed” and restored to who they were before the illness, but the illness becomes integrated.

We may cultivate a freedom of will in relationship to Fate, but the conditions of our lives, heritage, cultures, and souls press us to move toward a particular way of being. The extent to which we resist this Fate makes us more battered by it, dragging along behind its inexorable forward drive. The extent to which we accept and embrace this Fate gives us more freedom and creativity in how we work with it.

I imagine the relationship between Fate and Fortune as being like a rock in a tumbler, slowly polished into a beautiful, smooth stone. Fate may be that which needs to be expressed and lived from our being. Fortune simply sets the terrain in which that Fate is discovered and shaped.

The thing is, regardless of how much we accept and live our Fate, Fortune remains a capricious force. Why didn’t I get sick all these times but got sick this time? Why are there people who are cautious who still get sick with the disease, while there are others who flaunt masks and vaccinations and social distancing guidelines but remain apparently uninfected? Why do some die and others emerge relatively unscathed?

All of these questions have answers we may come to understand with time and research. But in our day-to-day living, when do not yet have these answers, we are looking at the mountain from the perspective of the ant. That is how it is to experience Fortune: to be at the mercy of a pattern we cannot comprehend or control.

If it is within my Fate to be a writer, and I write, then all I can do is create a practice of creativity and put my work into the world. What happens to it is ruled by Fortune. Once in a while, a piece of writing may go viral and draw a lot of attention. Often, pieces I might consider more meaningful or important might be wholly overlooked. There are practices I can learn around marketing to gain and keep a person’s attention, but even then there’s much beyond our control.

And as we may get lifted up high, Fortune may also abruptly throw us to the ground. To be seen and celebrated makes us visible, and visibility is also what puts us in danger of cancelation. Think of all those old social media posts that emerge when a person comes into a measure of fame and success. No one cared enough about them to cancel them before they were successful, although apparently they cared enough to remember and track their Tweets.

All of which is to say, right now COVID-19, social unrest, and the extreme weather events of climate change may be the relationship between both Fortune and Fate. Through our distress, conflict, disease, and suffering, we are being invited to look at all the structures of our society and lives that made these experiences inevitable. Disease has emerged from the shadows, and now we must look at what in those shadows makes us vulnerable, and what those shadows have to teach us about our Fate as a species, as a nation, as communities, as families, as individuals.

In spring of 2020 a global crisis—you may be familiar with it—compelled me to move my practice entirely to Telehealth. This transition was not smooth. Maintaining focus and connection in therapy was draining and brought up a number of unexpected feelings and thoughts. As a therapist I’d cultivated a discipline of meditative focus on the client, minimizing all the distractions in my room so I could keep practicing returning to connection. But with my laptop I had a relationship characterized by divided focus and multi-tasking.

One day, in a very embarrassing moment, a client called me out about not being present in an important moment, and I realized I needed to get my shit together. I turned toward colleagues for advice and, as I found what worked for me, facilitated a series of workshops for therapists having similar struggles. This writing offers the insights I’ve taken away from this work, for others who might need them.

Hard Focus

A teacher from whom I learned ceremonial drumming introduced me to the concept of “hard focus.” Hard focus works to push away all distractions from that which it wants to center. In this state of being, one’s focus of concentration is narrow, constrained, and stressed.

Imagine encountering a rattlesnake in the middle of a casual walk, and rousing that snake to its alert and threatening posture. The kind of attention you might pay to this rattlesnake would be hard focus. Of greatest importance is tracking the snake and keeping safe. Your senses may be less attentive to other environmental cues, your body may be tense, and it’s likely you would not be daydreaming about other things or enjoying a conversation with a good friend on the phone. 

Hard focus connects to the stress state, when our sympathetic nervous system is activated and primed to react to threats. Even in situations of safety, practicing a hard focus—like trying learn a new skill under great pressure or studying for a test—cues the body to activate the stress state. This is useful to an extent, but it also contains a flaw known as “target fixation,” when our body instinctively moves toward whatever is the center of our focus. 

