There are two kinds of boundary violations: overt and covert.

We know a lot about one half of boundary violations: the kind acted out in an anxious way.

This first kind of boundary violation is hopefully already obvious. This is when you say no, or are unable to consent, and someone goes ahead and touches you anyway. This is the kind of boundary violation that occurs when someone touches your body when you are drunk, or are unconscious, or are drugged, or do not say an enthusiastic yes, or your body language communicates trauma, fear or hesitation and someone goes ahead anyway. It is the kind of boundary violation when men insist that we smile for them on the street, or smile before they will give us our food at a restaurant, or when they insist we talk to them and placate them and flirt with them when we are really trying to get from point A to point B in public space.

There is still a long way to go in creating clear and straightforward ways to get no to mean no. There is still a long way to go in getting overt violations to stop.

Another category of boundary violation exists, however. I understood it a few years back at a counselling session when I felt like I was losing my mind and I blamed myself for it. My counsellor said, ‘no, this is not you. that person has crossed your boundaries and you are owning something that is actually not yours.’

This second kind of boundary cross is the covert kind, what my friend Martin calls ‘the unmaking.’

This is when you (consciously or unconsciously) use deception, undermining, prevarication, manipulation, or dishonesty when you want access to someone’s body, or want them to serve some purpose for you – whether sex or adventure or status or flattery – rather than engaging with them as a whole human being who has intelligible needs and feelings of her own.

Just as with overt violations, you can do this while not being fully aware that you are doing it. This doesn’t make you a ‘bad person,’ it makes you a human being who has done a harmful thing, who needs to know how to make it right. Saying “I didn’t realize,” or “I meant no harm,” or “I just didn’t get the impact of my actions,” or throwing up your hands helplessly and saying “I don’t know how this happened,” is not an appropriate response to hearing that you have done this to someone.

In this covert violation, you use conscious or unconscious deception rather than force to enter the gates, but you are not actually trustworthy, and once inside you damage everything you touch.

You get inside a woman’s trust by using (conscious or unconscious) manipulation, and then when she lets you in, you undermine her and smash up her emotional safety from the inside.

This behavior takes the physical pleasure you want, or other experiences that you want from someone, using deception, using that person for your own needs without the encumbent relational responsibility involved in gaining another human being’s physical and emotional trust.

This is a Trojan boundary violation.

You get her to open her emotional gates to you by hiding, lying, deceiving, manipulating, prevarication or dissembling, by saying all the right words even as your words bear no resemblance to reality. You talk about how much you do your own emotional work, about how accountable you are, about how you have the same values as her, about how self-aware you are, about what a good ally you are. You make promises. You tell her how much you love her. You talk and talk until she makes the mistake of trusting you, and lets you in to her trust, to her body, to her soul.

Once inside, however, you treat her with disrespect and gaslight her, creating instability, and hide your dishonesty from yourself and from everyone around you. When she asks you, bewildered and confused, to help her identify why her gut is telling her one thing while your words are telling her another, you lie or change the subject. You get more and more desperate as she gets closer to the truth, a truth you cannot handle or own.

This is every bit as much a boundary violation as the first kind. It is still getting someone to let you in, when they have not actually been able to make an informed choice about your trustworthiness, because your words are not remotely honest or you use words to try to control and mask reality.

It is deeply normalized in our culture for men to act in this way, as evident by how unsurprised we all are by ‘advice’ columns that say a guy ‘would have sex with a woman on a first date’ ‘only if he’s not really that into her.’ Men are still taught that they are not expected to be accountable for their actions in relationship –  because women are responsible for everyone.

This dynamic is still gendered, in our day and age. Those who identify with femininity or who walk in the world as women have to navigate a landscape in which we are expected to constantly discern whether men are actually treating us with respect. We are expected to ‘withhold’ sex like some kind of trump card until they prove they are treating us well. It is somehow our fault if they lie to us, our fault of we are trusting or gullible and believe them. This double standard begins young.

The same is not true for men navigating the sexual landscape, who are not raised to believe it is their job to ‘protect’ themselves from being used and deceived in this way.

Somehow this culture raises men who are not taught to take any accountability for their choices, words, and actions in sex, and raises women who are taught we are responsible not only for our own actions and emotions but for the actions of men, as well. We are somehow expected to ‘safeguard’ ourselves against masculine manipulation and dishonesty while men are taught their job is to ‘conquest’ and base their masculinity on how much sex they can get, no matter who they hurt. If we get duped, everyone asks why we did not run away, why we were unable to tell a guy was lying to get into our pants, when what they ought to be asking is why that guy used manipulation and dishonesty to gain access to our trust and to fuck us. Boys will be boys, amirite?

The reason covert boundary crossing in a patriarchal culture is so dangerous is because it is at once so quiet and so fundamentally undermining.

The ‘talking you up to gain your trust’ stage is the kind of grooming behaviour that people with narcissist qualities employ, who can then say they did not know they were doing it. They can be completely un-self aware by nature, and use this as a defense for dismantling someone else’s mind. As though someone other than themselves is responsible for their actions.

Meanwhile because the worst of it happens in private with no one but your abuser there to witness for you, no one can quite make out what is actually going on. People may have a funny feeling about the relationship but they may just think the woman is inherently unstable, especially if the guy is quiet, mild-mannered, or unassuming. The growing gap between public perception, word, and reality leaves the woman alone with this insanity, unable to come into words about how deeply wrong everything feels and unable to get help as she gets more and more isolated.

This kind of boundary cross destroys people.

It unmakes them.

It can include betrayals of trust by making and then breaking safety agreements around sex, while prevaricating to make it sound as though you never made the committments, or only ‘kind of’ made them. It can include humblebragging about what a good ally you are instead of actually doing your own emotional work. It can include using flattery and love-bombing to gain trust and connection without actually being responsive or emotionally safe; telling her you are in love with her when you are not; cultivating the feeling that she is your special secret friend or otherwise creating a special feeling of intimacy with her without actually being there for her; and calling her needy or crazy when she tries to name this gap.

It can include using her prior trauma history or mental health status to manipulate her by inviting her to share secrets, vulnerabilities, and intimacies with you while not really sharing intimacy or vulnerability of your own; sharing ‘pseudo-intimacies’ (such as ‘it is really hard for me to open up to people’ as though this is an intimacy) while not actually opening up at all; it can include subtle put-downs, undermining of her confidence and feeling of emotional safety with you, such as gaslighting her about normal emotional safety needs, or acting cold and cruel to her while telling her you are so generous, giving, and constantly burdened and put out by meeting her perfectly normal needs – needs that an emotionally healthy person would meet without thinking twice.

This last is deep narcissist territory and particularly damaging.

It can include acting in ways that make her question herself, like making out with her in private then acting  like you do not know her as soon as other people are around, or being with her while not telling anyone you are with her, or being with her while making it clear to her you could bolt at any time if she does anything to displease you or has any needs you do not like. It can include doing all this while denying this is occurring, prevaricating, dissembling, subtly changing the subject when she brings up the gap between your word and action, and generally fucking with her sense of reality until she is so unstable that she looks crazy, while you look calm and like you’re ‘such a good feminist’ to put up with her as she gets crazier and crazier. Then dumping her because you say she has ‘needs you can’t meet’ and quietly telling your friends and family that you ‘tried everything.’

When confronted with your manipulation and dishonesty, in this kind of boundary violation instead of owning, apologizing, and doing repair, the perpetrator – even or perhaps especially when he sees what he has done and is drowning in guilt – is so busy feeling guilt and shame that he feels no empathy. Instead of owning, he deflects, prevaricates, manipulates further, attempts to flee, or if all else fails, goes on the attack and tries to shut the woman up, discredit her or prevent her from naming what has happened to her. Anything to keep control of her mind, to keep control of the narrative, to prevent anyone from seeing the secret core of self-loathing that drives his acts of harm.

This reaction to naming harm – attack, avoid, or flee, driven by his guilt addiction rather than by empathy or accountability – creates an extremely unsafe environment for the person whose boundaries have been violated because when the survivor names the harm, the one who caused the harm is so deeply in narcissistic guilt and shame that rather than return with full accountability or any honest apology, the perpetrator goes on the attack and tries to destroy the woman to keep her from speaking and exposing his core of self-loathing, which he feels he must hide from the world at all cost.

You will see women in these kinds of relationships get smaller and smaller and smaller over time, living with this quiet, continual undermining of their trust in their own perceptions. It is the attempted unmaking of another human being.

This Trojan boundary violation entails manipulation and dishonesty of a profound and dangerous kind, because it is both traumatizing andhidden, and therefore deeply isolating, coming from within the boundaries of trust, from a lover, partner, or friend who has convinced you they are reliable and emotionally safe when they are actually fucking with your sense of reality moment by moment, day by day, and undermining you to those around both of you when they have committed to be your rock, your safe harbour. You will feel wrong but not know what is wrong or where the feeling is coming from. You will learn to separate yourself from yourself, because to live with the cognitive dissonance requires nothing less.

What is the difference, in the end, between drugging someone’s drink or isolating them, destabilizing them, and manipulating their social circle and their mind?

Both get you in, both let you get off treating someone like they are not a human being, both are a way to take all the power while taking no accountability for yourself.

The second kind of boundary violation, the Trojan boundary cross, is especially dangerous because it is usually done by those who are so fucked up inside that they don’t even know when they are lying and when they are telling the truth. They manipulate so successfully because they actually believe their own stories, since their true self – the part of them that would do empathy, trust, or connection –  is not online, utterly buried under firewalls and firewalls of shame.

A narcissist has built a false persona and resents everyone and everything that asks sincerity, empathy, or genuine connection of him, because he cannot provide these things, because he does not know that they exist. He will make this everyone else’s problem, and herein lies his danger and his violence.

He can playact being in love or looking you in the eyes, while you can’t understand what is going on because he is actually looking strangely inwards at himself. He can come inside you looking right at you, while the absence of an empathic or connected self there with you creates a terrifying cognitive dissonance.

They can mask for years the fear of actually letting you see any part of them, the fundamental disconnect and absence of an actual guide to connection with other human beings. They can lash out, shame or blame or ostracize you if you attempt to understand, or if you attempt to make sense with others who have experienced the same thing.

Their eyes look inward, always in to themselves.

They can mimic the acts of passionate love and yet there is a coldness, a kind of non-connection, and if you come close to naming this, they will attack you rather than admit what they are missing, what is offline inside them.

This kind of sex that is in fact focussed on physical sensations while pretending to be about emotional connection is extremely crazymaking, perhaps the most intense kind of boundary cross that exists, because in gaining your trust while they undermine your sanity they cross boundaries of body, spirit, mind, and trust in your own instincts all at the same time.

To observers, the woman being abused in this way may look like the people of Citagazze, in The Golden Compass. Consumed by ‘spectres’ that are invisible to the onlookers, the adults who get attacked look crazy, as they fend off an ‘invisible’ attack: they appear to dance about, shout, cry, and eventually go still as the spectres approach them to suck out their soul. Once the viewer becomes able to see the spectres, the movements of their victims become clear. Without seeing the source of the harm, however, you would not see an attack and a desperate attempt at survival – you would only see a crazy person crying, shouting, or dancing about in evasive maneuvers.

This kind of boundary violation – abusing someone and hiding that you are doing it so everyone only sees them looking angry and crazy – is the unmaking of another human being. It is the gift of making, turned backwards and become a weapon.

It is a horrific violence to the psyche, enacted quietly over a long time, all the more harmful because it is so deeply masked from others, who may leave the survivor alone in it or mistake her inchoate fury for a ‘personality trait’ when it is actually a direct and healthy response to abuse.

The incidence of these narcissistic qualities – the inability to say sorry, to make amends, to genuinely want to know when you have caused harm, to recognize and respond to other people’s emotions, to possess the inner compass that can let you act safe and receptive, is 7.7% of the male population, higher than among women at 4.8% http://thenarcissisticlife.com/what-is-the-prevalence-of-narcissism/. (The stats do not yet include genderfluid people – all of our stats need to change to reflect the actual lived realities of gender).

It is not that these folks don’t have a true and good-hearted self underneath, it is that they have a lot of work to do to allow this part of the self back into the world, when it may have been offline, fractured and buried from a very, very young age, so far back they do not even remember what they have lost. And that would be fine, if they were only harming themselves – but when you begin to harm others that creates responsibilities.

Nearly eight out of every hundred masculine-identified people have these qualities. Look at that in the mid-30s singles dating pool and that number gets much, much higher, because these are guys more likely to have relationships end or never get going.

Add to this the tendency for the single dating pool to also be disproportionately high in dismissive-avoidant attachers, because dismissive-avoidant attachers are the ones more likely to end partnerships or remain single, and what you have for the mid-30s dating straight cis female is a veritable treasure trove of dismissive-avoidant men with narcissistic qualities on every dating site and every place where you could connect with guys.

Given the preponderance of narcissists to lie convincingly to your face about very fundamental emotional realities from day one, lie so well because they do not even know they are doing it, dating straight men past age 30 begins to feel like a game of Russian Roulette. Where 25% of the chambers contain dismissive-avoidant guys who will make you feel crazy for needing emotional connection and 7.7% are waiting to reveal that that cute, sweet, mild-mannered and awesome guy who geeks out on all the same things as you and talks and talks about how he shares your values is actually some variant of un-self-aware narcissist who will gaslight you incessantly and then call you crazy when you lose your mind.

and somehow we’re supposed to beleive the ‘crazy ex girlfriend’ stories men tell.

ffffffffffsssss

http://www.theduluthmodel.org/pdf/Equality.pdf

When this kind of harm is named, a person who cannot own, apologize fully, and repair the harm they have caused will move into defensive strategies that make everything worse. This is a variation on ‘Not All Men’ – it is called ‘I Feel Bad When You Say That.’

Please share this post! If this post speaks to you or makes you think or reflect, please help out: share as widely as possible. For a world in which everyone can feel safer, including those who harm and those who cause harm. Thank you.

A note on gender binaries: I want in this post to talk about masculinity, and about power, and that is gendered. I want to do it in a way that doesn’t reinscribe violent gender binaries that cause erasure. This feels tricky to me, how to talk about power and masculinity – which we need to talk about – without erasing or reinscribing cishetnormativity. I want to talk about masculnity and power dynamics in the kinds of relationships that I know intimately, yet i want to be clear that these are not the only relationships and that these are not the only bodies. I don’t feel really well placed to write about how these power dynamics play out in queer and genderqueer relationships – I know they do, and I have been learning about it from people who understand how that works, but I can’t write about something I don’t know from the inside. I noticed when I woke up after posting that the image on this post is gendered – I hadn’t looked that closely at it, had seen the dotted lines that express healthy boundaries and liked that. How to fix it? Considering photoshopping them to make them all ‘dudes,’ since this is about masculinity. But the images are already so inscribed with cisnormativity. Is there a good way to get at focussing on masculinity and power while not kicking up these narratives? Am thinking maybe to photoshop out the skirt, but then photoshop in a variety of human body shapes: a range of kinds of bodies. just, like, skinny, round, curvy, hips, no hips? (update: there, have attempted ‘person person person person.’).

There is a variation on ‘Not All Men.’

It is called ‘I Feel Bad When You Say That.’

My godson Kyle is six. He is fairly emotionally perceptive for his age, as his grownups have been working with him to create an emotionally responsible and self-aware boy who we hope will grow into an emotionally responsible and self-aware man.

He knows at six that when you hurt someone, you go back right away and own, apologize, and do repair. For him that can mean if he hurts his friend while playing, he (ideally under his own initiative) is expected to promptly name what he did, apologize sincerely and lovingly, and ask his friend what he needs, or how he can help make things right between them: a hug, a high five, an offer to play. He is taught to listen to the needs and feelings of the other and act in a responsive way.

He is being encouraged to develop and express his empathic capacities, capacities he will need as a man. Whether with his parents, his friends at school, or his baby sister who cannot even speak yet, he is being taught to hear and notice how other people feel, to empathize and connect, to watch cues, and to act like someone aware of and able to embody his relational responsibilities.

He is also being taught that he is not shameful.

When he does something wrong, his adults show him how to make it right and they also let him know they love him and he is good just as he is. He is loved and good, he did a thing that hurt someone, and he has to make it right. These are not mutually exclusive, but connected.

As he learns, sometimes he mixes things up.

Sometimes he can’t tell the difference between him feeling bad because he hurt somebody, and feeling bad because someone hurt him.

Kyle and his dad are at the table. Kyle is restless and grouchy about having fruit for dessert when he wanted ice cream. He is kicking. He is six, he has a lot of energy, when he gets frustrated he still sometimes flails and needs help knowing how to express his anger in good ways. His mum tells him, “are you feeling angry because you wanted ice cream? It’s ok to feel angry. I hear you. All of your feelings are good. It’s not ok to kick people, though. If you feel angry you can say ‘I feel angry!’ You’re always allowed to feel anything you want, but kicking is not ok.”

Kyle, still flailing, kicks his dad on the shin.

At the end of his rope – but still modelling for his son how to handle anger – his dad says “You know what Kyle, my feelings are hurt because you kicked me. I don’t want to sit next to you right now.” And he goes to a different room. Because this is a securely attached family, he is still available if Kyle wants him, and he is not going far and not going for long. Kyle runs off to his room.

Meanwhile, Kyle’s mum says “Kyle, you kicked dad, come back and say sorry and make it right.”

Kyle comes back to his mum, crying, and says very intensely, his cute six-year-old face expressive and utterly for real:

“You said I kicked dad! You’re saying I’m bad! That hurts my feelings! You have to say sorry!”

This moment is a kind of hilarious moment, for the adults. He is using precisely the language we teach him to use (name hurtful action, name your feelings, ask for repair), except…

It is a good learning moment, for Kyle.

We can’t laugh. It’s tempting, but we don’t.

This logic is impeccable. Impeccable like a… like something snarky I can’t repeat.

Let’s slow this down, sports-replay style:

Kyle kicks dad.

Parent says: “Kyle, you kicked dad.”

So far so good.

Kyle says: “You said I kicked dad!”

That hurts my feelings!

You have to say sorry!”

oy.

He is kind of getting the point? Except kind of not getting it at all?

He actually thinks that his bad feeling at being told he kicked his father is the same thing as the kick itself.

The thing is that Kyle is absolutely genuine in his distress, upset and crying. He really means what he is saying.

He hasn’t made this connection yet, and we have to make it for him.

He is glowering intensely, crying, genuinely needing to be heard and his great big eyes expressing his fury, fear, and confusion, as only a six year old can do.

What is the appropriate response here?

He is growing, and we guide his growing, like a young tree.

His mum, suppressing a mix of bemused laughter and exasperation, says, carefully:

“Kyle, it is true that we teach you no one is bad.

I love you and you are good.

But you did kick dad.

It is ok for you to hear that, and I do not need to apologize.

Now go say sorry and make it right.”

She is absolutely firm on this. She does not apologize for naming his actions or their effects, and she corrects his mixing up of one thing with another. He has to learn this at some point if he is ever going to be an accountable man.

What if Kyle had not had such emotionally skilled parents? What if instead, they had actually shamed him by telling him he is bad, as many of our direct ancestors often have done? What if they silenced him, or coddled him and gave in, or all of the above? Kids need safe, sturdy, unbreakable and loving containers to grow into in order to grow up whole, emotionally healthy and accountable human beings.

What happens if no one helps him grow out of this? He comes from a family of physically big men and he is already a head taller than the other kids his age. He will be full grown early, and he already is ‘big’ to the kids his own age.

What if he had made it all the way to adulthood with this confusion intact? This may sound absurd, but I see this same confusion play out among adults, particularly when we begin to pull back the veil of unearned privileges that mask power in our society. I see this play out in masculinity, in whiteness.

As a white person who does antiracism education in the university classroom I am not unfamiliar with this phenomenon.

My impression, based on what I have perceived directly and based on what I have learned over time from BIPOC organizers about what is seen and unseen, is that this same attack posture is present in most white people when we encounter the fact of colonization, race and racism, and our complicity in both of these.

If we cannot feel ‘comfortable’ while grappling with the reality of colonization, or if we cannot have our bubble of ego preserved and coddled while we learn the hard facts about racism, we expect that it is somehow normal that we can go on the attack, and expect the people experiencing harm to coddle and apologize to us, rather than being responsible for our own feelings and making ourselves accessible and available to finally come to hear and see things that are happening every day to human beings all around us that our privilege lets us ignore.

When Kyle is 20, or 30, or 40, or 60, and harms someone by action or omission, where will the ‘parent’ be who can say “you are good and loved and not shameful, and you did this thing, now stop acting like an ass and go make it right.”?

I ran into this again recently when a group of people close to me called in a man who was acting in psychologically abusive ways towards me. He recognized he had done this harm, and expressed massive amounts of guilt that seemed to make him resentful and angry, but showed no empathy, and took absolutely no ownership or accountability. He left it up to everyone else to do his emotional work for him as he resentfully (and barely) went along.

Stuck in guilt and resentment, he seemed to have no inner guide that would lead him to want to empathize with the person he had harmed, or to own, apologize, or make it right – all the ways we come back into alignment with our integrity when we have acted outside it. Instead, after pretending to do process for a bit, sabotaging it the whole way, he went on the attack and told us all to stop talking, even to one another, or we would be hearing from his lawyers. Not because anything we had said was untrue, but because he “felt so bad” at hearing himself “described in this way” that when he could no longer control the narrative, he needed to silence the person he had harmed and all those around her.

There is a quality in guilt that paralyzes. Worse, it leads those who feel it to lash out, like pythons or like some kind of wild animal guarding a nest of self-loathing. Do not look at the man behind the curtain, says the guilt, or I will attempt to destroy you just to stop you from getting near the core of my shame.

This is the demon that I feel arising in my classroom around week three as we talk about the hard facts of colonization, of our collusion with it as settlers, and that it has not ended but is ongoing. This kind of wild serpent of fear and danger arises in the back of the room and – since I am white and a settler – if I have done my job well, the students having these inner demons will come talk to me during office hours, saying wildly racist and historically inaccurate things as I listen and listen and help them identify reality and where it diverges from their inner wildlings of shame. I do my best to siphon their demons out of the classroom but I am aware that (depending on the topic at hand) Indigenous or POC students in these classrooms are often asked to feel perpetually, extremely uncomfortable and to get traumatized by having to be in these spaces, just so my white students don’t have to experience even momentary discomfort. I see it as part of my job as a white person to notice this massive discrepancy is happening, that it is naturalized. I see it as my job to empathize with, hear, and to the best of my ability guard the safety of those whom the classroom is not designed to serve and whose safety is somehow not seen as a priority. This is somehow surprisingly challenging as my own subject position leads me to notice the needs of the students from dominant backgrounds, who don’t even realize everything and everyone is centered around them.

As a white woman I can do this with white people about racism or colonization because I am not paying the personal cost in my body of being attacked by them as they work out their shame and guilt over beginning to actually understand reality. I can coddle and placate (cough… empathize) and then find their edge, what they are willing to hear, and then offer a wider lens, because I am not in my body personally bearing the brunt of the violence.

I cannot do it with men.

As a woman I cannot ignore my body’s deep, deep awareness of men’s potential to explode, attack, or flee if I pipe up about a thing they did that caused harm and that may as a result invoke guilt. I have been raised to sense that shit by the microsecond and act preemptively to coddle and placate and soothe the guilt before it can become a poisonous snake about to lunge at me, or an abandoning friend about to leave when I need them most.

The cost to my body of coddling a scary, angry, fragile ego – coddling it to make sure it does not attack or abandon me – is so incredibly great that I actually cannot do this kind of coddling any longer. I realize I have been doing it instinctively for a long time.

If you harm someone and then make it so that they feel afraid to tell you about it, be aware that women are likely coddling you constantly day in and day out in ways that exhaust them and that you take as normal and do not even notice. If you do this as a white person to people of colour, be aware of the same. It is so taken for granted in our culture that those with marginal subjectivity will constantly placate those who are dominant that this is seen as perfectly  unremarkable by those with more power, while those doing the placating have silence – and exhaustion, and trauma’s many bodily impacts – as their shelter and companion.

You can live your life unaware of this. But do you really want to continue to live so oblivious to the emotions and experiences of the people around you? Is that who you are?

If you harm someone and then when they tell you about it, you are more focussed on the fact that your feelings are hurt than on the fact that you have caused harm, can you stop and ask yourself if that is an adult response?  Do you have your own inner desire to understand when you harm others?

If your answer is yes, then what do you do to live that desire and make yourself available for it? Have you let those around you know how you would like to know when you have caused harm? Is the answer, I want to know in theory, because I like that people think of me as a great feminist, but I have not actually developed a good way to help people speak up or to hear it, in real life?

If you want a good concrete thing you can do right now, here is a wonderful Pod Mapping project from the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective. It asks you who your people are who you would want to call you on it if you behaved in an abusive way. If you can’t think of anyone you would want to call you on abusive behaviour, or your response is ‘I don’t need that, I would never cause harm,’ than this is for you. If you consider yourself a feminist, ask yourself why you haven’t already initiated something of the sort, and fill this out. Make it available to every ex you have, and to any current or future partner/s: https://batjc.wordpress.com/pods-and-pod-mapping-worksheet/

This is the meaning of the phrase “Your allyship is meaningless if it isn’t accountable.”

If you are the kind of person who likes to know when you have caused harm, then there are some valuable questions about how to make that real: how do you invite this information, how do you welcome it, how do you thank those who help you grow this way, if they have to tell you because you have not figured it out for yourself? Do you realize just how scary it can be to tell you, before they know how you will react? Do you mix up their fear of you for anger? Is their fear in any way justified? How can you make sure it is not?

If your focus is more on the fact that harm got named than it is on the harm itself, does this strike you as at all peculiar?

Depending on the severity and longevity of the harm, and the body’s silencing effects when trauma occurs, do you make it the responsibility of those you have harmed to tell you ‘in a nice way’?

Is it possible they have tried to tell you in a nice way, and you have clapped your hands over your ears or made it hard for them, and eventually they lose the capacity to be ‘nice’ while they are getting harmed? If you think back – really think back – how long were they trusting you and asking you for help and empathy and support and compassion and honesty before they lost their buffer of capacity to speak kindly while drowning?

How long did you hear those requests and not-really-hear them? Imagine how it feels to speak and find it is as if you haven’t spoken. Not that people don’t ‘believe’ you but that they actually can not hear you, as though you are speaking gibberish or not speaking at all. As though in a nightmare where you ask for help and everyone answers as though you have said something else, where you say “help I’m drowning” and those around you reply, “Oh, yes I see, I like orange also, have a nice day!”

Put yourself in those shoes: how long, how many days and weeks and months, would you retain your sanity while speaking kindly and asking for help and having it seem as though you had not spoken at all?

Coming up from underwater into speaking up isn’t always pretty. What if one of the effects of trauma is that after naming and naming calmly without being heard for so long, or after having the words get trapped in the still waters of their body, they can no longer speak, and can only scream?

Just as indigenous students and students of colour in my classes on racism are somehow expected to be quietly, constantly unsafe and deeply out of their comfort zones just to make sure the white students do not experience a moment’s discomfort – and the white students actually think everyone is having the same experience they are – if you make it hard for people around you to let you know you have caused harm, you’re going to invoke survival strategies in your friends and colleagues when you think you’re just having a regular hangout with your friend.

This is the block to accountability that leads many of us to quietly placate men in ways they take for granted and think are normal. With certain men who have not owned that this guilt script is inside them, this placating others do for them is so continuous and so normalized that they seem to take as a given that women around them will handle their emotions for them, and they don’t even see it happening. I have recently understood that men I have to do this for are not actually men I can trust. Because if they harm me, they expect me to remain silent about the harm, and they expect me to remain silent about the fact of remaining silent, so that they don’t have to feel bad, so that I don’t feel scared of them. This is given as the normal state of affairs. When you are accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.

Here’s another example. When I was a little girl, my father would have random multi-hour rages for what he perceived as slights or insults. Later I learned there is a word for this, but at the time all I knew was confusion. Outside our family he could be charming, charismatic, friendly. He reserved his true self for behind closed doors.

An insult to him could be anything from how we sat in our chair, or how we moved our bodies, to not coming to the door late at night to greet him with a kiss when he arrived home, even if we were already in bed – or asleep.

He could feel personally insulted by things he witnessed between my friends and me while we were playing, that had nothing to do with him at all. What he would perceive as an ‘insult’ was completely random, and completely unpredictable.

He was a large man. Once he had been ‘insulted,’ he could scream, full volume, uninterrupted, for several hours. Sometimes two, sometimes four or five. Uninterrupted screaming. It was impossible to predict how long a rage would last once it began. His face bright red as he swelled up like an enormous, angry balloon.

While this was happening to us we had to sit perfectly still, not moving, not making any facial expressions. We did not go to the bathroom or drink water or eat while this was happening. We had to listen, and agree – but agreeing with a wrong facial expression, nodding the wrong way, could get him to expand and blow up further, so the safest thing to do was to stay perfectly, perfectly still, with the perfect neutral but agreeing expression, for however many hours until he was done. He did this regularly, all the years of my childhood.

I learned to keep a very smooth expression in his presence, to be very still, to have whatever body language or emotion he wanted. Mainly he liked when his daughter acted happy. His idea of how a girl ought to behave is pretty and happy and subservient and devoted.

If I felt afraid of him, he would scream he felt ‘bad’ that I was afraid. Somehow this was supposed to make him a good person.

There was probably guilt, in there, somewhere. Shame, certainly, deep down.

That didn’t help us.

Guilt is not empathy. Neither is shame.  In fact, when people feel overwhelmed by their own inner feelings of guilt, they are more likely to attack the people around them rather than act empathetic. Feeling guilt does not make you a good person.  Empathy and responsiveness make you a good person. Guilt blocks empathy.

Sometimes he would say he felt ‘bad’ that I was telling him he was a ‘bad father,’ and I had to say ‘no, no, you’re a wonderful father,’ to make sure he would not attack me.

He would scream things like “children all love me! I am wonderful with children!” or whatever other narrative he intended to terrorize us into accepting as real. And he was good with other people’s children – charismatic, playful, childlike. As long as he was having fun, and not responsible for their physical or emotional safety, he was good with children. Just not with us.  But wait, no, he was. Or was he. I couldn’t tell. He terrorized us until we demonstrated complete internalization of his fantasy structure.

And we did. Whatever he said. His control over reality was absolute. I became foggy, dissociated, not-there, and whatever he needed me to do or feel, I did or felt until I could get away. But it was impossible to get it right. The paranoia over ‘insults’ was a thing in him. It had nothing to do with me. No matter how hard I tried, there was no way to get it right.

Afterwards my mother would explain in a foggy, spacy voice that when we are afraid of him, we hurt his feelings. He felt, she said, that we don’t love him enough.

I would have to find a way to ‘make it up’ to him. I would actually apologize to him for having felt afraid. Because my hurt and fear hurt his feelings.

In the world he created, his fantasy structure – loving, devoted, happy and well-cared for daughters – was the only one that was allowed, and deviation from that fantasy structure by any of us created terror and raging until everyone fell back in line.

I left at 20 years old and while I am close with the rest of my family, and tried for many years to set workable boundaries that he inevitably crossed, eventually I have had to accept that with him there is only the fragile narcissist’s ego, and there is no repair that can be done.

After explaining healthy relating to him for decades, I eventually had to accept there is no reasonable person in there who can empathize with another human being. I have had to accept that with him, I have left, and I have not looked back.

I can no longer manage or coddle fragile male egos. I can no longer come to the door to give my angry father a kiss, in my incredibly vulnerable white cotton nightie and my bare feet, the sleep half-rubbed out of my six-year old eyes, feeling the secret tremor of fear stiffen and shake my body as I paste a smile on my face (hoping it is convincing as my true self exits my body and floats somewhere up near the ceiling) and kiss his cheek, because if he notices my fear, if he feels disrespected, he could pull me out of bed in the middle of the night to make me demonstrate how much I honour him by screaming into my tiny face until I do.

I have run into this – ‘I feel hurt that you are scared of me’ – with cops, and it struck me how similar it was. At a demo about police brutality once where the cops were detaining people and beating people up, a cop in full riot gear, with his viser up, said to me ‘What about me? You hurt my feelings when you’re scared of me. My feelings are hurt. That is as important as your feelings, isn’t it?’ when I said he was scaring me.

How do we get here, with adult men unable to differentiate narcissistic injury from actual harm? How do we get here where an adult man – a lover, a friend, a parent, a partner – can cause serious harm, and when that harm is named, can clap their hands over their ears and say “I’m not listening! I feel angry because you’re saying I hurt you! It hurts me too much to hear what I did to you! Go away shut up stop talking La La La Not Listening!”

Thankfully, I don’t have to do this with most of the men in my life, the ones who take their ally work seriously and are thirsty to learn, the ones who understand what accountability looks like, and who make it their business and do not wait for others to drag them along into it.

I do have to do it with guys who have not taken ownership of their own reactions. If a guy has not realized that women are doing this emotional management for him, I no longer feel safe alone with him.

Own. Apologize. Repair.

Say, “Here is what I did. I did this thing, and that thing, and this thing. They’re fucked up because …”

Ask “Have I got you? Do I understand?” and let the person clarify. Mirror until you get it.

Say, “Wow, thank you for sharing that with me. I know how hard it can be to share something like this, I’m really grateful you took that risk, and I’m taking it to heart. Here is what I’m going to do (concrete practical things) to make sure I get better about this in the future.”

The reason this is on my mind today is because of boundaries.

—-

PLEASE SHARE THIS POST If this post speaks to you or makes you think or reflect, please help out: share as widely as possible.

For a world in which everyone can feel safer, including those who harm and those who cause harm. Thank you.

I love this Bay Area Transformative Justice pod mapping worksheet so much that big, dramatic, hyperbole feels called for. ie I wanna shout it from the rooftops and say it again and again: if you consider yourself a feminist man, or you allow others around you to let you walk around with this identity and you enjoy having that reputation, or if you find you get laid or get dates or partners because of this reputation, and if you have not yet mapped out your pod of people who you would want to call you on it when you act in abusive ways, then do this right now. like today. like right away. Because it is everything, it is wonderful: https://batjc.wordpress.com/pods-and-pod-mapping-worksheet/

Of soup-friends and token-exchangers.

I’ve noticed a pattern. (surprise!)

It seems to me that two very different models exist of what people in our culture think we are doing when we nurture one another. This makes sense given that any modern culture is a complex swirl of ancestral inheritances only recently jumbled together and barely stirred, like marbled paper used in old book linings.

One world view is that nurturance is like tokens. In this world view when we take care of one another we pass tokens back and forth, with the assumption that getting nurturance is ‘receiving’ a token, and giving nurturance is ‘giving up’ a token.

In this model, while people may accept that at times tokens go more one way than the other for a while, overall, because we believe taking care of others ‘costs’ us something, it makes sense to keep a kind of count, to aim to have ‘tokens’ exchanged about 50/50 over time.

The other world view is that when we nurture one another, we are not exchanging tokens but are, rather, making soup. The pot is on the stove, and we gather around it. I put in a potato, you put in a pea. Over many many hours of care and interaction, the soup begins to  cook, and this nice home-cooked meal smell fills the house. You can imagine this is even the kind of soup that expands as it thickens. Because when we are sharing we have an abundance, friends come over and add some beef (or tofu, hey, your call) to the soup, and others come over and add some fresh picked garlic, or parsley and lemon from their yard – and presto, having taken this time to cook together we have a nice warm feeling for all of us in a home filled with deliciousness, our needs all get met, with those we trust around us to share in it.

In this second model, we do not ‘lose’ or ‘give away’ a token when we nurture others, because the act of nurturing itself feels good. The people in my soup-group are my soup-friends. To nurture a member of my soup-group creates closeness with them, creates emotional connection and intimacy, and over time of nurturing one another consistently, creates trust and safety between us. These feelings – this pot of shared soup – are what we seek.

The risk in this second model is when ‘soup-makers’ encounter ‘token-exchangers’ and do not realize the different assumptions underlying their acts of care. Because even very generous token exchangers naturally have a fear of giving and a desire to be receiving, because they conceptualize nurturing as ‘generosity’ or at the very least derive satisfaction in giving by feeling they have ‘done a good deed for another’ rather than in the experience of connection itself, this system creates a tendency to keep score, if only subconsciously and only over the long term. Because they don’t fully perceive the direct gain to themselves in nurturing others, aware only of what they think of as ‘giving’ or loss of tokens, they may not even be aware that a soup-maker who nurtures them is not ‘giving’ but is making soup.

It seems likely that this token-exchange world view of intimacy, whether between lovers, partners, or close friends is not coincidentally extremely widespread in the culture that invented capitalism and the commodification of, well, just about everything.

To those whose ancestors accumulated the most wealth this earth has ever seen, the world appears a scary vacuum waiting to take it all back. In this competitive, individualist world-fantasy it only makes sense to create tiny citadels-of-two within which nurturance is reciprocally exchanged. How else might you know if your tokens are going down or up?

On the other hand, to those who have nothing but each other and hopefully enough to eat, sharing everything is a no-brainier. The extra kick of abundance that sharing everything creates is the only way everyone survives.

‘The miracle,’ said Leonard Nimoy, ‘is this: the more we share, the more we have.’ This is as true of nurturance as it is of potatoes. Because everyone gains from the warm limbic connection that comes of trust, ‘giving’ nurturance to those around you is giving to yourself. Ironically, it is those who hoard potatoes for fear of famine who most often end up eating alone.

If the token-user – who cannot see there is soup being made right in front of them – tries to hoard potatoes, afraid they may not have enough because they believe they and only they must always feed themselves, then the soup-maker may add a lot of potatoes to the soup, believing that that is what everyone is doing. Meanwhile, the token-nurturer may, one low-potato day, not understand where all this good feeling came from, and take the soup and run. ‘Thanks for the exchange!’ they may say, ‘but I’m really low on food just now, so I gotta save what I see here in this pot for myself. Sorry!’

We understand this economically: sharing material wealth creates abundance that is much greater than its parts.

Attachment Theory, coming out of a field traditionally rooted in the primacy of the individual and the family, has managed to understand this extends to the couple, but has gone no further.

In Wired for Love this is called the Couple Bubble, and you are told that No One Would Ever Do For You What Your Partner Would Do, and Defend The Couple Bubble against all outside bonds.

We understand this economically, and yet strangely enough, some feminists have not yet made the leap between the economic principle and the social one.

An understanding of limbic connection and how it works not only for couples but for all trusting bonds can help bridge the gap.

Anyone can be soup-friends. All it entails is knowing you are doing this together.

—-

PLEASE SHARE THIS POST :D If this post speaks to you or makes you think or reflect, please help out: share as widely as possible.

I love this Bay Area Transformative Justice pod mapping worksheet so much that big, dramatic, hyperbole feels called for. ie I wanna shout it from the rooftops and say it again and again: if you consider yourself a feminist man, or you allow others around you to let you walk around with this identity and you enjoy having that reputation, or if you find you get laid or get dates or partners because of this reputation, and if you have not yet mapped out your pod of people who you would want to call you on it when you act in abusive ways, then do this right now. like today. like right away. Because it is everything, it is wonderful: https://batjc.wordpress.com/pods-and-pod-mapping-worksheet/

This is an incredibly on point and insightful piece from Everyday Feminism I highly recommend you read and act on right away:  Abusive ‘Feminist’ Men Exist — Here Are 6 Things Men Can Do to Stop Them

For more on working with shame and hope, here is a piece that looks at how the fear of being ‘not good enough‘ can be self-fulfilling

Do you love speculative fiction and social justice? I am working on a speculative fiction project that deals with the transformations our planet is undergoing, and the undoing of cultures of domination. Cipher is currently seeking collaborators, advisors, an agent, and a publisher. Learn more about Cipher here.

ps i wrote a short post! just for you.

The presidential debates have provided survivors everywhere with a gift.

We have been speaking and speaking and speaking about the harm we experience at the hands of gaslighting men forever, and yet unless you have witnessed this behavior yourself, it can be almost impossible to believe that it exists.

Because the abuse isn’t just the mistreatment itself. The abuse is the telling us that the mistreatment is normal. Getting us to forget. The abuse is the insistence that we are not even allowed to say stop or object or even speak up about being devalued, mistreated, objectified, manipulated, or treated as anything less than full human beings. Not even allowed to think it let alone speak it in a society where we have to learn over and over that no one will take her/their word over his. The abuse is the creating a social world, an imagination, in which it is impossible to imagine or even think of liberation. That is the abuse. And so the imagination is the first line of defense. Our minds and words are our first line of defense. knowing we see what is real is our first line of defense. Trusting ourselves about what is unnamed is our first line of defense. Because to topple this entire power structure that hides and condones and masks oppression means always, always knowing the unpoken truths of our bodies are real, no matter who attempts to tell us they are not.

How does this happen? The logical switchbacks, the emotional incoherence, the moves to control the terms of discussion, and the multiple competing realities that this man creates: these are the behaviours that create trauma and dissociation in survivors.

One needs multiple minds to hold all the multiple realities that gaslighting men generate in a near-continual stream and attempt to impose.

And yet, typically, this behaviour is reserved for intimacy – an abuser may not behave this way with other friends or family. (Hullo, we act differently when we’re having sex with people than we do normally? Who’d’a thought.) And so you, friendly bystander, when a woman or trans person says they are experiencing this – when they say they feel crazy, or when they can barely speak? You believing us, you believing us matters. Our words and our minds and our imaginations are our first line of defense, and so your willingness to take the time to understand is how you can help. Because this behaviour can happen under the radar of bystanders, quietly so only the survivor receives it. Yes, your perfectly nice friend who has never done this to you, even your son or your brother, yes they can do this to their partner or lover, in an under-the-radar way that only the partner or lover is subject to.

And so when the survivor finally speaks, it can be difficult for bystanders to empathize or even understand what the survivor has been through.

What is normally hidden, reserved for the private space of intimacy, is now beamed over millions of screens for all to see. Watching this man speak can help those who have never experienced gaslighting before empathize with those who have.

A recent piece in Bust magazine notes: “It’s remarkable how many female viewers report feeling physically ill.”  Trout has not touched any of them, not directly. Yet what survivors are reporting is that this kind of psychological violence is, in fact, physical violence.

Now, I’m no Clinton fan. I’m also, if it makes any difference, not American, and so I watch from (literally) the sidelines, with the ever-so-slight feeling of protection that comes of living in different country, though one that perches on the thin crust of the northern edge of the world’s once-greatest superpower.

I need that protection when I watch this man speak. I want to hold the border, the very 49th parallel, up as a barrier between me and this man, as I watch Trout lie, gaslight, evade, distort reality, and create multiple competing narratives that make no sense together. This was odd, because my usual understanding of borders is as tools of oppression and control. Yet here I was wishing for any barrier at all to the destruction that this man’s speech wreaks inside me. (If you’re wondering “Why ‘Trout’?” I’ve put the name into the title just so people see this post. My actual goal in writing is to starve the name. It is much easier for me to read a beautiful word like ‘Trout’ when my body is reacting in this way.)

I needed all the protection I could get because my brain – my literal neurons and physical brain structures – were originally molded and shaped by a man who behaved in remarkably similar ways.

With my mind and body developmentally formed by just this sort of gaslighting, I am extremely susceptible to people who create multiple competing realities and attempt to put them in my head.

Just as a survivor of sexual assault struggles afterwards to regain knowledge that they are allowed to determine who touches their own body, a survivor of serious, chronic gaslighting, who faces this abuse again in a new situation, has to work hard to know they are allowed their own thoughts.

I wanted to turn off the screen. And yet I also feel compelled to give name to these widespread experiences that have no name. We need words, because we live in a culture that readily and automatically allows abuse to go on just because it is so much easier to swim with than against the tide. Abuse is often considered polite, while naming abuse is not because it disrupts the normal flow of power. Cultures of dominance are, after all, woven through us all, not ‘out there’ but inside us.

And that means we live in a world where empathy for survivors needs to be consciously cultivated. Our world, in so many ways, is backwards. When friends and those who are supporting me first asked how it had happened, some wanted me to show them a metaphorical cup of abuse on the kitchen table, when the trouble was that the abuse and the bystander dynamics are the whole house. It took time, and deep listening from those who know me well, to understand what I had been through. How can I explain that the harm is so large we are inside it, that only once you bear the brunt of it do you see how it was around us all along?

The unfortunate Reality TV show that is this election offers a way out of the double bind that survivors find ourselves in, where if we succumb in silence, and extend our natural empathy towards our abusers, centring them even as they extend none back, we sacrifice our bodies and minds (that’s not a metaphor: the cost to survivors of this kind of gaslighting is loss of capacity to work, think, move, speak) and if we speak up, no one believes us, because who could imagine a moral world created by a man like Trout?

Deflection, minimization, gaslighting, shaming these emanate from him in a nearly-continous flow, as Liz Plank explains in a recent video when she notes: “If you feel crazy during this election, that’s Trout gaslighting you again, and again, and again, and again.”

Even as you watch him speak – even as I watch him speak and relive being gaslighted by the last two men who dated me, and the man who raised me – it is almost impossible to imagine how he could say the things he says with a straight face.

And yet he does, over and over, on and on and on. He appears to either have no idea he is doing it, or to feel entitled to go on doing it just to maintain control.

Abusers have two main features that distort their perceptions, according to the very helpful book Why Does He Do That. They have:

-an inappropriately large sense of their own entitlement and an inappropriately shrunken sense of the entitlement of others;

-and they perpetually center themselves, which leads them to systematically disregard the feelings, needs, and experiences of other people, typically while denying they are doing so.

They will depict normal expectations that we all have of one another – such as ordinary family responsibilities, or acting with emotional reliability for our loved ones – as distressing encroachments on their (inappropriately expanded) sphere of entitlement, and will depict the normal interdependence and mutuality of intimate relationships as an excessive imposition on their presumed right to center themselves at all times.

They will story themselves, for instance, as having ‘given and given and given’ when the things they are ‘giving’ are below even the ordinary normal expectations of basic interpersonal obligation to those one is intimate with. (Like describing ‘not lying’ as a gift, or ‘going to see a psychologist when she begins to believe I’m abusing her’ as some sort of extreme generosity, when these are just the basic things one does to be a decent human being.)

Men who abuse in this way do not distinguish between their self-image and their actual self, because their true self is offline. Any attempt to name harm (such as to ask them to stop) is received as criticism, and criticism threatens to call their self-story into question, and this self-story is all they have for a self, until they get sufficiently motivated to stop, and to recover the lost part of themselves that would do moral consistency and emotional connection. That is why they use words to try to control reality, and attack or isolate anyone who tries to bring a bit of reality back into the equation. (“I have all the best words,” he says, his face beaming into the living rooms of the nation.)

For those who did not grow up inside a reality controlled by a gaslighting man, perhaps spotting this kind of abuse would be ‘easy,’ as  a recent article says when it describes Trout thus: “We watch you say one thing, then say the opposite. Then refuse to admit any of it happened. […] We can spot gaslighting from a mile away.”

Perhaps for those writers, ‘spotting’ gaslighting is easy. For survivors raised inside this form of abuse, however, spotting gaslighting, let alone getting one’s own thoughts and memories back, is extremely difficult, because gaslighting during developmental years can literally shape the developing brain.

