Hi friends, I yearn to live in a world filled with Beauty & Tenderness. And if you’re reading this, I’m guessing you do too. To get there, we need a different kind of conversation. So I’ve started this newsletter as an experiment. In these occasional musings, I’d like to explore with you what’s needed to re-imagine what’s possible, and how we can navigate radical change together. I’d love to hear what resonates as I figure out the audience / find my voice for this newsletter. Much love, Melissa
PS, When I use the word “we” below, it’s explicitly addressed to white folks and non-black people of color.
History will probably remember last week as the one that broke America. George Floyd’s execution back-to-back with Amy Cooper’s 911 call shattered our dysfunctional status quo:
The myth that we live in a post-racial world was destroyed.
The genteel farce of a “civil society” was exposed.
Even “nice” liberals saw how we’re complicit.
All of the inconvenient truths our culture ignored are now center stage. The injustices repeated in the shadows for centuries have been laid bare on video.
It was an apocalyptic week in the original Greek sense of the word — apokálypsis — to uncover, to reveal.
Now that we see the brokenness of our social contract, we can’t un-see it.
And what’s different now (vs. post Trayvon Martin or Eric Garner) is that all this has happened when everyone feels vulnerable (to the coronavirus), and the fabric of normality has been ripped apart in a matter of weeks.
With this level of disruption, it’s impossible to go back to how things used to be. Humpty Dumpty can’t be put back together again.
Photo by Mike Von on Unsplash
As I write this — thousands of protestors are in the streets, helicopters are flying overhead, and sirens are blaring here in Oakland.
It’s terrifying to sit here on what feels like the eve of revolution. But I say hallelujah.
Now that America’s Shadow has been exposed, we have a chance to face what was festering in the dark for centuries. And so much energy has been unleashed that we may finally have the reckoning about slavery we put off for 155 years.
It’s unfortunate that it took the extreme events of the past week to jolt us awake as a country. But I’m more hopeful about real change than I’ve ever been.
That said, this is not going to be easy. The next few years are probably going to be the hardest we’ve ever lived through.
It’s not easy to face what’s uncomfortable, inconvenient, and even ugly. The things we put in the Shadow are there with good reason — usually that they’re too painful to be with, and so we split them off from ourselves and/or project them onto others.
The ugliest truth we need to face is that outer oppression stems from inner oppression.
It stems from the ways we’ve all internalized the social constructs and unmetabolized traumas of our history. The staggering size of this unacknowledged cultural Shadow is a big reason why so little has changed in the 50 years since the Civil Rights era.
In doing my own Shadow work over many years, it’s been devastating and humbling to see all the ways I’ve been violent toward others — through judgments, thoughts and actions — because I couldn’t bear to see what others reflected in me.
Raised in what sociologist Max Weber called the “iron cage” of American culture, I was socialized to believe that:
Everything can be controlled and dominated — nature, time, and other people. A banal expression of this is feeling the need to be productive all the time; a beautiful expression of this is the dazzling set of scientific advances we’ve made.
It’s a zero sum game which shows up in our scarcity mindsets, and culture wars around things like social benefits.
Hence, I must master other things, circumstances, and people; or they will control me. Ever notice the war metaphors in business? “Crushing it”, “Rallying the troops.”
Hurt people hurt people. And these are the beliefs of a culture founded by deeply traumatized people.
Psychotherapist Resmaa Menakem insightfully unpacks that this harsh set of cultural assumptions stems from the legacy of brutality of medieval Europe:
“The Puritans weren’t trying so much to create a New Jerusalem as they were refugees” — escaping the banality of medieval torture, crushing poverty, and/or persecution. These original English immigrants were looking for respite from trauma at the hands of other white bodies more powerful than theirs.
When trauma goes unmetabolized and frozen, it starts to look like culture.
And that’s what we’ve got in America now.
Photo by Hubert Neufeld on Unsplash
As a result of this conditioning, I met the vulnerability in others with the same harshness I treated my own vulnerability. I judged others as “weak”. I sized up others based on where they were in the pecking order; and when I felt my relative powerlessness, I either hid or puffed myself up through the well-honed weapon of my mind.
I did this because I didn’t yet have the resilience to be with the traumas I hadn’t met in myself. Facing the trauma was like asking me to dead lift a 1 ton car when I’d never worked this muscle a day in my life.
Not only was I carrying my own personal traumas, but as I discovered, I was carrying the unmetabolized traumas of my ancestors. My grandparents fled civil war-torn China in the 1930s and ‘40s — having experienced everything from poverty, to being orphaned in war, to witnessing the Communists push their parents down a well to die. Later, as poor immigrants in the US — where they didn’t speak the language, had limited employment options, and felt like outsiders — they didn’t have the time to process their experiences while trying to eke out a living.