A race-car driver attempting to navigate around a flaming pile of cars would not stare at the cars to ensure safety, as it would mean steering subtly toward them. To be safe, one needs to focus on the safe part of the road, where you want to go, while being aware of the danger.

With hard focus and the stress state, people tend to become ungrounded and lose their posture. Often clients talking about scary or upsetting experiences will unconsciously lift their feet from the ground, like their bodies are trying to draw inward or withdraw from the difficult feelings. Or else the body might begin to tilt toward the stressful stimuli, like how our heads may bend toward the screens when engaged in an online argument. 

So the tendency toward hard focus goes with losing groundedness, stability, and the capacity for calm reflection and seeing the larger context. From my understanding of neurobiology, this state seems feels very much related to the left hemisphere of the brain’s capacity to analyze, pick apart, and focus on details, cut off from the right hemisphere’s capacity to look holistically at what is happening and maintain perspective.

Should one spend a day trying to do therapy in this stress state, it’s inevitable that one would end the day feeling more exhausted and more caught up with our parts of self that are afraid of getting it wrong or feel they have something to prove. We can feel so distressed by both our urgency to connect to the client and the constant reminder of the client’s physical absence that we struggle to relax and actually connect.

Wow, I upset myself writing that. 

So with all this happening through the screen, now we’re adding complex mental tasks like at a person’s face, reading memes, filtering through a wall of text, crafting appropriate responses. We begin to lose contact with the body and environment and get pulled more into this mental world of the Internet.

Screens and Stress

Screens now connect us, for good and ill, to so many important areas of life—relationships, work, politics, information, self-care and survival needs, all of which are rife with threats that activate our nervous system. A notification that you received a text message from a particular name could spiral you into panic before you’ve even opened the message. Casually scrolling through social media to catch up with friends could go quickly awry when one of them posts a confusing meme that seems to disagree with your core values. Anything you post online could be screenshotted and sent to be used against you in the future. 

At the same time, apps and social media encourage us to multitask, check out, and click impulsively rather than slow down into deliberate focus. One could spend hours literally cycling through the same three to six apps with very little stimulation, while the blue light activates the brain.

The confluence of all this within the same object turns the phone or laptop into a symbol of both activation and dissociation: a source of stress and the stress-reliever.

For a time, I wondered if reading text itself invites a left-brained hard focus. That might be true, but in practice I’ve discovered that reading a book is soothing in a way that screens are not. Reading a book for pleasure is enjoyable in part because at no point do you risk the book demanding instant feedback from you with threats to your livelihood and relationships.

You may feel deeply called out and seen by a book, and you may feel your beliefs attacked by a book, but the book is unlikely to post your reactions to social media or call your boss. The book is not going to yell at you for missing a text it sent you hours ago. Reading a book or watching television are not exactly passive, but it is boundaried and personal the way screens are not. 

Urgency, hard focus, stressed states then prime us, when reading social media, to look for content that further causes us stress. Often I use the metaphor of wearing colored glasses to illustrate what happens to us in emotional states: it’s like we see the world through glasses that have a red tint, so everything appears red. If I view the world as threatening, then my lenses see everything tinged with that emotional color. When I feel hurt, lonely, or angry, I’m more likely to see a social media post I would’ve otherwise found benign as a very personally targeted call-out. In my stress, I may overlook an important word that changes the entire meaning of the post.

The paradox is that there are red things. We can’t pretend there aren’t red things. But if we confuse the lenses with reality itself then we’ll react to everything as though it’s red and miss the nuance and the possibility of other colors.

Softening Focus

So how does one navigate being aware of threats and risks while also focusing on the desired goal? This is what we’d call “soft focus.” In a soft focus, our attention is gentler and more expansive, taking in as much information as possible in an open way. After reading this sentence, take a moment to look away from the screen toward a blank wall or a sunny window, and try to pay attention to what’s happening at the edges of your peripheral vision for ten breaths.