Just as women raised in families where they were never encouraged to say ‘no’ find that, as adults, they have a very hard time doing so, those raised inside a gaslighting dynamic find it very, very difficult to hang on to their beliefs, memories, and knowledge when an abuser – like Trout – gets inside their head and attempts to put multiple competing realities there.

I have been learning a lot about this, because I attempted to create accountability with an abuser earlier this year, and encountered the hard wall of just how evasive and slippery this kind of abuse can be. I have a support pod, and we asked the abuser to create his own, but he just did weird slippery evasive maneuvers instead of taking any responsibility for a year of brutal gaslighting and messing with my head. Watching Trout talk is like a big, loud, public version of the switchbacks, multiple competing realities, bait and switch, entitlement, and manipulation that I experienced with this well-meaning ‘feminist’ dude for a year. It’s almost a relief, that I have something I can point to, to say: “There. There is what happened to me. Do you believe me now?”

My pod’s been doing a lot of research to try to understand what is happening, because as the very helpful book Why Does He Do That indicates, the abuser manages to tell only partial versions of events, to get those around him in a sort of thrall to his distorted sense of reality, and to normalize his strangely enlarged sense of entitlement. He tells the convenient parts of the story, because he wants most of all to prevent those around him from checking in with the survivor to check his facts.

Why Does He Do That – though it predates attachment theory and may need updating with this new information – has been super helpful at explaining this behaviour. Author Lundy Bancroft, who has worked with thousands of abusive men, writes that the only way to get a clear picture of what is happening with men who abuse is to check what they say against information provided by their exes and partners. There is no other way to get a clear picture, she writes, because abusers are not accurate sources of information about themselves or others. (“I never supported the war in Iraq,” Trout says, while audio clips that show he’s lying – like this one, starting at 1:40 – are readily available).

The pundits waste no time in fact-checking Trout’s bizarre dishonesties, his blatant bending of reality. They need to. As Bancroft’s research tells us, the only way to counter gaslighting is with powerful, repeated doses of reality.

This is why when an abuser gaslights a partner or former partner, he also seeks to talk one-on-one and preemptively to those she might go to for help, to convince them of a narrative that would lead bystanders to refuse to even speak to the survivor, to cut off attempts to check the abuser’s story against any external reality.

Deeply listening to survivors, fact checking the partial-ommission stories that those who abuse use to deflect and avoid accountability, takes energy and empathy and time, and may take acting against the current of socially ‘polite’ behaviour.  It is so much easier to toss up barriers to seeing intimate violence, especially when without cross-checking, the abuser’s narrative feels so truthy, and when even seeing the abuse might mean recognizing that we may have inadvertently become part of it.

A mistake we make as bystanders is to attempt to use our own rolodex of emotional experiences to empathize with the survivor – or to try to figure out the abuser. But empathizing with abuse survivors takes a different set of skills. Empathizing with survivors means stretching out of experiences we have already had, and into deep listening to the experience they have just had, or are still having, which may be completely outside our lived experience. Our own rolodex may just not provide the information we need to comprehend what they are telling us has just happened to them.

Meanwhile, empathizing with abusers can lead us to endlessly derail the centring of survivors, which is exactly what the abuser wants. It can also lead us to project our own ethical impulses onto the abuser’s actions, which would make sense if this were a reasonable person acting – but the whole point is that no matter how nice he may be to his friends or colleagues, the abuser’s actions in the context of intimacy typically do not make that kind of sense. Imagine trying to imagine why hamster-hair keeps saying “I did not support the war in Iraq,” or how he can say phrases like “no, I’m not racist against Mexicans. I’m building a wall. A wall between here and Mexico. I have no problem with Mexico. I’m building a wall.” You could imagine an empathetic reason for this incoherence that comes out of your own rolodex of experience, and it would just let him evade accountability, because he does not make that kind of sense. Abuser’s actions make another kind of sense: an abusive, entitled one. But they do not make ordinary empathic sense, so trying to empathize with an abuser who is evading accountability often just means throwing the survivor under the bus.

Bystanders may not comprehend the full depth of the  harm, because of a mistaken idea that physical violence is somehow ‘worse’ than psychological violence. Well, if he didn’t hit her, we think, maybe it wasn’t that bad. I mean, we all have bad days, right? We seem to have this mistaken assumption that abuse just means coming home a little grouchy and having a bad day. We think only of our own range of experiences, and may find it hard to really hear what the survivor is telling us.

The core of all the different forms of abuse is typically the inability to take accountability for one’s actions, the inability to hear when we are harming another, the inability to own our mistakes or grow from them in a way that actually does repair. While we do need a culture that can foster accountability without ostracization, we first need a culture that actually does believe and centre survivors of gendered violence (in all its forms: rape, assault, gaslighting, control of family funds, threats to leave if the abuser’s whims are not catered to, etc.). We need a culture that can do accountability at all.

In order to create a culture of accountability we need the capacity to recognize abuse in all its forms. This idea that ‘physical’ abuse is somehow distinct from ‘psychological’ abuse is outdated, based in a Manichean divide between mind and body that is itself a deeply messed up Western fantasy that prevents us from knowing our own bodies. Its primary function is to further disbelieve survivors, or tell them they are imagining it.

In the 1800s, before the germ theory of disease, people would have thought it absurd that tiny living creatures cover our skin and live inside our bodies, keeping us well and making us sick. They would have thought it absurd that tiny microbes, bacteria, viruses, can transfer invisibly from body to body, for how can something invisible make you sick?

In the 60s, Marshall McLuhan wrote that the light from a TV screen isn’t just something you’re ‘watching.’ It is physically crossing the room and touching your body, entering your skin and your eyes.

In the 90s, people thought that it was ridiculous that anyone could be allergic to perfume, because it’s just a smell. How could you be allergic to a smell?

A gas leak can kill you. Unless an odour is artificially added, it can kill you before you can catch or even detect it. We add that odour for a reason: we must make danger perceivable, so we can understand how to prevent it.

What happens when this man uses words to get at the millions of triggered women listening to him? It isn’t only his body language that presupposes threat. As an abuse survivor, what I am susceptible to – I don’t even want to write the word ‘vulnerable,’ because that seems to open up a tunnel by which he can get me – is the multiple competing realities. The bait and switch designed to make you feel crazy. The gaslighting. The getting inside your head and trying to get you to abandon your own reality and adopt his, even and especially when his make no sense, when his realities are internally incoherent, or when his words bear zero connection to his actions or to reality.

This kind of abuse is one of the most devastating forms of harm that any human being can do to another. Gaslighting shatters people. Physically.

And the worst thing about it is that those who regularly do this to others will then turn it around and say that you are doing it to them, by imposing on what they perceive as their ‘right’ to do this to you. Because what is consensus reality, anyway, right?

Here’s an example.

I say “The sky is blue.”

He says “The sky is green. It has always been green. What are you thinking? ‘The sky is blue.’ It’s never been blue. Look again.”

I look up. And because I have been raised by an abuser, because my brain has developed around precisely this kind of abuse, I see green.

I say, bewildered, but trusting him: “no, no I’m pretty sure it’s usually blue.”

He replies, getting upset: “You’re trying to control the narrative. I don’t feel safe now. I have to have room to control the narrative.”

And there I am, scared and confused, trying to believe both that the sky is green, and that me confusedly trying to remember reality is me ‘controlling the narrative’ – which of course I would never want to do.

Cue me having overwhelming dissociative symptoms. Cue him saying my dissociative symptoms mean there’s something wrong with me, because he’s acting totally fine.

He spent nearly a year telling me that he was acting completely normal, had no issues at all, and that the only issue was that all the women in his life were ‘crazy’ – And I completely accepted – even encouraged – his world view. Because that’s what you do when you care about someone, you encourage them to trust their worldview. Right?

This is what it’s like being a survivor of gaslighting abuse. This is how at risk I am to further abuse.

Here’s another example.

A guy I like says he’s into me. I say “ok, we gotta talk. I’m an abuse survivor. I’m in the middle of healing from serious formative abuse. I can only get close to guys if they are choosing to be actively part of my healing and are exceptionally careful with me. If we get involved at all, you’re going to have to treat me really, really well, act as safe and as good to me as the men who have treated me well.”

He explains what a feminist he is. How self-aware he is. How he does a ton of his own emotional work. He spends a few days explaining all of this to me, how he’s super super good to women and really committed to his feminist practice and totally gets it and is a big nurturer.

I think I’ve won the lottery – a cute guy I’m into who also is into helping women heal! I’ve been treated really, really well by several partners by this point and I know how awesome it is to be in a relationship with a guy who really treats you well. Who listens, who is comforting, who is responsive, who owns his shit, who values you just because you’re you, and because you help him grow. I know this well and between his words and his carefully cultivated feminist reputation I take him at his word that he is another one of these.

Fast forward a few months, and I am losing  my mind, and can’t figure out what is happening. He has been destabilizing me all day every day for months. When I finally blurt out “this is my worst nightmare, getting involved with an unreliable guy,” instead of saying ‘oh, shit, I am acting unreliable, aren’t I, and I committed to act really safe with you, didn’t I, wow thanks for letting me know, how can I do better,’ he does a classic bait and switch, though I only understand it later.

He has been actively training me not to rely on him, and telling himself that this is his right. He acts intentionally unreliable while telling me he is being good to me, inconsistently enough that in between the most blatant episodes I can lull myself into believing his words about how good he’s being to me, but destabilizing me often enough that I can never quite count on him to be there. My friends are extremely alarmed at his strange behaviour they witness towards me, but I only hear his words, and keep telling everyone they “just don’t know him the way I do.” After months of being deliberately trained out of emotional safety in a moment by moment way while he lies and lies to me about what he is doing, I am shaken and triggered and having all my old dissociative symptoms, the symptoms I so carefully explained to him before he got involved with me.

Instead of hearing me, and apologizing or recognizing he is treating me badly despite having committed to the responsibility to treat me well, when I blurt out “but this is my worst nightmare,” instead of offering any kind of compassion he shoots back  what he seems to think is a perfect parallel. “This is my worst nightmare,” he retorts. “My worst nightmare is anyone relying on me.”

Nothing even remotely resembling hearing me, nothing remotely resembling an apology for gaining and breaking a survivor’s trust, no recognition of what a strange ‘right’ this is for him to claim. He says it as though training others not to rely on him is something he ‘deserves’ – relationship without reliability, sex without accountability.

Even as he says this, he switchbacks on me moments later to say, somehow, angrily “I am being so reliable, I’m being so good to you, what is wrong with you that you don’t feel safe yet!” I have heard him tell me how good he is being to me over and over by now. And I have such a hard time comprehending reality when his words contradict it. He somehow manages to tell me this is real, that he’s ‘being so reliable,’ even as he also tells me it is perfectly normal that he is being unreliable, because he is entitled to act unreliable because his worst fear is anyone relying on him.

To cultivate empathy for survivors, think of this together with what you see Trout doing. With him saying incoherent things like “I’m not racist. That judge is Mexican. He’s proud of his heritage, just like I’m proud of mine. I have no problem with Mexico. I’m not racist. I’m building a wall. A wall between here and Mexico, not another country.”

If you wish to cultivate empathy for survivors of this kind of gaslighting and moral incoherence, that means facing and really hearing the parts that are hard to hear, facing and empathizing with the parts that hurt. And recognizing that your friend, who you know, who has never done this to you, may indeed be doing it to or about a current or former partner.

I attempt to live inside both of these competing realities at once. I somehow manage to believe, simultaneously, that he is both being unreliable because it’s ok for him to be unreliable (and shameful and wrong of me to expect him to be there for me), and that he’s being rock-solid reliable and there is something wrong with me if I don’t feel safe.

I manage to accept both of these realities simultaneously, because I care about him, and my brain is built this way, and he wants me to.

How can anyone live inside both of these realities? And yet I trust him, completely, and so somehow I do. Meanwhile he continues this constant, extremely alarming destabilization in his actions, while lying in dozens of different ways about why and about whether that is even happening.

That’s layer one. Hold that in mind – or try – can you? because here comes layer two.

As this is all going on, I also slowly discover that he has created two other alternate realities and seems to be attempting to live inside both of those at once too.

In one, he is – in his oft-repeated words – “deeply in love with me” and is my partner. This is the reality I take to be our consensual reality, the one we discussed for days and weeks and what I understood we were doing together. I had been amply, amply clear that given what I was healing from, I was only in a position to be with him if he was ready to be exceptionally solid with me, and if our relationship was out in the open, official, and real. I have had my trust shattered by a primary attachment bond, and I deserve to be treated with dignity and to have partners act in a very, very trustworthy way, and I had made all of this extremely clear to him at the start. He had said all the things he wanted me to believe.

He is simultaneously creating another entire reality, one I slowly come to understand he is building around us unbeknownst to me. In this alternate reality, he has “no romantic feelings for me” (also his words), and he is apparently just “hanging out” with me having casual sex. He says this to me at times as though we have agreed, as though I already know this. He switches back and forth between these realities depending on his mood, who we are around, and which story he has led them to believe. As the months go on he becomes more blatant about this, switches back and forth openly to my face, as though I somehow also live in both of these realities.

He seems to have no awareness, from moment to moment, that the thing he is saying completely contradicts everything else he has said. In each moment he appears utterly certain of himself, switching back and forth between these realities, acting as though it is me who is crazy.

Imagine trying to believe both of these things, as you are getting constantly, constantly destabilized by the person’s actively undermining behaviour.

Imagine while he is lying about his actions to you, and telling you to believe he is acting in a way other than he is actually acting, he also tells you not to “control the narrative.”

Imagine you are told all of this not by a random politician far away, but by someone you deeply trust, someone who is regularly inside you, someone who you want to support and love and be good to. Imagine you love this person and – far from ‘trying to control the narrative,’ have been encouraging them to ‘develop their own narrative,’ have spent months actively empathizing with them as they tell you that the reason they don’t really know how to be good to you is their ex’s fault, because their ex “always tried to control the narrative” and “trained them” out of being loving and affectionate, and you just buy it and buy it and buy it. You want to be the good girlfriend who is loving and supportive. You don’t want to do a thing they say has hurt them.

Imagine you have no defenses. None at all.

It breaks me. Even now, to try to exist in these multiple realities simultaneously does something strange to my head. It disrupts my entire body, it destabilizes my nervous system.

Had you not seen Trump speak like this over and over and over, you might find it difficult to believe that anyone could.

That’s not even the whole of it.

Even as this is happening he also tells me for almost a year that no man has ever treated me better than he is treating me, that my own memories of being treated well do not exist.

As he tells me this I find my memories slipping away. Memories of one of the first men I had sex with, at age 19, who has remained a friend to this day 20 years later, who stayed up all night at the Dead Sea in the brisk desert wind, rubbing my body to keep me warm when we missed the last bus home from the sea and spent the night out on the beach. Who responded to me: when I turned to him, he turned to me. Simple things, and yet these were my first experiences of safety. I now feel these memories slipping away.

Memories of my longest partner, who in our first year of friendship unselfishly nursed me back to health when I had pneumonia and hadn’t slept in months because of PTSD.

Memories of my partner for three years during my undergrad, who fed me, rocked me to sleep, tucked my winter scarf snugly into my jacket collar to keep me warm when I left the house, cuddled me when I was sad or scared, and would quietly come up and put a big fat multivitamin on my tray in the school cafeteria as his way of telling me he loved me.

I think I can remember these things, years of my life, years of being treated well by nurturing men. But it’s all slipping away, like an eraser scene from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

I remember being treated well. Now I do. My friends – and my supportive, loving exes – have all helped me rebuild reality. But this person told me for nearly a year that my memories didn’t exist, and I felt them breaking up and sliding away. As I struggled to keep them, struggling to speak and to hang on to my own memories, I tried to say “NO. Men have treated me well. Men have treated me well. I know being treated well exists because I have experienced it.” But even as I say it, I am not sure. Can I really remember Merlin’s arms around me in the desert at age 19? Can I really remember Jordan propping up pillows and rubbing my back for hours when I couldn’t breathe, so that I could get a few minutes of sleep at a time, until bit by bit I began to sleep again, and then began to get well? Can I really remember Kevin rocking me to sleep when I cried because my father had written me another manipulative email?

“Being treated well exists” I say, and I name these men like a litany, hanging on to reality, facing down both my abuser and this bewilderment inside me. Bewildered because I don’t trust myself: this “quiet, self-aware, nurturing, feminist man” couldn’t possibly be doing this to me, I must be imagining it, he is such a feminist man, he told me so himself. As my memories flit in and out, threaten to break up and flutter away like so many bits of tattered cloth, moth wings over my eyes and mouth.

When another friend intervenes to help, bystander dynamics come into play. Centring survivors is shockingly hard. Abusers centre themselves, and get everyone around them to centre them as well, by making centring them appear natural. The space they leave available for anyone other than themselves to be centred is a nearly nonexistent breathing room around the edges.

Relieved at the protection, I ask my friend to explain and speak for me, because by this point months and months in I have all but lost the capacity to think or speak. And then I try, I try to say “There Are Four Lights” – ie men have been good to me, men being good to me exists.

And instead of “oh, I see he is gaslighting you, hey buddy stop gaslighting her,” what I hear from our mutual friend is that I better stop right there, and take that back, because my abuser “feels bad when you say that.”

Instead of hearing me, or taking the time to really see what is happening for me, or helping me set a boundary with my abuser – “thou shalt not erase people’s memories” – the mutual friend who has offered to help instead turns to me forcefully and says “ok, now, well, stop that, because I think he feels bad when you say that other men were better to you than he was.”

Boom. Bait and switch. He is allowed to erase my memories, but I am not allowed to say “stop erasing my memories?” Because that makes him feel bad.

Apparently I’m never, ever allowed to be centred. It always, always has to be about the man’s feelings. Me losing my mind as a result of a year of active gaslighting couldn’t possibly be the least bit important in light of a man’s feelings.

Apparently me saying there are four lights is a ‘mean’ thing to say to the person who is gaslighting me.

Apparently him controlling reality is just normal, and me hanging on to my own memories is ‘hurting his feelings.’

This expanded sense of entitlement, the baseline setting of interpersonal responsibility set in a distorted place, is what Why Does He Do That describes as a key behavior that abusers have in common. They believe they are entitled to a distorted set of rights-without-responsibilities and that anyone attempting to expect emotional reliability from them is imposing on their inherent right to centre themselves. This very baseline of their belief system causes them to gaslight people, because their perception of reality is deeply distorted.

“There are four lights” hurts his feelings? How exactly does it hurt his feelings? It impinges on his natural entitlement to tell me that my own memories do not exist, that no one has ever treated me better than he is treating me.  Notice even as you read, the cultural tendency to centre men, to empathize with abusers. Even I feel it as I write this. Of course he felt bad, you think. You’re saying another man was ‘better’ than him. Maybe this brings up bad feelings about his manhood. Him him him. But at some point, we have to centre survivors. I gave him my support, love, and empathy for eight months. So. Much. Empathy. And it just got absorbed in the black hole of his entitlement, and turned around as harm.

He told me all of these realities simultaneously, and yet also told me for a year that I was the one who had something wrong with me.

In some ways focussing on rehabilitation and empathy for abusers can add to the existing tendency of abusers to continually centre themselves. It’s tricky. We have to centre survivors and simultaneously hold abusers accountable in ways that neither encourage their massive distortions of their entitlements, nor throw them away. This is the centre of a Nurturance Culture that does not condone violence, nor condone disposability.

Because make no mistake: gaslighting is not ‘psychological’ harm. When he did these things to me, the harm sent hormone cascades throughout my body. When he creates multiple competing realities and insists that I believe both simultaneously, my entire nervous system goes into a state of alarm. When he hangs up the phone after lying to me, this action sends every system in my body out of whack. Emotions are physiological. Words cause physical harm. Why Does He Do That reports that where there is both physical and psychological violence occurring, survivors report that it is the psychological violence that causes the worse harm.

We must do away once and for all with this imaginary ‘scale’ with ‘physical harm’ at one end and ‘psychological harm’ at the other. All gendered violence is physical harm. The harm that is caused by words and gaslighting, creating multiple realities, replacing people’s memories – using brainwashing strategies to destabilize survivors- this is every inch as ‘serious’ as what we used to understand as ‘physical’ harm.

When we hear a ‘nonpology’ – as Trout beautifully demonstrated earlier this week, simultaneously saying ‘I apologize,” and saying “that was locker room talk” so clearly not sorry at all – when we are forced to realize that this slipperiness and deflection is precisely how abusers operate, when we are forced to realize we actually believed, for a second, because we applied our own ethical system to this person who lacks one – we are again harmed physically. Viewers report feeling sick to their stomach. Feeling hit in the solar plexus. Losing sleep. Everything from the pituitary to the amygdala to the function of our kidneys to our muscle tone to the communication between our organs is altered by exposure to this abuser’s words.

If my adrenals go into overdrive cortisol production and that creates a whole host of health problems, from accelerated aging to hair falling out to lung infections to cancer, isn’t that physical abuse?

The age of ranking abuse on a scale of severity from ’emotional’ to ‘physical’ is over. All that outdated idea serves to do is to make the abuse seem ‘invisible’ or to disbelieve survivors, make them have to ‘prove’ that things are happening inside our bodies when we get psychologically abused, and that these things are neither ambiguous nor our imagination nor our fault. Trout doesn’t have to touch anyone to cause massive disruption to our physical bodies. Survivors of psychological abuse all over the world are getting physically harmed watching this man speak.

All abuse is physical abuse. And all deserves to be taken seriously.

It is time to mark the harm, to give it the cultural equivalent of a blue stain or an odour of eggs, so we can see it as it as it enters the body, see it as it travels. Check the facts against an abuser’s words. And ask the survivors in your life how they are doing.

Gaslighting is physical harm to my body, caused by words.

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PLEASE SHARE THIS POST If this post speaks to you or makes you think or reflect, please help out: share as widely as possible.

I love this Bay Area Transformative Justice pod mapping worksheet so much that big, dramatic, hyperbole feels called for. ie I wanna shout it from the rooftops and say it again and again: if you consider yourself a feminist man, or you allow others around you to let you walk around with this identity and you enjoy having that reputation, or if you find you get laid or get dates or partners because of this reputation, and if you have not yet mapped out your pod of people who you would want to call you on it when you act in abusive ways, then do this right now. like today. like right away. Because it is everything, it is wonderful: https://batjc.wordpress.com/pods-and-pod-mapping-worksheet/

For a world in which everyone can feel safer, including those who harm and those who cause harm. Thank you.

If you have been told that you abuse: this video from Everyday Feminism is also great, and I highly recommend you watch it and take in carefully what she is saying about her own experience of fucking up and then being fully accountable. Owning doesn’t centre you. It is not about your intentions or your emotions or your reasons for the fuckup. It centres the other person, the one you have harmed. Name fully your acts, take the time to fully get and own how they caused harm, and express in a responsive way how you intend to address them, and check if what you offer actually is effective for repair of the harm you caused. You can also have compassion for yourself of course but that’s not the owning part. That’s it. Nobody has to be perfect but you have to know how to do repair if you want to be part of social justice movements, because you’re going to fuck up and you have to know how to hear it and fix it without flipping out.  http://everydayfeminism.com/2013/11/how-to-apologize/

This is an incredibly on point and insightful piece from Everyday Feminism I highly recommend you read and act on right away:  Abusive ‘Feminist’ Men Exist — Here Are 6 Things Men Can Do to Stop Them

For more on working with shame and hope, here is a piece that looks at how the fear of being ‘not good enough‘ can be self-fulfilling

Minimizing, deflecting, bait and switch are core features of abuse. Here’s a resource that emphasizes the importance of expressing empathy when you apologize for harming someone. Without empathy your apology – like Trump’s “I did it, I’m not proud, I apologize,” will feel meaningless: Mindful Tools: How To Apologize

A note on gender binaries and cishetprivilege: I want in this post to talk about masculinity, and about power, and that is gendered. I want to do it in a way that doesn’t reinscribe violent gender binaries that cause erasure (and clearly I haven’t managed to do that here). This feels tricky to me, how to talk about power and masculinity – which we need to talk about – without erasing or reinscribing either cishetnormativity, or the ways intimate partner violence – which can happen to people of all bodies in all kinds of relationships – plays out in specific ways when it maps along gendered lines.

I want to talk about masculinity and power dynamics in the kinds of relationships that I know intimately, yet i want to be clear that these are not the only relationships and that these are not the only bodies. I don’t feel really well placed to write about how these power dynamics play out in queer and genderqueer relationships.  I have been learning about it from people who understand how that works, but I can’t write about something I don’t know from the inside. I want a way to not erase my own experience of the ways all the emotional labour I tried to do to stop him from abusing me gets completely erased, while not erasing the ways trans and queer folks and QTPOC get even more erased than me. I haven’t figured out how to do this yet.

Language like ‘female of centre’ and ‘male of centre’ can be helpful. It can also erase that what I’m facing in my own life has been abuse by cishetmen and bystander dynamics created by the normalization of centring masculinity. I am in the middle of multiple conversations about this, finding the path through the cliffs so that survivors can support each other and not erase each other. I welcome more.

Do you love speculative fiction and social justice? I am working on a speculative fiction project that deals with the transformations our planet is undergoing, and the undoing of cultures of domination. Cipher is currently seeking collaborators, advisors, an agent, and a publisher. Learn more about Cipher here.

Acknowledgement: This piece and all of the knowledge that is growing around gaslighting and all forms of intimate partner violence has been generated together with the wonderful folks in my pod (thnx Leetal Cuperman & Lily Schwartzbaum and the rest of the pod! you guys saved my life), and the growing crew of people who have gotten in touch to talk about their own experiences, share resources, share insights, and generally think together. People of the internets who have been teaching me things include Eve Rickert of https://www.morethantwo.com/, Chach M. Heart of www.fiercewitches.com, Eva Blake of LiberatingDesire.com, Michon Neal at Medium.com/@neal_Michon, as well as the many others who are building this knowledge together, challenging each other, and working together to think through and name experiences that our culture systematically refuses to name.

We often hear the question: “Why don’t survivors speak?”
It’s not just for the reasons you think.

Let’s take a journey inside the brain and nervous system of a survivor of gendered and/or racialized intimate partner violence.

First, let’s visit Broca’s Area

Broca’s Area is a furl of neural matter in the left half of your brain, curled behind your left temple, above your left ear. There it is – the smaller of two orange patches. On the left, there:

For the neuroscience geeks in the room, Broca’s area was the first area of the brain to be associated with a specific function, when in 1861 Paul Broca examined the brain of a man who, in life, had been unable to speak, and discovered a significant lesion in the left frontal lobe. (That big hole in the brain in this picture below.)

Here’s a picture of the brain of a man who went by the name ‘Tan’ because that was the only word he could say. After ‘Tan’s’ death, Broca autopsied his brain and found this one area was largely missing.

Broca’s area is involved in the production of speech, of words and sentences, both those inside your mind and those spoken out loud. Research shows that electrical stimulation to this area blocks the ability to speak. 

During trauma  “Broca’s area – the part of the left hemisphere responsible for translating personal experiences into communicable language – is turned off.”

This may help to account for the “speechless terror” experienced by survivors.

Replicable studies that examine brain scans of people with PTSD indicate that Broca’s area gets deactivated during recall of traumatic stress. The British Journal of Psychiatry notes: “A replicated finding has been the deactivation of Broca’s area, the area of the brain thought to be responsible for applying semantic representations to personal experience to allow its communication or description. This would appear to be consistent with subjects with PTSD having difficulty in cognitively restructuring their traumatic experience.”

In other words, a core speech area of a survivor’s brain shuts down during traumatic events, and shuts down again any time she attempts to name, describe, think, or talk about that traumatic experience.

What does this feel like? It feels like your body is telling you something, and part of you knows it  – and you just. can’t. say it. A disconnect occurs between what you know and what you are capable of articulating.

Depending on the nature of the abuse, you may be able to clearly remember and perceive the harm in your mind – you may wish you could just play the movie for others because it is so clear in your head.  If you could only plug others directly into your experience they would get it instantly. But you cannot speak it. You may be able to speak around it. But attempt to speak directly of it and you find you cannot access words.

If the harm is happening in the context of intimate partner violence, this terrifying experience can happen when you try to get across what is happening and ask for it to stop, which usually happens at first in private to the person who is harming you, the person who says he loves you, as you attempt to ask him desperately to stop harming you, at first believing that he will. This can go on for months. Even when you have the knowledge of what you are trying to say, even when there are specific harmful actions and experiences you badly need to convey (the perfectly clear visuals of his repeated gaslighting words or abusive actions, for example) you can’t even coherently think it in any way connected to words.

If the person harming you deflects, minimizes, or gaslights you when you attempt to raise concerns, you may try to reach out to another listener who is trying to help you, to express exactly what the harm is and ask for help to make it stop, but no words come. Your friends who observe your partner’s behaviour might also notice that he is treating you in a strange or abusive way, but when they ask you about it, you can’t respond. You can’t speak about it even enough to speak about this experience of not being able to speak. Any time you try, the words just can’t form. Any time you think about it, this shutting down of language recurs.

While you’re keeping Broca’s area in mind, let’s slide inwards a little, into the much-discussed limbic brain, to a structure called the hippocampus, which at this point is also going haywire.

The hippocampus, so called because it is shaped a little like a seahorse, is in the middle of your brain, in your limbic brain, below your ‘thinking’ neocortex and above your ‘lizard brain,’ or brainstem.

The hippocampus is involved in such functions as ordering of emotions, memories and events, as well as spatial and sequential memory. Since episodic memory is stored in dispersed networks in the brain, the hippocampus is responsible for keeping track of and integrating the many different neural networks involved in connecting the sensory and emotional experiences that come to form memories of the events of our life. For instance, say you have a dinner party. Your brain will store information in different places for the taste of the wine, who was there, how you felt, the way the flowers smelled or the heat of the candles. The hippocampus keeps track of and connects these different networks into coherent episodic memory.

The hippocampus is deeply woven into the autonomic nervous system and all of the lower survival functions, and is connected with the Hypothalamus-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) axis. As part of the attachment-oriented limbic brain, it is in the most relational part of our brains, the part that developed when mammals evolved to form inside a parent’s body rather than growing externally in an egg. This is thus a highly relational part of the brain, exquisitely attuned to interdependence and the rhythms of human interconnection.

This extremely vital and sensitive part of the brain gets damaged by chronic elevated cortisol levels, which means when someone is experiencing gendered violence, they will have a harder time thinking of things together that are typically brought together in consciousness, even when they know what has happened to them. Parts of the experience, sensory information, and emotional knowledge may be disconnected in the brain, causing fragmentation and dissociation – the inability to bring together elements of consciousness that are typically connected together. There is a relationship between chronic elevated cortisol levels and hippocampal atrophy, and some evidence to suggest that chronic elevated cortisol levels can cause lesions in the hippocampus.

In other words, when a person causing harm creates chronic stress in their lover or partner, such as by gaslighting them chronically over months and months, they are physically harming that person’s brain in ways that take years to repair.

Physiological elevation of chronic stress hormones can also lead to other physical changes in the body: weight gain around the middle with skinny arms and legs, a hump on the back between the shoulder blades, extra hair growth, and swelling of the lower half of the face are all symptoms of chronically elevated cortisol.

Moving even further inwards, we come to the amygdala. The amygdala is involved in connecting and observing the outside world to scan the environment for signs relevant to our survival, including the potential for sex and attachment, food, rivals, children in distress, risk and threat.

In situations of chronic elevated stress, such as that experienced by soldiers in combat zones or survivors experiencing chronic gaslighting and other forms of intimate partner abuse, the amygdala over time develops a greater and greater sensitivity to traumatic stress.

To see how the amygdala and the hippocampus connect to everything else, we travel now from the brain down out through an opening in the bottom of your skull, moving along your vagus nerve, the largest nerve in your body. The vagus nerve connects your brain to virtually every other organ and system, and it is an important part of the body’s ‘gearing up’ and ‘gearing down’ systems.  Here is our friend the vagus nerve, running up and down the body, in yellow:

When the amygdala determines that it is in danger, it initiates a hormone cascade that in turn shoots down to the adrenal glands, situated just above your kidneys:

…which pump out rushes of stress hormones including adrenaline and cortisol, that flood up the vagus nerve and overwhelm the sensitive hippocampus, creating long-term changes to this structure in the exquisitely sensitive limbic brain.

So the subverbal knowledge of our bodies is alerting us ‘something is wrong!’ and the alarms are going off, yet if the person we love, and/or the person harming us, is lying about it and gaslighting us, our capacity to hold it all together and make sense of the body’s signals is impaired simultaneously by the abuser’s lack of emotional accountability and also by our own physiology in response to the harm. And then even if we can form a coherent comprehension of what he is gaslighting us about, our language centre is impaired, rendering it incredibly difficult for us to speak what we know.

So when we talk about bravery, about the strength, dignity, and amazingness of female-of-centre people who speak up, we are talking about a lot more than just the guts involved socially in ‘deciding to tell.’ What is often overlooked and underestimated is just how much literal physiological silencing women struggle through to get able to speak at all.

The shut down in language centres and cognitive response can help explain why it can take months or even years for survivors to finally regain the capacity to speak, and the immense difficulty when they do. Please be aware of this when you are supporting them. If you ask a question and their mouth opens and no words come out, or the wrong words appear to come tumbling out of control, or they can only speak in incoherent ways, or if a normally kind and emotionally mature person appears to have only two settings, silence or screaming, or if a normally good writer begins to produce choppy broken phrasing when they try to name the harm, this effect you are seeing is caused by the abuse, and is a key element that needs your support, understanding, compassion, and protection. It feels exactly like those nightmares where your loved ones are all around you as a terrifying demon is about to eat you, and you beg the people around you for help but no words, or the wrong words, or only a tiny wordless squeak comes out. It is a waking nightmare. In NVC terms, this experience needs your full ‘giraffe ears‘ and your deep, deep nurturing support.

Many survivors describe this as a feeling like drowning, like you are underwater and cannot even speak to get the help you need, to get those around you to toss you a stick or recognize your paralysis and pull you back to dry land. Unfortunately, when describing terrifying physiological experiences, metaphor does not always help people understand. Interestingly enough, it may be more than a metaphor.

True drowning doesn’t look like drowning

Unlike on TV when people shout and wave their arms around, in real life drowning scenarios the Instinctive Drowning Response overrides the neocortex completely and the drowning person becomes physiologically unable to direct their own limbs or call out for help. This survival response blocks voluntary control of the body and creates a life-threatening stillness and inability to get attention or call for help.

Another automatic survival response that research indicates often arises in sexual assault, Tonic Immobility, similarly paralyzes the person experiencing the harm and leads them to be physiologically unable to fight, speak, or call out for help.  If someone you know has been quiet quiet quiet and then “abruptly” begins pleading or shouting for help, ask yourself what has been happening to them beforehand – what did you miss over months and months – that has led to that shout, made this attempt to finally get heard their last desperate option. If you’re trying to get heard through physiological paralysis, your only options can be deathly silence, or shouting to get around the inner block. True drowning,  whether in water or in abuse, can look very quiet.

Gaslighting survivors typically have a powerful, and understandable, need to create a coherent narrative and finally get their silenced voice heard. This need is what bystanders can centre to help the survivor heal. 

The ones who helped me were the ones who already have a deep empathic capacity, or who have been through this themselves; the ones who have a value of living their social justice commitments in their daily lives; the ones who recognize the harm and its signs because they have been there, on one side or another of the dynamic. Some of those who have helped the most were men who are committed to this kind of work and recognize the patterns and the signs, some of whom had behaved in harmful ways in previous relationships, who now do their own emotional work, and so were able to recognize the slippery manipulative things my former partner was doing to deny his responsibility and gaslight me again. My closest friends and those who were the most empathic or had the most experience with this kind of abuse took the time to see how gentle and scared I was inside, how long I had been trying and trying and trying to ask quietly and lovingly for help, how long – months and months on end – the one harming me had refused to hear me, and how easy it would have been for me to drown.

This is why when I talk of gendered violence I am referring to all forms of abuse, including all of the forms of what we typically refer to as ‘physical’ and ‘psychological’ harm, which are equally damaging and need to be recognized and responded to with the same degree of severity.

Indeed, ‘psychological’ harm is a misnomer, as this kind of abuse causes physical harm to brain structures and is in fact more physically violent than harm to one’s more readily visible body parts, because the harm is to the delicate brain and inner functioning of the nervous system. Brain damage can be much more debilitating than a black eye, taking years to heal compared with a visible bruise on the skin. And because the physical harm in this case would only be visible on an MRI, if bystanders don’t take it seriously the original harm is compounded by additional damage to the brain when those who are watching create secondary abuse by gaslighting the survivor again until they take the time to recognize the depth of the harm. I cannot waltz into an MRI lab and say, ‘hey, he damaged my HPA axis, my hippocampus seems to not be working, and I think Broca’s area keeps shutting down. Can you take a scan of my brain I can show?”

This ability to recognize and understand what the physiological symptoms of trauma look like is an essential part of your allyship toolkit. Just as you would want to know how to recognize if someone you know was drowning, to walk in this world as an ally you will need to know what it looks like when a woman or nonbinary survivor you know is trying to get help.

These physical silencing phenomena are part of why ‘white knighting’ awareness is so very, very important. You are welcome to your opinions about what a survivor should do – indeed, once she is safe, your opinions are likely to be quite helpful – as long as you strategize with her, not at her, and make sure you get her back to shore first. Then you can strategize together in your pod about how  to create accountability while deeply, deeply listening and believing and helping her articulate what has happened to her.

Now add to the physiological silencing the social silencing.

The layering of the social contours of oppression, that prioritize and centre the feelings of white and male-of-centre people, and especially centre white cismen who cause harm, create an inability of bystanders to listen to BIPOC, to women and nonbinary people. These social contours of oppression, combined with the physiological silencing of a survivor’s body, explains why those who can see abuse often cannot speak, and those who can speak freely and have the status to get heard socially often cannot, or feel entitled to choose not, to see. A central aspect of privilege is to have the privilege not to have to ever see how your actions affect those around you if you don’t want to.

So when this happened to me, I had to struggle to regain the capacity to speak through multiple layered barriers. My abuser gaslighted me anytime I tried to speak, and said he just didn’t care to hear or see my experience. Bystanders who had not personally seen his bizarre behaviour up close themselves had a hard time imagining it. And those who could understand it and had seen how he was abusing me were survivors themselves, who recognized what he was doing but like me, could not speak.

Depending on who the survivor is, the overlapping ways racism and patriarchy work together can silence survivors on multiple fronts at once. Given the ways racism and patriarchy work together in overlapping ways to harm Black, Indigenous and POC women and nonbinary people who face multiple forms of violence at once, I have for instance heard these experiences described by BIPOC folks as like “screaming into the wind,” or like “standing next to a black hole in space,” where the words get sucked into silence again before they even leave your mouth.

If culture cannot see a thing, it determines that thing does not exist. Your words describing a very real phenomenon are received as though they just do not mean anything. This phenomenon, this cognitive dissonance between our physical lived reality and our culture’s oppressive and erasing mythologies, creates a deadly gap.

So the ones who saw clearly what he was doing to me when I was quiet and drowning could not protect me because they had the same physiological silencing that I did. And when we finally spoke, those who had the power and prestige to get heard had no idea what we were talking about.

Here is where it become the case that ‘survivors don’t speak because they are not believed, they get shamed, they get attacked.” That is true, but it happens on top of the already brutal physiological silencing caused by the abuse. We have to keep both of these layers in mind when we try to understand why survivors have such a heard time speaking.

The combination creates a double, or triple, or quadrupal whammy. It is frankly commendable, given the strength required to survive this layering of erasure, that survivors continue putting one foot in front of the other, going on to live their lives, day after day. Because if those who harm have privilege, they can go on completely unwilling to hear how they have affected someone. That is the essence of privilege.

This is why “I believe women” matters so very, very much.

Many cognitive distortions shape our perceptions. Racism, individualist atomized capitalism, and white cishetpatriarchy shape how we perceive – and do not perceive – reality. To see violence, to end violence, we must work through our cognitive distortions, one by one by one.

It is frightening to describe traumatic experiences in a culture of erasure, because when something happening to you is so strange it is hard to even believe as it is happening to you, and when the person doing it is lying to you about it continuously, when their privilege gives them a feeling of entitlement to refuse to listen, care, or see how their actions cause harm, and our culture does not even have a word for what is happening to you, and the language centres of your brain deactivate when you try to talk about it? Facing all of that all at once? How can you speak?

Trying to tell people about harm that is hidden by structures of violence is frightening because even if you could speak, how can they believe you if the behavior is so strange you can hardly believe it even as it is happening? Racism, sexism, transphobia are massive cultural forms of gaslighting and that render ‘unseeable’ the violence that happens right in front of us every day. So much so that these words likely don’t even mean anything to you unless you have lived this yourself.

Add to this that the trauma occurring within the relationship is often not the only trauma; we need our partners and lovers and intimate friends and, yes, even our consensual fuckbuddies to be safe havens where we can heal from the layered violences we already face. A feminist lover or partner works through their own shit so they can offer a safe, reliable, accountable soft landing place, a reliable place for healing from structural violence, not an additional source of violence on top of the many systemic harms survivors already face.In this world in which so many of us have faced layered violence that break us apart, what we are often doing when we hold one another is putting one another back together.

What Can You Do?

How can you help? Well, if a woman or nonbinary person you know gets that wordless look on their face when they try to talk about something that has happened or is happening to them, or if they ask you for help, take unhurried time to look and feel deeply into what is happening for them. Try asking them gentle questions. If what they are describing is abuse, and they or you have already tried talking directly to their abuser about it to no avail, you can form an accountability and support committee, and begin the process of healing. 

Because a survivor who comes to you for help may be physiologically drowning inside their own body, if you gaslight her again (by falling sway to the abuser’s narrative, or saying she is imagining it), you actively damage the very brain structures she needs to be able to connect with others who care about her and find the ones who are able to help.

It helps to ask gentle questions and empathically calibrate how you understand the answers. “Are you having trouble speaking?” would have been a great one for me, because I could have vigorously nodded my head. “Are you feeling afraid?” likewise. I could not explain, but I could have nodded yes. The relief when friends began to get what I was feeling was immense.

Understand this may take some time. You can ask “Was it like this? Did he do that?” and believe, believe, believe, this person who is trapped in themselves, trying to communicate events that have happened to them that they can feel and see, but may not be able to connect coherently, and likely cannot utter even to their closest friends.

If you project that they look ‘angry’ notice that you may be disconnecting from them emotionally, and empathically connect with them instead. If they try to tell you ‘it’s not anger,’ believe them. Terror at drowning can look an awful lot like anger. The ones who saved me had a profound empathic capacity and could get past appearances to connect with what I was actually feeling.

Countering the social isolation that survivors with CPTSD often experience can help our healing as well. If the one who caused harm just doesn’t care to hear, then what bystanders can do is make sure the survivor is included, believed, protected, and cared for. This is a big help in itself. We need to experience social belonging, to be believed and heard and accepted in the social world around us, as an important part of creating the emotional safety that can help us heal.  As so many have written before in discussions of bystander dynamics, gossip and knowing that private information about your experience is circulating without your consent can lead to the survivor ending up leaving shared social spaces, while the abuser continues to take up those same spaces, because no one is comfortable enough protecting the survivor or simply naming to him what he did that caused harm.

Accepting, loving, compassionate and accountable social bonds are needed for the survivor’s healing, as social bonds affect everything from our cortisol levels to our vagal tone. “Close knit human bonds—whether it be family, friendship or a romantic partner—are vital for your physical and mental health at any age.  Recent studies have shown that the Vagus nerve also responds to human connectivity and physical touch to relax your parasympathetic nervous system.” But all too often, instead of love, connection, and support, the survivor’s personal details and the patriarchal systems that lead bystanders to isolate survivors end up double-punishing survivors if they even manage to speak at all. Emotional safety for survivors can occur not just with the one who caused the harm, but in the social spaces around them. This practice is so vital if we want to help create healing and acceptance for the one who was harmed.

Once you understand what has happened, an important step is asking what they need, and sticking it out with them as they figure that out. Understand that what they need may shift and change over time as they begin to heal after being heard. Some may need their support pod to name for them the things they cannot say themselves, to simply and firmly say to the abuser and his accountability pod: “This is what you did. We don’t think you’re a bad person, but you are not telling the truth, and this is the truth. When you are ready to rejoin the community, we will need you to own your abusive actions, apologize, and do appropriate repair.”

If you are a man, or are male of centre, and have been asked to do accountability, try thinking back to whether the person who says you have harmed them asked you kindly to help or stop, way way back before this point. How many of those kind loving benefit of the doubt ‘please help me understand why you’re doing these frightening hurtful things?’ conversations did you have? How did you respond? Did you act caring and emotionally honest and accountable, or did you mentally ‘skip’ their desperate, terrified attempts to get you to stop or to help?

How long – how many months – would you retain your capacity to stay kind and loving and caring and calm if the roles were reversed? How do you feel about having damaged someone else’s hippocampus to the point they cannot create coherent emotional sense? (What kind of repair would bring you back to integrity in the world and in your heart?)

Even as I write this I have to struggle through this continual shut down, this verbal and cognitive paralysis, that has meant I have to go and come back and go and come back and each step is like struggling through quicksand. You can’t tell by reading this, because your reception of this text may appear as though it was composed in a fluent way, but it was started and stopped and started and stopped as my body had to move through the wordlessness over and over and over and over again. And yet creating a coherent narrative, speaking and being honoured and heard, is one of the best forms of healing from trauma we have yet discerned.

This has been, physiologically, the hardest piece I have ever had to write. And yet pushing through step by step has been so very needed as I have heard more and more survivors attempt to create cultural understanding of what those who have not been in our shoes directly are at times unable to see.

It was as though he drove a car on top of me and parked there, gaslighting me continuously while insisting he was being good to me. And in this disruption and wordlessness I tried to asked first him, then our friends, to help me push the car off me as it was crushing my chest. I even managed to ask nicely, for months and months, while living in this state of disruption and terror. But the c0ntours of oppression won: the ones around me who saw what was happening were also survivors, who share the verbal shutdown and so could see but could not speak.

Only once others who were not experiencing this physiological and social erasure took the time to listen and see – those who could name clearly to my abuser what he was doing to me – did safety begin to return for me. Until that point, the vulnerability of this double layering of social and physiological silencing had been beating me. I remember sitting on the kitchen floor on the phone with a friend while this was all going on, in the drowning phase, barely able to speak, whispering “I just feel crazy, I just feel crazy,” and trying and trying to get the words out, and my friend was confused by my abuser’s story and seemed to have no idea how I felt inside or how the words could not, just could not come.

Even if we manage to struggle to speak through all of this, if we manage to get past the barriers physically silencing us, on top of all that – as we are in terror and hoping someone can see us drowning in our own shut down bodies – we then have to face the brutal social contours of racism and patriarchy that literally do not want us to be heard.

So if you are a bystander and a survivor finally manages to come up out of this silence and ask for help, know how much time she has spent underwater patiently, lovingly, peacefully, kindly, desperately trying to beg for help before she has gotten to words. Likely months, in some cases years.