As a result, this backlog of unresolved traumas — theirs, and those of all ancestors before them — got passed down in utero and epigenetically to my parents, and then to me.
To metabolize traumas of this scale requires enormous capacity and time. It requires fully feeling the terror of experience. (In modern trauma therapy, this is done gently in digestible bite-sized pieces over time.) But because traumas are by definition overwhelming to the nervous system, the body protects itself by armoring, numbing, or going into defensive anger.
I did all of these things to cope:
I disassociated from my emotions and shielded my heart even from myself. I walked through the world rigidly, bracing myself against potential threats. In my 20s, a potential roommate asked: “Are you always like a robot?” In my 30s, a massage therapist once gasped when she realized how frozen my body was.
I numbed myself from feeling through workaholism. In being so busy, there wasn’t space to feel.
Occasionally, I unleashed rage disproportionate to the trigger. For me, these situations usually involved blustery, old white men who didn’t know what they were talking about.
Photo by Taya Iv on Unsplash
I see now how my own inner oppression kept me from from what I most wanted — a sense of safety and belonging in an unpredictable world.
It drove me to seek shelter in the form of external accomplishments to grant me privilege in an inequitable system, and the false security of not feeling my deepest emotions / truths. The more letters I racked up after my name (BA magna cum laude from Yale, MBA from Harvard Business School), the more prestigious titles I added to my resume (McKinsey consultant, product manager at unicorn Silicon Valley startups), the more I hoped I’d finally be untouchable by the vulnerabilities of life.
Though I had security in a material sense, I was still a cog in the iron cage. I repressed my authentic expression in exchange for being a slightly bigger cog who didn’t need to feel the terror of being the most powerless cog in the system. I suppressed the gifts of my sensitivity, empathy and gentleness because my ancestors taught me epigenetically how violent the world is.
I created these structures to protect me from feeling the pain of life. But while hollowing myself out to keep me safe in the brutal iron cage, it robbed my life of the aliveness I so deeply craved.
The violence enacted on George Floyd and countless black / brown bodies before him is abhorrent. In my outrage, I’ve been asking: “How the hell did we get here?!”
When I trace the lineage of trauma in the American Shadow and I get really honest with myself — I begin to see how inner terror is something I may share with Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin who killed George Floyd. He is — in an extreme way — another cog in the dehumanizing iron cage.
Underneath the capacity for unflinching violence is the terror of having been terrorized once too. The deeper the callousness, the deeper the fear of the wounds festering in the Shadows. Victimizers never want to be victims again.
In a system that teaches people — especially boys — that they need to be master of someone / something else to have a place in the brutal cage where they can be shielded from the pain of their own traumas, he long ago cut off major parts of himself.
Just as I disconnected my head from my heart, he did the same.
Just as I weaponized my mind to fend off threats and dominate others, his bludgeon came in the form of his knee and physical strength.
Just as I relied on the privilege conferred by pedigree and powerful institutions, he relied on the institutional power of a badge and uniform.
Even though he was objectively safe, Derek Chauvin’s body and nervous system — because of America’s collective trauma — likely reflexively felt unsafe.
Derek Chauvin’s crime is indefensible, and I hope that justice is swift. But to enable lasting outer change to stick (e.g., at the level of policy and culture), the shared oppressive inner psyche of America needs to be dismantled.
Photo by Miltiadis Fragkidis on Unsplash
People of color every day navigate a system where the default is whiteness. But white bodied people have largely had the privilege of not having to consciously navigate race. As a result, when uncomfortable situations or conversations involving race come up — it’s easy to go into fight / flight / freeze. Rationally people may want to “do the right thing”, but because of the collective trauma lodged in the physical body, the knee-jerk response from the lizard brain is defensiveness.
And as my friend Iris Podschun noted, this may be what happened to Amy Cooper. When defensiveness didn’t work, she reflexively moved into manipulation and aggression. She was like a fearful animal feeling cornered. And so she called in the institutional power of the police because she lacked the nervous system capacity to be with her own discomfort.
I don’t say this to excuse Amy Cooper or Derek Chauvin. Far from.
But I share this as a call for us to begin the hard work of metabolizing our collective trauma. Dismantling America’s Shadow requires us to build our somatic capacity for discomfort in the face of difference so that the reflexive response is no longer defensiveness, numbing, manipulation or anger. This is not a cognitive process, but a deeply embodied one.
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PS, If you’d like to learn more how the shadow of America’s unresolved traumas around race live in us, Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands is hands down one of the best books I’ve read on inter-generational trauma.
June 4, 2020 update - This OnBeing interview with Resmaa Menakem is an extraordinary introduction to his body of work.