What you experienced, especially toward the last half of those breaths, is a softer focus. You may notice it’s hard to fixate on what’s at the corners of your peripheral vision but also simultaneously you take in more visual information than you would simply focused on what’s in front of you. With practice, there’s greater capacity to hold a center and take in the whole circumference of your awareness.

For some of us, letting our gaze soften feels scary, like we’re losing control, because we’re used to the stress response as a safety mechanism. Yet in some ways we become safer with this soft focus, more aware of what’s happening around us and with a greater range of potential responses.

We also tend to feel much, much calmer. Stress states are self-perpetuating. The more tense you become, the more narrow your focus will be. The more narrow your focus, the more likely you are to be in states of worry, anxiety, upset, anger, or fear. What I’ve learned in doing trauma therapy for almost a decade is that our physiological stress response and what we might call our psychological stress response—our thoughts and memories—mutually encourage each other.

What this means, in part, is that learning how to calm the stress in your body goes a long way to soothing psychological distress. Breathing deeply, into your belly, while looking at the corners of your vision is calming. Breathing in, clenching your muscles, and then breathing out while unclenching is calming. These skills are simple and available to you right now, without you having to solve all your issues, which is so wonderful. The downside is that they require practice and it’s easy to forget about them when we get caught up in our psychological distress. So ideally we would work both ends of this for the greatest freedom.

Grounding and Centering

Put your feet on the ground or on a footrest, whatever allows your feet to make full contact so that your body can feel the support and stability of the ground.

Sit back in your chair. What I do is focus on my breathing and, as I exhale, let my center of gravity shift back into my core. Often it feels like I’m sinking more into my tailbone and pelvis, not so much leaning forward. Roll your shoulders up and back as though you’re tucking them into your upper back. Let the top of your head lift up and your chin tilt slightly down. 

Periodically check in to remember that you are in a body. Let your chair, floor, or posture be a physical reminder of your embodied presence.

Softened Gaze

Frequently, during sessions or video calls, look away from the screen. Either notice the edges of your peripheral vision for several breaths, or if you can, look off into the distance. I may look slightly above the video camera in my computer so that it appears I am offering eye contact while I am resting my eyes.

If you have headphones on, this is also an opportunity to focus on the sound of the other person’s voice. What I find is that when I look at the screen, I am aware of the absence of my client. But when I focus on the voice, I feel much closer to them—their voice is so close to my ears, and I can attune to subtle information coming through their word choice, tone, and speed.

Tuning In

Jungian psychologists speak of the “intersubjective field,” which is a construct representing the ways we inhabit interpenetrating psychic spaces at all times. You have your subjective experience, as do I, and we are enfolded in the larger subjectivity of our shared cultures, our shared regions and nations.

None of us is able to maintain a wholly objective perspective—nor would that necessarily be desirable. What we do have is a big soup of all of our different experiences, each of us activating ourselves and each other. The fear I feel might not be mine, it might be yours, but for whatever reason you’re unable to feel it.

Working with this frame means in part listening to my experience with the same curiosity as I would a client’s, and to be curious if what’s present for me is echoing what may be happening for them. What’s tricky is that it may be dressed up in my own issues—like chewing on an insult paid to me five years ago—but if I step out of the content and look at the process, there may be gold. “Oh, I’m feeling distracted and irritable. I wonder if that’s happening for the client.”

In summary, what I’ve learned is that trying to connect by screens is much harder than relaxing into my body and experience and trusting that connection is happening. Trusting allows me to relax my gaze, open up to all the information available to me with curiosity, and meet everything with calmness and curiosity. 

This requires a certain amount of practice and diligence, but I find myself more effective and less exhausted having done the work. 