In my case, after months of being gaslighted and destabilized as I quietly, quietly, lovingly, trustingly asking my abuser over and over again to stop, as he continued gaslighting me and destabilizing me and lying about it every day, I finally months and months in ended up with only two settings: complete inability to speak, or incoherent screaming.

Those closest to me who have known me for many years knew how out of character this was and knew right away something terrible had happened to me. I am typically emotionally intelligent, compassionate, responsive, loving, and kind.

My oldest, closest friends knew to ask ‘what did he do to you that got you to this point?’ and that deep seeing me was what I needed, because no one else was in it with me to witness the second by second constant destabilizing behaviour over a year, the shaming, the gaslighting, the lying and then lying about lying, from this person who told me he “loved me deeply and wanted to be close to me forever” while his actions bore no resemblance to his words. And then just a few people in my support pod directly witnessed him sabotage the loving, gentle, kind, generous accountability process we offered him: doing it in private, telling him how much we like him, that we see his good heart, but that he had done these harmful things and needed to own them and stop gaslighting and manipulating, so that healing could begin.

We say “survivors don’t speak up because they fear they won’t be believed” and that’s true, too. But underneath that reality is another one, that layers to create complex harm. Under the social silencing is a physiological reality that undercuts survivor’s voices before they’ve even begun. This culture is not yet aware that this harm to the survivor’s agency – their access to their own body – is the first and biggest harm.

Imagine having to face social disbelief on top of your own body’s complete shutting down of your verbal capacity. Imagine you can barely speak, and instead of “hey I see how hard this is for you, wow I see you’re acting really out of character, what has happened to you, how can I help you form words? Is it like this, is this what is happening to you? What was it like?” or deep empathic witnessing that could help the survivor who desperately needs to get able to speak, imagine if instead what you hear is ‘prove it,’ or ‘don’t you think maybe you’re being a little hard on him?’ or ‘he told me he had the best of intentions,’ – or worse: ‘I’m going to get angry at you and try to control the conversation if you even try to talk about it.’ This is what happened to me, and what has happened to millions of other survivors.

If you care about being an ally to women this ability to recognize the depth of harm – to see the signs early and intervene – is a key tool in your emotional vocabulary. So that you can avoiike the parents standing nearby as their 9 year old daughter drowned, if you gaslight them again by telling them they are imagining it or buying in to their abuser’s story you actively damage the very brain structures they need to get help. When a survivor first opens her month, knowing how to create conditions of emotional safety is an essential skill.If you are watching someone you care about drowning, this is not the time to stand over them and deliberate strategy, to tell them you will not help them unless they do what you say. When someone is drowning, you throw them a rope, you pull them out of the water, and then once they are out on shore and covered in a warm blanket and drinking something hot do you ask them how it happened, express your love and concern for them, and let them hear your thoughts and advice while remaining open to what they say.

Abuse takes away our capacity to combine experience and words, takes away our agency and voice by shutting down an important language area in their brain and areas of the limbic system that we need to connect our experiences in a coherent way. When this is happening to a survivor, even if she could order and explain her experience, the words just do not come.

Survivors live in this double bind: those who care enough about them to listen may not have a comparable experience with which they can understand, and those who identify with or feel compelled by patriarchy to centre the one who harmed them may act defensive and not want to hear. If you tell her she is imagining it, or mistake the effects of abuse for personality traits, you are going to harm her again. And the worst thing is she won’t even be able to tell you what is happening.

After all of this, we often face abusers who control every inch of the process, tell us we have only a set number of minutes to speak, who threaten to walk away from accountability if we say a thing they don’t like, and who literally cannot hear the things they need to hear. The amount of pressure created by this kind of control is not conducive to accountability. And the truth is, if an abuser does not want to hear, no amount of clarity or accuracy will help him hear. His privilege lets him just not care. There is a better way. 

If you are a feminist, then women drowning in this wordlessness deserve your careful, careful nurturance, your deep, committed listening, and your working through whatever your own issues are that block you from believing them, in an ongoing way. Because to get to the point of naming the harm at all, they have to struggle through physiologically induced, very much real, wordless terror.  If you have not incorporated this awareness into your empathic care of survivors, if you tell them how they are feeling instead of deeply listening to them, or tell them that you know what is best for them without listening to help them gain access to their trapped words at the same time, or if you call them ‘angry’ while they are desperately trapped inside their bodies in this way trying to reach you for empathy – or if you have allowed this silencing to let you slide away from hearing how you personally have harmed someone, you may need to work on this if you want to consider yourself a feminist man, or just a good person who can be there for others.

Because wordless terror is how it feels. And wordless terror in response to abuse someone is living through deserves your empathy, kindness, connection, and care. When a survivor finally gets able to speak, we must stop thinking like a perpetrator, and become able to centre survivors.

Often, that first step means simply listening, listening deeply in an unhurried way, asking the survivor questions, and forming together with them an accurate picture in your mind of the things they are unable to say and that you may at first feel unable to hear. Patiently run your understanding of what happened by them, think on what they say until you can really empathize with them, and accept that it may take you a few weeks and stretching your empathic imagination to get the full picture of what actually happened. You can gently ask ‘was it like this? was it like that? am I picturing it as it was?’ and then calibrate your perception to match her – finally, relieved – response.

—

“Imagine you approached a friend, an elder, a health professional, a family member or work colleague and told them that you were in pain — extreme pain from a lot of hurt — but that you didn’t know why because society didn’t teach you that we are hurt by the way we are treated as babies, children and teenagers, at work, in the family and in society, and by the many oppressions inflicted on us like racism, abuse, sexism, homophobia, classism, bullying, political/religious doctrines, and many more that aren’t listened to. Putting all this into context and hearing the gentle words, ‘There’s absolutely nothing wrong with you and you are a good person,’ how would you feel then? How would you feel knowing you won’t be medicated, labeled or diagnosed if you were to cry, scream, shake, laugh out loud, or want someone to hold you through the pain? How would you feel in a world that could hold the hurt?”
– Renuka Bhakta (from “Searching for a Rose Garden: Challenging Psychiatry, Fostering Mad Studies,” 2016)

_______

PLEASE SHARE THIS POST   If this post speaks to you or you found it helpful, please help out by sharing as widely as possible!

Additional Resources:
BYP100 Community Accountability Process (I highly recommend this)
Incite! community accountability process
Philly Stands Up
The Revolution Starts at Home
Bay Area Transformative Justice Network

For further reading: https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/if-black-women-were-free-part-2

See the original viral post The Opposite of Rape Culture is Nurturance Culture

I love this Bay Area Transformative Justice pod mapping worksheet so much that big, dramatic, hyperbole feels called for. ie I wanna shout it from the rooftops and say it again and again: if you consider yourself a feminist man, or you allow others around you to let you walk around with this identity and you enjoy having that reputation, or if you find you get laid or get dates or partners because of this reputation, and if you have not yet mapped out your pod of people who you would want to call you on it when you act in abusive ways, then do this right now. like today. like right away. Because it is everything, it is wonderful: https://batjc.wordpress.com/pods-and-pod-mapping-worksheet/

For a world in which everyone can feel safer, including those who harm and those who cause harm.

This video from Everyday Feminism is also great, and I highly recommend you watch it and take in carefully what she is saying about her own experience of fucking up and then being fully accountable. Owning doesn’t centre you. It is not about your intentions or your emotions or your reasons for the fuckup. It centres the other person, the one you have harmed. Name fully your acts, take the time to fully get and own how they caused harm, and express in a responsive way how you intend to address them, and check if what you offer actually is effective for repair of the harm you caused. You can also have compassion for yourself of course but that’s not the owning part. That’s it. Nobody has to be perfect but you have to know how to do repair if you want to be part of social justice movements, because you’re going to fuck up and you have to know how to hear it and fix it without flipping out.  http://everydayfeminism.com/2013/11/how-to-apologize/

This is an incredibly on point and insightful piece from Everyday Feminism I highly recommend you read and act on right away:  Abusive ‘Feminist’ Men Exist — Here Are 6 Things Men Can Do to Stop Them

For more on working with shame and hope, here is a piece that looks at how the fear of being ‘not good enough‘ can be self-fulfilling

Here’s another resource I like that emphasizes the importance of expressing empathy when you apologize for harming someone. Without empathy your apology will feel hollow: Mindful Tools: How To Apologize

Do you love speculative fiction and social justice? I am working on a speculative fiction project that deals with the transformations our planet is undergoing, and the undoing of cultures of domination. Cipher is currently seeking collaborators, advisors, an agent, and a publisher. Learn more about Cipher here.

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Je n’arrête pas de discuter de ça, encore et encore. Ce truc, quand quelqu’un ruine ta perception de la réalité, et te dit que t’es timbrée, ou nie qu’un truc est en train de se produire au moment où c’est en train de se produire, tu vois ? Quand les personnes que nous aimons et en qui nous avons confiance nous font ça ?… ça crée un bon gros bordel dans notre esprit.

Avec le temps, ou quand c’est sur des choses vraiment importantes, l’expérience de recevoir un discours qui nie le réel ébranle notre confiance en nous-même et notre capacité à naviguer/s’orienter dans la réalité./Quand l’on reçoit fréquemment ou à propos de sujets importants, des discours qui nient le réel, notre confiance en nous même s’effrite ainsi que notre capacité à appréhender la réalité.

« Il y a un mot pour ça » dis-je à une amie en entendant encore une nouvelle histoire de ce genre. « C’est gaslighting. »

Mon amie demanda : « C’est quoi « gaslighting » ? Je n’en ai jamais entendu parler.

– C’est quand quelqu’un sape ta confiance en tes propres perceptions et que tu te sens folle parce que tes instincts, ton intuition et parfois juste tes bonnes vieilles perceptions te disent une chose, et que les mots de quelqu’un en qui tu as confiance te disent quelque chose de différent.

– Oh! dit-elle en recherchant la traduction en ligne, “Oh” répéta-t-elle, mais gaslighting semble signifier que l’autre personne te fait ça intentionnellement. Je ne pense pas qu’il m’ait fait ça intentionnellement. Finalement, c’est difficile à épingler parce que je ne pense même pas qu’il était complètement au courant de ce qu’il faisait. En plus, ça l’a contrarié quand je lui en ai parlé. Mais il l’a fait. Et j’ai fini par me demander si j’étais saine d’esprit. »

Comprends-tu la profondeur du mal qu’on fait quand on contraint quelqu’un à questionner sa propre santé mentale ? C’est un problème sérieux. Rien à voir avec : « Oups, je t’ai apporté de la glace à la fraise et j’ai oublié que tu préférais la glace à la banane. » C’est destabiliser les capacités fondamentales d’une personne à s’engager dans la réalité. Elargis maintenant le phénomène à un contexte social où il a été dit chaque jour aux femmes, durant leur vie entière, que leurs perceptions ne pouvaient pas être crues alors qu’en fait, ces perceptions tapent carrément dans le mille ! Vous avez là un phénomène psychologique profondément dévastateur, persuasif et systémique : la déraison à petit feu. (insanity by thousand cuts)

Tout cela doit être pris en compte non seulement à cause de la violence engendrée mais aussi parce que les implications sont plus importantes encore. Si l’on considère la puissance, la force et la capacité à réaliser des changements des femmes qui croient en elles-mêmes, il nous faut réaliser ce que nous perdons quand nous doutons de nous-mêmes : une force indomptable pour un changement social, qui parce qu’elle est considérable, est vue par certains comme effrayante. En d’autres mots, cette capacité à nous comprendre nous-mêmes est très puissante : il y a une raison bien précise pour que l’on écrase systématiquement ce pouvoir chez les personnes méprisées, c’est qu’il est une force qui peut renverser l’injustice.

Peu importe les façons dont nous subissons l’oppression, ce processus nous dérobe de nos meilleures qualités, alors présentées comme des faiblesses, pour dissimuler à notre propre regard l’importance de notre puissance et de notre envergure. La nature structurelle de cette violence crée les conditions par lesquelles ce processus s’inscrit dans nos corps. Par conséquent, cette érosion de la réalité ne nécessite pas d’être intentionnelle ou consciente pour causer un mal significatif.

Les gens discréditent les perceptions des femmes ou des personnes considérées comme des femmes pour une variété de raisons compréhensibles :

-Ils se sentent honteux à propos d’une chose qu’ils ressentent, veulent, et/ou font, alors ils rusent et agissent de façon malhonnête dans leur expressivité émotionnelle, ou blâment l’autre personne plutôt que de prendre la responsabilité  de leurs propres émotions, volontés et/ou actions.

-Ils ne sont pas conscients d’eux-même et n’ont pas fait leur propre travail émotionnel, donc quand on les interpelle sur quelque chose de déconcertant dans leur comportement (comme une distance émotionnelle incohérente, de l’irritabilité ou des problèmes d’attachement) ils ne peuvent pas donner une réponse honnête mais donne une réponse plausible, émotionnellement malhonnête, à la place.

-Ils sont attachés à une certaine image d’eux-mêmes (image de personnes généreuses et enrichissantes, en tant que féministe, comme très responsable et respectueux) et ne sont pas prêts à perçevoir leurs côtés obscurs ou moins développés émotionnellement qui contredisent leur vision d’eux-mêmes ou leur image publique.

-Ils ont été élevé dans un foyer hostile aux conflits et n’ont pas appris comment rencontrer leurs propres besoins et ceux des autres simultanément. Ainsi, ils croient sans remise en question qu’un match nul est la seule issue. Et ils veulent ce qu’ils veulent… L’échange semble impossible,comme une impasse donc ils imposent leur volonté.

– Lorsqu’ils parlent de sujets inconfortables, ils ont un niveau physiologique d’excitabilité ou d’alarme qui devient accablant émotionnellement pour eux. Donc, ils l’adoucissent avec des excuses et une ruse logistique.

– Un degré d’intimité sain les rend anxieux et les met en garde. Garder les choses vagues protège leur sentiment de contrôle sur l’intimité émotionnelle.

-Ils peuvent n’avoir jamais expérimenté de sécurité émotionnelle et une receptivité saine et nourrissante (nurturing) de la part de leur entourage. N’ayant pas réalisé cela à leur sujet, ils peuvent penser que les personnes avec qui ils développent une relation proche ont des besoins excessifs et déraisonnables.

-Ils peuvent avoir grandi avec un père parlant aux femmes et aux enfants de cette manière sans prendre le temps de reconnaître et changer ce schéma.

– Ils peuvent avoir des « caractéristiques narcissiques . » C’est finalement assez commun (7.7% de la population masculine apparemment). Le « narcissisme » relève d’une expérience humaine : un vide interieur, une conscience de soi fracturée et sous-développée émotionnellement, enterrée sous des couches et des couches de honte, avec une apparente très forte estime de soi par-dessus. Pour ceux que ce débat intérieur travaille, les parties originales ou vulnérables de soi-meme sont séparée par un pare-feu et sous-développées émotionnellement. Ainsi, le guide intérieur pour l’empathie, la confiance et la connexion que des « adultes en termes émotionnels » ont pour les guider, est à des degrés divers, hors service. Ces gens sont particulièrement susceptibles de gaslighter les autres, sans même réaliser qu’ils le font. Malheureusement, ils sont aussi ceux les moins à même de reconnaître leurs actions et de prendre la responsabilité de leurs actes. Ils essaieront plus probablement de couvrir leurs oreilles, dévier le sujet, tergiverser, changer de sujet, attaquer ou fuir  quand quelqu’un-e essaiera de leur demander de l’aide ou une clarification. Le degré de prise de conscience de soi avec des caractéristiques narcissiques est extrêmement, extrêmement bas : ils sont peu susceptibles de le reconnaitre en eux-mêmes et de changer, aussi, devenir proche d’eux s’avère plutôt délicat.

Ces causes sont toutes compréhensibles. Les êtres humains qui sont de bonnes personnes font des choses pour des raisons compréhensibles. Personne n’agit sans cause. Des fois, des fois, plusieurs sérieux problèmes de santé mentale entrent en jeu. Le « trouble de la personnalité narcissique », par exemple, implique un bon lot de gaslighting (accompagné de rage et d’une profonde incapacité à suivre une logique émotionnelle d’un point A à un point B). Cependant, c’est moins commun que la grande variété de spécimens rencontrés au jardin du quotidien.

Si l’impact sur l’autre personne l’entraçine à douter de sa propre santé mentale, nous devons, à un certain point, être capable de parler de ce qui se passe, sans se laisser engluer par un « mais je n’en avais pas l’intention » »

Nous comprenons avec le racisme que les effets comptent plus que l’intention. Alors, pourquoi sommes-nous si bloqués dans cette idée que ça ne compte pas si quelqu’un ruine notre santé mentale parce qu’il n’en avait pas l’intention ?

Voici un petit exemple :

J’appelle un copain proche que je connais depuis des années. Je suis bouleversée et j’aimerais m’épancher, peut-être entendre quelques mots affectueux et encourageants, peut-être demander conseil. Cet ami se sent parfois débordé par les émotions et parfois il trouve que ça le rapproche des gens et accueille volontier ces partages. Au moment de mon appel, il craque : « Je ne peux pas parler là, maintenant» et il balance le téléphone à sa copine, qui apprécie ce type de conversations.

Je me sens légèrement blessée par la brusquerie de sa phrase. Comme nous sommes tous très proches, j’en fait part à sa partenaire qui lui relaie l’information. Il répond de l’autre bout de la pièce : « non, non, Je ne suis pas du tout contrarié par toi, je suis juste en train de laver les plats et de préparer le diner, c’est tout. » Elle me relaie ceci : « son ton de voix n’a rien à voir avec ce que t’as dit, c’est juste lui qui est stressé à propos du repas. » J’ai pensé que j’avais dû mésinterpréter son comportement et dis : «  Oh, pardon ! Tout va bien ! » Tout en m’excusant de demander à parler alors qu’il avait des choses au four. D’une certaine façon, ma perception, celle qu’il m’avait raccroché au nez alors que je n’étais pas bien et qu’il se débarrasse du téléphone sans aucun mot gentil, comme si j’avais fait quelque chose pour le mettre en colère, fut mise de côté. Je décidais que je devais juste avoir complètement mésinterprété son comportement.

J’ai abandonné ma perception en recalibrant ma compréhension de ses besoins avec cette nouvelle information : il est ok pour écouter mes émotions, juste pas à cette heure du jour.

Lorsque  j’ai dit « pardon, » cependant, je me suis sentie un peu bizarre : je n’étais pas sûre de m’excuser pour mon mauvais timing ou pour avoir des émotions. Je pense que j’ai tort d’être secouée par cette interruption. Je doute de mes perceptions. Ses mots contredisent directement ce que me dit mon cerveau limbique de ce qu’il est en train de se produire.

Nous n’en avons plus parlé et j’ai noté dans mon petit carnet des connaissances que mon ami était comme ça quand il faisait plusieures choses à la fois, et que ce n’était pas une forme de réponse qui devait me contrarier du tout. Parce qu’il l’avait dit.

Quelques mois plus tard, nous sommes en train de discuter… Il est dans une phase où il travaille sur ses émotions et sur ses propres sentiments, augmentant ainsi sa capacité à gérer l’émotion. Il me dit : « Hé, tu te rappelles, cette fois où t’as appelé et que t’avais besoin d’une oreille et que j’ai répondu sèchement en me débarrassant du téléphone sans vérifier comment t’allais, puis quand j’ai dit que je n’étais pas du tout contrarié par toi mais que j’étais juste très occupé avec la vaisselle et le diner ? En fait, j’ai eu une assez grosse réaction physiologique à tes émotions et je n’arrivais pas à gérer. » Il n’a pas partagé ça comme une grosse révélation. Il avait pris conscience depuis un moment de sa réaction ; c’est uniquement parce qu’il était excité par ce qu’il était en train d’apprendre qu’ il m’en faisait part. Personne ne contrariait personne à ce moment là, c’était juste une conversation intéressante sur les émotions.

Je m’arrêtai. Je réalisais que mes perceptions avaient été justes la première fois. J’essayais d’encaisser le fait que j’ai effacé mes perceptions de ce petit moment. Et pas seulement. Afin d’être une amie bienveillante et attentive, j’avais intégré un schéma d’information sur le sens du comportement de mon ami, ce qui implique que j’avais continué à nier mes perceptions pendant des semaines, chaque fois que je repensais à cet instant.

Et je n’avais peut-être pas besoin de ça, peut-être que mes perceptions étaient bonnes. Il m’a répondu sèchement, il a lâché le téléphone comme une patate chaude, il semblait vraiment bouleversé, et je l’ai pris comme « juste en train de faire la vaisselle, pas contrarié par toi » et ai réévalué ma lecture de lui avec cette info, parce que j’ai confiance en lui et que je voulais accepter ses mots à propos de lui-même. Et pourtant, dans un sens très ordinaire, très quotidien, ses paroles à son sujet n’étaient finalement pas vraies.

Plus précisément, ses paroles ne correspondaient pas à ce que savait mon corps sur ce qui venait d’arriver : son bouleversement émotif. Ce qui n’était pas, en soi, une grosse affaire. Les gens peuvent avoir différentes capacités émotionnelles à différents moments. S’il avait dit :  « Là, je me sens dépassé par mes émotions », nous aurions vécu la même réalité et ma réponse aurait encore été : « oh, ok, tout va bien, je lui parlerai à elle, à la place. »

Je réalise que je pouvais, sur le moment, respecter ses besoins quels qu’ils fûent, et que cela aurait été beaucoup moins blessant pour moi de croire mes propres perceptions plutôt que sa parole qui était malhonnête émotionnellement.

J’aurais pu entendre ses mots « pas contrarié du tout, juste occupé à la vaisselle et au repas » et penser « ok, il semble juste émotionellement dépassé, et je devine qu’il ne se sent pas capable de le dire, donc il dit autre chose. C’est ok. »

Les deux raisons pour ne pas être disponible sont valables, mais l’une est vraie et l’autre ne l’est pas.

L’une me donne une capacité précise pour orienter ma boussole intérieure, l’autre la perturbe, si je crois sa parole plus que mes perceptions.

C’est piégeux : remettre en doute quelqu’un sur ses propres émotions est en soi une forme de gaslighting.

C’est une valeur forte chez moi de croire les gens quand ils me disent comment ils se sentent car, quand on en arrive là, nous sommes tous experts en nos propres réalités intérieures.

Mais, ayant eu mes perceptions ébranlées toute ma vie, je dois apprendre à tempérer l’information que je reçois par l’évidence de ce que je ressens, en maintenant les deux ensemble.

Quand je peux tenir les deux pièces d’information en même temps, je peux être plus disposée à le croire sur ce qu’il expérimente quand il a besoin de moi, sans automatiquement écarter toute information vraiment fiable que mon corps m’envoie.

Je n’ai pas besoin de lui dire qu’il a été malhonnête pour me faire confiance. Je peux juste apprendre que mes perceptions, finalement, sont plutôt correctes la plupart du temps, et m’ouvrir au fait qu’il est possible que lui ne soit pas entièrement franc, que les gens ne sont pas toujours  parfaitement conscients d’eux-même, que les humains sont compliqués.

Quand je sais au fond de moi que mes perceptions sont réellement carrément exactes, contrairement à ce qu’une vie de remise en question m’a imposée, je me sens moins tenir à la réalité comme à du sable qui se déroberait à la prise. Quand je sens que je m’accroche moins à ma santé mentale comme à un fil, je peux aborder ces situations avec plus d’aisance, de force, d’empathie et de compréhension.

Si j’en ai besoin, sachant que je peux perçevoir les choses précisément malgré ses mots, je peux gentiment questionner l’information qu’on me donne et voir si une réponse plus honnête pourrait juste être sous la surface du discours. : « Je vois que tu te sens un peu débordé, est-ce exact ? C’est ok si tu ne veux pas avoir à m’écouter chouiner. Personne ne veut avoir à faire ça tout le temps. Laisse moi savoir si c’est ce qu’il en est, ok ? ». Si j’ignore l’effacement de ma propre réalité et crois la petite voix à l’intérieur de moi qui dit : ‘Hum, non, attend, ces paroles et cette perception sensible s’invalident l’une l’autre, » peut-être serais-je assez forte pour demander des clarifications, offrir une compréhension, et obtenir une réponse plus précise.

Voici un autre exemple : j’étais à la recherche d’une maison avec un proche ami qui généralement me traite très bien. Je lui dis « Je roulerai dans la ville et nous chercherons des pancartes  A LOUER aux fenêtres ». Lui, en stress, dénigrant mon idée d’un battement de main, me dit d’un ton condescendant : « Personne ne met jamais de signe à sa fenêtre. Les gens utilisent juste Craiglist/les petites annonces ». Croyant automatiquement ses perceptions par-dessus les miennes, je pensais immédiatement : «  Whoa, je dois être stupide, pourquoi n’ai-je pas remarqué que dans cette ville c’est différent de là où j’ai grandi ? » et j’abandonnais honteuse mon plan de recherche. Je pense que quelquepart une idée me trottait à l’arrière du crâne, « oh mais je pensais avoir vu quelques pancartes aux fenêtres dans le quartier au nord d’ici, » mais j’étais confuse et je pensais donc devoir mal me souvenir.

Deux semaines plus tard, je rendis visite à une amie qui venait d’aménager dans un nouvel appartement et lui demandais : « Comment as-tu trouvé cet endroit ? » Elle dit : « oh, j’ai répondu à une pancarte à la fenêtre. Tu peux trouver les meilleures opportunités de cette manière parce que l’ancienne génération qui loue depuis longtemps comme ça n’augmente pas les loyers et a l’habitude d’utiliser ce moyen et non Craigslist/les petites annonces. » Je me figeai. Je réalisais que j’avais découvert un moment pendant lequel j’avais automatiquement laissé supplanter ma propre confiance en moi avec la supposition qu’un ami homme saurait mieux que moi.

Et oui, les femmes gaslightent les gens également. Mais le patriarcat et le sexisme structurel orientent les effets différemment. Dans le dernier exemple, l’ami fut d’accord avec le fait qu’on lui a appris à croire en ses perceptions toute sa vie et qu’ainsi il n’aurait pas abandonné ses propres idées à la présentation des miennes. Les personnes de genre féminin sont continuellement remises en question.

S’il n’y avait que ces quelques moments, il n’y aurait pas de mal. Mais il y a des milliers de moments de ce genre chaque jour, et nous ne pouvons que rarement les attraper si clairement.

La profondeur des impacts, quand tu réalises que toute ta vie tu as douté de tes propres perceptions, et que tout du long tu n’étais pas folle et que tu aurais pu te faire confiance, est vertigineuse. L’étendue de la distorsion, quand elle te frappe, est un mur de brique.

Et devine quoi ? Se sentir en colère quand ta réalité est sabotée comme ça, c’est normal et sain. Jette un œil à Picard, en haut. Il a l’air plutôt fâché, n’est-ce pas ? Quand tu tentes de t’accrocher à ta connaissance que tu n’es pas folle, tu pourrais avoir l’air un peu…folle.

Voilà toute l’essence du gaslighting. Faire activement quelquechose à une autre personne qui de façon attendue, l’amènera à ressentir des émotions comme la tristesse, la confusion, la souffrance, puis ensuite lui dire qu’elle est folle de ressentir ces émotions parce que tu n’as pas fait la chose, qu’en fait, tu as fait.

L’effet sur la psyché quand des personnes en qui tu as confiance te disent de façon quasi-continue, par des attaques journalières, que des choses réelles ne sont pas réelles est de causer une fragmentation et un sabotage de nos plus puissantes, nos plus belles et nos plus efficaces source d’orientation : nos perceptions et nos instincts.

Nous vivons dans un monde qui ne veut pas que les femmes aient confiance en elles. On nous dit littérallement par des milliers de façons, petites ou énormes, que ce que nous savons se passer ne se passe pas. Peut-être, comme me l’a dit un copain il y a quelques temps, même les hommes bons ne se sentent pas tout à fait à l’aise avec l’idée que les femmes croient en elles-même, parce que cela voudrait dire qu’il faut abandonner une partie du pouvoir inhérent à ce que le patriarcat et la domination masculine tente de s’accaparer. Les hommes bons sapent aussi la confiance des femmes s’ils n’ont pas travaillé sur cela.

Si, comme ça arrive souvent, tu es avec une femme qui a subi cela de façon plus sérieuse dans le passé, ces petits moments où tu lui dis de ne pas croire en ses perceptions s’accumulent au dessus des façons plus étendues dont elle a vu son sens de la réalité nié auparavant. Celles d’entre nous qui avons traversées des abus plus sérieux devont nous débattre d’autant plus pour savoir que nos perceptions sont justes, parfois sacrément dans le mille.

L’effet d’avoir des gens auxquels on croit, sur lesquels on compte pour nous renforcer, saper la réalité, est sérieux et profondément destructeur.

Pourquoi cela devrait-il compter qu’il l’ait fait exprès ou pas ? Je veux dire, le faire exprès peut faire de toi une personne authentiquement mauvaise, bien sur. Mais très peu parmi nos proches conçoivent de nous faire du mal, et pourtant, ils en font, du mal.

On ne joue pas légèrement avec la santé mentale de quelqu’un. S’il te blesse si profondément parce qu’il n’a  juste pas réalisé qu’il le faisait, ou parce qu’il se sent trop honteux pour admettre quelquechose, qui n’avait probablement rien d’honteux du tout, ou parce qu’il a grandi dans un monde où il pouvait s’en sortir avec et ne plus y penser, est-ce que les effets ne sont pas les mêmes ?

En fait, être dans ce genre de marécage de dissimulation peut être d’autant plus perturbant quand tu vois clairement que la personne que tu aimes profondément, la personne en qui tu as confiance et en qui tu as foi, croit elle-même en ce qu’elle dit_ même si ce n’est pas réel.

Le problème est que la masculinité nous dit tous, quelque soit notre genre, que les femmes ne savent pas de quoi elles parlent. Ainsi, si une information provient d’une bouche avec un certain ton de voix et une certaine présentation genrée, cela ne peut pas être pris sérieusement. Et ça, c’est malsain. Et ça, c’est dingue.

Quelquefois, un cercle entier de personnes peut faire cela à quelqu’un et ne rien voir du tout jusqu’à ce qu’il soit trop tard. Dans ma communauté, par exemple, il y a quelques années, il y avait une femme de couleur que les gens disaient « tout le temps en colère. » Et elle était avec ce mec blanc « mignon, doux et décontracté. » Nous nous demandions comment ils parvenaient à s’entendre car leur tempéraments semblaient si différents.Il s’avera plus tard qu’il l’agressait sexuellement depuis des années et niait sa réalité quand elle disait que ça arrivait. Pendant des années… Et nous, qui étions autour d’eux tout ce temps, nous nous sommes cognés à un mur de brique de notre propre cru : nous avions laissé ça arriver. Nous l’avions vu comme « une femme de couleur colérique,» sans nous arrêter pour penser : hé, qu’est-ce qui sur cette planète rendrait quelqu’un si fâché ? J’étais l’une de celle appelée pour aider sur la procédure de responsabilité. Et je compris qu’il n’avait pas complètement reconnu ce qu’il faisait. Est-ce que cela a changé l’impact sur elle qu’un groupe de personnes prétendument radical l’abandonne ? Avions-nous réellement besoin que la personne causant la blessure voit la blessure avant que nous aillons la volonté de reconnaître qu’elle était là ?

N’est-ce pas là une terrible quantité de pouvoir à donner à ceux qui gaslightent, que de les laisser décider si la personne qu’ils ont blessé peut être entendue ou reçevoir de l’aide ?

Et oui, le gaslighting arrive également aux hommes. Ceux qui l’ont expérimenté ont besoin de s’aider et de se soutenir (plutôt que d’être en compétition). Nous l’expérimentons de façons différentes selon le degré de connivence de notre société. Quand les hommes gaslightent les femmes ou les personnes de genre féminin, cela révèle l’étendue plus grande du phénomène de gaslighting et la formation culturelle des hommes cisgenres à massivement amplifier le préjudice et de jeter le-la survivante sous le bus. La même chose est vraie avec les enfants qui ont subi cela : ils ne sont pas crus. La meilleure chose que vous puissiez faire, si vous avez vécu ça ou que ça vous est arrivé, est d’utiliser cette conviction d’a quel point ça fout la pensée en l’air et de supporter les femmes qui doivent vivre dans un contexte dans lequel la culture entière les gaslighte littéralement chaque jour (livre : Men explain things to me de Rebecca Solnit). Cela signifie que lorsqu’un seul gars pratique le plus extrême abus de gaslighting, les femmes ou les personnes de genre féminin seront particulièrement visées tout en ne disposant que de très peu de moyens d’obtenir de l’aide.

Alors, a-t-on besoin d’un autre mot ?

Y a-t-il un mot pour « foutre en l’air ton sens des réalités et ébranler ta santé mentale en disant que quelquechose n’arrive pas quand c’est absolument en train de se passer ? » quand ça ne signifie pas « le faire exprès » mais au contraire de reconnaître le caractère profondément systémique, persuasif et profondément déglingant pour l’esprit de ces moments ?

J’ai appris récemment une distinction au sujet d’un outil de pensée sur le consentement sexuel : les accidents de consentement contre les violations de consentement. La distinction, bien que risquée comme de telles choses peuvent l’être, semble utile. Je me demande si nous ne pourrions pas utiliser une distinction similaire pour comprendre les différentes façons profondément blessantes dont le gaslighting affecte les femmes et les personnes au genre non binaire. Cela permettrait d’offrir dans le même mouvement, un chemin pour la réparation et l’apprentissage  quand les hommes reconnaissent qu’ils ont effectivement été engagés dans ce genre de sabotage psychologique en niant les perceptions justes de quelqu’un d’autre.

Quel seraient les mots à utiliser ? Gaslighting est un mot si puissant et qui a aidé beaucoup de personnes à enfin croirent en elles-même. Je ne veux pas le cantonner aux situations extrêmes car c’est le côté ordinaire et naturalisé d’une perturbation systémique qui le rend si difficile à épingler. Et pourtant, je veux distinguer les actes d’une personne très abusive, qui change ouvertement la réalité, de ceux que beaucoup d’hommes font par manque de travail psychologique sur eux-même ou de maturité émotionnelle, sans non plus laisser ce glissement continuer à avoir ces effets violents et néfastes pour les femmes comme à présent. Comment appellerions-nous ce gaslighting accidentel ?

Bien sûr, il y a ceux qui gaslightent à n’en plus finir lorsque vous leur laissez un tout petit peu d’espace. Il y a ceux avec qui il n’est pas sage de laisser une quelconque plage pour discuter de leurs intentions, parce qu’ils sont largement et entièrement incapables d’empathie avec ceux qu’ils ont blessés. Pour ces cas là, le « gaslighting direct » est probablement le meilleur mot. Parce que le centrage sur le survivant est tellement difficile pour ces individus, il est surement mieux dans ces cas de commencer justement à se concentrer sur le survivant, et d’y rester. Les effets comptent avant tout dans le gaslighting. Pas les intentions.

—–

Un grand merci à Fanny Chaumet pour la traduction !

See the original viral posts at:

https://norasamaran.com/2016/02/11/the-opposite-of-rape-culture-is-nurturance-culture-2/

https://norasamaran.com/2016/08/28/variations-on-not-all-men/

https://norasamaran.com/2016/06/28/on-gaslighting/

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Out of the Attic: dissociation and social justice

This is a workshop created over three years from information gathered as I was learning about my own experiences and integrating. A sandbox version of this workshop was offered in Vancouver in the Spring of 2015 with organizers and friends I have known for years, which generated ideas that are still shaping the future of the workshop. Sandbox versions have now been held in Montreal with the Politics and Care Collective at Concordia, in Toronto at the Cedar Centre, and in Detroit at AMC2016. Each sandbox version of the workshop leads to adaptations and new knowledge coming from the participants. It is never intended to be ‘complete’ as this learning is based in the expertise of the many different people who come to and use this tool, and share their wisdom and experiences for future workshop participants to use.

Supplies

Agreements and Foundations

Part One: information and questions

What is Dissociative Disorder?

First: What is Dissociation?

Symptoms

How does it happen? Causes

How it works

What it feels like

Distinctions: Some useful facts about what Dissociative Disorders are not

The effects of stigma: what we don’t know can hurt us

Gifts

Magic question box

Things you can do (and not do) to support someone with a dissociative disorder

Part Two: Practice

Role plays! (a.k.a. omg are we really doing this? Yes!)

Out of the Sandbox, into the ocean

Take home handouts: 1. symptoms, 2. how you can help

Resources

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Supplies:

Shoebox (question box / feedback box)
nametags, markers
printed copies of the whole workshop and of the handout on symptoms and how to help and not harm
big sheet of ground rules for wall
paper and pens
food, drinks, snacks
objects to handle (stones, feathers, squeeze toys)
Printout of workshop plan for facilitators

Agreements/Radical Mental Health/Foundations

Ground rules (borrowed from AORTA ground rules)

Welcome and Introductions, get food, settle in, make nametag
acknowledgment of territory

• Go around: Name (group repeats back), pronouns, one thing you’d like people here to know about you to help you feel safe here
• what do you need to be able to participate fully? Take care of your needs, lie down, walk around, eat, drink, washroom, step out if you need to, (childcare, bus tix, accessibility info, point out designated listeners/support people)
• Step up, step up

Assumptions:

• Oppression exists.
• We all have experienced being targets and agents of oppression.
• It is not useful to argue about a hierarchy of oppressions
• All forms of oppression are interconnected
• Confronting oppression will benefit everyone
• Placing blame helps no one, taking responsibility helps everyone
• Confronting social injustice is painful and joyful

Point to childcare, bus tix, accessibility info such as the washroom door size and stairs, designated listeners, separate rest/listening area.

Foundational assumptions:

This workshop adopts some basic assumptions and if you choose to be here you are agreeing to these basic foundations.

One is a radical mental health analysis, based on the work of The Icarus Project: we each make decisions about our own bodies. (whether you choose to use or not use diagnoses, psychological language, pharmaceuticals, whatever your approach to religion/spirituality/creator/soul/god/atheism etc., whatever you find are useful or not useful for you, all approaches are welcome. We will each find different tools useful and not useful for us, and the inner experience can be so complex and particular.)

Strengths and limits of DSM and biomedical model. Diagnosis can be useful and empowering if it lets you see that what is happening to you is not your fault and can let some people access resources. But the biomedical model views everything as happening ‘in the brain.’ It has limits: it can be pathologizing of what is actually part of the human range of experience, for instance. It can individualize what is actually inherently relational. It can separate out and categorize what is actually experienced all together and overlapping, which is particularly resonant when thinking about trauma and dissociative disorders. It also doesn’t take into account the ways people may experience dissociative disorders as fractures in their soul or spirit. (Interested in collaborating to provide more about all the different ways this is understood for people)

Another foundational assumption we are operating with is that structural power exists. We’re not going to get into debates over whether racism, colonization, sexism, heteronormativity, etc. exist. If you don’t see it, go teach yourself, that isn’t what we’re here for today, or we’ll never get to the point of the conversation.

I want to ask everyone here to treat each other and yourself with the kindness and compassion that to me is the foundation for this work. To get us into the mood we’re going to do a five minute solo exercise (thank you to adrienne maree brown for sharing this exercise) .

Short exercise:

3:15-3:25
Find your own place in the yard or on the deck or in the study and we’re going to each have five minutes alone. Please do a body scan, notice any places you feel discomfort in your body, and just send love and compassion to those places. Focus on filling your body with your breath, feel love for yourself and for others. Please take this quiet time to soothe your body and be ready to offer kindness and compassion to yourself and to others when you come back. (if you have a song, a prayer, or a practice of your own that you use that you find helpful, feel free to use it, don’t be shy to sing or make noise or move in whatever way your body wants to, or you can just watch the trees and send love and compassion to yourself and others).

3:20-3:25 when I say go, you’re going to take a deep breath, and then all together we’re going to make a sound storm releasing that breath with a loud sound, any sound that comes out of you. Imagine releasing stored up tension, stress, grief, sadness, fear, and letting it out of you as loud as you like, releasing it. Then take another breath in and imagine breathing in love, compassion for yourself and all living beings. We’ll do three big breaths and then gather together.

(When everyone returns: do big breath let out as loud a noise as your body wants to, move in any way your body wants to.)

Then to transition in, ‘open the box’ – say we will have time at the end to ‘close the box’ up again. these emotions are always here for you when you wish to come back to them, and you can choose what to share and when. Hold your hands in front of you, or you can do this in your mind if you prefer. Open up the box, create a safe moment out of time when you can touch these difficult emotions and love them, knowing you will have time to ‘close the box’ again before we go.

Grounding in experience
3:30 Want to situate it coming from me. As someone with various kinds of privilege (white skin privilege, employment, language fluency, citizenship) but also with a hidden history of poverty and patriarchal violence, I’m feeling like me taking a risk to speak publically about dissociative experiences might be a little safer for me than it might be for folks who are fighting multiple battles simultaneously. It’s still very very scary to speak about these experiences, for two reasons.

One, stigma. Dissociative Disorders are so rarely spoken about, and so little is still known about them, that there is almost no way to talk about them. For instance when I was doing the research for this I checked statscan and they have numbers for schitzophrenia, bipolar, depression, anxiety, but dissociative disorders doesn’t appear anywhere in the statscan database. Friends doing counseling psych degrees say they have barely touched on it at all. From what I understand these experiences get talked about in relation to trauma and PTSD but I didn’t have access to spaces where anyone was talking about dissociative disorders at all so I had no way to understand what was happening to me until about three years ago when I stumbled on the terms CPTSD and dissociative disorder. And I also don’t feel like people really know what it means, and the few folks that I do know who have this diagnosis don’t really talk about it. And this is odd because dissociative disorders are the third most common form of psychological distress after anxiety and depression. Estimates are that between 1% and 10% of the population experiences some kind of dissociative disorder or has regular dissociative experiences, and much more among communities who experience the most violence. QTBIPOC folks, people dealing with borders, immigration systems, racist prisons and policing, are who I’m hearing might have these kinds of experiences as a matter of daily life. These kinds of experiences can be difficult to think about or recognize, which means people may feel alone in having these kinds of experiences; it’s been important to recognize that these are actually very normal and not unusual – it’s just that they don’t easily get discussed.

The particular difficulty thinking about these experiences caused by the dissociation itself probably adds to this silence, but the sense of not being able to talk about it because of social stigma or the possibility of shame is honestly more harmful than the dissociation itself and makes creating safety much, much harder. Plus, shame we can do something about, by making it easy to talk about and normalizing dissociative experiences, creating more general knowledge and fluency about them, so that the people struggling to put the parts of their spirit back together aren’t simultaneously trying to navigate stigma and social shaming on top of the internal structural shame that causes it in the first place. I want to create a world in which it is as easy to talk about being supportive for someone while they have a dissociative experience as it is currently to talk about being quiet around someone when they have a headache or bringing someone soup when they have a cold.

At the same time the other reason it’s scary is that I’m afraid to get it wrong in a number of ways. Dissociative experiences are a spectrum and there is a wide, wide range of ways of thinking about them, and what I know currently is limited to my own experience. As I’ve said, I come from a certain amount of violence but also from various kinds of privilege, and that means my perspective at the moment is going to be very limited. I’m hoping that I can struggle through that process, by starting with what I do know, being honest about the limits of my perspective, and hopefully growing in relationship with others as I and we learn together. So my hope is that this version of this workshop will completely transform as it enters into dialogue with other people’s experiences and knowledge. That process has begun and it is wonderful, I’m so thankful for what I have heard and learned from listening to people during and after these sessions.

For instance, from conversations since writing this, I have learned that a lot of knowledge is coming out of Indigenous communities about the effects of trauma, and people may choose to talk about some experiences, that could maybe be thought of as ‘dissociative,’ as the effects of residential school or of trauma, or of the spirit not being safe in the body or being cracked, instead of using this language.

Another perspective is also that it can be very difficult to tease out what is dissociative relative to just responses to trauma in general, and not everyone will feel the need to think of their experiences in terms of dissociative disorders, especially as trauma layers on trauma and can cause all sorts of effects.

In a related vein, folks have said that just existing as a Black person, particularly a dark-skinned Black person, in this white supremacist world means surviving the very conditions that foster CPTSD, in which survival depends on maintaining a good relationship with the people causing the harm. So dissociation may not be called that but may be just life, or people may use other language to describe similar or parallel experiences.

So thinking about dissociative experiences is just one tool, one that I personally have found empowering and helpful to help me recognize that this isn’t my fault, that there is no shame in these experiences, and even to help me bring together the experiences I was thinking of separately. Part of having dissociative experiences in that the body protects you from even knowing it is happening, so it helps to see all these experiences all in one place, to increase my body awareness.

So this language isn’t meant to be all encompassing or definitive and not everyone will want it; my hope is that people take what they want from this discussion and also share their own understandings, and so this is just the part of a long conversation.  For me personally, a request is to please assume I do want to know and do care to learn, and share whatever you think directly as much as you feel able. This resource is not meant to overwrite or erase or make a masternarrative of this one set of tools, but rather, as some participants in the very first workshop suggested, the idea is to offer parallel streams of knowledge, like a river running alongside other rivers of understanding. I hope you will use it as one tool among many and share back whatever you feel would be useful for people who use this in the future – draw the rivers running alongside so others can find their path. There’ll also be a feedback box at the end for people to write anything that you would like to see included in future runs.

The goal when I began this has been to create something that I can give away on the net for anyone to use and adapt any way they want. But that takes the risk of saying ‘hey there is a lot I don’t know, can we learn together’ and that’s a trust-building exercise that, I hope, happens over many conversations. It will never be done and it will never be ‘expert’ knowledge, and it isn’t meant to be. So doing this at all is meant to push me past silence and paralysis. It’s not meant to be ‘done’ or perfect. I’ve structured this session because we need some structure to have something to do, but I feel strongly that there are no edges to this learning, it will mean different things to different people, and I’m excited about seeing what emerges. So I decided to go ahead with it even though it’s not going to be ‘right’ or finished: As adrienne mb says, ‘no failures, only data’.

Something else I also want to say about coming from my own perspective is that I’m not any kind of counselor or psychologist, and I’m not equipped to heal people’s trauma histories. This workshop is meant as a peer resource, to offer public education to my community, to build relationships and knowledge, not as therapy. So it’s important to me that people govern their own level of depth. Something else worth noting is that I’ve heard from many people and have found as well that delving into the past for its own sake isn’t necessarily the best approach to healing, and that being well in the here and now is actually a path many people find best for them, integrating traumatic experiences at a pace that is safe and keeps them feeling strong and ok in the here and now. So if this session brings up trauma for you, whether or not you consider yourself having ‘a dissociative disorder’ please govern how much you feel safe and comfortable sharing, considering that these experiences can be overwhelming sometimes. I don’t want to go deeper than anyone feels they can handle, so while we can support and learn from one another about all of our healing paths and those of our friends, family, and communities, please do listen to and take care of yourself and don’t get in over your (or our) head.

