by Lesley S. Curtis, Ph.D.
In the United States, a man with authoritarian intentions has been elected president, bringing along a pattern of fostering a culture of hate. There is much to grieve and lots of fear for us to work with.
Though I cannot offer any magic solutions, the skills that we teach in our inclusive leadership groups might be valuable to you at this time. In this post, I have described some fundamental trauma-informed systemic healing skills that I normally teach through experience to groups and individuals. They apply no matter the context, even in more intense environments.
These skills work on an individual level, giving you easy and practical ways to become more and more aware of what you can and cannot control. When we focus on what we can control and where our talents are, we have a greater capacity to bring love and compassion to fear-filled situations. This guide offers a path forward.
In sum, you do not have to do it all. You can make change. And you still deserve joy along the way.
Knowing what is mine makes me happier and more effective.
If you are reading this, you are likely familiar with grounding and meditative practices. They are incredibly valuable. But there’s a step that you’ve perhaps never practiced before, and that’s releasing emotions that are not yours.
You cannot process what does not belong to you. In fact, trying to do so usually intensifies activation rather than resolves it. On a deep level, most people we work with are trying hard to process other people’s stuff and they don’t know it.
You can learn to work with and metabolize only what belongs to you so that you are more available to others. This is necessary for avoiding burnout, helping others more, and finding your own joy. It also helps us see clearly where a threat actually is, rather than preemptively planning for threats that may not come to be.
A large percentage of us, especially those who were socialized as women, try to compensate for other people’s emotions. We spend our time managing them; we focus on how everyone feels around us; and it takes us effort (imagine writing with your non-dominant hand) to identify what belongs to us. We take on the pain of our friends, relatives, and ancestors without conscious knowledge. If this was something our mothers did (and, for most of us, it was), then we’ve rarely observed a role model who does not operate in this way. I once spoke with a client who felt terrible when her employee’s father died. This is understandable, but, as the Genie in Aladdin says, it is not in our power to bring people back from the dead. Reminding my client of her ordinary and normal limitations gave her tremendous relief because, until prompted to do so, she had not realized she was taking on the grief of her employee.
Sometimes it takes effort and intention to notice what we can do. In this case, my client offered and normalized leave policies that respected employees who were grieving. This is an appropriate and beneficial intervention that does not involve over-compensating for what we cannot control. This is the power of the skill we call Me/Not-me.
When we confuse what belongs to me and what does not, we exhibit a “tend and befriend” response. It works in a similar way to a fight/flight/freeze response. If you imagine someone running headfirst into a burning building before realizing they don’t have protective gear and they aren’t even a firefighter: that’s tend and befriend. We do it before we realize we’ve done it. But we can learn to slow down and redirect our attention and, when we do, we become more effective.
When we are helping leaders with burnout, tend and befriend is usually the pattern that we are healing. Parker Palmer explains it beautifully:
“Though usually regarded as the result of trying to give too much, burnout in my experience results from trying to give what I do not possess—the ultimate in giving too little! Burnout is a state of emptiness, to be sure, but it does not result from giving all I have: it merely reveals the nothingness from which I was trying to give in the first place.”
The skills to identify what is and is not mine and therefore avoid the tend-and-befriend response are essential for anyone doing social justice and equity work. This also applies whenever we are consuming activating information. Doing so without caution can trigger us into moving into the burning building. Focusing intentionally on the self first stops this response.
A self-first approach gives us a chance to be with others in a compassionate, non-activating way. We tap into self first in order to know that, in this moment, even in the presence of others’ pain, we are safe.
Metaphorically, we’re learning to say: wait, am I a firefighter? When we realize we are not, we can identify what is ours to contribute and what is not. It is from this space that we find appropriate and manageable solutions, like calling 911, finding a water source, or using our carpentry skills to rebuild.
My inner critic has a volume button–and, thankfully, I can turn it down.
Most of us have a voice inside our heads that tells us what’s right and wrong. It’s often very loud and very mean. For many people, it is judge, jury, and executioner. I remember several years ago when I was doing my coaching training, the voice in my head got furious at me for not finishing the strawberries in the fridge before they went bad. I have learned to not listen to her and now, I rarely hear her at all.
Once we come into an awareness that the world is not ours alone to fix through self-sacrifice, the next step is allowing ourselves to notice compassionately when old patterns emerge.
Again, to explain this skill, a story might be helpful.
At the end of a workshop last spring, a few of our participants were having revelations about how they did not need to compensate for others’ needs. One woman said, “I’ve noticed that if I don’t respond to emails immediately on the weekend, sometimes the issue gets resolved before I have a chance to respond.”