The Gaze of the Sage

When practicing a soft, grounded, open focus, I am reminded often of depictions of the masters of spiritual and martial art traditions over the centuries. Their eye gaze often appears unfocused and distant, though they perceive so much. Or a spiritual being might have one eye clouded or covered, signifying their perceptions of the spiritual realms while the other eye perceives the physical. 

In this state we are calm, open, engaged, though we take life less personally. It is a difficult state to sustain, as so many of our parts want to focus on particulars, and our stress and wounding tends to bring us back to that hardness.

I am mindful, too, that my focus in this post has been on the screens but that none of this has happened in a vacuum. While adjusting to Telehealth, all of us were living through a global pandemic and civil unrest, which would be more than enough to engender stress and hard focus for survival. 

We are still working through the stress and reactivity of this. Recently I was on a walk in my neighborhood and saw some kids had chalked the ground with the words “all lives matter.”

Immediately I felt a tightening, an anger response, as a part of me now associates that particular phrase as a sign of ideological disagreement and threat. Yet as I kept breathing, I reminded myself that this was written by children. Responding to them with the anger and harshness I felt would not have served anyone.

As I kept breathing, I noticed that when I took off my red-tinted-glasses, I did not disagree with the phrase itself, only when it was used in particular contexts. In hard focus, however, we stop attuning to the context in which the present is happening and instead bring forward the context of all our related past experiences.

The work remains: to honor our wounds and stressors and be mindful of dangers while bringing our attention to where we want to go in the present.

Now that you’ve finished this, I encourage you to once again take ten breaths attuning to the edges of your vision with your feet touching the ground—or if that doesn’t work for you, whatever you can feel that connects to the gravity that anchors you to the earth.

Having been a child who spent a lot of time alone, I went into lockdown thinking, “This’ll be fine, I know how to do this.” But after several months I started noticing the extent to which I was having imaginary fights with people, over-interpreting signals from friends and getting mad about things that turned out not to matter, and particularly having a hard doom focus on the apocalypse.

After people who loved me advised me to try being social, I scheduled some phone calls and outdoor distanced hangouts with people and almost immediately felt better.

“Oh,” I—a therapist with eight years’ experience—realized. “I was lonely.”

My younger, more left-brained and dismissively attached self tended to need explanations as to why socializing with other people was important. For a time other people seemed unsafe, more likely to bully or alienate than to accept and understand, but I let those bad experiences be reasons to avoid trying altogether.

What I didn’t fully understand was that many of my barriers to talking to people were results of chronic loneliness. This became more clear in recent years, having come across the late John Cacioppo’s research into the effects of chronic loneliness.

In brief, Cacioppo suggests that loneliness is “social hunger,” the indication from our whole organism that we are in need of social connection. When we go too long, chronically hungry, we start to experience certain recognizable patterns:

• Feelings of low self-worth
• Sensitivity to real and perceive rejection
• Fears of setting boundaries in current relationships, and a tendency to be taken advantage of
• Poor health (positive social connection decreases stress and blood pressure)
• Increased substance abuse or self-harming behavior
• Increased depressive symptoms (lack of motivation, tiredness)
• Paranoia and mistrust in others

Important things to know about loneliness is that, while the effects are the same, the appearance of loneliness varies widely. Social hunger is variable. Some of us need daily social contact; others feel perfectly well satisfied with the occasional phone call or outing.

Our social hunger is also only met in relationships that are mutual and authentic. If your only social contacts are your therapists and doctors, there’s nothing wrong with that, but those don’t feed the hunger in the ways that peers, friends, and family do.

One can have a job where they talk to hundreds of people a week, always networking and being “on” but still incredibly lonely because they necessarily cannot be their whole selves in these relationships. Two people can live together in committed relationship and be lonely. One person can live on their own, only go out once a month, and feel perfectly well-fed.

Being alone does not necessarily lead to loneliness. The easiest way to think about the differentiation is choice. Choosing to go to a silent meditation for a week may be a beautiful experience of time alone and in connection with what is greater than the self. Being compelled into isolation through solitary confinement or protracted lockdown due to pandemic concerns is not chosen, and thus far more painful and lonely.