Part One: Information and Questions

Ok: so caveats out of the way, I want to start with the Crazy Woman in the Attic. There’s an old book, Jane Eyre, and in it this man has a previous wife who is crazy and who you hear screaming from the attic. We know very little about her, except there she is, locked up in the attic, and crazy, as the story goes on. A book and then a film called Wide Sargasso Sea was made that tells the story of what might have happened before, and in it we see the man isolate and abuse the first wife, who becomes crazy as a result of this mistreatment, and who then gets locked away. The idea that crazy people should be put away and kept secret is one that I’m hoping to challenge. It’s been long work for myself to understand that I can and am allowed to be my whole self, at least in some spaces. How would the systems of power that oppress and deny people’s full humanity be forced to transform if we were all to exist in the world as our whole selves, accepted and safe as we truly are, with nothing cut off or lost? I’m curious what it would feel like, something one of my mentors, Proma, said to me when I was building the research for this workshop. What would it look like for us all to be welcome in the world as our whole selves? That’s the spirit this is being offered in.

Basics: WHAT IS DISSOCIATIVE DISORDER?

3:45
Neurological definition – Fundamentally, a dissociative disorder is characterized by keeping apart things that would typically be brought together in consciousness. Someone with a dissociative disorder is likely to experience aspects of awareness, thought, and consciousness as separate, or to have difficulty bringing them together or thinking of them together. Some people like to use the official diagnoses, but not everyone does. Just for reference, in DSM 4 the main diagnoses were:

Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID),
Dissociative Identity Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (DDNOS),
derealization,
depersonalization,
dissociative amnesia
dissociative fugue

in the DSM 5 they are now:
Dissociative Identity Disoder (DID),
Other Specified Dissociative Disorder (OSDD),
Unspecified Dissociative Disorder (UDD),
derealization/depersonalization
dissociative amnesia and dissociative fugue

But the words don’t really capture the experience, especially the enormous variety of inner experiences from person to person. I’ll just use ‘dissociative experiences’ to describe all of these experiences. However, dissociation is also something everyone does, as I’ll explain in a bit. Dissociation is a spectrum, with ‘ordinary’ dissociation on one end, dissociative disorders in the middle and dissociative identity disorder on the other. More on this shortly.

Spiritual definition – the real healing for me has actually come not from the neurological understanding, but from approaching the cracks in my spirit and putting them back together, and learning how to be here, or stay here. I’m still doing that, with guidance from some people I’m working with who work at the spirit level. They talk about how you can sometimes not even come fully into your body at the moment of conception, if you don’t feel safe or if there is violence coming down one or both lines, or your parents are experiencing fear or violence. And they’re teaching me to recognize the difference between my nervous system and brain and body and my spirit or higher self, in order to heal the body by listening to the higher self. It’s hard for me to talk about because I had no way to understand these things until recently.

The truth is the best and fastest healing is happening by using all the tools at my disposal, including the biopsychosocial model and the spiritual models. Everyone will find their own path and their own understanding; I might move fluidly back and forth between these frameworks which have all been helpful to me.

First: What is Dissociation

I want to bring us back here to the definition of Dissociative Disorder.

A dissociative disorder is characterized by keeping apart things that would typically be brought together in consciousness. Someone with a dissociative disorder is likely to experience aspects of awareness, thought, and consciousness as separate, or to have difficulty bringing them together or thinking of them together.

Keep that definition in mind as we take a step back, and talk about what ordinary dissociation is.

Not all dissociation is ‘dissociative disorder.’ Dissociation is a normal part of the human experience and everyone does it. Dissociation is a spectrum, with typical dissociation on one end, dissociative disorders in the middle, and dissociative identity disorder (DID, what was formerly called MPD) on the other. (side note: I’m saying ‘typical’ not ‘normal,’; as per ‘rad mental health’ approach explained earlier, I’m not really interested in maintaining ideas about what is normal as those can reify false pretenses and forms of privilege taken for granted. If you’re hearing voices but you’re not in distress and you’re not causing anyone any harm, maybe there’s nothing wrong. However, if you’re in emotional distress and you wish not to be, that’s when you can use the tools available, including workshops such as this one).

Typical or ordinary dissociation is a common human experience: getting lost in a good book or film, daydreaming, creating art, forgetting where you put your keys, driving or cycling home on autopilot and not remembering how you got there are all typical instances of dissociation that everyone experiences. It just means not being here in your body in the here and now, the opposite of mindfulness. It’s part of the creative nature of human beings and a good thing.

When a young child experiences overwhelming terror and shame, usually in a situation in which the person or people causing the fear are also those the child depends on for safety, or if the caregivers are loving but are themselves experiencing overwhelming fear and shame, there are several possible coping strategies for the child, one of which is structural dissociation.

Young children live in the imaginary world much of the time and do not yet distinguish real and imagined worlds, so they are well placed to respond to sustained trauma through creating structural dissociation: where a coping strategy is to decide the part of you experiencing overwhelming terror and shame is utterly unacceptable. You are too young to recognize or think that it may not be about you. An available solution when other strategies of protection or escape are not possible, when caregivers who you depend on for survival are the ones causing the harm, or are themselves experiencing overwhelming danger, is to ‘decide’ that the part of the self experiencing this overwhelming shame and terror is not-you. When this happens while the brain is still quite plastic, the neurochemical effects of shame and terror can literally wall off the neural networks involved in this overwhelming experience. They freeze in the state of trauma, and continue to operate in intense distress, but out of the consciousness of the child, who can then go on in the unbearable situation. The effects on awareness may create a fuzzy feeling, a sense of disorientation or unreality, etc. but the overwhelming distress can be partitioned off so the person can continue to handle the unsafe situation, stay with the caregiver or otherwise survive.

Recently, neuroimaging has added empirical data to the understanding of what is actually going on in the nervous system and brain of people who experience this structural dissociation; I do not have a psychiatric background, so my understanding is of a layperson, but a psychiatrist explained that the ‘lower’ levels of the brain (brainstem and limbic brain) can ‘shut down,’ reroute or circumvent executive function in the neocortex.

One theory is that our minds are already organized in associative neural nets that link together thoughts, smells, memories, physical sensations, proprioception, and emotion; the difference in dissociative disorders is that some of these neural nets can literally wall themselves off from the part of the mind that does “I” or unitary consciousness. We may all already be multiple, in some sense, but for most people, our networks or self-states are fluidly connecting in a way we don’t even notice, whereas for people further along the spectrum of dissociative disorders, some networks in the brain literally get isolated and cut off, along with some sensory bits of awareness that are part of these nets. These can include aspects of sensory experience (smell, taste, touch, proprioception) as well as thoughts, beliefs, emotions, associations, because the brain is structured in networks of linked association already. The neural nets may freeze at this stage of development (sensory input and all) and delink from the rest of cognitive functioning. This may be why people who begin to integrate previously ‘fragmented’ aspects of self find the ‘young’ fragments come along with full sensory memory of their bodies at that age.

Once it happens once, the brain becomes reorganized differently or primed to use dissociation as the go-to coping strategy, so further traumas that might not cause splitting in typical people may cause further splits for people with dissociative disorders. That is part of why you can have alters who are different ages and multiple self-states at the same age, or the sense of echoes or mirrors of alters.

However, the causes can be deeper and rooted in the spirit, not just the brain, and healing can entail accessing those spiritual levels of knowledge to put the spirit back together, call your spirit back into your body, heal cracks and ruptures, organize the self, and find a way to feel safe living in this world.  Some of us come into this world even from the moment of conception feeling we are not safe here, and resist fully entering the body even as it is being formed. Or we may enter the body but be fragmented, parts of the self ‘mixed up,’ disorganized and not coherent. Spirit and neurons are related and can be healed at the same time.

“Pop culture references to dissociative disorders are generally sensationalist and focus on the most dramatic elements of DID  – the ‘split personality’ idea, when really dissociative disorders are a much more nuanced and broad set of experiences to do with not being able to think of things together that most people can think of together.”

Pop culture references to dissociative disorders are generally sensationalist and focus on the most dramatic elements of DID  – the ‘split personality’ idea –  when really dissociative disorders are a much more nuanced and broad set of experiences to do with not being able to think of things together that most people can think of together. It’s like fractures in your spirit, or in neurological terms, like a partitioned hard drive, and can be about small things as well as big things. It’s just a spectrum of experience.

It is pretty important when understanding dissociative disorder to understand it is, and talk about it as, a normal part of human experience. There is nothing esoteric or rare or mystical about it. In fact, people with the disorder mayalready believe that parts of them are ‘subhuman’ or shamed out of deserving to be part of the circle of human bonds; it is important not to reify this distorted belief. We need to get as comfortable talking about dissociative disorders as we are about cramps or the flu. These disorders are the third most common form of psychological distress after depression and anxiety. And yet one of the symptoms of the disorder is that it is constituted through a layering of casting out parts of oneself, or of feeling absolutely convinced that the symptoms and the parts of self that are expressing normal human needs are shameful and must be hidden. This is not the fault of the person experiencing the disorder, and is to be expected – it is part of the structural dissociation. So there is a great, great difficulty talking about it, even for those who are otherwise quite open people who speak easily about emotions.

In other words, if you’re supporting someone with dissociative disorder you can speak of it routinely and in an ordinary way, the same way people speak of anxiety or indigestion. The experience of dissociation may be uncomfortable, but it doesn’t set us into a category apart and it’s a perfectly ordinary part of the human experience. Talking about it in an ordinary every day way makes people feel less like we have two heads (apologies to people with two heads!), which is especially important and supportive, because from the inside, shame has literally structured our experience of ourselves.

Where there have been better representations in recent years they tend to fall into the politics of respectability – Much as I love the show United States of Tara, which is about a white blond middle class woman with a husband and a suburban house who has DID – it does humanize the disorder somewhat compared to Sybil, the most famous story before Tara – it does so at the expense of the depth of who really is more likely to have dissociative disorders, which is typically people who experienced the most trauma and don’t have a big house and a VW bug to drive. The day we get a show or film that humanizes a queer Indigenous kid of residential school survivors who doesn’t need to have all these other markers of normalcy to be seen as human we’ll be making some real progress… so rather than seeking to widen the circle of social acceptability the goal is is to eradicate it, and love and see all human being as worthy of life.

Because that’s part of what a dissociative disorder does: the parts of you that experienced overwhelming terror and shame can actually come to believe they are not allowed to exist, they are shame-based, subhuman, monstrous, and need to go away. And of course that’s not true of any of us, and the irony is it’s usually very beautiful child parts that do that, and all children are beautiful and deserve to exist.

It is often the most beautiful, powerful parts of ourselves that have been shamed or presented back to us in a distorted mirror.

There is nothing shameful at all about these parts of the self. It’s the situation they live through, where they are dependent for survival on maintaining a good relationship with someone who terrifies or shames them, that leads them to believe they are shameful because if a child does not have a need met, they will decide they are not allowed to have that need, that they do not, in fact, have the need. And it takes a lot to undo that belief once it is laid down in the limbic brain as a ‘rule’ and marked in the spirit. (For more on how the limbic brain creates ‘rules’ out of what are actually just happenstance, see the fantastic book A General Theory of Love that has changed my thinking forever.)

Symptoms

Symptoms of dissociative disorders are foundationally the same as the symptoms of PTSD but become the baseline state of being over a long time, unlike regular PTSD after an isolated incident, which fades slowly after the incident. Structural dissociation has additional features that also are not as commonly found in regular PTSD. Long-term symptoms/experiences can include:

• fogginess, difficulty thinking clearly
• feeling not real (ex: looking at parts of your body with alienation like ‘whose arm is this’?)
• limited awareness of body’s physical needs, hunger, sleep, food; strong ability to ‘tune out’ body
• ability to ‘tune everything out’ and overfocus on one thing/idea/project for extended periods or with unusual focus, can act extremely competent in some situations and completely incapable in others. May be very high-functioning due to ability to mask and compartmentalize completely for years.
• feeling like things or people around you are not real, or like familiar spaces/people/objects feel unfamiliar
• objects around you appear far away, or appear to move close and far
• feeling like you are very small inside yourself, or are underwater, unable to speak or struggling to ‘come up’ into speech (meanwhile, your mouth may be speaking but not words you feel ‘you’ are choosing, can be hard for others to tell the difference unless they pay attention)
• feeling like you are watching yourself, like you are in a story, or watching yourself ‘from above’ (for me it is often up and to the left or up and to the right, people describe different sensations)
• but you know these experiences are not ‘real’ in the sense that you know you are actually real, it just feels like you’re not (different from psychosis in that the person is aware it is just a feeling)
• spinning or sense of direction inverted, up/down left/right inverting (polarities of the body inverting)
• disorientation in space and/or time (not knowing where you are in time or space, sense of streets or rooms moving around, sliding around in time, not understanding duration even while staring at a clock). It takes much more effort and concentration than other people to get from point A to point B even when you have done it many times because hallways, doors, buildings, seem to rearrange.
• more frequent instances of ‘losing keys’ phenomenon (especially when triggered), gaps in memory
• feeling your body is a different shape or size than it actually is (ex: a ‘younger’ body sense)
• finding evidence that you did things and do not remember doing them (new items acquired, emails in sent folder you don’t remember sending)
• involuntary behavior (can look similar to compulsion or OCD symptoms, usually lacks the ideation)
• losing executive control of your body/hands/speech, feeling you are only able to observe, or that you flail in attempting to reestablish connection and safety (you may experience a need for being held or for limbic connection as a life-threatening need)
• gaps in memory or awareness/amnesia for parts of days, or for spans of time
• feeling multiple, awareness of ‘alters/fragments/parts/self-states,’ co-consciousness (varies), chorus. Important to note there is no ‘original’ or ‘true’ self, all the parts are the person.
• actually hearing ‘other’ you’s responding in your head or your mouth, can be younger parts of you
• dream or waking pantheon of figures/self-states/dream figures (child states at different ages, capable protector, impotent protector, judge, internalized abuser figure, unicorn or magical self-state, etc.)
• strong tendency towards retreat into fantasy; strong fantasy life; protection from scary or painful experiences/knowledge by buffering with fantasy, or some difficulty distinguishing fantasy from reality (but different from psychosis in some noted ways, not ‘I can fly/the aliens put the ideas in my mind’ but more like ‘this person is going to stay with me forever,’ or ‘this person is not actually dead,’ difficulty and slowness absorbing painful realities esp to do with abandonment or reminders of original overwhelm). May have difficulty perceiving physical reality, doing daily chores and tasks, managing space, because physical senses ‘buffered’ by involuntary fantasy strategy.
• difficulty with or confusion over discerning appropriate levels of trust; may trust people too quickly in a childlike way, or trust the wrong people, or not really trust anyone at all and not know this experience is missing, simplistic black and white thinking about whether people are trustworthy. May take people very literally about verbal promises the way a young child would.
• simultaneously knowing and not-knowing things (related to strong fantasy structure). i.e. you can know that someone you love has actually died, but simultaneously not-know it. Or you can know that a relationship has ended, while simultaneously not-knowing it. Being multiple = simultaneous multiple truths/capacities to absorb.
• difficulty perceiving other people’s needs and feelings when in a triggered state
• strong inexplicable emotions, abrupt childlike emotions, even if not aware of fragments in consciousness (abruptness of emotions rising up that make no sense or feel simpler in density)
• self-harm (active like cutting, or passive like not sleeping, not eating, not noticing body)
• feeling each relationship is ‘the only one’ and forgetting who you are in your other relationships, i.e. having a hard time remembering that you are simultaneously your mother’s daughter, your partner’s partner, your best friend’s friend, thinking of each as though it is the only one
• having ‘parts/fragments/self-states’ that handle different situations/contexts – i.e. a part that handles driving, a part that does your job, a part that parents, etc.), finding it hard to think of yourself in multiple contexts simultaneously, sometimes behaving very differently in different contexts, more than typical (ie extreme shame or shyness or forgetting their strengths around certain people when person is also very outgoing and self-confident in other situations)
• whichever ‘part’ is expected or associated with a given situation is likely to ‘come forward’ involuntarily when in that situation/with that person. Can be useful coping strategy as when you automatically ‘become’ your capable self at work when you were completely non-functional at home, or can be disruptive/scary/uncomfortable when you can’t prevent switching around certain people you would want to not-switch around (ie people who trigger associations or lessons from original abuser), or as the ‘walls’ between parts of cognition begin to break down as you age and previous coping strategies no longer work)
• extreme feelings of shame or feeling some part of yourself is monstrous, unacceptable, abusive, subhuman, wanting to ‘cut off’ parts of yourself or ‘dissolve’ them or make them go away, denial of self-love for parts of yourself, difficulty even looking at this shame because it feels primordial and unquestionable, certainty that this part of the self must be hidden (even from oneself)
• concurrent self-medicating or ‘checking-out’ strategies (addiction to substances, internet, sex)
• seeking physical contact/reassurance, may end up in unsafe sexual situations when seeking care
• concurrent physical issues caused by chronic elevated stress over time: respiratory infections,
  autoimmune disorders, inflammation and inflammation-related illnesses, sleep disorders, weight gain, tiredness, difficulty healing physically, allergies, adrenal fatigue
• difficulty with self-regulation of nervous system (skipping developmental stages, needing lots of skin on skin contact or bodily pressure to feel ok, to sleep, to not feel physical discomfort, like an infant or young child would need. Skin on skin contact or full body pressure feels needed to regulate nervous system, may be experienced as a survival need)
• suicidal ideation, depression and anxiety, caused by the trauma or by triggers, (different from depressive/anxiety disorders)
• sleep disorders, night terrors, avoiding sleep, frequent wakings or disturbed sleep, may sleep best with safe trusted company
• difficulty imagining trust, belonging, or safety, may not know how these feel but may not realize it
• inability to speak, or inability to stop speaking, as the words tumble out, but they are not the words you are trying to say, which are trapped in the body
• not making the connections between these different experiences, not putting the picture together, finding it hard to think about things together (ex a person may have nightmares, feeling of unreality, slippage in space and time, and a partial ‘pantheon’ of figures, but never put any of these things together or notice they may be related). Not noticing that the slippage or disconnecting is even happening. Awareness may be only of feeling a little ‘spacy’ sometimes but not of all the other sensations or experiences, not knowing it is possible to feel any other way.

How does it happen? Causes

The current scientific understanding of the causes of dissociative disorder is that it is caused by CPTSD/disorganized attachment, caused by sustained trauma before the age of (some say 3, some 5 or 7), in which safety orperceived survival depend on a continued good relationship with the person or people causing the harm. Learning about attachment theory can be very helpful for putting this cause into context, as DD is caused by high-betrayal trust trauma, or attachment trauma, and is deeply relational, not something just happening inside the person in an isolated way. It can also occur when caregivers are themselves in distress or overwhelmed.  It isn’t necessarily the fault of parents or caregivers, who may themselves have trauma histories or be experiencing distress.

“Dissociative Disorder is caused by high-betrayal trust trauma, or attachment trauma, and is deeply relational, not something just happening inside the person in an isolated way. Dissociative disorders are the internalization of structural violence, of oppression. Dissociation is an adaptive response of a healthy body to an unhealthy situation – it is the body’s brilliance. ”

It usually occurs early, before the age of 5-7 because during this time children are still living vividly in the imaginary world and have exceptionally plastic, flexible brains, and also may have limited access to other coping strategies or material support and can turn to dissociation as a defense mechanism when no other escape is possible. It can also be found where there is not abuse, but where parents or caregivers are themselves in distress, as in war times, genocide, extreme poverty, intergenerational trauma, etc. So having a dissociative disorder doesn’t necessarily mean that your caregivers were abusive, but can occur because they themselves are experiencing overwhelming powerlessness and distress, as many do who face structural violence. Dissociative disorders are literally the internalizing of oppression.

Inasmuch as the ‘brain disorder’ paradigm is relevant – and I know even for so-called ‘brain diseases’ that is a contentious approach that has mixed value – even within the biomedical model, dissociative disorders are not genetic. You’re not born with them in the sense that you can be born with a family or genetic predisposition to schitzophrenia, depression, or autism. While dissociative strategies do run in families just as trauma does, there does not seem to be any kind of genetic predisposition, other than a tendency to be particularly imaginative.  (It may actually have a relationship to hypnosis in that you are acting without your own awareness, but what relationship is unclear, whether it is just an apparent similarity or is structurally related is not clear).

In other words, dissociative disorders are always caused by structural violence, by oppression. They are one way the body and spirit internalize violence we experience. So to heal and change this, you do not stigmatize or blame the person experiencing it, anymore than you would blame the victim in a rape case or blame refugees for fleeing war. These things are structural and the most ethical way to respond to them is to help and support the person having these experiences to make these links, which they may be prevented by the disorder from fully doing.

“To heal this, you do not stigmatize or blame the person experiencing it, anymore than you would blame the victim in a rape case or blame refugees for fleeing war.”

Who is most likely to have them? Stats seem very hard to come by but more women have DD than men, and trauma survivors also tend to have higher incidences of DD, so while I could not find statistics and am still looking, I would be curious to know the impact and occurrence among Indigenous people, incest, rape, and domestic abuse survivors, residential school survivors, survivors of genocide and land theft and continuing colonization, people detained as children in migrant detention or whose parents are dealing with migrant detention system, children dependent on smugglers to cross borders – there were very limited stats on it from what I could find. In other words, Dissociative Disorders are most common among people who experience structural violence over the long term and starting from very young, even from the moment of conception or from family structures that predate conception. Intergenerational trauma can also be part of this picture because, for instance, the very moment of conception and the time leading up to it can shape how you enter your body in the first place and how safe it feels to do so.

How it works

With improvements in brain imagining new research is coming out that can actually observe empirically different activity in areas of the brain when people are switching and see how people’s brains differ from ‘typical’ brains for those with DD/DID. This has created new knowledge about what actually happens to people who have this kind of fragmentation. It is neurological as well as spiritual, from what I’ve been able to understand. Both approaches are useful. However, knowledge of what actually happens in the brain – overdevelopment of certain areas, underdevelopment of others such as those responsible for learning, for understanding time and cause-effect, for emotional regulation  – is creating more tools for recognizing that this is not the fault of the person experiencing the fragmentation, that they’re not faking it, that it’s very real. The research has grown a lot in the last five or ten years in clarifying that these experiences are very real.

Internally, usually people are so accustomed to being fragmented that they don’t notice it is happening. Also, awareness of the dissociation is also one of the things ‘kept apart’ – awareness that you are dissociating is usually kept out of consciousness. This is a powerful protective mechanism and it is adaptive, usually as a response to prolongued trauma with no escape. I want to stress again here that it isn’t necessarily the fault of parents or caregivers, who may themselves have trauma histories or be experiencing distress. Dissociative Disorders do not necessarily mean your caregivers were abusive; it can occur when caregivers are themselves in distress or overwhelmed.

“Dissociative Disorders do not necessarily mean your caregivers were abusive; it can occur when caregivers are themselves in distress or overwhelmed.”

The risk in dissociative disorders is that the dissociation is involuntary and is situation-specific. So being a competent adult-self in a given situation may depend on continuing to associate that situation with that ‘part’. Once the walls between the parts start to break down, as does tend to happen with aging or after years of your body handling the chronic stress caused by the fragmentation, the inner world can become chaotic and confusing as previously walled-off aspects of awareness begin to intrude on consciousness.

For some further along the spectrum, these self-states, or alters, or parts (different people use different words) may feel quite distinct. The fundamental experience of separation of parts of awareness or consciousness is the underlying experience. People with dissociative disorders further along the spectrum or into DID can have varying degrees of ‘co-consciousness’ where the ‘parts’ are experienced like a chorus or a multitude of voices. Some may have less ‘co-consciousness’ where different aspects or parts of the self ‘move forward’ and take over executive function or ‘rise up’ and take turns acting as the primary self. Some people experience the ‘parts’ as having an internal location in inner space, and they may move as people integrate or as relationships between ‘parts’ become more coherent and consistent.

Because lower parts of the brain (brainstem and limbic brain) can circumvent or ‘shut down’ the neocortex to handle a perceived survival threat, sometimes ‘parts’ of a fragmented person can act independently without the conscious awareness of the person with the dissociative disorder, resulting in what looks (and is experienced as) involuntary behavior, what may appear similar to compulsions or OCD-like symptoms. This is sometimes one of the only symptoms the person may be aware of, and they may hide these symptoms for a long time due to the certainty that these symptoms (in fact, that the underlying ‘part’ and its very legitimate needs) are inherently shameful – even when that is patently untrue. Shame structures the limbic brain originally, in dissociative disorders, and so it can be quite convincing, even when from the outside it is evident there is nothing shameful in the person. The limbic brain, the middle part of our brain which handles relating (such as building bonds between newborn and parent, or between lovers, etc.)  does not have language.

It’s important to note, however, that these involuntary behaviors differ from compulsions. They are involuntary, not compulsive. They are being carried out by a part of the self that the person does not have volitional access to neurologically, so the strategies for managing compulsions are not the same as the strategies for healing this kind of trauma. Involuntary actions of this sort are not typically accompanied with ideation, the way compulsions are (such as, ‘if I don’t tap three times a plane will hit the house’ – see more on this later in ‘distinctions’). They are based in attachment traumas.

The psych literature uses the term DID where the ‘parts’ take on different names or where the person experiences what seem like two or more distinct personalities, and DD or OSDD where the parts appear less distinct. It’s all the same though, really: keeping apart things that typically you can think of together.

Examples: ‘what it feels like’

Feeling so different in different situations that you almost feel like you are different people, like you can’t remember who you are.

Feeling like your body isn’t real, or like objects or people around you aren’t real

Confusion in space and time, perception of the world ‘moving’ around you, doors and hallways appear to rearrange themselves regularly

Significant capacity to mask that any of this is happening

Buried sense of shame that feels impenetrable even when it is clearly not shameful

Hearing or feeling actual voices inside yourself that talk independently or feel emotions independently. You can feel ‘their’ emotion but the register is so different from your usual emotions that it feels like someone else. Sometimes they’re more childlike, simpler, bigger, or they rise up unexpectedly and then disappear again, and may be responding to things in the inner world (fantasy structures) rather than real things in the outer world.

Having a hard time remembering/understanding simultaneously that the ‘you’ who is your mother’s daughter is also the ‘you’ who is friends with your best friend, or partners with your partner. You may have all these relationships but only be able to think of yourself as in one at a time. That friend is ‘the only friend’ when you are with them.  When you are with them, your partner or best friends may each seem like “the only person you know or trust” in the world, when in reality you may have many safe trustworthy people in your life.

Having a hard time connecting, or not even thinking to connect, parts of your inner world or fantasy/dream world. Many people further along the dissociative disorder spectrum have waking or dreaming figures in their imaginary worlds that tend to form a ‘typical’ pantheon of figures:

child selves at different ages (such as multiple selves who are infants, 3 years old, 14 years old, etc.). this is not abstract, these ‘selves’ or parts can have actual physical sensations, sizes, associated with that age
the protector,
the judge,
there may be a magical or creative part of the self,
there often is an internalized figure of the original abuser, or a proximate symbolic figure (a scary angry man, an abusive adult from an institution, etc.) that resembles or represents the original perceived source of danger. This is also you, but it is a part of you that formed to try to prevent behavior that would originally have brought violence down on you when you were actually in the situation.
the defender/fighter parts (tough identities that can stick up for themselves)
these can be dream figures, or they can emerge as waking parts of the self, and they can have varying ‘locations’ in the inner world, and varying degrees of coconsciousness. They can sometimes take on the shape of different people with different names, histories, etc. but it’s important to remember that there is only one person in there and none of the ‘parts’ are full personalities. It is more like a fragmented or partitioned hard drive. It’s all one computer, but the consciousness gets separated into parts.

People with dissociative disorders may dream about, daydream about, or if they are creative types, even create fiction or films populated by these figures without putting them all together to see the pattern. Some parts may emerge in the waking, acting world, but even in milder cases there is usually a sort of inner world populated by this complexity of selves.

Distinctions: Some useful facts about what Dissociative Disorders are not

Dissociative Disorder symptoms are often not recognized or are misdiagnosed as other things. Even psychologists often know very little about dissociative disorders. For instance I had been told for years ‘you don’t have OCD, you don’t have depression, you don’t have generalized anxiety, so we don’t know why this is happening to you.’

Symptoms can resemble but are actually different from:

Bipolar – what looks like ‘quick changes’ in mood is actually multiple fragments all acting at once or moving ‘forward’ or ‘rising to the surface’ simultaneously or in turns, more like a chorus than like ‘rapid cycling of mood.’ From the outside it can be hard to tell the difference, but from the inside it feels very different from mood swings, more like a chorus of voices.

‘borderline’ – this catch-all term is highly controversial and very stigmatized, so I hesitate to even use it. A main distinction however between DD/DID and what people sometimes call ‘borderline’ is that in dissociative disorders the symptoms are not generalized across the person’s whole self. Certain distressed-states have these emotions (anger, difficulty perceiving and respecting boundaries, attachment issues or obsessing over attachment figures) while others do not. There is in DD usually an ‘apparently normal’ alter or self-state who does not appear symptomatic, is emotionally mature, has healthy boundaries, etc. while aspects of the whole self that have been ‘fragmented off’ (often the innocent parts that do genuine trust) are not noticed as missing by this part of the self. It’s important to note, however, that there is no ‘original’ self – all the fragments are the person. The ‘apparently normal self’ is just a self-state who developed on top of the younger or ‘emotional’ selves to cope with adult life. They are not ‘more real’ than any other part, but they may be who the person identifies as ‘themselves’ depending on how co-conscious the person is or how fragmented, or what their relationship is to integration, whether they are integrating or not, etc.

OCD/compulsion – the symptoms appear outwardly similar in that the person may do repeated things without choosing to and may be unable to voluntarily choose or will themselves to stop. However, this involuntary behaviour is an expression of attachment trauma and structural dissociation, not compulsion. In true compulsion there is ideation: ‘I must tap three times or a plane will hit the building.’ In dissociative disorders the behavior is just happening, and the person can’t stop it because they do not have executive access to the area of the brain that is acting. The lower levels of the brain can circumvent higher-order functioning and take over executive function when survival feels threatened (whether life is actually at risk or not: perception of the young child at the time of fragmentation is what matters). The person can no more ‘stop’ the action than they could ‘stop’ you from using your hands. Neurologically they simply do not have access, and it is important to understand this distinction. Because they do not have access to the source of executive functioning in these experiences, there isn’t the same kind of ideation or cause-effect emotions as in compulsion. Access must be regained before any further work can be done. There may be distress at watching the behavior, or the fragment who is carrying out the behavior may already be in a permanent state of extreme distress, but the experience is very different from the distress in compulsion because the cause-effect thoughts or sense of compulsivity is absent. There may not even be anxiety associated with the behavior, which is just happening while you watch, just as you would watch the actions of someone else’s body, not your own. Fighting it or trying to ‘just stop’ may make it worse, because the shame and distress level of the alter or fragmented self-state carrying out the actions may become more elevated, making the symptoms worse because they are addressing very real and legitimate unmet needs. Acceptance and compassion are the key to reintegration that allows the person experiencing these symptoms to regain executive control by reabsorbing the ‘fragment’ over time through loving acceptance, neurologically reintegrating the fragmented networks. The behavior is like an upset child trying to get a legitimate need met who does not believe they have the right to that need (for basic things like food, safety, trust, not to be abandoned by caregivers, etc.). If you’ve ever tried to tell a willful toddler they can’t have the hug they need when they are tired or scared, you’ll have some sense of just how strong this involuntary behaviour can be.

Depression or Anxiety – can be symptoms that are caused by trauma but are not in themselves the cause of the distress. Medication for these symptoms will not address the underlying disorder, which is not medicable, and sometimes medication can prevent accessing the emotions needed for integration.

Sleep disorders – are a symptom and heal by addressing the underlying fragmentation and trauma and rebuilding the nervous system.

The effects of stigma: what we don’t know can hurt us

Because it is so difficult to talk about for those experiencing it, because of sensationalist media representations, and because the neuroimaging technology that has let even professionals in the field understand structural dissociation is relatively new, this quite common human experience is still widely misunderstood and stigmatized. People with dissociative disorders already find it very difficult if not impossible to speak about their experiences, and reflexively use masking (both conscious and unconscious) to handle the fragmentation; when their symptoms can’t be hidden they may be shunned, shamed, or stigmatized, or may not get the support, compassion, and understanding they need.

The effects of stigma (loss of friends, social isolation, loss of work or shelter or social support) can be severe, especially where it retraumatizes the person by mimicking the original trauma. Stigma can be more harmful to the person with dissociative disorders than the disorder itself is when properly understood and supported.

The trickiest thing about supporting people with dissociative disorders is that overwhelming shame, fear, and ruptured trust are the original cause of the disorder, and the brain and spirit are literally structured by shame. The alters usually exist because they believe they are subhuman and not worthy of being part of a circle of humanity, of safety, of love and care and trust. That is the effect of experiencing overwhelming shame and fear at an age when you do not have the resources to understand why it is happening.

“You can create a safe culture for people with dissociative disorders.”

To heal, the alters need to be welcomed back into the fold of full humanity through compassionate acceptance that can begin to integrate the parts, neurochemically and spiritually. So when social ties repeat this shaming, shunning, or ostracizing, they literally retraumatize the person, reinjuring the same area that is causing the dissociation in the first place. You cannot shame a dissociated person into ‘acting normally’ – because dissociation is involuntary and is literally caused, structured, and driven by a primordial experience of being shamed and essential needs not being met (food, water, touch, reassurance, inclusion, love and acceptance, safety, attunement) which to a young child all feel like life or death needs.

It is an utterly misplaced sense of shame. Why would it be a young child’s failing if a parent neglects or doesn’t want them? Why would it be the child’s fault if the parents love them but are experiencing war, displacement, colonization, incarceration? Nonetheless since at a young age you can’t understand it isn’t about you, and because the limbic brain has a strategy of creating rules out of whatever is happening at the time the child is developing, the shame becomes a rock-solid distortion laid down deep in the limbic brain, in neurons, and in the spirit.

That structural shame is what drives the dissociation. So stigmatizing and ostracizing someone with a dissociative disorder – saying they must ‘just stop’ the dissociated behavior or you will stop speaking to them, for instance –  isparticularly retraumatizing to someone struggling with this disorder and is very likely to make symptoms much worse rather than better.

Of course, that doesn’t mean setting healthy boundaries isn’t good – it always is – but healthy boundaries are not coercive, they don’t work via the threat to cut ties if the involuntary mental health issue can’t be resolved upon demand. Healthy boundaries look like: hey, this is my boundary, I need you to respect it, I care about you, see you tomorrow/at dinner. Since CPTSD is an attachment trauma, or a high-betrayal-trust trauma, developing healthy attachment not only for the person with the symptoms but for those around them who love them is a big part of how healing happens. The person does not only heal in isolation but by experiencing healthy attachment bonds with secure, loving, consistently supportive people. (See Hold Me Tight by Sue Johnson for more on developing healthy secure attachments.)

Gifts

People with dissociative disorders, when the system is holding together, can have gifts of unusual focus, and also of unusual creativity. They are often unusually creative to begin with, and they may also keep a very rich fantasy world into adulthood. They can often, when they are holding it together, especially when they are younger, put away all distractions and focus utterly on what they are doing for kind of ridiculous lengths of time. (my old housemate said ‘endless-attention-span’ was my middle name, and many people in my life have commented on what was once an ability to concentrate on just one thing for hours, days, weeks, ignoring hunger, sleep, etc.). However, when the system is not holding together as well – as people begin to age, or as further stresses and traumas wear on the body – that intense focus can begin to break down, and intrusive thoughts and experiences can begin to mix in to the previously ‘walled off’ parts of the personality.

Because dissociative disorders come from attachment trauma, people with DD and disorganized or anxious attachment may have an uncanny ability to read subtleties in people and social situations, caused by the need to properly read unpredictable caregivers as children. People with DD thus have the gifts of highly sensitive attachment systems. They may be intuitive, and like many trauma survivors, they can be very, very ethical, unwilling to cause or witness harm to others because they know instinctively how it feels to be the subject of harm or neglect. They are often highly attuned to the suffering of ‘underdogs’ – abused animals, people in situations of violence or subjugation – and find it difficult to stop themselves from getting involved to stand up for justice because they grew up in a situation of injustice and are empathetic. Though their self-care skills may be lacking, they can, ironically, be very good caregivers, parents, partners, friends, especially if they get support and full loving acceptance to feel safe and work on managing and healing dissociative episodes and or beliefs of unworthiness. Like a wizard with a lot of power, someone with these kinds of gifts needs support, structure, safety, secure attachments, and training in how to use their gifts.

Questions!

Magic question box time

(take a short break, eat, etc. and have folks put questions in the box; answer any questions ppl write or ask in person). Remind ppl they don’t have to wait for breaks to move around, eat, lie down, etc.)

It’s important to normalize these experiences and cut some of the esoteric weirdness that shitty popular representations have woven up around them. So let’s get factual; ask whatever you want. I can only answer from my own experience and different people with dissociative disorders will have extremely varied inner experiences, but I’m happy to be the guinea pig and answer any questions about what it’s like for me.

Things you can do (and not do) to support someone with a dissociative disorder

Educate others and speak up. Actively educate yourself and others around you. Instead of leaving it to the person struggling with the disorder to educate others in the community, share this destigmatizing practice so it is not all up to them. If people respond with a stigmatizing or blaming reaction, you can point out “it isn’t their fault, they have a dissociative disorder caused by (name the violence), maybe you could be more accepting.” Make links clear to the abuse or violence that caused the dissociative disorder, and to the need for social inclusion in countering the effects of structural violence. Just as we are learning that people with depression aren’t to blame for what they are experiencing, and we can love and support them as they are without expecting them to “just snap out of it,” people with dissociative disorders cannot just “snap out of it.” It isn’t something they’re doing on purpose, and they may already be feeling quite a lot of deep shame about it. Add to that the fact that the experience of dissociation puts even very verbal people into a childlike, sometimes nonverbal state, or makes it very difficult for them to choose or even access speech, and expecting them to be able to act in the normal ways adults usually act or judging them for an inability to explain what is going on or ‘stop it’ is actually cruel. Don’t leave it up to the people experiencing the disorder to advocate for themselves at times when they may hardly even be able to speak; learn about the disorder and share this role of education. Blaming someone for involuntary dissociative actions is akin to blaming someone for limping when they have a hurt leg. You do not ostracize someone socially, you offer support in a nonjudgmental atmosphere, and work together to find healthy inclusive ways for everyone to feel good.

Don’t be a bystander; you can make the world safer for people with dissociative disorders by normalizing the fact that this disorder exists, is not their fault, and is actually quite common. The only reason people do not yet easily say things like “Oh, are you feeling a little dissociated today?” the way we might ask “How’s your cold?” is because we have not yet reached the level of broad social awareness that we need. As we have seen with other experiences, this can change and can change quickly, once people join in and change the discourse.

Stop ‘Atticking’: Include and honour, don’t shun or hide the person. Be conscious of the history of ‘the madwoman in the attic.’ Don’t try to hide the person away, or encourage masking or shame over the symptoms. When you encourage the person to hide you’re retraumatizing them by reinforcing the original shunning/shaming. Be aware in particular of how gendered this is, how much women are taught to not have needs, to not have concerns and harm seen. If their symptoms are embarrassing to you because they are not normative, how do you think it feels from inside them? Normalize instead of hiding. Act as an ally who can say ‘hey, you’re welcome with us as you are even when you are dissociating. Here is your seat at the table. You don’t have to pretend to be feeling ‘normal’. We get it, and we get you, and you’re welcome here just as you are.

But do not out people or share info you know that the person experiencing it has not agreed can be shared. Outing people can lose them friends, jobs, driver’s licenses, housing, and maybe even control over their bodies, because whatever ‘part’ is expected is more likely to arise for a dissociated person, so having people know of their alters makes it more likely that alters will step forward. This may not always be what the person wants; for most of us, keeping our adult selves ‘in front’ is crucial to how we hold our lives together.

Counter stigma. Get comfortable talking about and hearing about experiences that fall outside the ‘norm,’ including dissociative experiences. Get familiar with these experiences if you’re not already, so they become normal and easy to talk about. But do not expect someone with a dissociative disorder to be able to or feel safe explaining it or talking about it or even showing you what is going on inside them. The only places that feel really safe to have alters come up are very very private, intimate, utterly safe places with people who are not going anywhere and are totally accepting and stable in their support. Because dissociation is situational, telling people does make it more possible that we might dissociate around that person. When we can’t choose when and how the switching happens it can be very destructive. Imagine having parts of yourself that act without your conscious will – really take time to imagine that. How would you want people to respond to you? Make the fact that dissociative disorders exist a normal part of daily life, just something to accept about people, and see how people blossom at this social inclusion.

Remember that ‘distressed states’ are just a facet of their personality and that there is a whole person in there even at moments when they can’t remember themselves; focus on what you and others in your community like, trust, admire about them. Also remember that even the ‘emotional’ parts of them are good. Usually these are just scared traumatized children who have all the wonderful qualities that a sensitive child would have had, and they just need love acceptance and support like anyone else. If their actions make you upset, you can learn how to set healthy boundaries without creating walls or judgment or using anger and distancing to try to control them; coercion or threats of abandonment don’t work, and are retraumatizing. Instead, know your capacity to offer love and care and support, and stay within your own limits. Build and actively use a support net so that friendships do not get overly taxed, and step up and back appropriately. Take this opportunity to learn about yourself and increase your ability to be part of a community care net by increasing your awareness of your own limits and capacities in advance so you can offer predictable levels of support. Get good at communicating your needs and capacities in a mature way. Don’t blame the person or get angry at them for things that are out of their control; it is cruel and makes healing much harder. Mad mapping/wellness mapping and advance directives are useful tools for community care; use them. Work on your own attachment practices and styles so that you can be supportive.

Listen Deeply recognize the person may be having immense difficulty expressing what is happening to them or using language. They may say things that seem out of character, words tumbling out of control, or may struggle to speak at all. Listen carefully for the quiet reasonable part that may be trying to express what would return them to a feeling of safety. If you speak to this ‘part’ you may make it easier for this ‘part’ to come forward. Ask the person how this feels for them. Do they want you to talk with ‘fragments’ or just with the ‘apparently normal self’?

Believe in them and in their self-knowledge. Don’t try to ‘guess’ when someone with a dissociative disorder is or isn’t dissociating, or try to guess what that might feel like. Just ask them. You will not guess right because the way it feels varies from person to person and internally day by day even for the same person. Sometimes people may be severely dissociated and it will be obvious if you know what dissociation looks like for that person, and prior understandings, such as mad maps, can be very helpful, but sometimes normal life is going on and there is some background noise of dissociation happening at the same time. Dissociation does not mean ‘switching’ in some simplistic sense where you literally talk to different people, because even for those who have severe DID there are varying degrees of co-awareness between fragmented self-states. It is always all one person, just a person with fragmentation in their awareness.

Trust the person’s expertise about their own experiences and respect the safety agreements they ask for. Trying to guess when someone is or isn’t dissociated, countering what they say is going on, is demeaning and demoralizing. It is stressful and scary to have to ‘convince’ people that you are not dissociated when they think you are, or that you are dissociating when they think you are not. Having people not trust you on your own self-state adds extra layers of distress to the already complex and challenging process of learning to understand your own internal experience. It takes away yet more autonomy from people who already may be working overtime to maintain autonomy over their own body. Someone with a dissociative disorder may notalways know when they are dissociating, especially when it is just partial or when they are so used to dissociating they don’t notice – but they can learn, and are usually working to get better at recognizing their own symptoms. They will always be better at recognizing it than you. So show the person you have faith in their knowledge of themselves – and actually have it – by simply asking them in an open, accepting, and listening way, whether they are dissociating and what would help, and letting them have space to figure out the answers. They are the best situated person to understand their own internal experience. Paternalistic responses are ill-informed and harmful. In addition, what we really need is to be loved and accepted as our whole selves as we are integrating. For many of us, the reality is there are not clear lines between when we ‘are’ and ‘aren’t’ dissociating – there is no ‘true’ personality, and our adult competent self is also an alter. So love us whole, accept us whole, and trust our expertise on ourselves, if you want to help.

Don’t diagnose people or tell them what they need. On that note: when we are already experiencing loss of agency and control over our bodies and potentially aspects of our lives and minds, being told what we feel and what to do in a paternalistic way rather than being listened to and supported is extra scary and disempowering. Also these experiences are extremely complex on the inside – oceans of cause and effect – so what you see on the outside may be very different from what the person is actually experiencing. Trust them and teach them to trust themselves, especially as this agency may have originally been denied them by the original situation that caused the fragmentation. The person themselves is best situated to figure out what they need, with your support and faith in them. It can be very very hard to come into speech from deep inside yourself to name what is happening and what will keep you safe: listen for that quiet voice trying to speak, and help. Be an advocate for the person.

Counter Gaslighting. If the person has internalized beliefs about shame or unworthiness due to abuse or violence they have experienced, or if they are being shamed or ostracized by the people who should be supporting them, or if they find it hard to think about events, help them see themselves and the situation more clearly. If someone has changed reality on them (common in trauma situations with complex PTSD) or made them feel something is their fault that is actually structural or external to them, help them see it. Work on being able to see it yourself, by recognizing structural violence and putting responsibility where it belongs.

Wait it out. Mark Twain famously said “If you don’t like the weather in New England, wait five minutes.” Someone who is switching, including subtly when there are no clear distinct ‘alters,’ may not remember that five minutes ago they were fine. Once they feel fine, they may not remember why they were so upset. Be the bridge: when they are in distress, remember for them that this is not their whole self. Give them time and patience and remember who they are, until they come back to themselves.

We’re not trained monkeys. While it’s important to be able to speak easily about this common human experience, do not exoticize or mystify it. It is actually very common, it isn’t actually that bizarre, and there is a perfectly ordinary human in there who is having these experiences. People may choose to share with you if you are trustworthy, but do not ask for people to ‘perform’ or ask to ‘meet’ alters. Do not ask ‘which you are you?’ People do have varying degrees of co-consciousness between parts, and how internally consistent they feel changes for any one person over time. The inner experience is generally much more complex than the idea of ‘many people inside one person’ would suggest. Remember this is all one person, just someone with a trauma history and fragmentation in their spirit. Talk to them the way you would anyone else, and respect their privacy.

Make and keep agreements about which parts you speak to; adapt agreements as needed over time. Find out whether (and when and how) your friend or lover or coworker finds it helpful for you to address alters or fragmented self-states. sometimes if you have a very trusting relationship, you can help by building trust with fragments, but this is a long-term responsibility, akin to the responsibility of parenting, and cannot be entered into lightly. Often you may help more by simply accepting that fragment-states exist, offering kindness and understanding, while agreeing to interact only with the ‘adult/apparently normal’ self-state, since addressing the adult part of your friend may let them be that part of themselves more easily and may protect the ‘younger’ fragment-states from reinjury or retraumatization. If you decide to start building trust with child-state fragments, you must stick around for the long haul or risk retraumatizing these parts that need trust to counter the shame that made them; keep that in mind in your decision-making about your capacities. Sometimes it is best to decide together that everyone agrees the fragment states are allowed to exist (there’s no shame in them and the symptoms are totally ok), but you’re choosing to talk to or interact with the regular adult part of your friend.

Understand that healing entails learning and change. Adapt with them as the person learns more about what helps. What was useful understanding a year ago may have changed as the person moves along their healing path. Do your own research and reading and offer them tools and resources so they do not always have to lead. Get good at supportive, interdependent boundaries and at communication. Caring about and supporting someone in a non-stigmatizing way means growing with them as they grow, moving with them in the dance of relating. If you can do it in a noncoercive, nonpaternalistic, respectful and supportive way, then it helps if you actively make their healing your business.

