If you’ve been around activists for a long time, you might have noticed an oddity when they start getting success. When people finally are ready to hear their message, or show up newly awakened to problems and ready for direction and guidance.
Sometimes, that activist who’s been at it so long doesn’t respond in kind with gratitude or enthusiasm. Sometimes, they respond with resentment, bitterness, and a kind of collapse. Sometimes, they’re pissed at the newer people for taking so long to see the issues. Sometimes, they’re utterly unwilling to continue the work of educating.
This sucks for the folks new to the work, who could use the mentorship and wisdom of the ones who have been on the journey for a while. It sucks when we blast our new would-be allies and co-collaborators with more hostility than we’d direct at our adversaries. It feels unfair, and disillusioning, and may alienate new folks or lead them to marginalize the cranky elder.
It also seems self-defeating. Why would a person who’s tried for so long to get attention to their causes be so dismissive when people begin to care?
This emotional pattern shows up also when the resentful leader in the organization cannot stop complaining about their work and obligations but is also wholly unwilling to relinquish them. There’s a longing to be supported and mistrust that anyone could shoulder these burdens.
I’ve never understood either of these expressions until I began practicing Internal Family Systems therapy. Then I began to see a parallel experience in the inner work. When we as clients are finally able to access our Self energy and turn toward our protectors and our wounded parts with love or caring, the response is not always joy and gratitude. Frequently, it’s some angry version of:
“Finally! Why now?”
This response may feel daunting, like our connection is unwelcome, but now I see it as a sign of finally connecting. These parts of us have felt neglected and alone for too long, fighting a tough battle to keep us safe or endure their personal suffering.
As much as they may hate it, our parts also tend to cultivate a kind of pride and righteousness in their capacity to endure: I hate being alone, but it’s because I’m the only one strong enough to do this.
When it turns out there is a well of strength, love, compassion, and caring that is available and ready to take over leadership, our protectors might experience a rush of resentment and mistrust. Where have you been all this time? Now you’re going to come in and take over? And beneath that, What will happen to me if I lose my only job?
One source of this anger is the eruption of all those unmet needs and dreams deferred in service to the mission. Our protectors may have endured years of hard, unappreciated work to fight a threat that seems obvious to them and yet somehow invisible to everyone else, which only hardens that sense of I’m the one who has to do it.
All along, what these protectors have needed is concerned, caring attention. To be heard and understood and taken seriously. To be supported in community. To know that others were watching out for the same threat so there could be time for rest, or play, or enjoy the comforts and ease that those oblivious to the threat appear to enjoy.
So in these moments, that spark of anger and resentment is a good sign. Finally feeling heard and understood means there’s enough safety to feel all that exhaustion and need for care.
When we are doing our inner work from the IFS model, we have the resources of the greater Self to build trust and take over leadership from those worn-out parts, and let them take a true rest knowing their concerns are being addressed. That Self only needs to be with the resentment and the sadness, the exhaustion, offering its compassionate understanding and witness until trust is restored.
In the outer world, such ease is harder to draw upon without a larger community or spiritual body to serve as that font of care and compassion. Trust is a tricky qualit. It requires nondefensive presence, clear expectations, and making promises that are kept. In early stages, it’s easy for one mistake to undo all the gains.
When I think of my own experiences in community leadership, I was able to let go of resentful exhaustion when I felt there were protocols and people in place who were attending to the important work of the community without it all having to be my responsibility. I could let go even more deeply once I accepted it truly was not my responsibility to save anyone—that all my skills and brilliant ideas actually exist in various forms across the world, as though some larger intelligence keeps offering them to those ready to listen. So many of us are doing the work of liberation.
In observing this emotional pattern, it seems to me a kind of psychological law to understand rather than a problem to solve. Now I feel great compassion for the cranky activists I’ve met whose irritability felt so confusing and personal. I feel, too, great compassion for the newly awakened and ready to work, unsoiled by cynicism and too many years of defeat, who could not be expected to tolerate a torrent of resentment that isn’t really about them specifically.
In my dreams, we build communities with rituals of care, honoring our elders and giving them space to process these feelings with loving witness, and honoring the newly awakened to bring them joyfully and gradually into responsibility for the work we are doing. Until such rituals are in place, we can begin by honoring our own resentments, our own hard work, and to have gratitude for those cranky, battle-hardened protectors in us that were given more responsibility than one person should bear.