Chronic loneliness is the ultimate self-defeating condition, with its tendency to make us assholes toward those trying to connect with us. We’re so on edge, mistrustful, desperate for connection and terrified of getting hurt, that our guardedness and vigilance for signs of rejection are highly sensitive. Instead of tolerating awkward moments, jokes that landed badly, or confusing statements, we’re more likely to interpret these as signs of scorn or rejection and then react with our own protective “fuck off” energy.

At the same time, we’re more likely to settle for people who really do treat us badly because we’re afraid of having boundaries and losing all connection. It’s very confusing.

In the past year something obvious finally clicked for me. We talk about authenticity in terms of “vulnerability” because it requires setting aside, on purpose, our social safety measures. To connect, we must lay down our weapons and armor.

There are times when it is unwise to do so, when we need those weapons and armor, particularly with those unwilling to lay down their own. There are times when our inability to lay down our weapons and armor costs us opportunities for the connection and love they long to experience. There is risk in every choice, but from every experience we can accrue wisdom to guide future risks.

In these COVID19 pandemic days, social connection without proper safeguards exposes us to serious threats to physical health and wellbeing, not to mention the threat of overwhelming our medical system. And the lack of connection has tremendous and important social and emotional consequences for our wellbeing.

Some focus on the social and emotional damage of isolation and say we need to end social distancing and masking now because of it. Some focus on the medical risks of COVID19 and say we should be stringently locking down because of the real and enormous risk. These two positions, in my mind, are not equal in merit, but we do need to reckon with managing the physical and emotional risks and the current tension between them.

There are plenty of options available for getting some social connection that are low risk of COVID infection: phone calls, video calls, outdoor distanced gatherings, going on walks with masks.

As more of us get vaccinated, obviously the range of safe social options increases with other vaccinated people. I am not an epidemiologist or an expert in transmission, but I’ve come up with four “slider bars” by which I calculate COVID risk:

• Masks: The more people involved are wearing masks, the less risk of COVID infection.
• Proximity: The further apart people are, the less risk of COVID infection.
• Time: The briefer the social encounter, the less risk of COVID infection.
• Ventilation: The more ventilation in the space, the less risk of COVID infection. (Outdoors is ideal.)

When risking social connections, if you want to increase risk on one of these slider bars, you could offset it with the others, such as: hugging someone you love (more risky time and proximity) while outdoors and masked (less risky ventilation and masking).

In general, if you’re feeling lonely and having any of the experiences I’ve named above, consider extending yourself a bit to connect. If you don’t talk to anyone, try texting a friend to tell them you’re thinking about them. If you only text people, try scheduling a phone call. If you have lots of calls, try scheduling an outdoor walk.

Remember, when you’re getting connected, that it’s going to be emotionally challenging. It’s like if you used to be athletic but find yourself getting winded going up a staircase again because you’ve lost conditioning. This is not a permanent situation, it’s simply about getting your conditioning back.

You don’t jump from not exercising at all to running a marathon next week. You start where you’re at, start getting some practice exercises in, get rest between exercise, and then slowly increase the duration and intensity.

We’re getting through this, and in some ways this may be the hardest time, when we can see the end. If you’re struggling, know that we’re struggling with you, and if you can, take a risk.

This year I presented a series of workshops for therapists struggling with the shift to telehealth demanded by the COVID19 pandemic. As these workshops emerged around the time of the uprising against police violence and the surge of support for Black lives, I have offered all of these workshops with the cost being a donation to organizations working for prison abolition, civil liberties, and the mental health and wellness of Black and Indigenous people of color.

I am very pleased that overall participants donated $600 to the ACLU, the Washington Therapy Fund, and King County Equity Now.

May all beings be liberated in a world of equity, kindness, and mutual aid.