Unconditional acceptance and kindness, along with formal structured support systems and ending stigma, are the best cure. Dissociative disorders are among the most treatable mental health issues, responding better to treatment than anxiety or depression.

Make mad maps. The best way to build collective safety and capacity for mutual care and support is to create mad maps, which let someone think ahead about how their community, family and friends can best help when they are in distress. People with high-betrayal-trust trauma may not understand or believe that they deserve emotional support, inclusion, or belonging, and so you can model this for them even if they do not understand how it feels to be included and to have their legitimate needs for safety recognized and met. Mad maps also give you clear info about who the primary support people are, so people do not get overwhelmed or feel in over their heads. This is important, because protecting relationships over the long term prevents retraumatization, shaming, and social isolation, and experiencing genuine trust encourages healing.

Build nets. To spread out the care and help the primary support people feel supported themselves, some people like to create a formal ‘net’ of support. Different friends may enjoy offering support in different ways. For instance, one person might like to be the one who checks if you’ve eaten and slept that day, but doesn’t want to do a lot of emotional processing, while another might love to listen to the minutia of emotional healing, but won’t want to cuddle you to sleep. Everyone can help in the ways they want to when you create a net of trusted friends. This is usually done in confidence.  The members of the net know who each other are, and have permission from the affected person to turn to each other for extra help and ideas. Nets also mean the person at the centre offers a gift to their community of fostering stronger relationships. The bonds formed and learning that arises through these nets is a gift the person with the dissociative disorder shares with their family and community, by strengthening the genuine bonds between people and helping people be more vulnerable with one another, building trust.

Share responsibility for creating a safe culture for people with dissociative disorders and with all ‘divergent’ mental health experiences. Speak up. When you are witness to someone stigmatizing people who have these experiences, whether in private or in groups, don’t silently go along. When someone you know engages in demeaning gossip, attacking, ostracizing, or shaming, of someone with these symptoms, try saying something simple like “You know x has a dissociative disorder. It isn’t their fault, it is caused by (name the structural violence) and they’re doing their best. Maybe you could have a little more understanding.” Just as we don’t leave it up to trans people to always have to be the ones to ask for pronouns to be respected, because it isn’t the job of the person who is stigmatized or facing ignorance to educate everyone – it is all of our responsibility – we can help reduce stigma and ignorance about dissociative disorders.

Many people have them and keep that info and symptoms masked. Currently it is not very safe to be out as having a dissociative disorder. Let’s change that. If someone you know has dissociative symptoms and is able to name what is happening to them in whatever way they understand it, do not shame or ostracize them; and if you hear people getting angry or being judgmental about these symptoms, speak up. You can say “it’s not their fault, and judging them isn’t right.” You can learn more about the disorder so that it appears less mystifying and esoteric and more ordinary, so that people struggling with these experiences don’t need to do so in secret but can learn that they are safe and accepted.

Give people the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes symptoms of the disorder can mask as personality traits; people may decide you are simply an unreliable or untrustworthy person if you appear to have sudden inexplicable changes in self-state or awareness. It is important to be able to simply ask, rather than assume. If the person is experiencing an involuntary change of consciousness or is unable to speak from their ‘adult’ or ‘ordinary’ self, or can’t concentrate or is suddenly foggy or not all there, work with them to help bring that part of them back out. Do not blame or get angry at child-states as that elevates tension and makes the situation much harder. Usually with a collaborative agreement and some basic safety agreements made – and kept – the person can get a handle on what is happening, and can take responsibility for their actions. While you can’t always know what is happening inside someone who does things you don’t like, in general giving each other the benefit of the doubt creates a more accepting, loving culture that makes everyone safer.

No, it’s not ‘an inner child’. Dissociative disorders are different from the idea of ‘an inner child’ and it is demeaning and disrespectful to insist they are ‘the same’. It’s a common question people ask, and it’s fine to wonder and ask, but the answer is ‘no, this is not the same as your inner child or childish emotions.’ These are related experiences but they are not the same. If you insist that it is you are not listening. Your ‘inner child’ may have a bad day but it does NOT take over executive control of your body, or make you black out and not remember later what you did, or speak in a literally separate voice, or move your mouth to answer your questions. These are real things that are happening in our brain and spirit – they are neurological structures within us and/or fractures in our spirit. Ask if you want, but when you hear the answer, don’t tell people you know what is happening inside them as it’s incredibly disempowering and disrespectful. Feel free to ask if someone feels comfortable talking about the difference, so that you can learn, but then listenand believe them when they tell you how their experience differs from yours.

Use a structural perspective. Actively make the connections – for yourself and for others – between violence a person has experienced in their formative years and the dissociative symptoms you may be witnessing now. Since this violence may be hidden, and/or may be old (though usually it springs back up again when exposure to traumatizing situations occurs, such as at family events or in similar contexts, so it may not be as ‘in the past’ as all that) help the person make the connections and see with adult eyes that what happened/s to them is NOT THEIR FAULT and not about them at all, not a measure of their worth or value as a human being or deserving of acceptance. If you are close to someone who has a dissociative disorder now because of patriarchal or racist violence that structured their psyche, talk about that with others around them instead of erasing it or individualizing the disorder. We do not exist in isolation, and the symptoms that show up in one person can be indications of normalized violence acted out by another. Think about relational responsibility, and learn how to develop healthy boundaries instead of cutting ties. This is how our politics is lived on the ground.

Don’t say ‘Just stop’ or get angry at the person experiencing dissociative symptoms, involuntary behavior, switching, etc. This is cruel because they can’t ‘just stop’ and threatening to stop speaking to them if they can’t stop an involuntary mental health issue will be likely to raise the level of distress of the alter, making it harder for the person to do what you’re asking rather than easier. Work together with the ‘adult’ or ‘reasonable’ part of them to help handle the distressed self-states together.

Say “this isn’t your fault,” and “there is no shame in what you’re experiencing,” and take the time to make the political connections to see why that is true. Actin ways that back up your words: include the person and stop others from shaming them. And do the long term work within yourself to increase your compassion and empathy for self and others. Compassion for self and compassion for others grow together and are related: the more you can offer care and love and acceptance to yourself the more you can offer acceptance and safety to one another, to create a fertile ground for healing. When we cannot love or accept or even fully see ourselves we have a harder time loving, accepting, and seeing others fully. Grow the good.

(this is the end of the first three-hour session, follow this by discussion, questions, go-arounds, people sharing their insights and understandings). If there is time for a second three-hour session..

Part Two:

Role plays! (a.k.a. omg are we really doing this? Yes!)

caveat: I feel very uncertain about these and am looking to gather more. DD is a tremendously varied experience from person to person and context to context. There are things missing that I wondered about including but felt unable to represent them well because they are far from my experience, and other things that may be so specific to me that they aren’t useful for a workshop. I really feel uncertain about these, and I’m interested to see how they go. Most are from my own experience, some are from research I’ve been doing or readings.

Also of course these are hard to frame because these same situations or experiences could be caused by other things. So for the purpose of today I wanted to see if it works if we assume that some form of dissociation is part of the picture, whether or not that is named explicitly. I’m interested in hearing feedback about how that feels, if it works, what else might work as an approach. So this feels very tentative and I thank you for sandboxing it with me.

There is an ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ box – you can pick which box you take from J

(easy box)
A friend confides in you that they are feeling like they are not sure they are real, that they feel their body is someone else’s, or feel like familiar objects and people around them seem unreal or suddenly unfamiliar. ‘whose life is this? whose body is this?’. They say they know it is just a feeling, that of course they and their surroundings are real. but the feeling is very real and causes them distress. They ask if you’ve ever felt things like that.

A good friend you have known for years sometimes seems disoriented in time or space. For instance one day they are supposed to come over. They’ve been to your house dozens of times. They are late and then they phone you and say ‘I’m so confused, I am standing in front of your house but it doesn’t look the way I remember, did you change the flowers?’ turns out they are on the next block over looking at a house in approximately the same place as yours but a block over. This seems so funny to you because they’ve been coming to your house for years.

Your partner, in their sleep, sometimes becomes distressed, opens their eyes, and starts screaming, running around, or sometimes throwing things out the window. One time you wake up to find the blankets are already halfway out the second-floor window with your partner furiously stuffing them the rest of the way. Another time they sit up yelling that ‘the big wall with spikes’ is going to crush you both and you have to run now. Their eyes are open and they are talking about their dream as if it is real and they seem to believe the window is the only way out of the room and that you both have to run before you get crushed (or spiked, or a bomb explodes under the bed, or glass falls on you from the ceiling, etc.) They soon wake up partway and say ‘it is just a dream but I am looking right at it’. This happens every few nights. You are concerned some day they and not just the blankets may actually go out the window, but so far so good. They don’t feel seriously concerned about this and don’t want to move the bed.

Your housemate, who you don’t know very well, frequently screams or runs around in their sleep, sometimes screaming bloody murder loud enough to wake up the whole house.

An acquaintance you met at a friend’s birthday dinner and spent a whole night talking to is then at the same demo as you the following week, and when you say hi, they seem not to remember you at all. You feel snubbed or like they just don’t think you’re important enough to say hi to. Now you’re in conversation with other people who are all discussing how this person must be a snob because sometimes they are really friendly and sometimes they act like they don’t know you at all.

Your coworker confides in you that they are experiencing upset child states and have recently learned they have a dissociative disorder, and they are afraid if anyone notices they have started ‘switching’ states of consciousness at work they may lose their job.

(hard box)

Someone you know suddenly behaves in a very different way than usual, and says they have a hard time ‘remembering’ how they normally feel, who their friends and family are, who they trust. They report abrupt changes back and forth depending on who they are interacting with, sometimes within seconds or minutes. One ‘state’ may seem happy, confident, calm, while the other may seem distressed, young or very emotionally needy, or express feelings of shame and lack of self-love or self-acceptance. They are experiencing immense distress.

Someone you have known a long time who is usually full of ideas and talkative now has long stretches (hours/days) of staring blankly into space. In a clearer moment they say they have been having constant compulsive symptoms for several weeks in secret, and they now spend many hours each day not moving or speaking, barely responsive.

You make plans with a friend of yours who is usually easygoing. You say you’ll do something specific, like talk on the phone at 3 pm on a certain day. That day comes and you are busy and forget. You call later that day for another reason, and suddenly your friend seem very distressed and repeats your words, in a childlike way, saying things like  ‘you said we would’ or ‘you said these words’. They seem unable to move on or let go of the words you used when you made the plan.

Someone you are dating or involved with romantically confides that they experience involuntary behaviour after romantic or sexual situations, and say they feel like they are watching themselves and cannot voluntarily access their body’s actions sometimes. Examples include compulsive emailing or phoning. They express profound shame over this part of themselves and say they wish they could just ‘cut it off and make it go away’. In person the behaviour may include simply the feeling they need to be near a specific person (sitting near them, seeking physical contact, perhaps in a childlike way) but in a way that is very different from how this person usually behaves. This person expresses shame, guilt, or self-recrimination and believes that part of themselves is ‘monstrous,’ ‘subhuman,’ or unnacceptable.

Someone you know has marks that suggest cutting, and they confide that they sometimes feel they are literally watching when self-harm is happening, not like they are doing it themselves but like their hands act independently and are not responsive to their will no matter how hard they try.

As you are ending a long term relationship, your partner who has usually been loving, self-aware and kind suddenly behaves in very erratic or out of character ways, more than can be accounted for just by the usual emotions of a breakup. For instance, they break up with you and say they believe it is the right thing to do, but then become extremely distraught and seem to act suddenly childlike, wordless, or say things about not wanting to lose you that they later do not remember clearly, or later say weren’t actually real. They seem to be in denial about the breakup, talking about how you will live together for the rest of your lives and have a home together, even though they say they are the one who thinks the relationship should end. They seem disconnected from reality and are able to answer your questions about the fantasy structure, though they have a hard time clearing it out of their thoughts.

A coworker who has confided in you that they have a dissociative disorder frequently seems to forget conversations you had or agreements you made. They may say they will do something, like return a borrowed item, and then not do it, and when you confront them they say ‘I genuinely thought that I had returned that, I have a vivid memory of bringing it back.” At times this can be very frustrating because they agree to things and then act as if the conversation never happened, or redo work in different ways than you agreed. They seem completely unaware that this is happening and you can’t help but wonder if they are just being manipulative or trying to control everything when they appear to go back on agreements without talking to you and act like nothing happened when you bring it up.

bystander (hard box)

Someone who you know has multiple forms of trauma appears to have some dissociative symptoms and gets fired from jobs repeatedly and then loses their home when they can’t pay rent, but they don’t have money to pay for treatment. Someone says to you “why don’t they just try harder to keep their jobs?”

A straight man you know tells you a story about how they hooked up with a woman who had said she has something weird happen to her after hookups sometimes. He says after they talked about it and he reassured her he would understand and it would be ok if her symptoms came up, they made out one night. The next day she phoned 85 times, and seemed in distress, but had nothing to say or said unrelated things, and said she wasn’t even sure why she was calling, that her hands seemed to be acting on their own. The guy telling you this story is very disparaging, says “she was so crazy, I stopped speaking to her.”

part 1/3 You are at dinner at a friend’s house, and a woman is there who you have heard through a close friend ‘is crazy.’ You’ve met her before and never noticed anything odd about her behavior but your friend has stopped speaking to her because she has behaved in ‘crazy’ ways towards him after they were briefly involved. At dinner she is quiet and polite but seems distracted and keeps leaving and going downstairs, and when she comes back it looks like she has been crying. When she is in the room she seems to act in a childlike way that is different from how you have seen her behave before. Everyone acts like nothing is wrong and then you all leave together, leaving her alone at the house because she is uncomfortable to be around.

2/3 Your roommate and good friend says they are having dissociative symptoms around a specific person who has stopped speaking to them after a brief romantic involvement. That person’s closest friends are all coming over for dinner and then everyone is going out to meet that person at a pub, except your roommate who is not invited. You want everything to feel smooth, so you ask nicely if your roommate can go to the basement if she feels symptomatic so no one will feel uncomfortable. During dinner she sometimes goes downstairs and cries and has compulsive symptoms, and sometimes comes upstairs and tries to act normal, but her mannerisms and voice seem more childlike than usual. When she is downstairs you go down and check on her when you can, and you tell her you are glad she does not name what is happening at the dinner table because it would make everyone uncomfortable. At the end of the dinner you leave and go to the pub, leaving your friend alone at the house because she is not welcome due to her dissociative symptoms.

3/3 You are at a dinner with some new friends in which one person you barely know keeps leaving to go to the basement and when she comes back she seems unhappy, distracted, and acts in a childlike and strangely insecure way. Everyone else acts like everything is normal. The tension is palpable but the people who know her aren’t saying anything so you’re not sure what to do. At the end of the dinner everyone goes out to the pub, and you are invited, and the person with the odd behavior is not invited so you leave her alone at the house.

(Add more of your own: what are other scenarios you have witnessed or experienced in which people were shamed or stigmatized or needed support and those around them perhaps did not know what to do?)

Out of the Sandbox, into the ocean

(where can this go next? Who might want to add/use/adapt it? What would you want to use/add/adapt? How can it be better and more useful?). What other role plays might be useful?

Handouts/takeaway:

Dissociative Disorders can include these experiences

• fogginess, difficulty thinking clearly
• feeling not real (ex: looking at parts of your body with alienation like ‘whose arm is this’?)
• limited awareness of body’s physical needs, hunger, sleep, food; strong ability to ‘tune out’ body
• ability to ‘tune everything out’ and overfocus on one thing/idea/project for extended periods or with unusual focus, can act extremely competent in some situations and completely incapable in others. May be very high-functioning due to ability to mask and compartmentalize completely for years.
• feeling like things or people around you are not real, or like familiar spaces/people/objects feel unfamiliar
• objects around you appear far away, or appear to move close and far
• feeling like you are very small inside yourself, or are underwater, unable to speak or struggling to ‘come up’ into speech (meanwhile, your mouth may be speaking but not words you feel ‘you’ are choosing, can be hard for others to tell the difference unless they pay attention)
• feeling like you are watching yourself, like you are in a story, or watching yourself ‘from above’ (for me it is often up and to the left or up and to the right, people describe different sensations)
• but you know these experiences are not ‘real’ in the sense that you know you are actually real, it just feels like you’re not (different from psychosis in that the person is aware it is just a feeling)
• spinning or sense of direction inverted, up/down left/right inverting (polarities of the body inverting)
• disorientation in space and/or time (not knowing where you are in time or space, sense of streets or rooms moving around, sliding around in time, not understanding duration even while staring at a clock). It takes much more effort and concentration than other people to get from point A to point B even when you have done it many times because hallways, doors, buildings, seem to rearrange.
• more frequent instances of ‘losing keys’ phenomenon (especially when triggered), gaps in memory
• feeling your body is a different shape or size than it actually is (ex: a ‘younger’ body sense)
• finding evidence that you did things and do not remember doing them (new items acquired, emails in sent folder you don’t remember sending)
• involuntary behavior (can look similar to compulsion or OCD symptoms, usually lacks the ideation)
• losing executive control of your body/hands/speech, feeling you are only able to observe
• gaps in memory or awareness/amnesia for parts of days, or for spans of time
• feeling multiple, awareness of ‘alters/fragments/parts/self-states,’ co-consciousness (varies), chorus. Important to note there is no ‘original’ or ‘true’ self, all the parts are the person.
• actually hearing ‘other’ you’s responding in your head or your mouth, can be younger parts of you
• dream or waking pantheon of figures/self-states/dream figures (child states at different ages, capable protector, impotent protector, judge, internalized abuser figure, unicorn or magical self-state, etc.)
• strong tendency towards retreat into fantasy; strong fantasy life; protection from scary or painful experiences/knowledge by buffering with fantasy, or some difficulty distinguishing fantasy from reality (but different from psychosis in some noted ways, not ‘I can fly/the aliens put the ideas in my mind’ but more like ‘this person is going to stay with me forever,’ or ‘this person is not actually dead,’ difficulty and slowness absorbing painful realities esp to do with abandonment or reminders of original overwhelm). May have difficulty perceiving physical reality, doing daily chores and tasks, managing space, because physical senses ‘buffered’ by involuntary fantasy strategy.
• difficulty with or confusion over discerning appropriate levels of trust; may trust people too quickly in a childlike way, or trust the wrong people, or not really trust anyone at all and not know this experience is missing, simplistic black and white thinking about whether people are trustworthy. May take people very literally about verbal promises the way a young child would.
• simultaneously knowing and not-knowing things (related to strong fantasy structure). i.e. you can know that someone you love has actually died, but simultaneously not-know it. Or you can know that a relationship has ended, while simultaneously not-knowing it. Being multiple = simultaneous multiple truths/capacities to absorb.
• difficulty perceiving other people’s needs and feelings when in a triggered state
• strong inexplicable emotions, abrupt childlike emotions, even if not aware of fragments in consciousness (abruptness of emotions rising up that make no sense or feel simpler in density)
• self-harm (active like cutting, or passive like not sleeping, not eating, not noticing body)
• feeling each relationship is ‘the only one’ and forgetting who you are in your other relationships, i.e. having a hard time remembering that you are simultaneously your mother’s daughter, your partner’s partner, your best friend’s friend, thinking of each as though it is the only one
• having ‘parts/fragments/self-states’ that handle different situations/contexts – i.e. a part that handles driving, a part that does your job, a part that parents, etc.), finding it hard to think of yourself in multiple contexts simultaneously, sometimes behaving very differently in different contexts, more than typical (ie extreme shame or shyness or forgetting their strengths around certain people when person is also very outgoing and self-confident in other situations)
• whichever ‘part’ is expected or associated with a given situation is likely to ‘come forward’ involuntarily when in that situation/with that person. Can be useful coping strategy as when you automatically ‘become’ your capable self at work when you were completely non-functional at home, or can be disruptive/scary/uncomfortable when you can’t prevent switching around certain people you would want to not-switch around (ie people who trigger associations or lessons from original abuser), or as the ‘walls’ between parts of cognition begin to break down as you age and previous coping strategies no longer work)
• extreme feelings of shame or feeling some part of yourself is monstrous, unacceptable, abusive, subhuman, wanting to ‘cut off’ parts of yourself or ‘dissolve’ them or make them go away, denial of self-love for parts of yourself, difficulty even looking at this shame because it feels primordial and unquestionable, certainty that this part of the self must be hidden (even from oneself)
• concurrent self-medicating or ‘checking-out’ strategies (addiction to substances, internet, sex)
• seeking physical contact/reassurance, may end up in unsafe sexual situations when seeking care
• concurrent physical issues caused by chronic elevated stress over time: respiratory infections,
  autoimmune disorders, inflammation and inflammation-related illnesses, sleep disorders, weight gain, tiredness, difficulty healing physically, allergies, adrenal fatigue
• difficulty with self-regulation of nervous system (skipping developmental stages, needing lots of skin on skin contact or bodily pressure to feel ok, to sleep, to not feel physical discomfort, like an infant or young child would need. Skin on skin contact or full body pressure feels needed to survive)
• suicidal ideation, depression and anxiety, caused by the trauma or by triggers, (different from depressive/anxiety disorders)
• sleep disorders, night terrors, avoiding sleep, frequent wakings or disturbed sleep, may sleep best with safe trusted company
• difficulty imagining trust, belonging, or safety, may not know how these feel but may not realize it

not making the connections between these different experiences, not putting the picture together, finding it hard to think about things together (ex a person may have nightmares, feeling of unreality, slippage in space and time, and a partial ‘pantheon’ of figures, but never put any of these things together or notice they may be related). Not noticing that the slippage or disconnecting is even happening. Awareness may be only of feeling a little ‘spacy’ sometimes but not of all the other sensations or experiences, not knowing it is possible to feel any other way.

Helpful and unhelpful ways to respond: how you can support, or at least not harm, people with DDs (handout)

As always, how to be supportive is different for different people, so the best thing you can do is always ask. ‘What do you need?’ ‘How do you like to be supported?’ ‘Would you prefer I do this, or that?’ are always useful questions, especially if you listen to, believe, and honour the answers. This list isn’t intended to be the magic solution for all situations; it is just a way to start thinking about options, tools, and possibilities, and to offer some of what I have seen as helpful and unhelpful in how people respond.

Educate others and speak up. Actively educate yourself and others around you. instead of leaving it to the person struggling with the disorder to educate others in the community, share this destigmatizing; if people respond with a stigmatizing or blaming reaction, you can point out ‘it isn’t their fault, they have a dissociative disorder, maybe you could be more accepting.’ Make links to the abuse or violence that caused the dissociative disorder, and to the need for social inclusion in countering the effects of structural violence. Just as we are learning that people with depression aren’t to blame for what they are experiencing, and we can love and support them as they are without expecting them to “just snap out of it,” people with dissociative disorders cannot just “snap out of it.” It isn’t something they’re doing on purpose, and they may already be feeling quite a lot of deep shame about it. Add to that the fact that the experience of dissociation puts even very verbal people into a childlike, sometimes nonverbal state, or makes it very difficult for them to choose or even access speech, and expecting them to be able to act in the normal ways adults usually act or judging them for an inability to explain what is going on or stop it is actually cruel. Blaming someone for involuntary dissociative actions is akin to blaming someone for limping when they have a hurt leg. You do not ostracize someone socially, you offer support in a nonjudgmental atmosphere, and work together to find healthy inclusive ways for everyone to feel good.

Don’t be a bystander; you can make the world safer for people with dissociative disorders by normalizing the fact that this disorder exists, is not their fault, and is actually quite common.

But do not out people or share info you know that the person experiencing it has not agreed can be shared. Outing people can lose them friends, jobs, driver’s licenses, housing, and maybe even control over their bodies, because whatever ‘part’ is expected is more likely to arise for a dissociated person, so having people know of their alters makes it more likely that alters will step forward. This may not always be what the person wants; for most of us, keeping our adult selves ‘in front’ is crucial to how we hold our lives together.

Counter stigma. Get comfortable talking about and hearing about experiences that fall outside the ‘norm,’ including dissociative experiences. Get familiar with these experiences if you’re not already, so they become normal and easy to talk about. But do not expect someone with a dissociative disorder to be able to or feel safe explaining it or talking about it or even showing you what is going on inside them. The only places that feel really safe to have alters come up are very very private, intimate, utterly safe places with people who are not going anywhere and are totally accepting and stable in their support. Because dissociation is situational, telling people does make it more possible that we might dissociate around that person. When we can’t choose when and how the switching happens it can be very destructive. Imagine having parts of yourself that act without your conscious will – really take time to imagine that. How would you want people to respond to you? Make it normal and see how people blossom at this acceptance.

Remember that ‘distressed states’ are just a facet of their personality and that there is a whole person in there even at moments when they can’t remember themselves; focus on what you and others in your community like, trust, admire about them. Also remember that even the ‘emotional’ parts of them are good. Usually these are just scared traumatized children who have all the wonderful qualities that a sensitive child would have had, and they just need love acceptance and support like anyone else. If their actions make you upset, you can learn how to set healthy boundaries without creating walls or judgment or using anger and distancing to try to control them; coercion or threats of abandonment don’t work, and are retraumatizing. Instead, know your capacity to offer love and care and support, and stay within your own limits. Build and actively use a support net so that friendships do not get overly taxed, and step up and back appropriately. Take this opportunity to learn about yourself and increase your ability to be part of a community care net by increasing your awareness of your own limits and capacities in advance. Get good at communicating your needs and capacities in a mature way. Don’t blame the person or get angry at them for things that are out of their control; it is cruel and makes healing much harder. Mad mapping/wellness mapping and advance directives are useful tools for community care; use them. Work on your own attachment practices and styles so that you can be supportive.

Listen Deeply recognize the person may be having immense difficulty expressing what is happening to them or using language. They may say things that seem out of character, words tumbling out of control, or may struggle to speak at all. Listen for the quiet reasonable part that may be trying to express what would return them to a feeling of safety. If you speak to this ‘part’ you may make it easier for this ‘part’ to come forward. As the person how this feels for them. Do they want you to talk with ‘fragments’ or just with the ‘apparently normal self’?

Believe in them and in their self-knowledge. Don’t try to ‘guess’ when someone with a dissociative disorder is or isn’t dissociating, or try to guess what that might feel like. Just ask them. You will not guess right because the way it feels varies from person to person and internally day by day even for the same person. Sometimes people may be severely dissociated and it will be obvious if you know what dissociation looks like for that person, and prior understandings, such as mad maps, can be very helpful, but sometimes normal life is going on and there is some background noise of dissociation happening at the same time. Dissociation does not mean ‘switching’ in some simplistic sense where you literally talk to different people, because even for those who have severe DID there are varying degrees of co-awareness between fragmented self-states. It is always all one person, just a person with fragmentation in their awareness.

Trust the person’s expertise about their own experiences and respect the safety agreements they ask for. Trying to guess when someone is or isn’t dissociated, countering what they say is going on, is demeaning and demoralizing. It is stressful and scary to have to ‘convince’ people that you are not dissociated when they think you are, or that you are dissociating when they think you are not. Having people not trust you on your own self-state adds extra layers of pain to the already complex and challenging process of learning to understand your own internal experience. It takes away yet more autonomy from people who already may be working overtime to maintain autonomy over their own body. Someone with a dissociative disorder may notalways know when they are dissociating, especially when it is just partial or when they are so used to dissociating they don’t notice – but they can learn, and are usually working to get better at recognizing their own symptoms. They will always be better at recognizing it than you. So show the person you have faith in their knowledge of themselves – and actually have it – by simply asking them in an open, accepting, and listening way, whether they are dissociating and what would help, and letting them have space to figure out the answers. They are the best situated person to understand their own internal experience. In addition for many of us, when we ‘are’ and ‘aren’t’ dissociating isn’t so clear cut – there is no ‘true’ personality, and our adult competent self is also an alter. So love us whole, accept us whole, and trust we know ourselves better than you do, if you want to help.

Don’t diagnose people or tell them what they need. On that note: when we are already experiencing loss of agency and control over our bodies and potentially aspects of our lives and minds, being told what we feel and what to do in a paternalistic way rather than being listened to and supported is extra scary and disempowering. Also these experiences are extremely complex on the inside – oceans of cause and effect – so what you see on the outside may be very different from what the person is actually experiencing. Trust them and teach them to trust themselves, especially as this agency may have originally been denied them by the original situation that caused the fragmentation. The person themselves is best situated to figure out what they need, with your support and faith in them. It can be very very hard to come into speech from deep inside yourself to name what is happening and what will keep you safe: listen for that quiet voice trying to speak, and help. Be an advocate for the person.

Counter Gaslighting. If the person has internalized beliefs about shame or unworthiness due to abuse or violence they have experienced, or if they are being shamed or ostracized, or if they find it hard to think about events, help them see themselves and the situation more clearly. If someone has changed reality on them (common in trauma situations with complex PTSD) or made them feel something is their fault that is actually structural or external to them, help them see it. Work on being able to see it yourself, by recognizing structural violence and putting responsibility where it belongs.

Wait it out. Mark Twain famously said “If you don’t like the weather in New England, wait five minutes.” Someone who is switching, including subtly when there are no clear distinct ‘alters,’ may not remember that five minutes ago they were fine. Once they feel fine, they may not remember why they were so upset. Be the bridge: when they are in distress, remember for them that this is not their whole self. Give them time and patience and remember who they are, until they come back to themselves.

We’re not trained monkeys. Don’t exoticize or mystify the experience. It is actually very common, it isn’t actually that bizarre, and there is a perfectly ordinary human in there who is having these experiences. People may choose to share with you if you are trustworthy, but do not ask for people to ‘perform’ or ask to ‘meet’ alters. Do not ask ‘which you are you?’ People do have varying degrees of co-consciousness between parts, and how internally consistent they feel changes for any one person over time. The inner experience is generally much more complex than the idea of ‘many people inside one person’ would suggest. Remember this is all one person, just someone with a trauma history and fragmentation in their spirit. Talk to them the way you would anyone else.

Make and keep agreements about which parts you speak to; adapt agreements as needed over time. Find out whether (and when and how) your friend or lover or coworker finds it helpful for you to address alters or fragmented self-states. sometimes if you have a very trusting relationship, you can help by building trust with fragments, but this is a long-term responsibility, akin to the responsibility of parenting, and cannot be entered into lightly. Often you may help more by simply accepting that fragment-states exist, offering kindness and understanding, while agreeing to interact only with the ‘adult/apparently normal’ self-state, since addressing the adult part of your friend may let them be that part of themselves more easily and may protect the ‘younger’ fragment-states from reinjury or retraumatization. If you decide to start building trust with child-state fragments, you must stick around for the long haul or risk retraumatizing these parts that need trust to counter the shame that made them; keep that in mind in your decision-making about your capacities. Sometimes it is best to decide together that everyone agrees the fragment states are allowed to exist (there’s no shame in them and the symptoms are totally ok), but you’re choosing to talk to or interact with the regular adult part of your friend.

Understand that healing entails change. Adapt as the person learns more about what helps. What was useful understanding a year ago may have changed as the person moves along their healing path. Get good at supportive, interdependent boundaries and at communication. Caring about and supporting someone in a non-stigmatizing way means growing with them as they grow, moving with them in the dance of relating.

Unconditional acceptance and kindness, along with formal structured support systems and ending stigma, are the best cure. Dissociative disorders are among the most treatable mental health issues, responding better to treatment than anxiety or depression.

Make mad maps. The best way to build collective safety and capacity for mutual care and support is to create mad maps, which let someone think ahead about how their community, family and friends can best help when they are in distress. People with high-betrayal-trust trauma may not understand or believe that they deserve care, inclusion, or belonging, and so you can model this for them even if they do not understand how it feels to be included and to have their legitimate needs for safety recognized and met. Mad maps also give you clear info about who the primary support people are, so people do not get overwhelmed or feel in over their heads. This is important, because protecting relationships over the long term prevents retraumatization, shaming, and social isolation, and experiencing genuine trust encourages healing.

Build nets. To spread out the care and help the primary support people feel supported themselves, some people like to create a formal ‘net’ of support. Different friends may enjoy offering support in different ways. For instance, one person might like to be the one who checks if you’ve eaten and slept that day, but doesn’t want to do a lot of emotional processing, while another might love to listen to the minutia of emotional healing, but won’t want to cuddle you to sleep. Everyone can help in the ways they want to when you create a net of trusted friends. This is usually done in confidence.  The members of the net know who each other are, and have permission from the affected person to turn to each other for extra help and ideas. Nets also mean the person at the centre offers a gift to their community of fostering stronger relationships. The bonds formed and learning that arises through these nets is a gift the person with the dissociative disorder shares with their family and community, by strengthening the genuine bonds between people and helping people be more vulnerable with one another, building trust.

Share responsibility for creating a safe culture for people with dissociative disorders and with all ‘divergent’ mental health experiences. Speak up. When you are witness to someone stigmatizing people who have these experiences, whether in private or in groups, don’t silently go along. When someone you know engages in demeaning gossip, attacking, ostracizing, or shaming, of someone with these symptoms, try saying something simple like ‘you know x has a dissociative disorder. it isn’t their fault, it is caused by (name the structural violence) and they’re doing their best. Maybe you could have a little more understanding.’ Just as we don’t leave it up to trans people to always have to be the ones to ask for pronouns to be respected, because it isn’t the job of the person who is stigmatized or facing ignorance to educate everyone – it is all of our responsibility – we can help reduce stigma and ignorance about dissociative disorders.

Many people have them and keep that info and symptoms masked. Currently it is not very safe to be out as having a dissociative disorder. Let’s change that. If someone you know has dissociative symptoms and is able to name what is happening to them in whatever way they understand it, do not shame or ostracize them; and if you hear people getting angry or being judgmental about these symptoms, speak up. You can say ‘it’s not their fault, and judging them isn’t right.’ You can learn more about the disorder so that it appears less mystifying and esoteric and more ordinary, so that people struggling with these experiences don’t need to do so in secret but can learn that they are safe and accepted.

Give people the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes symptoms of the disorder can mask as personality traits; people may decide you are simply an unreliable or untrustworthy person if you appear to have sudden inexplicable changes in self-state or awareness. It is important to be able to simply ask, rather than assume. If the person is experiencing an involuntary change of consciousness or is unable to speak from their ‘adult’ or ‘ordinary’ self, or can’t concentrate or is suddenly foggy or not all there, work with them to help bring that part of them back out. Do not blame or get angry at child-states as that elevates tension and makes the situation much harder. Usually with a collaborative agreement and some basic safety agreements made – and kept – the person can get a handle on what is happening, and can take responsibility for their actions. While you can’t always know what is happening inside someone who does things you don’t like, in general giving each other the benefit of the doubt creates a more accepting, loving culture that makes everyone safer.

No, it’s not ‘an inner child’. Dissociative disorder is different from the idea of ‘an inner child’ and it is demeaning and disrespectful to insist they are ‘the same’. It’s a common question people ask, and it’s fine to wonder and ask, but the answer is ‘no, this is not the same as your inner child or childish emotions.’ If you insist that it is you are not listening. Your ‘inner child’ may have a bad day but it does NOT take over executive control of your body, or make you black out and not remember later what you did, or speak in a literally separate voice, or move your mouth to answer your questions. These are real things that are happening in our brain and spirit – they are neurological structures within us and/or fractures in our spirit. Ask if you want, but when you hear the answer, don’t tell people you know what is happening inside them as it’s incredibly disempowering and disrespectful.

Stop ‘Atticking’: Include and honour, don’t shun or hide the person. Be conscious of the history of ‘the madwoman in the attic.’ Don’t try to hide the person away, or encourage masking or shame over the symptoms. When you encourage the person to hide you’re retraumatizing them by reinforcing the original shunning/shaming. Be aware in particular of how gendered this is, how much women are taught to not have needs, to not have concerns and harm seen. If their symptoms are embarrassing to you because they are not normative, how do you think it feels from inside them? Normalize instead of hiding. Act as an ally who can say ‘hey, you’re welcome with us as you are even when you are dissociating. Here is your seat at the table. You don’t have to pretend to be feeling ‘normal’. We get it, and we get you, and you’re welcome here just as you are.

Use a structural perspective. Actively make the connections – for yourself and for others – between violence a person has experienced in their formative years and the dissociative symptoms you may be witnessing now. Since this violence may be hidden, and/or may be old (though usually it springs back up again when exposure to traumatizing situations occurs, such as at family events or in similar contexts, so it may not be as ‘in the past’ as all that) help the person make the connections and see with adult eyes that what happened/s to them is NOT THEIR FAULT and not about them at all, not a measure of their worth or value as a human being or deserving of acceptance. If you are close to someone who has a dissociative disorder now because of patriarchal or racist violence that structured their psyche, talk about that with others around them instead of erasing it or individualizing the disorder. We do not exist in isolation, and the symptoms that show up in one person can be indications of normalized violence acted out by another. Think about relational responsibility, and learn how to develop healthy boundaries instead of cutting ties. This is how our politics is lived on the ground.

Don’t say ‘Just stop’ or get angry at the person experiencing dissociative symptoms, involuntary behavior, switching, etc. This is cruel because they can’t ‘just stop’ and threatening to stop speaking to them if they can’t stop an involuntary mental health issue will be likely to raise the level of distress of the alter, making it harder for the person to do what you’re asking rather than easier. Work together with the ‘adult’ or ‘reasonable’ part of them to help handle the distressed self-states together.

Say “this isn’t your fault,” and “there is no shame in what you’re experiencing,” and take the time to make the political connections to see why that is true.

Stand with, stand alongside and be allies to people who have these experiences. Counter shame with love, nurturance, support, and inclusion of their and your whole selves.

Do the long term work within yourself to increase your compassion and empathy for self and others. Compassion for self and compassion for others grow together and are related: the more you can offer care and love and acceptance to yourself the more you can offer acceptance and safety to one another, to create a fertile ground for healing.

Please feel free to join the Dissociative Disorders Knowledge Sharing group

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How to use this resource: any way you would like! As long as you do so with credit given, I’d be happy for people to adapt it, make it your own, run your own workshop for your friends, supporters, and community. Please credit and link to this page clearly if you use parts of this workshop. I’d also be happy to collect additional role play scenarios, and other ways that people understand their experiences, particularly how folks in Indigenous communities and POC communities understand these experiences, so that I can share those other ‘streams’ of knowledge with future participants who come from similar experiences and may find them helpful. Contact me at nora.samaran@gmail.com.
If you’re an artist and want to create comics out of the handouts or other parts of this resource, I’d love to hear from you.

If this was helpful as an information source for those with dissociative disorders and the people supporting them, please share it. :) I would love to get the word out and change the stigma to create more acceptance and general knowledge about dissociative disorders – you can help by sharing this on twitter or facebook using the buttons below. Thanks!

Testimonials:

Naava’s workshop created safety and facilitated deep experiential learning. As a helping professional, administrator, mad person, and MSW student I felt incredibly safe, inspired, and honored in all of my parts. Naava brought a wealth of knowledge and personal experience that helped to shift paradigms in the group and sparked personal insights. Not only was the workshop content rich and meaningful, but the day modeled collective participatory group work at its best.
-Catherine Chhina, Hon.BSc., MSW Cdt.  Intake Coordinator/Clinical Administrator, Cedar Centre, Toronto

Additional Resources:

Neuro-decolonization, Michael Yellow Bird
https://www.ndsu.edu/socanth/faculty/michael_yellow_bird/

Decolonizing Trauma Work, Renee Linklater, Fernwood Publishing
https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/decolonizing-trauma-work

Decolonizing Trans 101:
https://publishbiyuti.org/decolonizingtransgender101/

Miss Major
http://www.missmajorfilm.com/

Generative Somatics:
http://www.generativesomatics.org/

http://themighty.com/2016/02/what-i-want-you-to-know-about-dissociative-identity-disorder1/

If you have your own experiences you’d like to share, I am gathering resources to contribute to future workshops Feel free to send stories, poems, descriptions of your experiences, how people can help you when you have dissociative experiences, or anything you think future workshop participants may benefit from seeing.

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I’m also working on a speculative fiction piece: check out Cipher here

How does Nurturance Culture look, feel, smell, sound, taste to you? Send your one-line answers, video, audio, comics, art, poems, responses, to nora.samaran@gmail.com with subject line “Nurturance Is” to possibly appear in a future post! Check out the call for submissions.

Follow Nora on Twitter and Facebook

Thank you for reading!
Please share as widely as possible

Because the beautiful responses keep coming in, and because we need some good words today:

six  more replies to ‘Nurturance Culture’:

1. Nurturance is the feel of your bristly beard on my forehead as I melt into your arms after you pick me up from a three day therapeutic retreat. It’s in your suggestion to fold the seats down and lie in the back of the car to get out of the rain when you sense that I’m not ready for you to let go yet.  Its asking if we can both fit in my bath tub, and then getting in the dry tub with me to try, clothes and all; then even though we fit, just sitting there listening to me tell my story, and stroking my hair.

Nurturance is you showing up for me, all “what can I do” when I’m worn out and have a stomach bug; even though you’re supposed to be at work. It’s in the smell of the peppermint essential oil you put in my puke pail. It’s in the way you rub some on my stomach and chest. It’s in the taste of the peptobismol you went out to get for me. It’s in your silly twisted chanting of ” poop! poop! poop!” in response to my urgent bathroom needs; which really lightens the mood and makes me smile even though I’m mortified. It’s in the look in your eyes when you tell me I’m beautiful even when I’m sick; and knowing that I look terrible, but also knowing that you really mean it. Nurturance is there when you say, “No. Thank you for letting me take care of you. It  feels good to be able to do this for you.”

2. When I got divorced, my brother moved across the country from Seattle to live with me. He has been my rock. I hate to think of life these past few years without him. My earliest memory is of getting in trouble for calling this guy ‘Jesus.’ My mom thought it was blasphemous. As Easter Sunday approaches, I may not believe in Jesus anymore, but I sure as hell believe in my brother Nathan. A few days ago, in crisis, I asked for his advice. He told me to do what I most want to do and not fear the future. He said that we would figure things out together.
Thank you Nate. Thank you for believing me and supporting me every step of the way.

3. Nurturance is putting “father, partner, homemaker” first in your professional profile or bio. Not just the miracle of putting it there at all (how many men do?) but putting it first, before your job description. It is living this in your daily life too: putting the concentric circles of your life in good order: father, partner, first, always – the trust centre of a balanced feminist male engagement with the world. Then parents, siblings and chosen family. Then friends. Then work. Sometimes the order of the centre shuffles: sometimes your mom takes centre and your partner and kids rearrange around an elderly parent’s care. Either way, your nurturance role is the central role of your life.

If you do this right, the circles will all feed each other: your partner will be the person you trust the most and most want to impress with your public commitments, and will also be the place you incubate the sensitive stages of your new work projects. They will be your rock, and you theirs, so you can stick your neck out and do the right thing in the world because the people who matter to you are always on your side. If you do it wrong, you will think “my partner and kids should know they are important to me because I take time away from work for them.” Bull. That means you put work first. Put your relationships first and you’ll find yourself asking “Is this work worth the time it takes away from my partner and kids?” rather than the other way around. Put the circles in order and watch your family and your own heart blossom.

5. Nurturance is sitting in a circle with your community, including those you like and those you do not, to work out a conflict using loving skills of compassion, listening, and taking full responsibility with an awareness of power. Nurturance is recognizing that everyone in the circle is affected by a conflict between any two people. A community is as strong as its weakest bond, so the circle must support and hold all those within it.

6. Nurturance is making sure every single baby and child is loved, held, treasured and honoured. It means taking full and complete responsibility, without excuses, for the physical, emotional, and social wellbeing of your children. It means doing your own emotional work so that you can be an adult with caregiver skills who can take full and proper care of them, not just sometimes, but every day.

Want more?

Ten Reader Replies: Nurturance Is…

Boys, Brothers, and Saying “I Love You”: Readers’ Thoughts about Nurturance Culture

The original piece that inspired this post:
The Opposite of Rape Culture is Nurturance Culture (in English)
Lo Opuesto a una Cultura de la Violación es una Cultura Afectiva (In Spanish)
O Oposto da Cultura de Estupro é a Cultura masculina de Acolhimento (in Portuguese)

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How does Nurturance Culture look, feel, smell, sound, taste to you? Send your one-line answers, video, audio, comics, art, poems, responses, to nora.samaran@gmail.com with subject line “Nurturance Is” to possibly appear in a future post! The call for submissions is here: https://norasamaran.com/2016/02/24/call-for-submissions-nurturance-is-dtfm/

All references to gender in this post are intended in a trans-inclusive way. I want to recognize that human beings’ lived experience of gender is much more complex than an either/or set of boxes can capture. When I speak of ‘men’ and ‘masculinity’ I am referring to masculine-identified people, including, as appropriate, aspects of the self for those who only partially identify in this way. Open to feedback and always happy to further nuance this analysis, feel free to get in touch.

I’m also working on a speculative fiction project. Check out Cipher here.

See more of Puuung’s art here: http://www.grafolio.com/illustration/146448

Follow Nora on Twitter and Facebook

Thank you for reading!
Please share as widely as possible

(English version here)

Je n’arrête pas de discuter de ça, encore et encore. Ce truc, quand quelqu’un ruine ta perception de la réalité, et te dit que t’es timbrée, ou nie qu’un truc est en train de se produire au moment où c’est en train de se produire, tu vois ? Quand les personnes que nous aimons et en qui nous avons confiance nous font ça ?… ça crée un bon gros bordel dans notre esprit.

Avec le temps, ou quand c’est sur des choses vraiment importantes, l’expérience de recevoir un discours qui nie le réel ébranle notre confiance en nous-même et notre capacité à naviguer/s’orienter dans la réalité./Quand l’on reçoit fréquemment ou à propos de sujets importants, des discours qui nient le réel, notre confiance en nous même s’effrite ainsi que notre capacité à appréhender la réalité.

« Il y a un mot pour ça » dis-je à une amie en entendant encore une nouvelle histoire de ce genre. « C’est gaslighting. »

Mon amie demanda : « C’est quoi « gaslighting » ? Je n’en ai jamais entendu parler.

– C’est quand quelqu’un sape ta confiance en tes propres perceptions et que tu te sens folle parce que tes instincts, ton intuition et parfois juste tes bonnes vieilles perceptions te disent une chose, et que les mots de quelqu’un en qui tu as confiance te disent quelque chose de différent.