For me as a facilitator, this was amazing to hear. These small changes can make people’s lives much more manageable. And, it is usually from this space that I watch burnout dissipate.
But, the conversation then quickly turned to: “I just have to make sure I never check my email on the weekend.” “Yes, do you know how to set up an away message? You should do that.” “Yes, I will just have to force myself not to respond to others all the time. I should have better boundaries.” It sounded like people were planning their diet, calculating calories by examining and weighing every last piece of lettuce.
While boundaries are important, the first attempts to set them up usually come from the inner critic. Let’s call her (or him or them) Critty.
Critty is sitting right up at the front of the class and taking copious notes: “The right thing is to have boundaries. Aha! That’s what’s wrong with me. I was doing it wrong by not having boundaries.”
Critty rejoices in knowing what is right. That’s how you can identify her. Being right is how she understands love. She is an intense figure to work with because: getting things wrong is the most terrifying thing that could ever happen to her.
Imagine Critty is a young part of you, given the job of managing the classroom while the teacher is out. She has no skills except to refer to the right/wrong list and to yell at everyone who’s out of control.
Critty adds “boundaries” to the already long list of right and wrong. She feels smug and even excited that a new item has been added. She’s eagerly ready to whip you into shape the first time you mess up. And here’s the important part: she thinks she’s helping.
Your ability to live in the space between reaction and response puts Critty in her appropriate seat at the back of the classroom. Once you notice she’s standing on the teacher’s desk, a drill sergeant directing every part of your life, you can remove her megaphone.
Critty is a tricky one to identify because she is more sophisticated than some of the other survival strategies we develop. Remember: the critic thinks she’s helping. To tell her to shut up would involve amplifying the harm she already creates. The volume button can only be found through deep compassion and grace for ourselves.
Authoritarians thrive in chaos and manipulate our sense of what’s right and wrong. Usually what becomes right is what responds to their need to be the center of everything by controlling through fear. They speak to our inner critic by creating simplified and horrifying definitions about who is wrong and therefore unworthy. For people whose worldview is dominated by this punitive understanding of human value, authoritarians make sense. We do not need to assist them by punishing ourselves. Every ounce of grace and compassion we offer ourselves is an act of resistance.
When you take this approach, what you are leaning into is the truth that there is no “right” way to be worthy of love. You are just worthy. Period.
This is not that.
When faced with a traumatic situation, like the intensifying of a culture of hate, we always pull information in from what has happened before, sometimes on deep subconscious levels. While this can be useful on an intellectual level and can make us feel more in control, it often distorts our perception and intensifies our fear.
For example, one of my clients was having an intense conflict with a colleague. After weeks of working together, he began to realize how much the colleague reminded him of his older cousin, who had moved in with his family when he was 7 because his uncle was abusive. By doing some untangling of the two experiences, my client started to realize that he could manage the conflict at work in a different, less activated way. He started to truly see that this is not that.
Authoritarians might easily remind us of an abusive father, uncle, or grandfather. They and their followers will do things that are quite similar and operate from a worldview that accepts abuse as a norm. We can do work to lessen the impact of fear-mongering by showing compassion to the parts of ourselves that experienced the original violence, especially if those were early experiences during which we had fewer resources to manage the pain.
I do not share this information as if it’s easy work. Healing ourselves is uncomfortable and hard sometimes. Yet, whatever we heal in ourselves not only gives us the better life we deserve, it offers a model, an energetic template, for those around us who seek the same experience of lightness and joy.
Healing from what was is a strategy for learning to address what is. It’s how we learn this is not that, responding to only what is truly before us.
You deserve joy.
Remember that humans are hard-wired to look for threats. And know that there are thousands of us who have spent our careers researching and encouraging methods that bring humans back from pain. Today, we have more resources than ever thanks to fields like neuroscience, meditative psychology, systems science, social work, critical race studies, gender studies, literary analysis, and more. No matter how scary these times are, this time is not that time.
Joy is also here and it is real. It does not need to hide to keep us safe.
A note about us
We are a culture change company founded by coaches and academics. We focus on inclusive leadership. We are deeply human and invested in change. We are trained guides who know how to process grief, welcome fear, encourage love, and find joy. We know, from practice and study, what works in creating sustainable change and collective systems that benefit all of us. We follow a practice of love over fear and collective healing through individual joy. If you’d like to join us in an exploration of what this looks like moving forward, please email us at connect@sagelycreative.com.