– Oh! dit-elle en recherchant la définition en ligne, “Oh” répéta-t-elle, mais gaslighting semble signifier que l’autre personne te fait ça intentionnellement. Je ne pense pas qu’il m’ait fait ça intentionnellement. Finalement, c’est difficile à épingler parce que je ne pense même pas qu’il était complètement au courant de ce qu’il faisait. En plus, ça l’a contrarié quand je lui en ai parlé. Mais il l’a fait. Et j’ai fini par me demander si j’étais saine d’esprit. »

Comprends-tu la profondeur du mal qu’on fait quand on contraint quelqu’un à questionner sa propre santé mentale ? C’est un problème sérieux. Rien à voir avec : « Oups, je t’ai apporté de la glace à la fraise et j’ai oublié que tu préférais la glace à la banane. » C’est destabiliser les capacités fondamentales d’une personne à s’engager dans la réalité. Elargis maintenant le phénomène à un contexte social où il a été dit chaque jour aux femmes, durant leur vie entière, que leurs perceptions ne pouvaient pas être crues alors qu’en fait, ces perceptions tapent carrément dans le mille ! Vous avez là un phénomène psychologique profondément dévastateur, persuasif et systémique : la déraison à petit feu. (insanity by thousand cuts)

Tout cela doit être pris en compte non seulement à cause de la violence engendrée mais aussi parce que les implications sont plus importantes encore. Si l’on considère la puissance, la force et la capacité à réaliser des changements des femmes qui croient en elles-mêmes, il nous faut réaliser ce que nous perdons quand nous doutons de nous-mêmes : une force indomptable pour un changement social, qui parce qu’elle est considérable, est vue par certains comme effrayante. En d’autres mots, cette capacité à nous comprendre nous-mêmes est très puissante : il y a une raison bien précise pour que l’on écrase systématiquement ce pouvoir chez les personnes méprisées, c’est qu’il est une force qui peut renverser l’injustice.

Peu importe les façons dont nous subissons l’oppression, ce processus nous dérobe de nos meilleures qualités, alors présentées comme des faiblesses, pour dissimuler à notre propre regard l’importance de notre puissance et de notre envergure. La nature structurelle de cette violence crée les conditions par lesquelles ce processus s’inscrit dans nos corps. Par conséquent, cette érosion de la réalité ne nécessite pas d’être intentionnelle ou consciente pour causer un mal significatif.

Les gens discréditent les perceptions des femmes ou des personnes considérées comme des femmes pour une variété de raisons compréhensibles :

-Ils se sentent honteux à propos d’une chose qu’ils ressentent, veulent, et/ou font, alors ils rusent et agissent de façon malhonnête dans leur expressivité émotionnelle, ou blâment l’autre personne plutôt que de prendre la responsabilité  de leurs propres émotions, volontés et/ou actions.

-Ils ne sont pas conscients d’eux-même et n’ont pas fait leur propre travail émotionnel, donc quand on les interpelle sur quelque chose de déconcertant dans leur comportement (comme une distance émotionnelle incohérente, de l’irritabilité ou des problèmes d’attachement) ils ne peuvent pas donner une réponse honnête mais donne une réponse plausible, émotionnellement malhonnête, à la place.

-Ils sont attachés à une certaine image d’eux-mêmes (image de personnes généreuses et enrichissantes, en tant que féministe, comme très responsable et respectueux) et ne sont pas prêts à perçevoir leurs côtés obscurs ou moins développés émotionnellement qui contredisent leur vision d’eux-mêmes ou leur image publique.

-Ils ont été élevé dans un foyer hostile aux conflits et n’ont pas appris comment rencontrer leurs propres besoins et ceux des autres simultanément. Ainsi, ils croient sans remise en question qu’un match nul est la seule issue. Et ils veulent ce qu’ils veulent… L’échange semble impossible,comme une impasse donc ils imposent leur volonté.

– Lorsqu’ils parlent de sujets inconfortables, ils ont un niveau physiologique d’excitabilité ou d’alarme qui devient accablant émotionnellement pour eux. Donc, ils l’adoucissent avec des excuses et une ruse logistique.

– Un degré d’intimité sain les rend anxieux et les met en garde. Garder les choses vagues protège leur sentiment de contrôle sur l’intimité émotionnelle.

-Ils peuvent n’avoir jamais expérimenté de sécurité émotionnelle et une receptivité saine et nourrissante (nurturing) de la part de leur entourage. N’ayant pas réalisé cela à leur sujet, ils peuvent penser que les personnes avec qui ils développent une relation proche ont des besoins excessifs et déraisonnables.

-Ils peuvent avoir grandi avec un père parlant aux femmes et aux enfants de cette manière sans prendre le temps de reconnaître et changer ce schéma.

– Ils peuvent avoir des « caractéristiques narcissiques . » C’est finalement assez commun (7.7% de la population masculine apparemment). Le « narcissisme » relève d’une expérience humaine : un vide interieur, une conscience de soi fracturée et sous-développée émotionnellement, enterrée sous des couches et des couches de honte, avec une apparente très forte estime de soi par-dessus. Pour ceux que ce débat intérieur travaille, les parties originales ou vulnérables de soi-meme sont séparée par un pare-feu et sous-développées émotionnellement. Ainsi, le guide intérieur pour l’empathie, la confiance et la connexion que des « adultes en termes émotionnels » ont pour les guider, est à des degrés divers, hors service. Ces gens sont particulièrement susceptibles de gaslighter les autres, sans même réaliser qu’ils le font. Malheureusement, ils sont aussi ceux les moins à même de reconnaître leurs actions et de prendre la responsabilité de leurs actes. Ils essaieront plus probablement de couvrir leurs oreilles, dévier le sujet, tergiverser, changer de sujet, attaquer ou fuir  quand quelqu’un-e essaiera de leur demander de l’aide ou une clarification. Le degré de prise de conscience de soi avec des caractéristiques narcissiques est extrêmement, extrêmement bas : ils sont peu susceptibles de le reconnaitre en eux-mêmes et de changer, aussi, devenir proche d’eux s’avère plutôt délicat.

Ces causes sont toutes compréhensibles. Les êtres humains qui sont de bonnes personnes font des choses pour des raisons compréhensibles. Personne n’agit sans cause. Des fois, des fois, plusieurs sérieux problèmes de santé mentale entrent en jeu. Le « trouble de la personnalité narcissique », par exemple, implique un bon lot de gaslighting (accompagné de rage et d’une profonde incapacité à suivre une logique émotionnelle d’un point A à un point B). Cependant, c’est moins commun que la grande variété de spécimens rencontrés au jardin du quotidien.

Si l’impact sur l’autre personne l’entraçine à douter de sa propre santé mentale, nous devons, à un certain point, être capable de parler de ce qui se passe, sans se laisser engluer par un « mais je n’en avais pas l’intention » »

Nous comprenons avec le racisme que les effets comptent plus que l’intention. Alors, pourquoi sommes-nous si bloqués dans cette idée que ça ne compte pas si quelqu’un ruine notre santé mentale parce qu’il n’en avait pas l’intention ?

Voici un petit exemple :

J’appelle un copain proche que je connais depuis des années. Je suis bouleversée et j’aimerais m’épancher, peut-être entendre quelques mots affectueux et encourageants, peut-être demander conseil. Cet ami se sent parfois débordé par les émotions et parfois il trouve que ça le rapproche des gens et accueille volontier ces partages. Au moment de mon appel, il craque : « Je ne peux pas parler là, maintenant» et il balance le téléphone à sa copine, qui apprécie ce type de conversations.

Je me sens légèrement blessée par la brusquerie de sa phrase. Comme nous sommes tous très proches, j’en fait part à sa partenaire qui lui relaie l’information. Il répond de l’autre bout de la pièce : « non, non, Je ne suis pas du tout contrarié par toi, je suis juste en train de laver les plats et de préparer le diner, c’est tout. » Elle me relaie ceci : « son ton de voix n’a rien à voir avec ce que t’as dit, c’est juste lui qui est stressé à propos du repas. » J’ai pensé que j’avais dû mésinterpréter son comportement et dis : «  Oh, pardon ! Tout va bien ! » Tout en m’excusant de demander à parler alors qu’il avait des choses au four. D’une certaine façon, ma perception, celle qu’il m’avait raccroché au nez alors que je n’étais pas bien et qu’il se débarrasse du téléphone sans aucun mot gentil, comme si j’avais fait quelque chose pour le mettre en colère, fut mise de côté. Je décidais que je devais juste avoir complètement mésinterprété son comportement.

J’ai abandonné ma perception en recalibrant ma compréhension de ses besoins avec cette nouvelle information : il est ok pour écouter mes émotions, juste pas à cette heure du jour.

Lorsque  j’ai dit « pardon, » cependant, je me suis sentie un peu bizarre : je n’étais pas sûre de m’excuser pour mon mauvais timing ou pour avoir des émotions. Je pense que j’ai tort d’être secouée par cette interruption. Je doute de mes perceptions. Ses mots contredisent directement ce que me dit mon cerveau limbique de ce qu’il est en train de se produire.

Nous n’en avons plus parlé et j’ai noté dans mon petit carnet des connaissances que mon ami était comme ça quand il faisait plusieures choses à la fois, et que ce n’était pas une forme de réponse qui devait me contrarier du tout. Parce qu’il l’avait dit.

Quelques mois plus tard, nous sommes en train de discuter… Il est dans une phase où il travaille sur ses émotions et sur ses propres sentiments, augmentant ainsi sa capacité à gérer l’émotion. Il me dit : « Hé, tu te rappelles, cette fois où t’as appelé et que t’avais besoin d’une oreille et que j’ai répondu sèchement en me débarrassant du téléphone sans vérifier comment t’allais, puis quand j’ai dit que je n’étais pas du tout contrarié par toi mais que j’étais juste très occupé avec la vaisselle et le diner ? En fait, j’ai eu une assez grosse réaction physiologique à tes émotions et je n’arrivais pas à gérer. » Il n’a pas partagé ça comme une grosse révélation. Il avait pris conscience depuis un moment de sa réaction ; c’est uniquement parce qu’il était excité par ce qu’il était en train d’apprendre qu’ il m’en faisait part. Personne ne contrariait personne à ce moment là, c’était juste une conversation intéressante sur les émotions.

Je m’arrêtai. Je réalisais que mes perceptions avaient été justes la première fois. J’essayais d’encaisser le fait que j’ai effacé mes perceptions de ce petit moment. Et pas seulement. Afin d’être une amie bienveillante et attentive, j’avais intégré un schéma d’information sur le sens du comportement de mon ami, ce qui implique que j’avais continué à nier mes perceptions pendant des semaines, chaque fois que je repensais à cet instant.

Et je n’avais peut-être pas besoin de ça, peut-être que mes perceptions étaient bonnes. Il m’a répondu sèchement, il a lâché le téléphone comme une patate chaude, il semblait vraiment bouleversé, et je l’ai pris comme « juste en train de faire la vaisselle, pas contrarié par toi » et ai réévalué ma lecture de lui avec cette info, parce que j’ai confiance en lui et que je voulais accepter ses mots à propos de lui-même. Et pourtant, dans un sens très ordinaire, très quotidien, ses paroles à son sujet n’étaient finalement pas vraies.

Plus précisément, ses paroles ne correspondaient pas à ce que savait mon corps sur ce qui venait d’arriver : son bouleversement émotif. Ce qui n’était pas, en soi, une grosse affaire. Les gens peuvent avoir différentes capacités émotionnelles à différents moments. S’il avait dit :  « Là, je me sens dépassé par mes émotions », nous aurions vécu la même réalité et ma réponse aurait encore été : « oh, ok, tout va bien, je lui parlerai à elle, à la place. »

Je réalise que je pouvais, sur le moment, respecter ses besoins quels qu’ils fûent, et que cela aurait été beaucoup moins blessant pour moi de croire mes propres perceptions plutôt que sa parole qui était malhonnête émotionnellement.

J’aurais pu entendre ses mots « pas contrarié du tout, juste occupé à la vaisselle et au repas » et penser « ok, il semble juste émotionellement dépassé, et je devine qu’il ne se sent pas capable de le dire, donc il dit autre chose. C’est ok. »

Les deux raisons pour ne pas être disponible sont valables, mais l’une est vraie et l’autre ne l’est pas.

L’une me donne une capacité précise pour orienter ma boussole intérieure, l’autre la perturbe, si je crois sa parole plus que mes perceptions.

C’est piégeux : remettre en doute quelqu’un sur ses propres émotions est en soi une forme de gaslighting.

C’est une valeur forte chez moi de croire les gens quand ils me disent comment ils se sentent car, quand on en arrive là, nous sommes tous experts en nos propres réalités intérieures.

Mais, ayant eu mes perceptions ébranlées toute ma vie, je dois apprendre à tempérer l’information que je reçois par l’évidence de ce que je ressens, en maintenant les deux ensemble.

Quand je peux tenir les deux pièces d’information en même temps, je peux être plus disposée à le croire sur ce qu’il expérimente quand il a besoin de moi, sans automatiquement écarter toute information vraiment fiable que mon corps m’envoie.

Je n’ai pas besoin de lui dire qu’il a été malhonnête pour me faire confiance. Je peux juste apprendre que mes perceptions, finalement, sont plutôt correctes la plupart du temps, et m’ouvrir au fait qu’il est possible que lui ne soit pas entièrement franc, que les gens ne sont pas toujours  parfaitement conscients d’eux-même, que les humains sont compliqués.

Quand je sais au fond de moi que mes perceptions sont réellement carrément exactes, contrairement à ce qu’une vie de remise en question m’a imposée, je me sens moins tenir à la réalité comme à du sable qui se déroberait à la prise. Quand je sens que je m’accroche moins à ma santé mentale comme à un fil, je peux aborder ces situations avec plus d’aisance, de force, d’empathie et de compréhension.

Si j’en ai besoin, sachant que je peux perçevoir les choses précisément malgré ses mots, je peux gentiment questionner l’information qu’on me donne et voir si une réponse plus honnête pourrait juste être sous la surface du discours. : « Je vois que tu te sens un peu débordé, est-ce exact ? C’est ok si tu ne veux pas avoir à m’écouter chouiner. Personne ne veut avoir à faire ça tout le temps. Laisse moi savoir si c’est ce qu’il en est, ok ? ». Si j’ignore l’effacement de ma propre réalité et crois la petite voix à l’intérieur de moi qui dit : ‘Hum, non, attend, ces paroles et cette perception sensible s’invalident l’une l’autre, » peut-être serais-je assez forte pour demander des clarifications, offrir une compréhension, et obtenir une réponse plus précise.

Voici un autre exemple : j’étais à la recherche d’une maison avec un proche ami qui généralement me traite très bien. Je lui dis « Je roulerai dans la ville et nous chercherons des pancartes  A LOUER aux fenêtres ». Lui, en stress, dénigrant mon idée d’un battement de main, me dit d’un ton condescendant : « Personne ne met jamais de signe à sa fenêtre. Les gens utilisent juste Craiglist/les petites annonces ». Croyant automatiquement ses perceptions par-dessus les miennes, je pensais immédiatement : «  Whoa, je dois être stupide, pourquoi n’ai-je pas remarqué que dans cette ville c’est différent de là où j’ai grandi ? » et j’abandonnais honteuse mon plan de recherche. Je pense que quelquepart une idée me trottait à l’arrière du crâne, « oh mais je pensais avoir vu quelques pancartes aux fenêtres dans le quartier au nord d’ici, » mais j’étais confuse et je pensais donc devoir mal me souvenir.

Deux semaines plus tard, je rendis visite à une amie qui venait d’aménager dans un nouvel appartement et lui demandais : « Comment as-tu trouvé cet endroit ? » Elle dit : « oh, j’ai répondu à une pancarte à la fenêtre. Tu peux trouver les meilleures opportunités de cette manière parce que l’ancienne génération qui loue depuis longtemps comme ça n’augmente pas les loyers et a l’habitude d’utiliser ce moyen et non Craigslist/les petites annonces. » Je me figeai. Je réalisais que j’avais découvert un moment pendant lequel j’avais automatiquement laissé supplanter ma propre confiance en moi avec la supposition qu’un ami homme saurait mieux que moi.

Et oui, les femmes gaslightent les gens également. Mais le patriarcat et le sexisme structurel orientent les effets différemment. Dans le dernier exemple, l’ami fut d’accord avec le fait qu’on lui a appris à croire en ses perceptions toute sa vie et qu’ainsi il n’aurait pas abandonné ses propres idées à la présentation des miennes. Les personnes de genre féminin sont continuellement remises en question.

S’il n’y avait que ces quelques moments, il n’y aurait pas de mal. Mais il y a des milliers de moments de ce genre chaque jour, et nous ne pouvons que rarement les attraper si clairement.

La profondeur des impacts, quand tu réalises que toute ta vie tu as douté de tes propres perceptions, et que tout du long tu n’étais pas folle et que tu aurais pu te faire confiance, est vertigineuse. L’étendue de la distorsion, quand elle te frappe, est un mur de brique.

Et devine quoi ? Se sentir en colère quand ta réalité est sabotée comme ça, c’est normal et sain. Jette un œil à Picard, en haut. Il a l’air plutôt fâché, n’est-ce pas ? Quand tu tentes de t’accrocher à ta connaissance que tu n’es pas folle, tu pourrais avoir l’air un peu…folle.

Voilà toute l’essence du gaslighting. Faire activement quelquechose à une autre personne qui de façon attendue, l’amènera à ressentir des émotions comme la tristesse, la confusion, la souffrance, puis ensuite lui dire qu’elle est folle de ressentir ces émotions parce que tu n’as pas fait la chose, qu’en fait, tu as fait.

L’effet sur la psyché quand des personnes en qui tu as confiance te disent de façon quasi-continue, par des attaques journalières, que des choses réelles ne sont pas réelles est de causer une fragmentation et un sabotage de nos plus puissantes, nos plus belles et nos plus efficaces source d’orientation : nos perceptions et nos instincts.

Nous vivons dans un monde qui ne veut pas que les femmes aient confiance en elles. On nous dit littérallement par des milliers de façons, petites ou énormes, que ce que nous savons se passer ne se passe pas. Peut-être, comme me l’a dit un copain il y a quelques temps, même les hommes bons ne se sentent pas tout à fait à l’aise avec l’idée que les femmes croient en elles-même, parce que cela voudrait dire qu’il faut abandonner une partie du pouvoir inhérent à ce que le patriarcat et la domination masculine tente de s’accaparer. Les hommes bons sapent aussi la confiance des femmes s’ils n’ont pas travaillé sur cela.

Si, comme ça arrive souvent, tu es avec une femme qui a subi cela de façon plus sérieuse dans le passé, ces petits moments où tu lui dis de ne pas croire en ses perceptions s’accumulent au dessus des façons plus étendues dont elle a vu son sens de la réalité nié auparavant. Celles d’entre nous qui avons traversées des abus plus sérieux devont nous débattre d’autant plus pour savoir que nos perceptions sont justes, parfois sacrément dans le mille.

L’effet d’avoir des gens auxquels on croit, sur lesquels on compte pour nous renforcer, saper la réalité, est sérieux et profondément destructeur.

Pourquoi cela devrait-il compter qu’il l’ait fait exprès ou pas ? Je veux dire, le faire exprès peut faire de toi une personne authentiquement mauvaise, bien sur. Mais très peu parmi nos proches conçoivent de nous faire du mal, et pourtant, ils en font, du mal.

On ne joue pas légèrement avec la santé mentale de quelqu’un. S’il te blesse si profondément parce qu’il n’a  juste pas réalisé qu’il le faisait, ou parce qu’il se sent trop honteux pour admettre quelquechose, qui n’avait probablement rien d’honteux du tout, ou parce qu’il a grandi dans un monde où il pouvait s’en sortir avec et ne plus y penser, est-ce que les effets ne sont pas les mêmes ?

En fait, être dans ce genre de marécage de dissimulation peut être d’autant plus perturbant quand tu vois clairement que la personne que tu aimes profondément, la personne en qui tu as confiance et en qui tu as foi, croit elle-même en ce qu’elle dit_ même si ce n’est pas réel.

Le problème est que la masculinité nous dit tous, quelque soit notre genre, que les femmes ne savent pas de quoi elles parlent. Ainsi, si une information provient d’une bouche avec un certain ton de voix et une certaine présentation genrée, cela ne peut pas être pris sérieusement. Et ça, c’est malsain. Et ça, c’est dingue.

Quelquefois, un cercle entier de personnes peut faire cela à quelqu’un et ne rien voir du tout jusqu’à ce qu’il soit trop tard. Dans ma communauté, par exemple, il y a quelques années, il y avait une femme de couleur que les gens disaient « tout le temps en colère. » Et elle était avec ce mec blanc « mignon, doux et décontracté. » Nous nous demandions comment ils parvenaient à s’entendre car leur tempéraments semblaient si différents.Il s’avera plus tard qu’il l’agressait sexuellement depuis des années et niait sa réalité quand elle disait que ça arrivait. Pendant des années… Et nous, qui étions autour d’eux tout ce temps, nous nous sommes cognés à un mur de brique de notre propre cru : nous avions laissé ça arriver. Nous l’avions vu comme « une femme de couleur colérique,» sans nous arrêter pour penser : hé, qu’est-ce qui sur cette planète rendrait quelqu’un si fâché ? J’étais l’une de celle appelée pour aider sur la procédure de responsabilité. Et je compris qu’il n’avait pas complètement reconnu ce qu’il faisait. Est-ce que cela a changé l’impact sur elle qu’un groupe de personnes prétendument radical l’abandonne ? Avions-nous réellement besoin que la personne causant la blessure voit la blessure avant que nous aillons la volonté de reconnaître qu’elle était là ?

N’est-ce pas là une terrible quantité de pouvoir à donner à ceux qui gaslightent, que de les laisser décider si la personne qu’ils ont blessé peut être entendue ou reçevoir de l’aide ?

Et oui, le gaslighting arrive également aux hommes. Ceux qui l’ont expérimenté ont besoin de s’aider et de se soutenir (plutôt que d’être en compétition). Nous l’expérimentons de façons différentes selon le degré de connivence de notre société. Quand les hommes gaslightent les femmes ou les personnes de genre féminin, cela révèle l’étendue plus grande du phénomène de gaslighting et la formation culturelle des hommes cisgenres à massivement amplifier le préjudice et de jeter le-la survivante sous le bus. La même chose est vraie avec les enfants qui ont subi cela : ils ne sont pas crus. La meilleure chose que vous puissiez faire, si vous avez vécu ça ou que ça vous est arrivé, est d’utiliser cette conviction d’a quel point ça fout la pensée en l’air et de supporter les femmes qui doivent vivre dans un contexte dans lequel la culture entière les gaslighte littéralement chaque jour (livre : Men explain things to me de Rebecca Solnit). Cela signifie que lorsqu’un seul gars pratique le plus extrême abus de gaslighting, les femmes ou les personnes de genre féminin seront particulièrement visées tout en ne disposant que de très peu de moyens d’obtenir de l’aide.

Alors, a-t-on besoin d’un autre mot ?

Y a-t-il un mot pour « foutre en l’air ton sens des réalités et ébranler ta santé mentale en disant que quelquechose n’arrive pas quand c’est absolument en train de se passer ? » quand ça ne signifie pas « le faire exprès » mais au contraire de reconnaître le caractère profondément systémique, persuasif et profondément déglingant pour l’esprit de ces moments ?

J’ai appris récemment une distinction au sujet d’un outil de pensée sur le consentement sexuel : les accidents de consentement contre les violations de consentement. La distinction, bien que risquée comme de telles choses peuvent l’être, semble utile. Je me demande si nous ne pourrions pas utiliser une distinction similaire pour comprendre les différentes façons profondément blessantes dont le gaslighting affecte les femmes et les personnes au genre non binaire. Cela permettrait d’offrir dans le même mouvement, un chemin pour la réparation et l’apprentissage  quand les hommes reconnaissent qu’ils ont effectivement été engagés dans ce genre de sabotage psychologique en niant les perceptions justes de quelqu’un d’autre.

Quel seraient les mots à utiliser ? Gaslighting est un mot si puissant et qui a aidé beaucoup de personnes à enfin croirent en elles-même. Je ne veux pas le cantonner aux situations extrêmes car c’est le côté ordinaire et naturalisé d’une perturbation systémique qui le rend si difficile à épingler. Et pourtant, je veux distinguer les actes d’une personne très abusive, qui change ouvertement la réalité, de ceux que beaucoup d’hommes font par manque de travail psychologique sur eux-même ou de maturité émotionnelle, sans non plus laisser ce glissement continuer à avoir ces effets violents et néfastes pour les femmes comme à présent. Comment appellerions-nous ce gaslighting accidentel ?

Bien sûr, il y a ceux qui gaslightent à n’en plus finir lorsque vous leur laissez un tout petit peu d’espace. Il y a ceux avec qui il n’est pas sage de laisser une quelconque plage pour discuter de leurs intentions, parce qu’ils sont largement et entièrement incapables d’empathie avec ceux qu’ils ont blessés. Pour ces cas là, le « gaslighting direct » est probablement le meilleur mot. Parce que le centrage sur le survivant est tellement difficile pour ces individus, il est surement mieux dans ces cas de commencer justement à se concentrer sur le survivant, et d’y rester. Les effets comptent avant tout dans le gaslighting. Pas les intentions.

—–

Un grand merci à Fanny Chaumet pour la traduction !

See the original viral posts at:

https://norasamaran.com/2016/02/11/the-opposite-of-rape-culture-is-nurturance-culture-2/

https://norasamaran.com/2016/08/28/variations-on-not-all-men/

https://norasamaran.com/2016/06/28/on-gaslighting/

Contact

This page is a list of resources to help those around survivors of gendered harm begin or continue learning about good ways to respond.

As anyone who has begun the process of supporting survivors will no doubt have perceived, distinct bystander patterns emerge.

These same patterns are described in all of these resources, dating from the mid-1990s to the present day.

This consistent experience of bystander patterns across time and space suggests that the whiplash-quick social conditioning that makes it appear normal and natural to harm survivors the moment they speak up, and the question of how to perceive harm accurately, let alone protect survivors from it, is an old problem, one that communities and movements have been dealing with for a long time.

This list of resources can hopefully help bystanders, supporters, and pod members skip over common pitfalls and prevent some of the the anguish of reinventing the wheel.

In the end, though, in a culture that normalizes and minimizes harm, choosing to centre, believe, and protect survivors is just that: a choice.

No amount of reading can demonstrate how widespread and systemic and deeply-rooted this cultural conditioning into racism-and-sexism is. In a lot of ways, there are no words.

But if you are witnessing it, or beginning to become aware of it, the readings and tools here can affirm that you and those who are supporting you are absolutely not imagining it.

The harm is enormous, so large and so deeply-rooted it is difficult to see – until you bump up against it and it bumps you back, hard.

from Sprout Distro’s Betrayal Zine:

“This conspiracy of silence seeks not only to end a survivor’s struggle before it even begins, but also to provide the back drop for what will happen to the few survivors who refuse to be muzzled. For a survivor to speak openly of their experiences in such a climate can only be understood as an act of resistance, and as with all acts of resistance, repression is a likely outcome. This repression is more nuanced than the clubs of police officers or the guns of soldiers, though these too have been turned on survivors. The repressive forces are more likely to be mentally and emotionally devastating. Those who doubt the brutality of this internal repressive apparatus have likely never been on the receiving end.

The ‘communities’ that are so often turned to with the expectation of support are more often mobilized against the survivors on behalf of their perpetrators in a stunning counter attack. It’s difficult to properly illustrate what so many survivors have had to endure at the hands of their supposed comrades.

Perhaps a survivor gave no clue of abuse as they endured it, perhaps they consented to certain sexual activity but not all of it, perhaps they felt the need to disclose certain experiences and withhold others, perhaps they needed time to process their trauma and only revealed it gradually, perhaps they have their own issues with power or boundaries. What’s important is not the details themselves, but how they can be twisted, taken out of context, or else used to undermine a survivor’s credibility. Past histories, addictions, coping mechanisms, debts, insecurities, even a survivor’s political identity, all are fair game. When this strategy is successful, survivors are villainized and their attackers are recast as the victims of lies and manipulation.

But even if the apparent objective of discrediting a survivor in the eyes of community fails, the process itself can still be effective at forcing survivors out of that community. Knowing that simply walking into a space means that nearly everyone there has discussed your personal life at length creates a tremendous barrier, regardless of the conclusions people may have reached. Survivors may feel compelled to pre-empt this dynamic by engaging their critics. Often, this plays into demands for “proof” or details of assaults or abuse. The retraumatizing aspect of this is yet another further attack on the survivor, and often feeds rather than undermines the conflict.

As tensions grow, it begins to spill over into new arenas. Previously uninvolved parties […] become caught up in the mounting bedlam, and organizing becomes disrupted. Of course, at this point normalization has been broken, and the repressive apparatus no longer has anything to lose by not holding back. […] “These divisions are hurting us!” they cry. Of course, such divisions are never blamed on the perpetrator or their actions, but on the survivor for insisting that the trauma they’ve experienced cannot go unanswered.

They will often liken the survivor’s struggle to a ‘witch hunt,’ when they themselves share more in common with the executioners than with those who burn at the stake.”

Why Does He Do That  (especially the chapters on ‘abusers and their allies’ and on the cultural context for entitlement)

BYP100 Community Accountability Process

Incite! community accountability process

Philly Stands Up

Bay Area Transformative Justice Network

Punch Up Collective

Sprout Distro Broken Teapot Zine

Sprout Distro’s Betrayal Zine

If Black Women Were Free

Mo Daviau – Narcissistic Abuse Resources

Your Friend Has Been Abused: What Do You Do?

Everyday Feminism: How to Apologize

The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence within Activist Communities (see section 4 describing bystander dynamics)

Creative Interventions, Creative Interventions Toolkit: A Practical Guide to Stop Interpersonal Violence

Anti-authoritarian Approaches to Resolving and Transforming Conflict and Harm

Facilitating the Creation of Accountability Policies & Procedures Tip Sheet

Community Accountability for Survivors of Sexual Violence Toolkit

Rock Dove Collective, Dealing with Conflict

https://www.rainn.org/articles/how-respond-survivor

Baby, I’m a Manarchist

My profound gratitude to the Badassery group and to my pod for gathering these resources and sharing them with one another as we all learn and struggle together. <3<3<3

The presidential debates, horrific as their results were, provided survivors everywhere with a strange, backwards gift.

A recent piece notes: “It’s remarkable how many female viewers report feeling physically ill.”  Trout has not touched any of them, not directly. Yet what survivors are reporting, watching him enter their living rooms via their TV screens, is that this kind of psychological violence is, in fact, physical violence.

We have been speaking and speaking and speaking about the harm caused by narcissistic gaslighting behaviour for years. Yet unless you have witnessed this yourself, it can be almost impossible to believe that it exists.

The logical switchbacks, emotional manipulation, moves to control the terms of discussion, utter lack of consistency or emotional accountability, and multiple competing realities that we are witnessing: these behaviors create trauma and dissociation in vulnerable people who are subject to them, especially when in the context of a gendered or other significant power imbalance. These behaviours, when they occur under circumstances of structural power imbalance and its attendant physiological vulnerability, can cause physical harm in the brains of survivors. One needs multiple minds to hold the multiple realities that emerge from this gaslighting behaviour in a near-continual stream.

Deflection, minimization, bait and switch, accusing others of things he has done, these emanate from Trout in a nearly-continous flow, as Liz Plank explains in a recent video when she notes: “If you feel crazy during this election, that’s Trout gaslighting you again, and again, and again, and again.”

(Note for the curious: if you’re wondering “Why ‘Trout’?”: like many, I choose to starve the name. It is much easier for me to read a beautiful word like ‘Trout’ when my body is reacting in this way.)

Even as you watch him speak – even as I watch him speak and relive being gaslighted by the last two men who dated me and the man who raised me – it is almost impossible to imagine how he could say the things he says with a straight face. And yet he does, over and over, on and on and on.

Observers note that he really, genuinely, appears to believe each disjointed, incoherent thing he says, in the moment he says it, regardless of how completely disconnected it is from his statement just a second before.

This is the reason he causes such harm. Whether because of mirror neurons or just limbic connectivity, the bizarre incoherent things he believes, it is very difficult for observers who are watching and listening to him not to believe. There is a powerful limbic connectivity that these kinds of abusers generate that pulls certain vulnerable listeners into their distorted reality.

I had to get rid of the eyes; the danger in limbic connectivity 

The thing is, typically this kind of behavior is reserved for the private context of intimacy. These kinds of abusers, especially the low-grade ones, can hold quite successful positions and are drawn to positions of power and prestige, becoming big fish in small ponds and crafting a well-liked and even ‘humble’ persona. Only in the crucible of intimacy do the forgetting and emptiness, the bizarre dishonesties, the switchbacks and emotional incoherence become apparent, because they are attempting an intimacy that is impossible when you do not know the true self at all. In other words, someone who gaslights lovers and partners may not behave this way with other friends or family.

Typically this behavior happens under the radar of bystanders, on a narrow-band channel that only the survivor receives. Yes, your perfectly nice friend who has never done this to you, even your son or your brother, yes they can do this to their partner, ex, or lover, in a narrowband channel that you will have to work to see, because an intimate is interacting with their deeper true self, not the persona that they have subconsciously crafted that stands in for a genuine relationship to the self. Most others will interact with the surface, crafted self. Not the emotional depths, which are absent of connection to the true self, and thus are emotionally incoherent.

Until you choose to listen very very deeply to what the survivor is experiencing, you may only perceive the surface persona, and not see the gaslighting, while only the partner or lover is subject to it in ways that are hidden from bystanders. So when the survivor finally struggles through the physiological silencing of trauma and manages to speak, bystanders may not empathize or even understand what the one who was harmed is living through.

Watching Trout speak can help those who have never experienced gaslighting empathize with those who have. What is normally hidden, reserved for the private communication channels of intimacy, is now beamed over millions of screens for all to see.

The inability to name the harm is physiological and involves multiple neurobiological systems.*  If a normally kind and compassionate person seems now to have only two settings, silence or screaming, or a normally good writer begins to produce choppy broken phrasing, or becomes unable to speak coherently when they try to name the harm, this is caused by the abuse they need support, understanding, and protection from.

Now, I’m  not American, so I watch from the sidelines, with the ever-so-slight protection of living in a different country. I need that protection when I watch Trout speak. I want to hold the border, the very 49th parallel, up as a barrier, as I watch Trout lie, minimize, evade, distort reality, create multiple competing realities, and deny that any of this is happening. This is particularly striking because my usual understanding of borders is as sources of violence and harm. Yet watching him speak I find myself wishing for any barrier to the destruction this man can wreak inside my head.

I need all the protection I can get, because my brain – my literal neurons and physical brain structures – have been originally structured by a man who behaved in this same way.

With my mind and body developmentally formed by just this sort of abuse, I am physically extremely susceptible to people who create multiple competing realities and attempt to put them in my head.

Just as a survivor of sexual assault struggles afterwards to regain knowledge that they are allowed to determine who touches their own body, a survivor of serious, chronic gaslighting, who faces this abuse again in a new situation, has to work hard to know they are allowed their own thoughts. Because the harm happened from within trusted intimacy, it shaped brain development; our brains are primed to be vulneralbe to this harm.

We need names for these experiences, because we live in a culture that automatically protects men who abuse, and allows abuse to continue just because it is so much easier to swim with than against the tide. Because we live in a culture that masks and normalizes hierarchies of power, abuse can be hidden as ‘polite’ because it preserves the normal flow of power, while even gently interrupting abuse disrupts the normal flow of power, so appears ‘rude.’ Cultures of dominance are, after all, woven through us all, not ‘out there’ but inside us.

And that means we live in a world where empathy for survivors needs to be consciously cultivated. We need ‘best practices’ so that survivors are not left holding the responsibility to educate everyone around them at the time when they have lost the ability to eat, sleep, move, or speak, and most need others to know what to do.

When friends and those who are supporting me first asked how it had happened, some wanted me to show them a metaphorical cup of abuse on the kitchen table, when the trouble was that the abuse and the bystander dynamics are the whole house. It took time, doing their own research, and a lot of deep listening by those who know me well, to understand what I was living through, especially in the long stretch of time when I had physiologically lost the capacity to speak at all. How can I explain that the harm is so large we are inside it, that – like the holodeck walls on Star Trek Next Gen – only once you bump up against it do you see how it was around us all along?

The structural conditioning to disbelieve and not-hear survivors is massive and unseen until you ask for help, and bump up against it

The unfortunate reality TV show that is this man’s face has a strange positive side effect: despite the horrors of this administration, when used the right way this experience can offer a way out of the double bind that survivors find ourselves in, where if we are kind and quiet and succumb we sacrifice our bodies and minds (that’s not a metaphor: the cost to survivors of this kind of abuse is loss of capacity to think, move, eat, sleep, speak). But if we speak up, those who care have to work very hard to understand us, because who could imagine a moral world created by a man like Trout?

For those who did not grow up inside a reality controlled by a gaslighting man, spotting this kind of abuse may be ‘easy‘ as these authors write: “We watch you say one thing, then say the opposite. Then refuse to admit any of it happened. […] We can spot gaslighting from a mile away.” Sure. If you are not yourself a survivor of this abuse during developmental years, you can spot it and protect yourself. Hence half his audience saying he reads as ‘a buffoon,’ absurd, nonsensical, as the other half experiences him as emanating terrifying distortion that they have no protection from.

For survivors raised inside this form of abuse, “spotting” gaslighting, let alone getting your own thoughts and memories back, is extremely difficult, because gaslighting during developmental years can literally shape the developing brain.

Just as women raised in families where they were never encouraged to say ‘no’ find that, as adults, they have a very hard time doing so, those raised with a gaslighting man find it very, very difficult to hang on to their beliefs, memories, and knowledge when someone like Trout gets inside their head and attempts to put multiple competing realities there.

I’ve been learning more than I wish to about this, because I asked for accountability with a former partner earlier this year, and encountered the hard wall of just how evasive and slippery this kind of harm can be. I have a support pod, and we asked him to create his own, but he just did weird slippery evasive maneuvers instead of taking any responsibility for a year of gaslighting and messing with my head.

Watching Trout talk is like a big, loud, public version of the bizarre emptiness, switchbacks, multiple competing realities, bait and switch, and manipulation that I experienced with this well-intended ‘feminist’ guy for a year. It’s a relief to have something I can point to, to say: “There. That guy on the TV who is making survivors’ nervous systems everywhere go haywire. There is what happened to me. Except he did it in a way that was hidden to others and that largely only I could see.”

It is vital to centre the emotions of the survivor. Notice this. Notice the tendency to instantly and continuously centre the feelings of the one who harmed, and fight it. Centre the survivor, direct and keep your empathy with them, even as we become curious about what causes this galislighting behaviour.

The continual, dizzying flipping back and forth we see in Trumps’s speech is part of a familiar pattern. It is real. When a survivor tells you they have lived through this, understand it is real and it is almost impossible to describe.

One developmental theory that might help explain what causes men like trump to gaslight in this way – viewed through an attachment lens – is that infants come to know themselves through experiencing mirroring and acceptance of their true self by caregivers. In this theory, those who are inadequately mirrored in infancy experience deep structural shame, and disconnect totally from their genuine selves. The pain of this disconnection is so great that they become a vast emptiness inside. Instead of experiencing genuine connection to self – or to others – they construct a surface self that can gain the approval and proximity of caregivers. This core loss of the connection to their inherent spontaneous genuine self can occur so early that they do not even remember the loss. They only know their ‘self’ to be the constructed ego, the seemingly very-confident shell that they present to the world, that appears to have very little or no shame whatsoever.

Where there is no coherent emotional relationship to the true self, what is actually under that overly-confident, emotionally disconnected persona is  in truth a tremendous deep well of unbearable shame, a self-loathing that is not within the daily awareness, but which causes results in emotional, and hence moral and empathic, incoherence. The self, that governs empathy and connection, is not known, and is (falsely) presumed to be unworthy of being known. Anyone who comes too close to seeing this true self gets harmed. Deflection, prevarication, dissembling, and yes, deep continual gaslighting is the cost of anyone attempting intimacy with these folks.

Those with this inner disconnection cannot handle the slightest criticism of their constructed, highly-inflated persona. It is a false self covering a fragile, disconnected inner emptiness and emotional incoherence that is continually denied.

They need to do the hard reconnection work to know the spontaneous, genuine self, before they can become emotionally accountable or able to accept or give nurturance or normal responsiveness and connection.

Because there is no inner emotional coherence, they forget. They forget emotions they forget any true feelings of love and vulnerability with others that do occur. Any experience of vulnerability or genuine connection (seeing and being seen unprotected, experiencing unconditional acceptance by another) is so painful that it becomes completely buried very quickly afterwards. They move on from intimacies with shocking speed, and completely forget any tiny amount of vulnerability they experienced, even when it was positive.

This disconnection from the self means they can retroactively wish they had thought a certain way about an event, and then convince themselves that they always felt that way. Lundy Bancroft writes that people with this distortion can pass lie detector tests. They actually forget what they thought, said, and felt before, and believe in each moment whatever they feel is best suited to their false, inflated persona. Emotional consistency slides off them.

Narcissists of this sort are capable of passing lie detector tests because of this disconnectedness to anything resembling a true, genuine essential self who can be vulnerable – be seen as they truly are – with others. They honestly convince themselves that anything they say in the moment is and always has been the truth, even if a second later they are in a completely different reality that does not connect. This is what was done to me every day for a year.

My pod’s been doing a lot of research to try to understand what is happening when we ask for help, because as the very helpful book Why Does He Do That indicates, those who behave in this way have an utter block to taking accountability. They cannot hear information that contradicts their sense of self. They compulsively forget the uncomfortable parts of the story, so they gaslight everyone around them as well as the original one they harmed. They invite those around them into their distorted sense of reality. He wants most of all to prevent those around him from connecting with the one he has harmed, because this would allow them to check his facts.

Why Does He Do That has been super helpful at explaining this behaviour. Lundy Bancroft, who has worked with thousands of abusive men, writes that the only way to get a clear picture of what is happening is to consistently check what they say against information provided by their current and former partners. This is the only way to get a clear picture, he writes, because a consistent pattern in men who harm others is that they are not remotely accurate sources of information, even when they have completely good intent. Just like Trout, they can be extremely convincing because in each moment of speech they genuinely believe what they are saying. 

Do you ever feel crazy looking at Trout and seeing that he really seems to believe the incoherencies he keeps spouting? That is how sure and honest-feeling these men can be.

The pundits waste no time in fact-checking Trout’s bizarre dishonesties, his blatant bending of reality. They need to. As Bancroft’s research tells us, the only way to counter gaslighting is with powerful, repeated doses of reality.

This is why when an abuser gaslights a partner or former partner, he also seeks to talk one-on-one and preemptively to those she might go to for help, to convince them of a narrative that would lead bystanders to refuse to even speak to the survivor, to cut off attempts to check the abuser’s story against any external reality. His desperate attempts to control the narrative include attempting to silence the survivor completely if he finally loses control.

Men who have an emptiness inside them – who do not know the beauty of their own true selves and instead live in a toxic mix of emptiness and entitlement – live their whole lives turned outwards reaching for external accolades, advancement, and praise. These men may never turn inward, to know themselves and cultivate a whole, warm, nurturing heart, because this would entail facing the unbearable emptiness at their core that results from lack of healthy mirroring as an infant. Instead they seek constant external excitement, external markers of success, to distract them from the emptiness at their core. Their public image is their self.

Since this emptiness does not give them the conscious desire for true emotional connection with others, this emptiness manifests in acts of control and neglect towards those they love.

They use people for temporary needs and then discard them like nothing when they’re done with them. They block out and forget any emotional connection they once felt, after they move on.

They use words to try to get others to see them well, as though controlling a self-image is the same as cultivating a self.

Because these men have an emptiness inside them, they have no distinction between a public persona and an inner self. They live a barely-concealed toxic combination of insecurity and entitlement.

Where there is no cultivated loving heart, no connection to self, there is no warm centre that can love and nurture others. Instead they attempt to create a mask of a nurturing self.

These men are completely disconnected from their inner selves, and so they spend their lives seeking out superficial external reward rather than internal emotional maturity. If an act of kindness or nurturance is not publically rewarded – if no one they consider ‘superior’ to them who they want to impress is watching – they have very little inner incentive to offer nurturance or care.

Where there is no connection to the true self, there is no inner desire to create a warm home bond because this does not garner them the public praise that they are entirely oriented to. They can gaslight, manipulate, control or neglect their closest because the needs and feelings of their intimates just aren’t that important to them, as long as their carefully cultivated image does not get affected.

Especially in those crucial moments when normal care and nurturance are needed by their loved ones, as is normal and expected in a healthy relationship, in those moments when they are called upon to have something more than a vacuum at the core, they can grow angry, cruel, and blaming, telling those near and dear to them that the issue lies in them as they grow distant and neglecting. On ordinary days, they engage in a frantic, barely-concealed continual fleeing of their own inner emptiness and of anything resembling actual intimacy with those whose trust they gain – whether as lovers, partners, or intimate friends. They live in a continual, quiet, frantic attempt to conceal their true selves.

Rather than creating healthy emotional connection, as others would, they stew in a hurtful combination of self-loathing and entitlement that leads to them to act in entirely self focussed ways, with very little room for the needs or feelings of anyone else. This combination of inferiority and superiority, the pull between these two poles, leads them to confuse, abuse, and gaslight those they love rather than nurture and support those they care for.

The form the harm takes is this combination of gaslighting, emotional dishonesty (for how can you tell the truth when you have never known your own heart?), and continual quiet manipulation to get what they want, whether that is casual sex, or companionship  without committment, or arm candy they can feel proud to ‘own.’ They focus entirely on their own needs while largely acting unconcerned with the needs or feelings of others.

Men who have not awoken to their true inner self will not have the joy in giving and loving just for the beauty of getting to love.

They do not experience the wonderful warm feeling of a deep, trusting family bond. They only know what others can give them, they only know how others can elevate their social status or help them gain admiration and influence. They exist for their reputation rather than heart and home. So they will depict normal expectations that we all have of one another – such as ordinary family responsibilities, or acting with warmth, honesty, and accountability for our loved ones – as distressing encroachments on their inappropriately expanded sense of entitlement, or as an invasive move ‘too close’ to their core of emptiness. If you come close to perceiving their true self they will lash out or flee. They perceive the healthy interdependence and mutuality of intimate relationships, which is for most human beings the place where comfort and wellbeing occurs – as an excessive imposition on their right to center themselves at all times, and simultaneously as a terrifying form of entrapment, an attempt to come ‘too close’ – even during sex, and with those they say they love.

They will story themselves as having ‘given and given and given’ when the things they are ‘giving’ does not rise to even the minimal expectations of interpersonal obligations to those one is intimate with. (Like describing ‘not lying’ as a gift, or ‘hugging my child’ as some extreme imposition, or ‘going to see a psychologist when my partner says I’m abusing her’ as some sort of fantastic act of generosity, when these are just the basic things one does to be a decent human being.) If there is no public praise involved in an act of nurturance, they have very little incentive to do it.

Any attempt to name harm (such as to ask them to stop gaslighting you, or to tell the truth) is received as criticism, and this can only be perceived as a blow to their image because the usual empathic capacities are underdeveloped. Since their image is all they have for a self, they must ignore, tune out, or ultimately destroy the one who asks them to stop harming. This appears to them to be the only available option until they get sufficiently motivated to recover the lost part of themselves that would derive pleasure in emotional connection. Men who abuse in this way do not distinguish between their self-image and their actual self, because their true self is underdeveloped, immature, or offline.

That is why they use words to try to control reality, and attack or isolate anyone who tries to bring a bit of reality back into the equation. (“I have all the best words,” he says, his face beaming into the living rooms of the nation.)

The thing is, they will lie, and lie, and lie about this. And if they lie to a survivor of gaslighting abuse, like me, the harm is immeasurable. And so you, friendly bystander, when a woman or trans person says they are experiencing this – when they say they feel crazy, or when they can barely speak? You believing us, you believing us matters. Our words and our minds and our imaginations are our first line of defense, and so your willingness to take the time to understand what is happening is how you can help.

Deeply listening to survivors, fact checking the partial-ommission stories that those who abuse use to deflect and avoid accountability, takes energy and empathy and time, and may take acting against the current of socially ‘polite’ behaviour.

In a violent culture, it is so much easier to toss up barriers to seeing intimate violence, especially when without cross-checking, the abuser’s narrative feels so truthy, and when even seeing the abuse might mean recognizing that we may have inadvertently become part of it.

A mistake we make as bystanders is to attempt to use our own rolodex of emotional experiences to empathize with the survivor – or to try to figure out the abuser. But empathizing with abuse survivors takes a different set of skills. Empathizing with survivors means stretching out of experiences we have already had, and into deep listening to the experience they have just had, or are still having, which may be completely outside our lived experience. Our own rolodex may just not provide the information we need to comprehend what they are telling us has just happened to them.

I believe completely, passionately, in transformative justice processes rooted in compassion, accountability, and a belief that no one is disposable – and yet this only works when we centre survivors. Empathy for abusers is needed but it is all too frequently used to derail support for survivors, which is exactly what the abuser wants.

It can also lead us to project our own ethical impulses onto the abuser’s actions, which would make sense if this were a reasonable person acting – but the whole point is that no matter how nice he may be to his friends or colleagues – who are interacting with his surface, carefully cultivated self – the abuser’s actions in the context of intimacy, in which our true selves become naked and bare, typically do not make that kind of sense. Imagine trying to imagine why hamster-hair keeps repeating “ICE has endorsed me,” when the plain fact that government agencies do not endorse candidates has been clarified multiple times. He believes if he repeats a thing enough it becomes true, because he is emptiness inside – his surface self is his only self.

You could imagine an empathetic reason for this incoherence that comes out of your own rolodex of experience, and it would just let him evade accountability, because he does not make that kind of sense. These actions make another kind of sense: an abusive, empty, entitled one. But they do not make ordinary empathic sense, so trying to empathize with an abuser who is evading accountability often just means throwing the survivor under the bus.

Bystanders may not comprehend the full depth of the harm, because of a mistaken idea that physical violence is somehow ‘worse’ than psychological violence. Well, if he didn’t hit her, we think, maybe it wasn’t that bad. I mean, we all have bad days, right? We seem to have this mistaken assumption that abuse just means coming home a little grouchy and having a bad day. We think only of our own range of experiences, and may find it hard to really hear what the survivor is telling us.

The core of all the different forms of abuse is typically the inability to take accountability for one’s actions, the inability to hear when we are harming another, the inability to own our mistakes or grow from them in a way that actually does repair. While we do need a culture that can foster accountability without ostracization, we first need a culture that believes and centre survivors of gendered violence (in all its forms: rape, assault, gaslighting, control of family funds, threats to leave if the abuser’s whims are not catered to, etc.).

We need a culture that can support accountability happening at all.

This idea that ‘physical’ abuse is somehow distinct from ‘psychological’ abuse is outdated, based in a Manichean divide between mind and body that is itself a deeply messed up Western fantasy that prevents us from knowing our own bodies. Its primary function is to further disbelieve survivors, or tell them they are imagining it.

In the 1800s, before the germ theory of disease, people would have thought it absurd that tiny creatures cover our skin and live in our bodies, keeping us well and making us sick. Absurd that tiny microbes, bacteria, viruses, can transfer invisibly from body to body. How can something invisible make you sick?

In the 60s, Marshall McLuhan wrote that the light from a TV screen isn’t just something you’re ‘watching.’ It physically crosses the room and touches your body, entering your skin and your eyes.

In the 90s, people thought it was ridiculous that anyone could be allergic to perfume, because it’s just a smell. How could you be allergic to a smell?

A gas leak can kill you. Unless an odour is artificially added, it can kill you before you can even detect it. We add the odour for a reason: we must make danger visible, so we can understand how to prevent it.

What happens when this man uses words to get at the millions of triggered women listening to him?

It isn’t only his body language that presupposes threat. As an abuse survivor, what I am susceptible to – I don’t even want to write the word ‘vulnerable,’ because that seems to open up a tunnel by which he can get me – is the multiple competing realities. The bait and switch designed to make you feel crazy. The gaslighting. The getting inside your head and trying to get you to abandon your own reality and adopt his, even and especially when his makes no sense, when his realities are internally incoherent, or when his words bear zero connection to his actions or to reality.

This kind of abuse is one of the most devastating forms of harm that any human being can do to another. Gaslighting shatters people. Physically.

And the worst thing about it is that those who regularly do this to others will then turn it around and say that you are doing it to them, by imposing on what they perceive as their ‘right’ to do this to you. Because what is consensus reality, anyway, right?

Here’s an example.

I say “The sky is blue.”

He says “The sky is green. It has always been green. What are you thinking? ‘The sky is blue.’ It’s never been blue. Look again.”

I look up. And because I have been raised by an abuser, because my brain has developed around precisely this kind of abuse, I see green.

I say, bewildered, but trusting him: “no, no I’m pretty sure it’s usually blue?” as I stare at the green sky.

He replies, getting upset: “You’re trying to control the narrative. I don’t feel safe now. I have to have room to control the narrative.”

And there I am, scared and confused, trying to believe both that the sky is green, and that me confusedly trying to remember reality is me ‘controlling the narrative’ – which of course I would never want to do.

Cue me having overwhelming dissociative symptoms. Cue him saying my dissociative symptoms mean there’s something wrong with me, because he’s acting totally fine.

He spent nearly a year telling me that he was acting completely normal, had no issues at all, and that the only issue was that all the women in his life were ‘crazy’ – And I completely accepted – even encouraged – his world view. Because that’s what you do when you care about someone, you encourage them to trust their worldview. Right?

This is what it’s like being a survivor of gaslighting abuse. This is how at risk I am to further abuse.

Here’s another example.

A guy I like says he’s into me. I say “ok, we gotta talk. I’m a survivor of serious formative abuse, and it kicked me in the ass last year. I’m in the middle of an extremely sensitive healing process, and have taken myself apart in order to carefully put all the pieces back together. I can only get close to guys if they are choosing to be actively part of my healing and are exceptionally careful with me. I get horrible dissociative symptoms if men are not extremely emotionally reliable and nurturing with me. So if we get involved at all, you’re going to have to treat me really, really well, act as solid, present, and good to me as the men who have treated me well.”

He explains what a feminist he is. How self-aware he is. How he does a ton of his own emotional work. He spends a few days explaining all of this to me, how he’s super super good to women and really committed to his feminist practice and totally gets it and is a big nurturer.

I think I’ve won the lottery – a cute guy I’m into who also is into helping women heal! I’ve been treated really, really well by several partners by this point and I know how awesome it is to be in a relationship with a guy who really treats you well. Who listens, who is comforting, who is responsive, who owns his shit, who values you just because you’re you, and because you help him grow. I know this well and between his words and his carefully cultivated feminist reputation I take him at his word that he is another one of these.

Fast forward a few months, and I am losing  my mind, and can’t figure out what is happening. He has been destabilizing me all day every day for months.

He has been actively training me not to rely on him, continually tracking me for any indication that I’m beginning to feel secure and actively doing tiny and big things that pull the rug out from under me, while telling me a combination of that it’s not happening, that i’m imagining it, and that if it is happening it’s because it is his right. He acts intentionally destabilizing and unreliable while telling me he is being good to me, inconsistently enough that in between the most blatant episodes I can lull myself into believing his words about how good he’s being to me, but actively pulling the rug out from under me often enough that I can never quite count on him to be connected or emotionally reliable or even to be physically there – he literally physically runs off frequenly when asked for things like a hug or emotional connection and comes back angry and blaming as though I have done something wrong. My friends are extremely alarmed at his strange behaviour they witness towards me, but I only hear his words, and keep telling everyone they “just don’t know him the way I do.” After months of being deliberately trained out of emotional safety in a moment by moment way while being told all of these contradictory things, I am shaken and triggered and having all my old dissociative symptoms, the symptoms I so carefully explained to him before he got involved with me.

When I finally blurt out “but we talked about this before we got involved, this is my worst nightmare, getting involved with a guy who is destabilizing and unreliable,” instead of saying ‘oh, shit, I am acting unreliable, aren’t I, and I committed to act really safe with you, didn’t I, wow thanks for letting me know, how can I do better,’ he does a classic bait and switch, though I only understand it later. Instead of hearing me, and apologizing or recognizing he is treating me badly despite having committed to the responsibility to treat me well, when I blurt out “but this is my worst nightmare,” instead of offering any kind of compassion he shoots back  what he seems to think is a perfect parallel. “This is my worst nightmare,” he retorts. “My worst nightmare is anyone relying on me.”

Nothing even remotely resembling hearing me, or connecting back to his safety commitment to me, nothing remotely resembling an apology for gaining and breaking a survivor’s trust, no recognition of what a strange ‘right’ this is for him to claim. He says it as though training others not to rely on him is something he ‘deserves’ – relationship without reliability, sex without accountability.

Even as he says this, he switchbacks on me moments later to say, somehow, angrily “I am being so reliable, I’m being so good to you, what is wrong with you that you don’t feel safe yet!” I have heard him tell me how good he is being to me over and over by now. And I have such a hard time comprehending reality when his words contradict it. He somehow manages to tell me this is real, that he’s ‘being so reliable,’ even as he also tells me it is perfectly normal that he is being unreliable, because he is entitled to act unreliable because his worst fear is anyone relying on him.

I manage to live inside both of these realities simultaneously, because I care about him, and my brain is built this way, and he wants me to. How can anyone live inside directly competing realities? And yet I trust him, completely, so somehow I do. Meanwhile he continues this constant, extremely alarming destabilization in his moment-by-moment actions, actively policing me for any sign of reassuring comfort or emotional intimacy, actively policing our interactions to make sure I never get to a feeling of safety, while lying in dozens of different ways about why he is doing this and about whether it is even happening.

That’s layer one. Hold that in mind, because here comes layer two.

As this is all going on, I also slowly discover that he has created two other alternate realities and seems to be attempting to live inside both of those at once too.

In one, he is – in his oft-repeated words – “deeply in love with me” and is my partner. This is the reality I take to be our consensual reality, the one we discussed for days and weeks and what I understood we were doing together. I had been amply, amply clear that given what I was healing from, I was only in a position to be with him if he was ready to be exceptionally emotionally consistent, present, and solid with me, our relationship out in the open, official, and real. I have had my trust shattered by a primary attachment bond, and I deserve to be treated with dignity and to have partners act in a very, very trustworthy way to help me heal, and I had made all of this extremely clear to him at the start. He had said all the things he wanted me to believe.

He is simultaneously creating another entire reality, one I slowly come to understand he is building around us unbeknownst to me. In this alternate reality, he “has no romantic feelings for me” (also his words!), and he is apparently just “hanging out” with me having casual sex.

He switches back and forth subtly between these realities depending on his mood, who we are around, and which story he has led them to believe. As the months go on he becomes more blatant about this, until he finally one day switches back and forth openly to my face, as though I somehow also live in both of these realities. He says this to me as though we have agreed, as though I already know this.

He seems to have no awareness, from moment to moment, that the thing he is saying completely contradicts everything else he has said. In each moment he appears utterly certain of himself, switching back and forth between these realities, acting as though it is me who is crazy. And when I am utterly, utterly bewildered and extremely confused and scared, and say ‘what are you talking about?’ he… slips… off the question, as though it hasn’t been asked.

Imagine trying to believe both of these things, as you are getting constantly, constantly destabilized by the person’s moment-by-moment undermining behavior.

That’s not even the whole of it.

Even as this is happening – and I find myself losing the capacity to speak and getting more and more destabilized by all of this – he also tells me for almost a year that no man has ever treated me better than he is treating me, that my own memories of being treated well do not exist.

As he tells me this I find my memories slipping away. Memories of one of the first men I had sex with, at age 19, who has remained a friend to this day 20 years later, who stayed up all night at the Dead Sea in the brisk desert wind, rubbing my body to keep me warm when we missed the last bus home from the sea and spent the night out on the beach. Who responded to me: when I turned to him, he turned to me. Simple things, and yet these were my first experiences of safety. I now feel these memories slipping away.

Memories of my longest partner, who in our first year of friendship unselfishly nursed me back to health when I had pneumonia and hadn’t slept in months because of PTSD.

Memories of my partner for three years during my undergrad, who fed me, rocked me to sleep, tucked my winter scarf snugly into my jacket collar to keep me warm when I left the house, cuddled me when I was sad or scared, and would quietly come up and put a big fat multivitamin on my tray in the school cafeteria as his way of telling me he loved me.

I think I can remember these things, years of my life, years of being treated well by nurturing men. But it’s all slipping away, like an eraser scene from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

I remember being treated well again now – mostly. My friends – and those same supportive, loving exes, who are still in my life and still act emotionally responsive – have all helped me rebuild reality after he tried to erase it.

But this ‘feminist man’ told me for nearly a year as he was actively destabilizing me that my memories of being treated well by other men didn’t exist, and I felt them breaking up and sliding away.

As I struggled to keep my own memories, struggled to speak and to hang on to reality, I tried to say “NO. Men have treated me well. Men have treated me well. I know being treated well exists because I have experienced it.” But even as I said it, I could not be sure. Can I really remember Merlin’s arms around me in the desert at age 19? Can I really remember Jordan propping up pillows and rubbing my back for hours when I couldn’t breathe, so that I could get a few minutes of sleep at a time, until bit by bit I began to sleep again, and then began to get well? Can I really remember Kevin rocking me to sleep when I cried because my father had written me another manipulative email? It is all slipping away, fragmentary, in the face of his utter certainty that emotional intimacy, responsiveness, and relational reliability do not exist. “All couples are like this inside,” he says. “They look ok on the outside, but nothing else exists.”

“Being treated well exists” I say, and I name these men like a litany, hanging on to reality, facing down both my abuser and this terrifying bewilderment inside me. Bewildered because I don’t trust myself: this quiet, self-aware, nurturing, feminist guy couldn’t possibly be doing this to me, he keeps telling me he is treating me well, I must be imagining it, he is so good to women, he told me so himself. As my memories flit in and out, threaten to break up and flutter away like so many bits of tattered cloth, moth wings over my eyes and mouth. Even now I have not gotten them all back, those visceral memories. Even now after more than a year of being told this every day, if I even think back and recall those conversations, my own memories threaten to slip away. This is how abuse creates dissociation.

By this point, when I have begun to come up into speech about how badly he has treated me, he decides he is entitled to control every aspect of our communication down to when it begins and ends and what topics he will permit. He ‘reserves the right to end the conversation for good’ if I or any of my support people tell him anything that makes him ‘feel bad.’

When a friend intervenes to help, bystander dynamics come into play. Centring survivors is shockingly hard. Men who have this vacuum inside centre themselves, and get everyone around them to centre them as well, by making centring them appear natural. The space they leave available for anyone other than themselves to be centred is a nearly nonexistent breathing room around the edges.

Relieved at the protection by another male ally, I ask my friend to explain and speak for me, because by this point months and months in I have all but lost the capacity to think or speak. Physiological effects come into play and break up my typical ease with language so anything I try to say comes out fragmented and incoherent. So I ask my friend to speak for me, and I try, I try to say “There Are Four Lights” – ie men have been good to me, men being good to me exists.

And instead of “oh, I see he is gaslighting you, hey buddy stop gaslighting her,” what I hear from our mutual friend is that I better stop right there, and take that back, because my ex “feels bad when you say that.”

Instead of hearing me, or taking the time to see what is happening, or naming the abuse, instead of helping me set a boundary – “thou shalt not erase people’s memories” the mutual friend who has offered to help turns to me forcefully and says “ok, now, well, stop that, because I think he feels bad when you say that other men were better to you than he was.”

Boom. Bait and switch. He is allowed to erase my memories, but I am not allowed to say “stop erasing my memories?” Because that makes him feel bad.

Apparently I’m never, ever allowed to be centred. It always, always has to be about the man’s feelings. Me losing my mind as a result of a year of active gaslighting couldn’t possibly be the least bit important in light of a man’s feelings. Me saying there are four lights is, it seems, a ‘mean’ thing to say to the person who is gaslighting me. Apparently him controlling reality is just normal, and me hanging on to my own memories or ever, ever centring my own experience is somehow not ok.

This expanded sense of entitlement, the baseline setting of interpersonal responsibility set in a distorted place, is what Why Does He Do That describes as a key behavior that abusers have in common. They believe they are entitled to a distorted set of rights-without-responsibilities and that anyone attempting to expect emotional reliability from them is imposing on their inherent right to centre themselves. This very baseline of their belief system causes them to gaslight people, because their perception of emotional reality is deeply distorted.

“There are four lights” hurts his feelings? How exactly does it hurt his feelings? It impinges on his natural entitlement to tell me that my own memories do not exist, that no one has ever treated me better than he is treating me.  Notice even as you read, the cultural tendency to centre men, to empathize with abusers. Even I feel it as I write this. Of course he felt bad, you think. You’re saying another man was ‘better’ than him. Maybe this brings up bad feelings about his manhood. Him him him. But at some point, we have to centre survivors. I gave him my support, love, and empathy for eight months. So. Much. Empathy. And it just got absorbed in the black hole of his entitlement, and turned around as harm.

He told me all of these realities simultaneously, and yet also told me for a year that I was the one who had something wrong with me.

In some ways focussing on rehabilitation and empathy for abusers can add to the existing tendency of abusers to continually centre themselves. It’s tricky. We have to centre survivors and simultaneously hold abusers accountable in ways that neither encourage their massive distortions of their entitlements, nor throw them away. This is the centre of a Nurturance Culture that does not condone violence, nor condone disposability.

Because make no mistake: gaslighting is not ‘psychological’ harm. When he did these things to me, the harm sent hormone cascades throughout my body. When he creates multiple competing realities and insists that I believe both simultaneously, my entire nervous system goes into a state of alarm. When he hangs up the phone after lying to me, this action sends every system in my body out of whack. Emotions are physiological. Words cause physical harm. Why Does He Do That reports that where there is both physical and psychological violence occurring, survivors report that it is the psychological violence that causes the worse harm.

We must do away once and for all with this imaginary ‘scale’ with ‘physical harm’ at one end and ‘psychological harm’ at the other. All gendered violence is physical harm. The harm that is caused by words and gaslighting, creating multiple realities, replacing people’s memories – using brainwashing strategies to destabilize survivors- this is every inch as ‘serious’ as what we used to understand as ‘physical’ harm.

When we hear a ‘nonpology’ – as Trout beautifully demonstrated earlier this week, simultaneously saying ‘I apologize,” and saying “that was locker room talk” so clearly not sorry at all – when we are forced to realize that this slipperiness and deflection is precisely how abusers operate, when we are forced to realize we actually believed, for a second, because we applied our own ethical system to this person who lacks one – we are again harmed physically. Viewers report feeling sick to their stomach. Feeling hit in the solar plexus. Losing sleep. Everything from the pituitary to the amygdala to the function of our kidneys to our muscle tone to the communication between our organs is altered by exposure to this abuser’s words.

If my adrenals go into overdrive cortisol production and that creates a whole host of health problems, from accelerated aging to hair falling out to lung infections to cancer, isn’t that physical abuse?

The age of ranking abuse on a scale of severity from ’emotional’ to ‘physical’ is over. All that outdated idea serves to do is to make the abuse seem ‘invisible’ or to disbelieve survivors, make them have to ‘prove’ that things are happening inside our bodies when we get psychologically abused, and that these things are neither ambiguous nor our imagination nor our fault. Trout doesn’t have to touch anyone to cause massive disruption to our physical bodies. Survivors of psychological abuse all over the world are getting physically harmed watching this man speak.

All abuse is physical abuse. And all deserves to be taken seriously.

It is time to mark the harm, to give it the cultural equivalent of a blue stain or an odour of eggs, so we can see it as it as it enters the body, see it as it travels.

Check the facts against an abuser’s words.

And ask the survivors in your life how they are doing. Nothing beats a phone call, or an email, or an extended hand, to counter the inner and outer silencing of this kind of abuse, the helplessness, the fear of speaking up.

If you are in an accountability pod for an abuser, notice just how hard they find it to Own, Apologize, and Repair. Your role in the accountability pod is to hold them to it.

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*The British Journal of Psychiatry notes: “A replicated finding has been the deactivation of Broca’s area, the area of the brain thought to be responsible for applying semantic representations to personal experience to allow its communication or description (Rauch et al, 1996; Shin et al, 1997b). This would appear to be consistent with subjects with PTSD having difficulty in cognitively restructuring their traumatic experience.”

I love this Bay Area Transformative Justice pod mapping worksheet so much that big, dramatic, hyperbole feels called for. ie I wanna shout it from the rooftops and say it again and again: if you consider yourself a feminist man, or you allow others around you to let you walk around with this identity and you enjoy having that reputation, or if you find you get laid or get dates or partners because of this reputation, and if you have not yet mapped out your pod of people who you would want to call you on it when you act in abusive ways, then do this right now. like today. like right away. Because it is everything, it is wonderful: https://batjc.wordpress.com/pods-and-pod-mapping-worksheet/

For a world in which everyone can feel safer, including those who harm and those who cause harm. Thank you.

If you have been told that you abuse: this video from Everyday Feminism is also great, and I highly recommend you watch it and take in carefully what she is saying about her own experience of fucking up and then being fully accountable. Owning doesn’t centre you. It is not about your intentions or your emotions or your reasons for the fuckup. It centres the other person, the one you have harmed. Name fully your acts, take the time to fully get and own how they caused harm, and express in a responsive way how you intend to address them, and check if what you offer actually is effective for repair of the harm you caused. You can also have compassion for yourself of course but that’s not the owning part. That’s it. Nobody has to be perfect but you have to know how to do repair if you want to be part of social justice movements, because you’re going to fuck up and you have to know how to hear it and fix it without flipping out.  http://everydayfeminism.com/2013/11/how-to-apologize/

This is an incredibly on point and insightful piece from Everyday Feminism I highly recommend you read and act on right away:  Abusive ‘Feminist’ Men Exist — Here Are 6 Things Men Can Do to Stop Them

For more on working with shame and hope, here is a piece that looks at how the fear of being ‘not good enough‘ can be self-fulfilling

Minimizing, deflecting, bait and switch are core features of abuse. Here’s a resource that emphasizes the importance of expressing empathy when you apologize for harming someone. Without empathy your apology – like Trump’s “I did it, I’m not proud, I apologize,” will feel meaningless: Mindful Tools: How To Apologize

A note on gender binaries and cishetprivilege: I want in this post to talk about masculinity, and about power, and that is gendered. I want to do it in a way that doesn’t reinscribe violent gender binaries that cause erasure (and clearly I haven’t managed to do that here). This feels tricky to me, how to talk about power and masculinity – which we need to talk about – without erasing or reinscribing either cishetnormativity, or the ways intimate partner violence – which can happen to people of all bodies in all kinds of relationships – plays out in specific ways when it maps along gendered lines.

I want to talk about masculinity and power dynamics in the kinds of relationships that I know intimately, yet i want to be clear that these are not the only relationships and that these are not the only bodies. I don’t feel really well placed to write about how these power dynamics play out in queer and genderqueer relationships.  I have been learning about it from people who understand how that works, but I can’t write about something I don’t know from the inside. I want a way to not erase my own experience of the ways all the emotional labour I tried to do to stop him from abusing me gets completely erased, while not erasing the ways trans and queer folks and QTPOC get even more erased than me. I haven’t figured out how to do this yet.

Language like ‘female of centre’ and ‘male of centre’ can be helpful. It can also erase that what I’m facing in my own life has been abuse by cishetmen and bystander dynamics created by the normalization of centring masculinity. I am in the middle of multiple conversations about this, finding the path through the cliffs so that survivors can support each other and not erase each other. I welcome more.

Do you love speculative fiction and social justice? I am working on a speculative fiction project that deals with the transformations our planet is undergoing, and the undoing of cultures of domination. Cipher is currently seeking collaborators, advisors, an agent, and a publisher. Learn more about Cipher here.

Acknowledgement: This piece and all of the knowledge that is growing around gaslighting and all forms of intimate partner violence has been generated together with the wonderful folks in my pod (thnx Leetal, Lily, Martin, Avi and the rest of the pod! you guys saved my life), and the growing crew of people who have gotten in touch to talk about their own experiences, share resources, share insights, and generally think together. People of the internets who have been teaching me things include Eve Rickert of https://www.morethantwo.com/, Chach M. Heart of www.fiercewitches.com, Eva Blake of LiberatingDesire.com, Michon Neal at Medium.com/@neal_Michon, as well as the many others who are building this knowledge together, challenging each other, and working together to think through and name experiences that our culture systematically refuses to name.

“Feminism taught me the difference
between a conviction in the head
and a change in the way you live.”
–Stuart Hall, speaking of things he learned
from Catherine Barrett

From 1996 to 2005 I worked at a summer camp in Western Massachusetts teaching kids social justice skills. In a beautiful mountain setting, we worked to help kids learn how to act in solidarity across race, class, ability, gender.

I am thinking back to a summer I was running the Farm & Nature program, a small hobby farm with a few chickens, some ducks, some sheep and a goat, where these city kids got to get into dirt and take responsibility for feeding, watering, and cleaning hutches and stalls.

From the small garden by the old weatherworn barn you could see out a long ways down the rolling pasture, nothing but long green rolling land down to the treeline. The sun was often hot on those slow summer days, the four or five horses off in the old lower riding ring stamping, flicking their tails, and making the slow lippy sounds horses make on a hot summer day when nothing needs a rush.

Our little patch of garden smelled like fresh earth baked in the sun. On this particular day I am thinking of, I am standing in the garden patch with a group of kids, bent over weeding the tomatoes by hand. The camp was based on free choice, which meant the kids in the garden that day had chosen to be there, and also meant any activity usually had a mix of ages. On this day our voluntary weeding crew consisted of one or two 8 year olds, a few more 11 and 12 year olds, and maybe one older camper who seemed terribly mature at 14. I distinctly remember this day because, as we weeded, a conflict arose.

A White girl from a working class background in New York, being raised by a single mother, said she was worried about the educational opportunities passing her by. She explained how acceptance at good high schools in New York’s competitive education system was dependent on grades and money, and her mother couldn’t afford things like tutoring or fancy tuition. We all listened, work humming along, backs pleasantly warm in the sun and the smell of fresh tomatoes on our palms.

Then she said it “felt unfair” to her that kids in her financial situation who were not White were “more likely to get scholarships and support” than she was, and she felt they were “passing her by.” A Black girl in the group who heard this replied “people always assume if you get a scholarship it is because you’re Black and not because you worked hard or are smart.”

The circle of kids all stopped weeding for a moment. Everyone looked at me, expectant. I moved to an open patch and sat down, and they all sat down, too. In a circle. This is what we did at this camp when a conflict arose – or when the contours of structural violence reveal themselves, which is often the same thing. We sat together, in a circle, and calmed ourselves so we could listen. Those not directly involved in the conflict sat in the circle and listened supportively, and the two used skills to hear each other and try to understand.

So now we were sitting in a circle weeding the basil. And the soil was coming clear under our hands as the weeds went into buckets, and the basil was showing up against the soil. The girls took turns speaking, and they said back things like, ‘am I hearing you right? Is this what you mean?’ before they expressed what their realities were like. I intervened gently with questions occasionally and kept a sense of the emotional tone of the conversation. Aware that the original comment had in fact been harmful to the Black girl – a microaggresion, likely one of hundreds she has to live – and that it was my job to hold a space of compassion that was also informed by an awareness of power.

The other kids in the circle listened, and sometimes said ‘wait, I think you missed what she meant there’ or helped the two girls clarify and understand each other, and sometimes added experiences or reflections – analysis – of their own, as their hands pulled up weeds big and small from the crumbly black soil. Tears were shed in emotion, and the afternoon sun warmed our backs and faces. I guided and listened. Did the Black girl feel safe to share her experiences of racism and know they would be taken seriously and heard? Did the White girl understand that while her class barriers were real, Black students were not to blame, and were often facing even more barriers than her? And that while we all continue to welcome her, and accept her, and like her, that she really needed to empathize, and we expected her to apologize? Because this is how we take the typically-minimized needs and feelings of the Black girl into account, and make sure not to go with the usual move, which is to erase them. On a deeply uneven playing field – cavernously uneven, in fact – compassion with accountability is how justice occurs.

We do approach conflict assuming everyone has the need to belong, be heard, and to feel emotionally accepted and valued in the group – to feel limbically secure. But to get there, to get where we need to be for those whose fears and lived experiences are most often not seen, we do not approach conflict assuming there are “two equal sides.” We openly and honestly name power, and act with compassion while refusing to silence or hide from reality.

By the time the rope bell on the camp’s main A-frame was pulled to set the bell pealing and call us in for dinner, by the time the sound rang across the wood and stone buildings and out over the pasture to our ears in the garden, the circle of girls had lapsed into pensive quiet.

I made a mental note to check in individually with each girl at the centre of the discussion later that day to see what they needed and if they were ok. We rounded up the buckets, dumped the weeds behind the barn, and headed in to a meal, the two girls both looking pensive and fairly peaceful. The kids who had formed the rest of the circle left with content, proud looks on their faces – they had helped.

That conversation didn’t resolve the immense structural violence that the Black girl must face every day, here and at home. It didn’t resolve the class barriers the White camper was facing. More to the point, it didn’t directly target the stacked school system within which they were both being forced to compete. They were kids at summer camp, and we weren’t organizing, at that moment, for direct change in those systems. What that conversation, and our willingness to have it, did do was give each kid a template: a template for building trust with someone they may otherwise have viewed as a threat.

By naming power, while loving one another, they got to undermine a divide and conquer strategy of our current social order: the one that teaches poor White kids to blame kids of colour instead of banding together to see the discrete pressures in a system affecting them both. By understanding together the specific kinds of erasure and silencing Black women and girls face, they became stronger and more able to perceive harm and hence, protect against it.

Both received empathy and recognition of their very real struggles with structural violence – racism, poverty – while helping them begin to see an alliance between them as the best way to go. Instead of competing, they were able to hear one another’s realities, face their relative power honestly, and turn their attention to the system affecting them both.

Those conversations were a completely normal part of the daily fabric of life at this camp.

Fierce revolutionary love: like everything, better with practice

When two kids got into a conflict, everyone nearby or involved with them would stop what they were doing and sit in a circle, and look to the adults or, often, initiate conflict resolution on their own.

It was recognized in this community that a conflict between two people affects everyone they are connected to. That conflict handled well is an opportunity to create trust, that conflict avoided just simmers under the surface until it erupts in unforeseen ways: gossip, damaged relationships, and weakened social bonds. Bonds we need if we are to do our work.

With countless such conversations under their belt, the children and the adults were more likely to learn from their mistakes, expand their capacity for empathy and nuance their understanding of human nature, and at the best of times, see and work to support each other in the face of the naturalized forms and systems of power that privilege some and harm some, every day.

The heart at the centre of the struggle

I’m not saying it always worked. The camp had its own underlying power dynamics. I can think of times when I failed to hear or see what was right in front of me until later and perpetuated violence in various ways, and there are likely just as many times that I still don’t recognize, even later. This was also done to me on various unspoken axes of privilege; silencing occurs everywhere power exists. The point isn’t that we created some magic idyll where we left power and violence at the road. The point was that we practiced, and worked at, becoming better, more connected, more accountable people, every day.

Sometimes we made it, sometimes we didn’t, but the skills were available and put into practice every chance we got. While painting popsicle sticks or doing macramé, while feeding the ducks, while taking out the pig slop and cleaning the kitchen, while sharing a meal, while helping the kids tidy up their shoes, while running around chasing a soccer ball, there was a willingness to learn and work at being human beings capable of having conflict, or recognizing harm, and turning into it rather than running away.

How did we create this culture?

The training during staff week varied every year but certain skills were rock solid values of the camp, grounded in years of conflict resolution knowledge.

Here are some of the skills we were trained in as staff, with a few additional kinds of awareness I’ve picked up since. These are some of the practices we were taught to use as adults, and the skills we modeled for the children in our care. Everyone who chose to work there was committing to uphold these values and practice these skills in order to be part of this community of care.

Before I list these, I want to say that are not the only ways that conflict can be understood. Also, it’s important to note that not everyone is responsible for this, all of the time: if you’re facing violence and harm, and you’ve had this reality erased for a long, long time, your very survival may mean you just need to speak truth and leave the gentling to the ones with more privilege to sort out.

These are not the whole picture. But they are core values that can help inform a conflict’s-not-scary approach, especially for those who become aware that they are in the position with more structural power.

1. Talk to the person directly first. Don’t talk about the conflict with others because that escalates, reifies misunderstanding and difference, and is destructive to the two people involved and the strength of the entire community. If you don’t feel ready to talk to the person directly, or there is a power differential that means they may not hear you, ask one other person whose discretion you trust to give you advice about how to approach that person, and approach them, together if you wish, as soon as you are able. Resolve conflicts quickly before they grow.
2. Where you can, name needs, values, and behavior – and yet do not fall into tone policing.When you speak to the person you’re upset with, try your best to speak of your emotions and needs, and describe their behaviour rather than their essence. Practice ‘when you do this behavior, I feel this emotion. This is my need.’ Tell the truth, directly, openly, and honestly, and listen to the full truths of others. Recognize that their entire world view may be different from yours, and you may be building a lexicon to even understand what words mean to each of you. Identify areas that were misunderstanding, identify core value differences that may be the cause of the conflict, identify power dynamics and do not sweep them under the rug. See if you can learn the other person’s logic and reasons, while expecting that they will stick around for repair if they have caused harm. And yet when someone becomes unable to speak in this ‘kind, careful’ way, ask yourself how much harm they may have been living with, and how much erasure they may be surviving. If you’re the one with more structural power, it is on you to hear their words and gain insight into power, not just get stuck on the tone of their voice.
3. Get appropriate support. Instead of gossiping or talking destructively to others, those who are close to you can help. If talking directly to the person involved doesn’t work, ask a friend or supervisor to sit with the two of you, to keep you both on track and help you navigate.
4. Make a plan for what to do when it comes up again, and then continually adjust the plan. Once you have a clearer understanding of the causes of the conflict, assume it will arise again, and make a concrete plan for what to do next time. Continually practice until you find common ground. Take seriously your commitment to improve your conflict skills the next time around. See each conflict as an opportunity to practice.
5. The whole circle is affected by each of the relationships within it. Recognize others who have been affected by the conflict will also need reconnection and support. Once it is resolved between the two,  sit with everyone all together to avoid broken telephone and gossip. Use talking circles and the same skills – identifying misunderstanding, recognizing needs and power dynamics, listening to and believing each other, acting accountable, and being honest and direct. Other people who felt pressured to take sides or felt scared or confused will also need their emotions honoured, and safety rebuilt.
6. Know your own conflict style, strengths and weaknesses (more on that in ‘conflict styles,’ below).

Those skills and strategies were an expected part of our job performance. They were included in our evaluations and were a factor in rehiring decisions. The camp’s raison d’être was not to teach kids to make popsicle art or even to learn to horseback ride or swim, though skills development was certainly part of the program. The real reason we were there was to inculcate those community building skills that would foster the development of ethical, responsive, self-aware adults.

If we are committed to building a resilient left movement – or many movements that can work together without perpetually fragmenting each time conflict occurs – it is evident that we need skills for embracing conflict and harm, and learning how to hold one another when it occurs.

In other words, we need the mindset that views conflict as normal, as an opportunity for alliance building and learning, instead of as unusual or avoidable. That isn’t abstract. It is a daily practice, as essential to organizing as knowing how to make a leaflet or organize a panel.

So you can imagine my surprise when I found myself in radical left communities that had very little of this skill set, or took for granted that conflict could simply be avoided and that it would go away. That has, sadly, been my experience more often than I would wish, most notably in predominantly white organizing circles in Canada. We need to hold one another in these frightening times. We need to know how to roll with conflict and hold one another in safety, in this individualist culture, so we can take the risks that we are called upon to take.

I’m thinking of another day, in that same garden. This was just a week or so after that first, wonderful moment of kids seeing it work, seeing learning happen instead of fear. A group of kids are back at the garden, including some regulars who had been there the week before. Our hands are once again in the soil, our backs in the sun.

An older girl says something judging a younger girl’s clothes – I don’t remember what. Some comment that made everyone in the garden go still for a moment and brought a strained, unhappy look to the younger girl’s face.

And then the kids looked at me and all sat down in a circle.

Curious about what would happen, I joined them. And they all looked at the older girl who had done the hurtful thing.

Who didn’t seem to notice. She went on with what she’d been doing – we were staking beans – as though nothing had changed. Awkward silence.

One of the kids sitting in the circle looked at me with big eyes, looked at her, looked back at me, and said, ‘aren’t we going to talk?’

And I looked at the girl who had initiated the conflict. Who didn’t look at me or seem to notice everyone staring. With the rest of the campers looking at me expectantly, I asked the older girl, ‘do you want to talk about what just happened?’ and she said, ‘not really,’ and turned away, back to the beans, for all the world as if she was alone in the garden, chattering to herself.

After a few moments watching, I shrugged to the others. ‘We can’t force her.’ Everyone looked dejected. I felt dejected. The girl who had been the recipient of the harm looked like she was about to cry. The others put their arms around her. The bell rang.

In conflict resolution parlance, this is called stonewalling. The utter refusal to engage. It is the denial of relationship, and it has recognizeable and fairly predictable effects: open conflict is temporarily averted; social bonds are weakened as relationships stay superficial; understanding is avoided; the circle breaks down.

When the one doing the stonewalling is the person with more privilege or power, they can stonewall to protect this privilege. When you stonewall, existing power dynamics remain in place, which benefits those with more power, whose mere inaction is enough to keep the unearned privilege they experience, whether they notice this or not.

Among good people who aren’t intentionally trying to harm others, stonewalling usually arises because people feel overwhelmed. Either they fear they will not be able to maintain their own boundaries while choosing to engage with another, or they don’t know their own edges, don’t know how to say their own needs while hearing the needs of others.

For some, anger itself can feel overwhelming, and it can feel safer to say nothing. If most of what people know of conflict is the knee-jerk reactions, such as ‘avoid/attack’ or the barely better ‘negotiate and trade,’ then conflict appears a zero-sum game with winners and losers. It can appear that the only options are to lose, or to be invaded, or to literally put up a stone wall: nothing gets in or out. The safety of a barricade.

On the other hand, with practice in collaborative conflict resolution, conflict appears more like a rubix cube, a complex puzzle of interlocking parts, one you can solve together for everyone’s benefit.

The skill level of everyone involved – and how well supported they are by the circle around them – shapes how quickly and safely you can solve the puzzle.

Clearly, that older child had a responsibility. Had she hit another kid, had she stolen, I could have insisted she sit and talk. We have social lines about certain things. But when her violence was verbal, and was done in that quiet way that is so often how power operates – that older child could, by and large, go on unaccountable.

Everyone has reasons for their actions; I had known that older girl for years, and I liked her. She was a good kid who was behaving in a shut down way, for reasons she didn’t feel able to share. But her chance to see her mistake, to learn from it, and to rebuild trust before it formed a permanent rift, was lost. More importantly, the girl who was harmed had no recourse to rebuild her safety, the freedom from shame that kids loved the most about this camp.

The older girl wasn’t willing to see her power in that situation, and no one else could make her see it, not even a circle of her peers sitting staring at her with an open place in the circle for her, or a culture of constructive, skilled conflict resolution. That doesn’t mean her social power wasn’t operating. It meant she could use it to refuse to see the effects of her actions.

Conflict Styles

Conflict styles – each of our personal, familial, and cultural signatures, or our ‘fingerprint’ of strengths and weaknesses – affect how smoothly conflict unfolds. These personal styles improve with dedication and space to learn. Without anyone being ‘bad’ or having ill intent, unskilled behaviors of one or more of the people involved can make engaging more difficult, and these are where seeing conflict resolution as a set of skills we improve through practice is paramount. In the context of the many systems of oppression that affect us, learning to build trust through conflict is as necessary a skill as any other in an organizer’s repertoire. None of us start out ‘good’ at conflict, and we each can work on our own weak areas. We need one another, and recent events have made amply clear how vital it is to hold on to each other so we can take risks together.

Unskilled conflict habits include:
-stonewalling, the refusal to engage the conflict at all
–steamrolling, refusing to disengage in the moment when one person needs a break
-threatening to end the relationship entirely if one does not get their way or if conflict continues
-characterizing, targeting the person’s essence rather than their behaviour
-gaslighting, denial of unearned privilege or oppressive realities, refusal to empathize, ‘punching down,’
-gossip, talking about people rather than with them

These habits polarize and make conflict harder for everyone. We all use some of them sometimes. All of these are unskilled styles, and they improve with practice.

Stonewalling is always available, but it harms relationships every bit as much as the other destructive conflict styles. Conflict skill improves with a shared commitment to distinguish the behavior from the person, and with room to learn from our mistakes – together.

As long time organizer Mandy Hiscocks beautifully says:

“We tend to gravitate towards people who are like us, who enjoy the same things and have the same politics, who use similar tactics. It’s easier. It’s also more fun- I mean, if you’re going to organize in your spare time you’re giving up opportunities to hang out with friends. So if you organize with your friends, you’re feeding two birds with one hand so to speak. The downside of combining organizing with friends with the ability to move easily is that people’s personal shit, their arguments with and disappointments in each other, can often mean that they just walk away. They stay in town but leave the movement or stay in the movement and leave town. There’s no real impetus to do the hard work of staying where we are, sorting out our differences, and carrying on.”

Like learning how to facilitate a meeting, how to bake a cake, how to drive a car, sometimes we get it right, sometimes we get it wrong. If friends stopped speaking to each other every time one of them baked a bad cake, no one would ever get very good at cake because the risk would feel too high. An open-armed approach to conflict, in which no one is expendible, and we are not being evaluated merely for our social worth, but are seen for our inherent value as human beings, creates a ground of safety for everyone involved. As long as no one stonewalls for good, no mistake or unskilled action is the end of the game, and we can learn together and heal together over time. If people can’t always engage in the moment, they need to be able to say ‘I know this is important; I just can’t talk about it right now’ and then find a time when they can.

Some have cultural or family approaches that taught that ‘conflict is best not discussed,’ or ‘It’s best to just let it clear up on its own.’ That’s like saying ‘yeah there’s this sink full of dishes, but if I just wait they’ll probably be clean eventually.’ It just doesn’t work, most of the time, and hoping it will just leaves conflicts swept under the rug where everyone has to step around them, acting like they’re not there. Eventually every bond breaks using this approach. It lets the conflict appear smoothed over as long as the same situation doesn’t arise again, but it doesn’t actually solve the problem. Whatever caused the conflict in the first place will still be there later, waiting for the same situation – hardened by the memory each person has of how badly it went the last time.

So while sometimes ‘it’s just not a good time,’ is real and true, it’s important to recognize that sometimes – in the words of my smart friend Graham –  saying ‘this isn’t a good time,’ is just an excuse. Sometimes it truly and legitimately does mean ‘I can hardly get out of bed today, and I’m holding on to my job by the skin of my teeth, so I have to tackle this on the sunday, not today,” and sometimes it means, “I could deal with this now, but I really don’t want to because it makes me uncomfortable, or it makes me have to face myself, and I don’t know how to be uncomfortable, or I don’t want to look inwards or see my relative power and privilege, so I’m going to say it’s not a good time, when what I really mean is go away.’ For some folks, raised in a style that asserts that conflict is best left unspoken, ‘this isn’t a good time’ appears as a permanent state.

If you expect zero discomfort, you may wait a long, long time. Conflict is uncomfortable, but it doesn’t have to grow and if handled directly and quickly it can in fact strengthen bonds and compassion and connection.

When conflict is left unhandled, it grows. You lose trust, you lose strength as a group or collective, and the social bonds that we rely on as a movement are weakened when they could be made stronger. What we are doing when we engage in working things out is learning how we can have each other’s backs even when it is hard. We are building the beautiful community, the community that can stay together and hold one another through all the vagaries and violence capitalism, racism, and the systems of violence throw at us.

Stonewalling leaves us vulnerable to the divide and conquer strategies of the systems that pit us against one another in competition for seemingly limited safety.

There are too many bigger struggles we face, too many reasons we need each other. We must resist individualist narratives that isolate, that teach us we have to fend for ourselves, that no one can be trusted.

It doesn’t have to be this way. As Ursula K. Leguin writes, “Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone. It has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”

For those who have dedicated themselves to social change, building up comfort with conflict, starting with viewing conflict as an opportunity rather than a problem, is a necessary skill set. The next time you face conflict, even if it is you who has caused harm, sit in a circle. Still your heart. Calm your body. And give it the time that it needs until safety emerges. It is often closer, much closer than you think – and this is the work we need to create a good world.

If you liked this piece, please share!

Resources:

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/reviews-recommen…http://guelphpeak.org/feature/2014/03/committing-for-better-for-worse-an-interview-with-mandy-hiscocks/

This is part two in a two-part series. For Part One please click here.

Conflict Styles

Conflict styles – each of our personal, familial, and cultural signatures, or our ‘fingerprint’ of strengths and weaknesses – affect how smoothly conflict unfolds. These personal styles improve with dedication and space to learn. Without anyone being ‘bad’ or having ill intent, unskilled behaviors of one or more of the people involved can make engaging more difficult, and these are where seeing conflict resolution as a set of skills we improve through practice is paramount. In the context of the many systems of oppression that affect us, learning to build trust through conflict is as necessary a skill as any other in an organizer’s repertoire. None of us start out ‘good’ at conflict, and we each can work on our own weak areas. We need one another, and recent events have made amply clear how vital it is to hold on to each other so we can take risks together.

I’m thinking of another day, in that same garden. This was just a week or so after that first, wonderful moment of kids seeing it work, seeing learning happen instead of fear. A group of kids are back at the garden, including some regulars who had been there the week before. Our hands are once again in the soil, our backs in the sun.

An older girl says something judging a younger girl’s clothes – I don’t remember what. Some comment that made everyone in the garden go still for a moment and brought a strained, unhappy look to the younger girl’s face.

And then the kids looked at me and all sat down in a circle.

Curious about what would happen, I joined them. And they all looked at the older girl who had done the hurtful thing.

Who didn’t seem to notice. She went on with what she’d been doing – we were staking beans – as though nothing had changed. Awkward silence.

One of the kids sitting in the circle looked at me with big eyes, looked at her, looked back at me, and said, ‘aren’t we going to talk?’

And I looked at the girl who had initiated the conflict. Who didn’t look at me or seem to notice everyone staring. With the rest of the campers looking at me expectantly, I asked the older girl, ‘do you want to talk about what just happened?’ and she said, ‘not really,’ and turned away, back to the beans, for all the world as if she was alone in the garden, chattering to herself.

After a few moments watching, I shrugged to the others. ‘We can’t force her.’ Everyone looked dejected. I felt dejected. The girl who had been the recipient of the harm looked like she was about to cry. The others put their arms around her. The bell rang.

In conflict resolution parlance, this is called stonewalling. The utter refusal to engage. It is the denial of relationship, and it has recognizeable and fairly predictable effects: social bonds are weakened as relationships stay superficial; understanding is avoided; structural power remains unquestioned; typically, if stonewalling continues over more than a day or two, the circle breaks down.

When the one doing the stonewalling is the person with more privilege or power, they can stonewall to protect this privilege. When you stonewall, existing power dynamics remain in place, which benefits those with more power, whose mere inaction is enough to keep the unearned privilege they experience, whether they notice this or not.

Among good people who aren’t intentionally trying to harm others, stonewalling usually arises because people feel overwhelmed. Either they fear they will not be able to maintain their own boundaries while choosing to engage with another, or they don’t know their own edges, don’t know how to say their own needs while hearing the needs of others.

For some, anger itself can feel overwhelming, and it can feel safer to say nothing. If most of what people know of conflict is the knee-jerk reactions, such as ‘avoid/attack’ or the barely better ‘negotiate and trade,’ then conflict appears a zero-sum game with winners and losers. On the other hand, with practice in collaborative conflict resolution, conflict appears more like a rubix cube, a complex puzzle of interlocking parts, one you can solve together for everyone’s benefit. The skill level of everyone involved – and how well supported they are by the circle around them for their own drop off areas where they lack capacity – shapes how quickly and safely you can solve the puzzle.

Clearly, that older child had a responsibility. Had she hit another kid, had she stolen, I could have insisted she sit and talk. We have social lines about certain things. But when her violence was verbal, and was done in that quiet way that is so often how power operates – that older child could, by and large, go on unaccountable.

Everyone has reasons for their actions; I had known that older girl for years, and I liked her. We can connect and care about one another without going along pretending nothing happened – I could like her, and also tell her that her actions had hurt another person. Her chance to see her mistake, to learn from it, and to rebuild trust before it formed a permanent rift was lost. More importantly, the girl who was harmed had no recourse to rebuild her safety, the freedom from shame that kids loved the most about this camp.

The older girl wasn’t willing to see her power in that situation, and no one else could make her see it, not even a circle of her peers sitting staring at her with an open place in the circle for her, or a culture of constructive, skilled conflict resolution. That doesn’t mean her social power wasn’t operating. It meant she could use it to refuse to see the effects of her actions.

Unskilled conflict habits include:
-stonewalling, the refusal to engage the conflict at all
–steamrolling, refusing to disengage in the moment when one person needs a break
-threatening to end the relationship entirely if one does not get their way or if conflict continues
-characterizing, targeting the person’s essence rather than their behaviour
-gaslighting, denial of unearned privilege or oppressive realities, refusal to empathize, ‘punching down,’
-gossip, talking about people rather than with them, leading to broken telephone and chaos

These habits polarize and make conflict harder for everyone. We all use some of them sometimes. All of these are unskilled styles, and they improve with practice.

Stonewalling is always available, but it harms relationships every bit as much as the other destructive conflict styles. Conflict skill improves with a shared commitment to distinguish the behavior from the person, and with room to learn from our mistakes – together.

As long time organizer Mandy Hiscocks beautifully says:

“We tend to gravitate towards people who are like us, who enjoy the same things and have the same politics, who use similar tactics. It’s easier. It’s also more fun- I mean, if you’re going to organize in your spare time you’re giving up opportunities to hang out with friends. So if you organize with your friends, you’re feeding two birds with one hand so to speak. The downside of combining organizing with friends with the ability to move easily is that people’s personal shit, their arguments with and disappointments in each other, can often mean that they just walk away. They stay in town but leave the movement or stay in the movement and leave town. There’s no real impetus to do the hard work of staying where we are, sorting out our differences, and carrying on.”

Some have cultural or family approaches that taught that ‘conflict is best not discussed,’ or ‘It’s best to just let it clear up on its own.’ That’s like saying ‘yeah there’s this sink full of dishes, but if I just wait they’ll probably be clean eventually.’ It just doesn’t work, most of the time, and hoping it will just leaves conflicts swept under the rug where everyone has to step around them, acting like they’re not there. Eventually every bond breaks using this approach. It lets the conflict appear smoothed over as long as the same situation doesn’t arise again, but it doesn’t actually solve the problem. Whatever caused the conflict in the first place will still be there later, waiting for the same situation – hardened by the memory each person has of how badly it went the last time.

So while sometimes ‘it’s just not a good time,’ is real and true, it’s important to recognize that sometimes – in the words of my smart friend Graham –  saying ‘this isn’t a good time,’ is just an excuse. Sometimes it truly and legitimately does mean ‘I can hardly get out of bed today, and I’m holding on to my job by the skin of my teeth, so I have to tackle this on the sunday, not today,” and sometimes it means, “I could deal with this now, but I really don’t want to because it makes me uncomfortable, or it makes me have to face myself, and I don’t know how to be uncomfortable, or I don’t want to look inwards or see my relative power and privilege, so I’m going to say it’s not a good time, when what I really mean is go away.’ For some folks, raised in a style that asserts that conflict is best left unspoken, ‘this isn’t a good time’ appears as a permanent state.

If you expect zero discomfort before you’re willing to go clean up an interpersonal conflict, or perfect comfort when being called to recognize structural violence you are participating in, you could wait a long, long time till ‘a good time’ arises. On the other hand, conflict, when handled directly and quickly, can in fact strengthen bonds, understanding, compassion and connection.

This is part two of a two-part piece. For part one, on why we need conflict skills to be able to hold together in the face of systemic violence, please click here.

“Feminism taught me the difference
between a conviction in the head
and a change in the way you live.”
–Stuart Hall, speaking of things he learned
from Catherine Barrett

From 1996 to 2005 I worked at a summer camp in Western Massachusetts teaching kids conflict resolution skills. In a beautiful mountain setting, we worked to help kids learn how to work out conflict in ways that kept relationships strong.

I am thinking back to a summer I was running the Farm & Nature program, a small hobby farm with a few chickens, some ducks, some sheep and a goat, where these city kids got to get into dirt and take responsibility for feeding, watering, and cleaning hutches and stalls.

From the small garden by the old weatherworn barn you could see out a long ways down the rolling pasture, nothing but long green rolling land down to the treeline. The sun was often hot on those slow summer days, the four or five horses off in the old lower riding ring stamping, flicking their tails, and making the slow lippy sounds horses make on a hot summer day when nothing needs a rush.

Our little patch of garden smelled like fresh earth baked in the sun. On this particular day I am thinking of, I am standing in the garden patch with a group of kids, bent over weeding the tomatoes by hand. The camp was based on free choice, which meant the kids in the garden that day had chosen to be there, and also meant any activity usually had a mix of ages. On this day our voluntary weeding crew consisted of one or two 8 year olds, a few more 11 and 12 year olds, and maybe one older camper who seemed terribly mature at 14. I distinctly remember this day because, as we weeded, a conflict arose.

A white girl from a working class background in New York, being raised by a single mother, said she was worried about the educational opportunities passing her by. She explained how acceptance at good high schools in New York’s competitive education system was dependent on grades and money, and her mother couldn’t afford things like tutoring or fancy tuition. We all listened, work humming along, backs pleasantly warm in the sun and the smell of fresh tomatoes on our palms.

Then she said it “felt unfair” to her that kids in her financial situation who were not white were “more likely to get scholarships and support” than she was, and she felt they were “passing her by.” A Black girl in the group who heard this replied “people always assume if you get a scholarship it is because you’re Black and not because you worked hard or are smart.”

The circle of kids all stopped weeding for a moment. Everyone looked at me, expectant. I moved to an open patch and sat down, and they all sat down, too. In a circle. This is what we did at this camp when a conflict arose – or when the contours of structural violence reveal themselves, which is often the same thing. We sat together, in a circle, and calmed ourselves so we could listen. Those not directly involved in the conflict sat in the circle and listened supportively, and the two used skills to hear each other and try to understand.

So now we were sitting in a circle weeding the basil. And the soil was coming clear under our hands as the weeds went into buckets, and the basil was showing up against the soil. The girls took turns speaking, and they said back things like, ‘am I hearing you right? Is this what you mean?’ before they expressed what their realities were like. I intervened gently with questions occasionally and kept a sense of the emotional tone of the conversation. Aware that the original comment had in fact been harmful to the Black girl – a microaggresion, likely one of hundreds she has to live – and that it was my job to hold a space of compassion that was also informed by an accurate awareness of power.

It was my job to hold a space informed by an accurate awareness of power. 

The other kids in the circle listened, and sometimes said ‘wait, I think you missed what she meant there’ or helped the two girls clarify and understand each other, and sometimes added experiences or reflections – analysis – of their own, as their hands pulled up weeds big and small from the crumbly black soil. Tears were shed in emotion, and the afternoon sun warmed our backs and faces. I guided and listened. Did the Black girl feel safe to share her experiences of racism and know they would be taken seriously and heard? Did the White girl understand that while her class barriers were real, Black students were not to blame, and were often facing even more barriers than her? And that while we all continue to welcome her, and accept her, and like her, that she really needed to empathize, and we expected her to apologize? Because this is how we take the typically-minimized needs and feelings of the Black girl into account, and make sure not to go with the usual move, which is to erase them. On a deeply uneven playing field – cavernously uneven, in fact, and full of pits and deadly surprises – compassion with accountability is how justice occurs.

We do approach conflict assuming everyone has the need to belong, be heard, and to feel emotionally accepted and valued in the group – to feel limbically secure. But to get there, to get where we need to be for those whose lived experiences are most often not seen, we do not approach conflict assuming there are “two equal sides.” We openly and honestly name power, and act with compassion while refusing to silence or hide from reality. We must do this, lest the so-called ‘healing’ only replicate yet more erasure and harm.

By the time the rope bell on the camp’s main A-frame was pulled to set the bell pealing and call us in for dinner, by the time the sound rang across the wood and stone buildings and out over the pasture to our ears in the garden, the circle of girls had lapsed into pensive quiet.

I made a mental note to check in individually with each girl at the centre of the discussion later that day to see what they needed and if they were ok. We rounded up the buckets, dumped the weeds behind the barn, and headed in to a meal, the two girls both looking pensive and fairly peaceful. The kids who had formed the rest of the circle left with content, proud looks on their faces – they had helped.

That conversation didn’t resolve the immense structural violence that the Black girl must face every day, here and at home. It didn’t resolve the class barriers the White camper was facing. More to the point, it didn’t directly target the stacked school system within which they were both being forced to compete. They were kids at summer camp, and we weren’t organizing, at that moment, for direct change in those systems. What that conversation, and our willingness to have it, did do was give each kid a template: a template for building trust with someone they may otherwise have viewed as a threat.

By naming power, while loving one another, they got to undermine a divide and conquer strategy of our current social order: the one that teaches poor White kids to blame kids of colour instead of banding together to see the discrete pressures in a system affecting them both. By understanding together the specific kinds of erasure and silencing Black women and girls face, they became stronger and more able to perceive harm and hence, protect against it.

We do not approach conflict assuming there are “two equal sides.” We openly and honestly name power, and act with compassion while refusing to silence or hide from reality.

Both received empathy and recognition of their very real struggles with structural violence – racism, poverty – while helping them begin to see an alliance between them as the best way to go. Instead of competing, they were able to hear one another’s realities, face their relative power honestly, and turn their attention to the system affecting them both.

Fierce revolutionary love: like everything, better with practice

Those conversations were a completely normal part of the daily fabric of life at this camp. When two kids got into a conflict, everyone nearby or involved with them would stop what they were doing and sit in a circle, and look to the adults or, often, initiate conflict resolution on their own.

It was recognized in this community that a conflict between two people affects everyone they are connected to. That conflict handled well is an opportunity to create trust, that conflict avoided just simmers under the surface until it erupts in unforeseen ways: gossip, damaged relationships, and weakened social bonds. Bonds we need if we are to do our work.

With countless such conversations under their belt, the children and the adults were more likely to learn from their mistakes, expand their capacity for empathy and nuance their understanding of human nature, and at the best of times, see and work to support each other in the face of the naturalized forms and systems of power that privilege some and harm some, every day.

The heart at the centre of the struggle

I’m not saying it always worked. The camp had its own underlying power dynamics. I can think of times when I failed to hear or see what was right in front of me until later and perpetuated violence in various ways, and there are likely just as many times that I still don’t recognize, even later. This was also done to me on various unspoken axes of privilege; silencing occurs everywhere power exists. The point isn’t that we created some magic idyll where we left power and violence at the road. The point was that we practiced, and worked at, becoming better, more connected, more accountable people, every day.

Sometimes we made it, sometimes we didn’t, but the skills were available and put into practice every chance we got. While painting popsicle sticks or doing macramé, while feeding the ducks, while taking out the pig slop and cleaning the kitchen, while sharing a meal, while helping the kids tidy up their shoes, while running around chasing a soccer ball, there was a willingness to learn and work at being human beings capable of having conflict, or recognizing harm, and turning into it rather than running away.

Many of us have never experienced a healthy, functioning community, in which every member understands that the fabric of community is a real, living thing, and needs continual tending. We must know in our bodies that actual functioning community can exist before we can understand our place within it.

How did we create this culture?

The training during staff week varied every year but certain skills were rock solid values of the camp, grounded in years of conflict resolution knowledge.

Here are some of the skills we were trained in as staff, with a few additional kinds of awareness I’ve picked up since. These are some of the practices we were taught to use as adults, and the skills we modeled for the children in our care. Everyone who chose to work there was committing to uphold these values and practice these skills in order to be part of this community of care.

Before I list these, I want to say that are not the only ways that conflict can be understood. Also, it’s important to note that not everyone is responsible for this, all of the time: if you’re facing violence and harm, and you’ve had this reality erased for a long, long time, your very survival may mean you just need to speak truth and leave the gentling to the ones with more privilege to sort out.

Similarly, I have come to understand that in a white supremacist and structurally patriarchal world, silence can be a place of power and protection for those who have known the dangers around them from a very young age. Not everyone is responsible for doing this kind of work – but those who have more structural power in a given group or relationship are always responsible to it if they wish to live in a functioning community – not a random jamming together of isolated self-interested individuals.

Those of us who want a world in which conflict does not repeatedly break human beings, a world in which we all can exist in a loving fabric of community, where we live into our values to take care of one another – there are daily practices we can do. We can each commit to making more places where speaking up about naturalized power is received properly, where those with more structural power make themselves receptive and open, becoming safer people to tell. It is a daily choice to be willing to turn towards one another and hear the truth of invisible power dynamics even when we must quiet our bodies and make our minds receptive to experiences we have not ourselves lived, and may not even comprehend at first, in order to invert the power dynamics that get taken for granted.

These core values may not capture the whole picture, but they can help inform a conflict’s-not-scary approach, especially for those who become aware that they are in the position with more structural power:

1. Talk to the person directly first. Don’t talk about the conflict with others because that escalates, reifies misunderstanding and difference, and is destructive to the two people involved and the strength of the entire community. If you don’t feel ready to talk to the person directly, or there is a power differential that means they may not hear you, ask one other person whose discretion you trust to give you advice about how to approach that person, and approach them, together if you wish, as soon as you are able. Resolve conflicts quickly before they grow
2. Where you can, name needs, values, and behavior – and yet do not fall into tone policing.When you speak to the person you’re upset with, try your best to speak of your emotions and needs, and describe their behaviour rather than their essence. Practice ‘when you do this behavior, I feel this emotion. This is my need.’ Tell the truth, directly, openly, and honestly, and listen to the full truths of others. Recognize that their entire world view may be different from yours, and you may be building a lexicon to even understand what words mean to each of you. Identify areas that were misunderstanding, identify core value differences that may be the cause of the conflict, identify power dynamics and do not sweep them under the rug. See if you can learn the other person’s logic and reasons, while expecting that they will stick around for repair if they have caused harm. And yet when someone becomes unable to speak in this ‘kind, careful’ way, ask yourself how much harm they may have been living with, and how much erasure they may be surviving. If you’re the one with more structural power, it is on you to hear their words and gain insight into power, not just get stuck on the tone of their voice.
3. Get appropriate support. Instead of gossiping or talking destructively to others, those who are close to you can help. If talking directly to the person involved doesn’t work, ask a friend or supervisor to sit with the two of you, to keep you both on track and help you navigate.
4. Make a plan for what to do when it comes up again, and then continually adjust the plan. Once you have a clearer understanding of the causes of the conflict, assume it will arise again, and make a concrete plan for what to do next time. Continually practice until you find common ground. Take seriously your commitment to improve your conflict skills the next time around. See each conflict as an opportunity to practice.
5. The whole circle is affected by each of the relationships within it. Recognize others who have been affected by the conflict will also need reconnection and support. Once it is resolved between the two,  sit with everyone all together to avoid broken telephone and gossip. Use talking circles and the same skills – identifying misunderstanding, recognizing needs and power dynamics, listening to and believing each other, acting accountable, and being honest and direct. Other people who felt pressured to take sides or felt scared or confused will also need their emotions honoured, and safety rebuilt.
6. Know your own conflict style, strengths and weaknesses (more on that in ‘conflict styles,’ in part two).

Those skills and strategies were an expected part of our job performance. They were included in our evaluations and were a factor in rehiring decisions. The camp’s raison d’être was not to teach kids to make popsicle art or even to learn to horseback ride or swim, though skills development was certainly part of the program. The real reason we were there was to inculcate those community building skills that would foster the development of ethical, responsive, self-aware people who understood how a living community that can hold together works.

Like learning how to facilitate a meeting, how to bake a cake, how to drive a car, sometimes we get it right, sometimes we get it wrong. If friends stopped speaking to each other every time one of them baked a bad cake, no one would ever get very good at cake because the risk would feel too high. An open-armed approach to conflict, in which no one is expendible, and we are not being evaluated merely for our social worth, but are seen for our inherent value as human beings, creates a ground of safety for everyone involved. As long as no one stonewalls for good, no mistake or unskilled action is the end of the game, and we can learn together and heal together over time. If people can’t always engage in the moment, they need to be able to say ‘I know this is important; I just can’t talk about it right now’ and then find a time when they can.

If we are committed to building a resilient left movement – or many movements that can hold together without perpetually fragmenting – it is evident that we need skills for embracing conflict and harm, learning to distinguish between the two, and learning how to hold one another when either one occurs.

In other words, we need the mindset that views conflict as normal, as an opportunity for alliance building and learning, instead of as unusual or avoidable. That isn’t abstract. It is a daily practice, as essential to organizing as knowing how to make a leaflet or organize a panel.

We need to hold one another in these frightening times. We need to know how to roll with conflict and hold one another in safety, in this individualist culture, so we can take the risks that we are called upon to take.

When conflict is left unhandled, it grows. You lose trust, you lose strength as a group or collective, and the social bonds that we rely on as a movement are weakened when they could be made stronger. What we are doing when we engage in working things out is learning how we can have each other’s backs even when it is hard. We are building the beautiful community, the community that can stay together and hold one another through all the vagaries and violence capitalism, racism, and the systems of violence throw at us.

Stonewalling leaves us vulnerable to the divide and conquer strategies of the systems that pit us against one another.

There are too many bigger struggles we face, too many reasons we need each other. We must resist individualist narratives that isolate, that teach us we have to fend for ourselves, that no one can be trusted.

It doesn’t have to be this way. As Ursula K. Leguin writes, “Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone. It has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”

For those who have dedicated themselves to movement work, building up comfort with conflict, starting with viewing conflict as an opportunity rather than a problem, is a necessary skill set. The next time you face conflict, even if it is you who has caused harm, sit in a circle. Still your heart. Calm your body. And give it the time that it needs until safety emerges. It is often closer, much closer than you think – and this is the work we need to create a good world.

This is part one of a two-part piece. For Part Two, on conflict styles, please click here.

If you liked this piece, please share!

Resources:

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/reviews-recommen…http://guelphpeak.org/feature/2014/03/committing-for-better-for-worse-an-interview-with-mandy-hiscocks/

HI everyone! I’m doing a talk at SFU on Friday this week (Friday the 13th!). It’s the first time I’ve talked about this kind of work in any academic context, and the first time I’ve talked in public about it. And I’ve decided I’m going to do that talk the same way I do the blog. Every post here was written in rough form, given quietly to a few friends and colleagues and think-together-loves before going out, but then given out to the world while still wet and glistening from the egg. I think of the rough posts as a kind of sonar that echoes out and sends things bouncing back, and reveals contours of oppression in the echoes. The final posts are never complete, but are in a continual state of growing and transformation – in other words, they are alive.

Every single post then gets revised in light of the echoes from the world that come back to me once I post. If you’re interested, you can read more about how that process works and how important it has been for my work in the About section. But don’t do that yet! Because I’m doing something hopeful and exciting here, and inviting your feedback. I’m going to post the very rough notes for the talk, and edit live in here as I keep working on it. Here they are, as they currently exist. Whatever comes alive in this space before Friday, will be the talk as it becomes alive on Friday.

On Nurturance and Vulnerability in Academic Life (for real this time):

Thank you to everyone for being here.

To begin I would like to acknowledge that we are on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), and Tsleil-Waututh  people. One of the things that I’ve been learning as a settler learning how to live in a good way in these lands is to speak from the heart and listen from the heart and that is what I’m planning to do today.

I would like to thank the Institute for the Humanities for proposing this talk, I would like to thank Samir Gandesha and Steve Collis at the Institute, and Huyen Pham for organizing logistics and getting the word out. I’d also like to thank all of the friends and colleagues who are here today. I’m going to be taking some emotional risks and it feels good to see your faces.

(slide)

So, here’s why we’re here today. In february 2016, I wrote an essay and gave it to the world on a blog, and to my great surprise it went viral. It hit over 300 000 views in one week and generated a little starburst of responses and replies around the world. A couple of other posts also went viral after that.

(slide: 189 countries)

It’s now read in 189 countries and has crossed a million views, and the blog has now taken on a life of its own, and this response has raised incredible questions. Just so people know what they’re looking at, this is the wordpress map. WordPress likes to inform you that countries in yellow are ones that have read the blog, and countries in white are the ones that haven’t visited the blog. I always find that entertaining. It’s still kind of hard to believe and absurd, I find it hilarious.

(next: news clippings again).

The writing from that blog is now being used in university classrooms and counselling centres throughout Canada and the US, Europe and Australia. It’s cropped up in anarchist reading groups in squats in Spain, pop up infoshops in Ireland, a women’s organization in Brazil, an article about gender norms in Nigeria, it even cropped up in an academic Call for Papers in Canada. It circulates in ways that are fascinating. And the resonance that it has generated suggests that this concept touched a chord.

(slides: brief excerpts from the blog)

(move through next slides slowly as you speak)

For those who haven’t read it, The key insight of the essay was  to combine attachment theory with cultural analysis. These are just a few snippets from the essay, I’m not going to get into it in great detail because what I’m interested in today is a reflection that arises at the essay’s close.

(slide transition here to slide “what we need is” and stay there for next line)

While it began in the context of masculinity, the piece closed on a much larger question that has continued to unfold along with the life of the article. And it’s this closing thought of the piece that I’m interested in opening up and taking further with you here today. This is a towards the close of the essay; I’ll just give people a minute to sit with it.

(time to read that slide)

I think that one reason the Nurturance Culture essay took on the resonance it did is in part because it was never really only about masculinity. It hit the hearts of so many people in part because the argument about masculinity was embedded in something much bigger, a cultural transformation.

(next slide: what would it look like to be welcome…)

And of course this has brought back for me questions about cultural production and academic knowledge production in this time when we are facing unprecedented difficulty and transformation as a culture, indeed perhaps as a civilization. This is the central question of the talk today, and so we’ll be coming back to this question as we go.

In particular, what I’m inviting is an exploration of a question: How might the cultural intervention posed by the idea of Nurturance Culture alter how we come to academic life?

This is all new work that I’ll be sharing, and I’m intending to create it with you today much as the blog is generated in conversation with readers.

(stay on slide: what would it feel like to be welcome in the world as our whole selves)

The blog has a format, and since this talk emerges out of the work of the blog, I’m going to give it in that format. It often opens with a narrative and then brings that narrative into a political and theoretical concern. I’m going to be working today in that same spirit. I do consider this to be a feminist way of working: our bodies and our voices and our narratives are how we theorize, theory and life cannot be divorced.

[[In Work that Reconnects spaces where I’ve been growing lately we also learn to listen from the heart and speak from the heart, and that is what I’m going to do. If you’re comfortable doing so, I’m inviting everyone here to come today with this same desire to listen from the heart and speak from the heart for this talk. ]]]

Also a word about what I am and am not speaking of today: I’m doing my best to work out of my own position, and so there are important aspects of power within academic spaces that while they influence my thinking, I’m eliding in the talk. Analyses of ways racism and sexism compound and interlock in academic cultures to particularly impact Black women and other women of colour and Indigenous women are part of the context for this talk but one that I don’t address explicitly, and that feels like an lacuna, so I want to address it openly so it doesn’t become a naturalized erasure. That decision is chosen based in a desire to work and speak on those questions in relationship, to save those conversations for events with others who have expertise on this in a way that I’m not able to speak to from who I am and where I am socially located. So I’d be of course pleased if those reflections and that kind of analysis were to come up in the conversation, and it feels most effective coming from those who walk in the world with experiences that I do not face. If that is your experience and you find as you’re listening that you have thoughts you’d like to layer in with this work, I’m always open to collaboration and correction, happy to hear from people who might want to chat and see what happens in the soilbed when we put our ideas together. I’m offering this as one river of experience and analysis offered alongside others, not intending to create a totalizing narrative.

So, I’ve come to this path in an interesting way.

Three years ago I lost the ability to read. And I went into a very, very still time. I’m going to talk about how that led to the creation of the blog, but I want to go back a bit further and talk about how I came to academic work.

(stay on slide “what would it feel like to be welcome”…)

Narrative – how I came to academic work

I’ve been on the search for places in which this kind of open hearted learning and creating and growing is fostered and there are pockets of people who work in these ways, who do remarkable things. And speaking as a white person, one way in that I’ve had personally has been through the Work That Reconnects, which like many of our fields of inquiry and knowledge is going through tremendous upheaval in our time, good upheaval, the kind that growing needs. In the Work this upheaval is understood as a part of the spiral, in which destruction of old ways has to happen for things to grow in the compost that that collapse creates. That’s been true in my personal life as well as in the cultural moment that we appear to be living in.

This experience of composting the old so the new can grow is directly connected to how I found my way here, moving towards and away from academic work in a way that appears productive now, though it hasn’t always appeared so in every moment.

There are particular ways one comes to academia if you weren’t raised to do it.

(slide: family image) –

I come from a working class immigrant family, a refugee family background. (That’s my dad on the bottom left. This would be when they had just come out of the refugee camps, and it struck me looking at this yesterday that at the time of this image, my family, who speak five languages, would not have been existing in a life in English or French yet.)

(stay on slide)

When I was growing up my father and uncle were journeyman electricians, what in Quebec is called Maitre Electricien, very respectable work in my family.

(next slide: kids)

I grew up in a house of ten in Cote Des Neiges, one of the most densely populated and culturally and linguistically mixed urban areas in the country, in a duplex with my family upstairs and my uncle aunt and cousins downstairs.

And you know of course it was the 70s and early 80s and no one had heard of seat belts and so the dilemma of how to cart that many children around was solved with my uncle’s electrical truck.

So basically imagine a big white van with the walls full of metal shelves with pretty much every imaginable dangerous projectile strapped to it, and pile six kids into the back. And I loved it. This was my favourite way to get around for me as a kid, piled in this white van with my cousins and my brother and sister. I imagine this today sometimes, six kids in the back of an electrical truck, and how impossible it would be, bouncing around Montreal with electrical equipment and wiring and screwdrivers and ladders. It feels like part of the absurd generative creativity of that time. My mum is a very creative person and my aunt and my mum are both very loving people who brought art and books and music into the house and even though we did not have a lot of money there were always games and toys and creative things to make and do. And while my uncle and my father do not have much formal education because they had to work when they immigrated as teenagers, and were from a working class family to begin with – the intellectual traditions that brought me into academic life are things that I learned from my immediate and extended family.

To debate, to get to the core of things, to play with ideas, to entertain oneself and one another with a deeply felt cosmic irony, to get down to the marrow of a concept, these are the qualities that my family gave me. It’s how we played and had fun. Those are the qualities that gave me a thirst to know, to grow, to learn, to think. I had no idea what an academic career looked like, and I didn’t know anyone who had done this, but I knew that I wanted to be in a place where there was intellectual work happening and I knew that because of them.

And so that brought me to an academic path that my family, much as they love me, could not have foreseen. They wanted me to do something more… practical. [[My uncle who I’m close to, who raised me, once when I was done my Masters and was about to go on to a PhD he asked me at dinner one time,  “If you get a PhD and you become a professor, will you still speak to me.” And I was at a loss for words. But I wanted to say, of course, you made me who I am. i am myself because of all of you.]]

Later I thought of what I would have wanted to say to him. There’s a wise thing that my uncle said to the kids, when everyone was little. If one of my cousins was jealous of another one – someone was more pretty or someone did better at school, whatever. He’d say “What each of us does reflects on the others. So if one of us is beautiful that means we all are. If one of us does something good that means we all did it.” And that was really smart, a good thing to teach kids. And I think the values of my family have shaped me in very profound ways that I didn’t understand fully until I learned more about how unusual this is, at least in north America.

(back to slide ‘what would it look like’)

I did go to university, and I went to Trent, and for where I was at the time that was a very nurturing environment, one in which I was able to engage in that rigourous drilling down into ideas with friends I was learning with. We were deeply engaged in a very interdisciplinary and genuine hearted kind of work. So it was only when I went to grad school and began the process of professionalization that I came to understand that I was being asked to grow able to perform a kind of intellectual work that asked of me that I divorce my body from my intellectual production. I think when you come into academic cultures from underneath, from below, as the AORTA folks and others have pointed out in their work on oppression… entering any structure from below, you have a perspective on the edifice that you’re entering into: a perspective from below. And that perspective lets you see things that are not as readily visible to those who fit seamlessly into structures.

And I resisted this divorcing of body and intellect, and I think a lot of us do resist it on some level.  (next slide: articles)

I also came to like it.

and once I began doing my work, I likely would have gone on doing that kind of theorizing, had I not come up against the wall that came next.

The year of the abyss

Here’s how this happened. About three years ago I lost the ability to read. Completely. For about six months I couldn’t read a sentence, couldn’t even look at text. Over the time that came next I went on medical leave and began to work back up bit by bit from graphic novels back up into very creative and grounded writing – one of the first books I was able to read when I couldn’t read anything else was Leanne Simpson’s Islands of Decolonial Love, and I think I could read that when I couldn’t read anything else because it came from such a genuine place and I could feel it.

I couldn’t read much else for over a year. Now I can again, and yet in that time when I didn’t know if that capacity would be coming back, I needed to completely reevaluate my relationship with theory and textuality. This was a very, very still time. Everything stopped. I think of it as a long nothing time, a long time of looking out over the abyss.

(slides from Octavia’s Brood, Evidence: “no one is impatient with anyone else’s growing” and “we did it”)

The next book that I was able to come back to when I began reading again is what we have up on screen, a book that came out during that time that I’m sure many of you are familiar with, the Octavia’s Brood collection. I’m deeply inspired by the work that came together into this book, and I can’t do the project justice here, so I’m going to focus on one short story in it by Alexis Pauline Gumbs that touched my quite deeply in that time.

It is called “Evidence” and I’ve got a page or two of it up on screen.

In this story a character who lives in a future time when a good world has come into being, is writing back to her own ancestor five generations back, who lives now, who still lives in capitalism and in a time of oppression, racism, and exploitation.

(slide: exhibit B)

The future descendant describes what life is like in her time and reaches back to her ancestor to tell her that it feels like “maybe you knew about us. it feels like you loved us already.” and to thank her for being brave.

There’s a line that I love in this story, and it is –

(slide: no one is impatient w someone else’s stillness)

That line – no one is impatient with someone else’s stillness –

I lived for two years in almost total stillness. I didn’t speak much. I didn’t write and I didn’t often see anyone other than very close people who could see me any way that I was.

And I think it’s important, reading a little bit up the page, that this stillness comes up in the context of a culture in which “it is on everyone’s mind and heart how to best support the genius that surrounds us. How to shepherd each of us into the brilliance we come from even though our experience breaking each other apart through capitalism has left much healing to be done.”

Here’s the thing. That stillness was needed to create the work. Without the time of the abyss, and the decision to trust what wanted to come out into the world through that time, there would have been no Nurturance essay. So what is the relationship between that stillness and knowledge production?  Of course this led me to think of how we generate knowledge: how would we create knowledge if we could work in this way? what kind of knowledge would we create if we let ourselves fall, and surrender and let what wants to come through arrive, shephered and loved and fostered by our intellectual and organizing communities, which can be one and the same thing? how would our knowledge production look? I spent about a year or two there in that place. Now the funny thing about that is that when you’re in it you feel alone, but once you come back up and start talking about this experience it turns out that many people have had that kind of experience of the abyss – of looking out over the edge and not feeling too sure that you still want to be here. That’s a much more common experience than our culture encourages us to admit.

As this was all happening, I was doing two things simultaneously. I was slowly touching this inner personal experience, slowly, slowly writing a piece about it, and I was talking now and then with close friends who are coming up on midcareer – I’m 40, so the folks that I came up with were in this time approaching tenure or now have tenure – are on second books or in some cases third or fourth books and I was hearing the same thing from all of these different people – including successful cis het white men who by all measure had every reason to be content – that they were hitting burnout too, and not only because of having worked hard, but because of a feeling of missing something, of facing a kind of abyss. When the external markers of success are present, but you feel disconnected from something inside yourself, and if you’ve had that feeling for so long you don’t even know it’s a feeling,  over time, that can take a toll, and result in feelings of emptiness or impact motivation and will to go on. And I got really curious about this because I had of course heard for years and years from women of colour, Black women, Indigenous women, and in a very different way in my own lived experience coming into this place from a very working class background – about academia alienating people – but I was surprised when I began hearing these things from upper middle class cis white men with all the right hits on their cv. I was slowly putting all of these experiences together, connecting things that I had not connected before, while looking at the abyss quite regularly. And that’s the what blog does: it puts things together.

And so I began thinking in terms of dangerous gifts, language that I learned from the Icarus project, coming to understand the gifts that can be present in neurodivergent experiences when they are handled in good ways.  And I do perceive this work that I’m now choosing to do as the gift that comes out of danger once you get a handle on it. There was a moment at the very bottom of that time of abyss, a moment when I stopped fighting, and I surrendered.

I didn’t know what would come next, but I gave in. and I had very good guidance from some very powerful body workers who guided this process. On the other side of those kinds of suffering, when you go through them with the right kinds of physical backup, on the other side is a kind of stillness in which everything can happen, what I’m learning is called ‘dynamic stillness.’ And it was about three days on from that day of deciding to give in, to let go, that I pressed ‘submit’ on that blog post and then watched as the internet lit up. And the lingering question that the post opens, and yet cannot close – that question has been with me ever since, and grew into this next stage of the work. And something I saw in a piece by Mia Mackenzie and CarmenLeah Ascencio(quoting David Whyte) stayed with me: that the antidote to burnout is not rest, it is wholeheartedness. That the antidote to burnout is not rest, it is wholeheartedness. I didn’t know what that meant at the time, but I was beginning to learn.

Thinking as a poet,  disability is the constraint that rendered possible the production of the Nurturance piece. Coming back to writing with a cognitive disability requires a different kind of relationship with language than the one that I had developed previously, one that engages with all levels of the body rather than engaging the neocortex at the expense of the rest of my cognitive system. And so after the long time in which I could not even look at a line of text, when I did come back to reading, the kind of theorizing that could emerge within the constraint of this cognitive disability has been by necessity grounded in the body. After a lifetime of textuality this new relationship was strange, it was aural, it was physiological, it was entirely new. I had no choice but to work in this way, and to rediscover the gifts that were wanting to come out of this new way of engaging textually, with my whole body and my whole self. It has turned out to generate a kind of work that I would not have produced had I kept on what I thought was my path.

And that brings us to today

I came back to reading and back to theory, in an embodied way. Now I can do theoretical text in part because a brain does heal, and in part because I have learned how to keep myself in my whole body and in my emotions as I engage.

As the blog has continued to make its way around the world, sweeping into new little inlets and echoing back, it became clear that the kind of work that many of are feeling called to do would be embodied, and I believe that this is valuable intellectual work. I’m of course far and away not the first to make this intervention. It has been made and made, and the question is what will it take to transform the entire structure of how we in academic life create knowledge?

I’m thinking of this as a series of questions and explorations, rather than as five point action plan for bringing nurturance culture into academia. The core animating question, one that I’d like to bring to you, and echo a bit between us, is the closing concept of the blog, really more of an opening than a closing:

(slide: what would it look like for us to be accepted in the world as our whole selves – that paragraph that asks that question and describes what it would be like – the solution is slow self love that brings the shame up into the light, people who hold you accountable and aren’t going anywhere – unconditional positive regard).

what would it look like for us to be accepted in the world as our whole selves.

A word about

methodology

As I mentioned earlier I’m inspired by the Octavia’s Brood project. I’m also taking inspiration here from emergent strategy, from the work of adrienne maree brown among others, whose work i can’t do justice in the confines of this talk, but I’d like to pick up on just one piece of that work. Thinking in an emergent way, brown argues that organizing work is fractal: in this conception every rendering at every scale of struggle is fractal – we create right relationships within ourselves and with one another which creates a resilience with which we grow able to take on, challenge, and transform state power and structural oppression, listening to and working with those who have a perspective from below. It is from underneath that we can topple all of these structures. this change is collective, not individual, but my hope is that it can happen in an emergent way.

I also take inspiration from the work of Ajay Heble at the University of Guelph and Rebecca Caines at U of A on improvisation, an approach in which one may create a container for transformation but without knowing or seeking to overdetermine what will arise once forces begin to move. like a muscle, we seek many failures, creating room for emergence to happen. I also take inspiration from what I have understood of the Boggs school, which I only learned of much too late, and yet even in its echoes it has touched me, in video and in descriptions of how Grace Lee Boggs worked with others. I’m taking inspiration from this echo to inform my own practice of knowledge production, one in which speaking together and abiding together in stillness, feeding the soil between us, are how cultures of practice emerge.

I’m also influenced by a growing body of work that Aravinda Ananda and others have been creating that reconnects critical awareness of oppression with somatic practices from the Work That Reconnects tradition.

with that spirit, I’d like to invite everyone who is able to to come out to the open area for an exercise.  Just a quick note to say that anything interactive, please do take care of your body, you are invited to adapt any way that feels good for you. If you need to sit or lie down or move around in a way that works for your body that is always completely ok. Please take care of your own body in whatever ways you need. Also, we’re going to be using very gentle somatic tools, but even very gentle tools can bring up emotion, and this is intended as a gentle creative exercise, so I ask everyone to govern your own level of depth, stay within the level that works for you.

This is adapted from and loosely inspired by the Work That Reconnects and is intended to create room for a comfortable vulnerability and a context of unconditional positive regard for a group, conditions helpful to creative emergence. I’m going to adapt the exercises for our purposes today.

1. Milling – explain it and then invite to participate –

milling is metaphor in which we shed husks, and reveal grain, like a mill turning hard grain into flour. I invite you to do this in perfect silence, from when we begin, until we settle into pairs. it happens in three steps, normally we begin with eyes lightly open but downcast looking at your feet, or at the ground just in front of you, no eye contact with others at the beginning, walking very slowly and feeling your own presence and the presence of the others around you, as you mill, moving freely through the space. and three times i will invite us all to move a little bit more quickly, and then once again a bit more quickly, but still at a relaxed pace, tune in gently to yourself, and start to notice the feeling of these other people around you and notice if more using your felt sense of one another than your eyes, move towards those who you feel a draw to, allowing others to move freely towards and away from you. As we reach the third stage I will invite you to gently draw towards one of the people who you find yourself feeling comfortable with or drawn towards, you might not know why. again, allow others to move freely, and as you settle on a buddy I’ll ask you to move in your buddies to an open space and find a place to sit, we’ll be doing three questions with this partner.

The person with longer hair will be the one who will be first to speak, the person with shorter hair will be second. keeping silence, please give me a nod if you know who is first speaker.

Now taking 30 seconds silently just thinking to yourself, this will be the question. Before we do it together I invite you to think it quietly to yourself for 30 seconds.

first question:

1. A time when I felt accepted, seen, and felt belonging as I am, was…
   It can be any moment in your life at any age. A time when you completely accepted and seen and loved, or when you felt the most accepted, belonging just as you are. You can share: what does that feel like, how does it feel in your body? What emotions or sensations does that feeling bring up for you? If you find you can’t think of an experience of that kind of belonging, that’s ok, you can think or talk about what that feels like. A time when I felt accepted, and seen, or felt belonging as you are was…

now you’ll have thirty seconds to think about it quietly on your own. When you hear the bell begin that will transition us back.

(thirty seconds).

ok now we will take turns in pairs. first speaker, you will be invited to speak for two minutes uninterrupted and then will hear a bell letting you know to close your last thoughts. first listener, your role will be to be perfectly silent, and simply give this person your accepting attention. we do this to give people relief from needing to respond, if you wish you can think in your mind, ‘i’m with you. i hear you.’ and your job is just to hold a listening space for them without any words. you won’t need to respond to what they say. when they are done you are welcome to offer them a nod or any quiet indication of thanks.

when the bell rings, first speaker will slowly close their role, listeners you can give them an visual expression of gratitude for what they’ve shared, I will repeat the question, and we will switch roles. A time when I felt the most accepted and seen, or felt belonging as I am was…

(two minutes, close, other person takes a turn).

Then next question:

This time, the second speaker will go first, so those who just spoke, you will be speaking again. Again, you will have two minutes to speak while the other person listens with you in silence, offering if they are able, presence, kindness, and unconditional acceptance. Person listening, you will listen in complete silence; you will not be expected to respond in any way except to offer presence. At the close when you hear the bell, you are invited to offer a silent gesture of gratitude for what your partner has shared.

second question: The kinds of work I would be able to do, if I felt this way every day in my work life, would be…

pairs, reverse, same as before.

now, returning to the person who began the first time, we’ll do one more question in pairs:

third question, returning to first speaker.

what in your life brings you a feeling of gratitude? this can be as broad or as narrow as you like, just bringing up that feeling of gratitude and feeling it in your body. you will speak for two minutes, then you will hear the bell which signals to you to close up your thoughts. I feel gratitude for…

both have turn, bell to close.

thank you to our pairs now please feel free to return to your seats. and with the person you came in with, or someone sitting near you, we’re going to do an exercise in which we connect with a being outside of time.

In this exercise we’re doing something like the exercise that generated the short story evidence in which we step into a conversation with a future being.

You’re going to meet someone from fifteen years into the future, who is living after a time of great transformation and who lives and works in a community in which work has been completely transformed. You can imagine this person is you fifteen years in the future. The live in a time after the great transformation when their work is fostered in a culture of unconditional positive regard and nurturance. You will meet at a point outside of time, and you will hear a question.

(in order to facilitate this meeting we will step out of time and encounter one another, transported by the sound of the bell).

Everyone facing the right wall or the front is a future being, everyone facing the left wall or the back is a present day being.

Future beings, you will speak first. You will hear a question asked and you will hear it in my voice. You will hear it asked as though it comes from the person in front of you. Present day  beings, you will be silent, and you will hear a question asked in my voice, as though it comes from  you. You will hear two questions and will speak twice.

It is amazing to meet you. I know that you are living in a time after the transformation has taken place, and people who produce knowledge create it in a community in which stillness is known to be a needed part of the work, and in which a lot of attention is given to bringing out the gifts that are in each of us and all around us. What’s it like to be in your time?

This future being – you fifteen years in the future – is working in exactly the way your heart would want and works with a community of scholars who work in this good way

– present day beings, you will hear your question asked in my voice, and you will simply hear it as though it is coming through you as your own question, you will not speaik.

Future beings, you will hear a question, and you will hear it as though it comes to you from the person in front of you, and you will hear it in my voice, and you will have two minutes to answer.

When the bell rings we are transported to a moment outside time where you encounter your self fifteen years in the future, after the transformation.

Present Day being asks: it’s amazing to meet you. I’m so happy to know that you are working in exactly the way your heart would want you to – what is it like, how do you work? What are your days like? What do you work on?

2 minutes.

Second question: again you will hear it asked in my voice. You will hear it knowing it comes right from the heart-mind of the past sealf in front of you.

“From your time to mine feels like such a big jump. I know that you are coming in the future but in my time we would not even know how to begin. If you think back to when you were me, how did you begin? What was the first step?”

2 minutes to answer, then close with the bell.

Then if feels right, reverse.

Now we want to gather all of that wisdom that emerged. And we’re going to do this creating a group hive mind that speaks within itself. It may have many voices but it is one mind.  We’re going to do an exercise to gather all of this wisdom (pop perspectives – learned from Marco and Mimi. Adapted here into group mind). We’ll be creating one mind speaking to itself, like electrical currents jumping synapses.
You’ll get a piece of paper; it could be blank or could have a cue on it. This is a free association game, so write what first comes to mind. You won’t need to read out your own words, you may read the words someone else has written.

Cues (helpers give out blank paper with cues in regular size font at the top – as many sheets as participants):

one way to hold up the writing, ideas, and knowledge of those who face systemic oppression in my work world would be:

one way to act in solidarity with those who face systemic oppression in my work world would be:

I would feel liberated if we:

one way to turn this world inside out would be:

(and some blank ones for free associating)

These cues are just there to free up your thinking. Without thinking too hard, writing quickly, write whatever comes to mind, try to write legibly, and when you hear the shaker start, you’ll fold it in four, and then pass and receive continuously while you hear the shaker going. When the shaker stops, open the one you have, read what is on it, and add whatever comes to your mind, responding to the others or whatever is alive for you, then when you hear the shaker again you’ll pass and receive until the next stop, and we’ll repeat that a few times. Does everyone have a paper?

Ok, so write one thought, anything that comes to you, don’t think too hard just let what wants to arise come, fold it in four, pass and receive during a time shaker plays, then when you hear the shaker stop you’ll open the one that you’re holding and see what it says. Now in order to collect all of this wisdom we’re going to create a group hive mind, spoken aloud. In order to do this, simply speak when you feel called, when a space opens up, anything that moves you on your paper. This group mind will be speaking to itself. (go with the group, see what emerges)

We’ll do a few rounds of passing then see what we’ve found. Read whatever strikes you that you want to share. You don’t need to wait to be asked, simply speak when you feel called, words on the paper that speak to you when a pause presents itself or anything else that you feel called to speak. Overlap is ok and pauses are ok. We’ll create a shared group mind of knowledge.

(the group creates ‘group mind’ of all the insights that come up from the cued sheets)

(this was really fun and people got into it, it worked well, the shaker works best as you can judge the timing and be playful)

(last slide: nurturance culture in academic life opening slide)  (some organic responses may arise here depending on what grows out of the group mind game – transition, then close)

as i said when i opened, working through disability requires one to work in a different way, to honour gifts in a different way, and finding my footing in this way has never been fully individual and so I’d like to close with those words that my uncle gave us in his very powerful way of theorizing: that what any of us does that is beautiful, we all did.

and what any of us does that is good, we all did. we do it together. thank you very much.