Might Makes Right vs Rule Of Law

Might Makes Right: the arbitrary exercise of power to gain desired results

Rule of Law: the restriction of the arbitrary exercise of power by subordinating it to well-defined and established rules of conduct

I’ve been doing a whole lot of work slogging through the various cultural and familial wounds that are cluttering up my psyche. A HUGE one is the gender wounding which largely appears to stem from religious notions. As part of this work, I’m attempting to examine things from multiple angles and I was thinking about War Lord levels of society as compared with civilized societies and it hit me:

Might Makes Right is a deeply patriarchal notion, which encourages bullies among other things. In fact, this statement is pretty much the bully mantra. Alas, bullies are not particularly empowered or balanced people.

Rule of Law, however, is the guiding principle of ‘civilized’ societies and under the Rule of Law … “might” means nothing. Just because you can beat up your neighbor and steal his car does not mean it’s yours. While it’s tempting to consider the Rule of Law as a manifestation of a matriarchy, I think it’s actually an egalitarian system where ideally (heh) the law applies equally to everyone: poor or rich, male or female, strong or weak. That said, Rule of Law only works if the vast majority of the culture agree to follow the rules established.

So think about which mindset is being espoused behind someone’s rhetoric. Rule of Law? Or Might Makes Right? Which one do you personally prefer and why?

Nothing. Just … nothing.

I can’t find the source now, but it was from some TV show or movie. The setup is that a small group of characters are working to resuscitate one who’s heart had stopped or something. They succeeded and brought the man back to life. The character who has a more spiritual bent asks “What did you see?” After a moment of silence in which the character literally appears shattered replies “Nothing. I saw nothing. Just … blank. There’s nothing there.”

And here was my immediate response if I were in that scene.

“Oh pulease! You have all the subconscious awareness of a brick. I see you’re descending into an existential crisis here, so let me ask: How often do you remember your dreams? Ever worked with them at all? I mean actively.” To which I imagine surprised head shakes. “And if you don’t remember your dreams, does that mean that when you are asleep and there is ‘nothing, just nothing’ that you have ceased to exist?” More head shakes with a furrowed brow.

“See, the world that awaits us after death is the one we visit constantly in our sleep. It is our dreaming self’s native world. Those who work with their dreams and have an actual relationship with their dreaming self will have the most ‘awareness’ – at least to our conscious concept of such – at to what goes on after death. But for those who have not developed that relationship, those psychic or mental/spiritual muscles? Nothing. Just blank. Why? Because your conscious capacity to process what it encounters is what is actually blank. We are 3 dimensional creatures visiting a 6th dimensional realm, to pose an analogy – and most minds simply can’t handle that.”

It’s akin to asking a kindergartner to solve calculus problems and then using the inability to do so as proof that that level of math is impossible and bogus.

Trusting Others

I’ve been hotboxing the StarGate family of series and one really struck me. It was a StarGate SG1 episode called Past and Present in which a returning character had her memory wiped and she didn’t remember that she was a sociopathic murderer and as a result, now she’s nice. That said, there were clues sprinkled very subtly in a couple of places that perhaps some part of her is still not that nice. In the end, she takes something to help restore her memories and decides she hates the person she was … so she takes the original drug again in order to wipe away the memory.

Interesting. Of course it’s the “nature versus nurture” type of question but something struck me. Do you know Aesop’s fable of the Scorpion and the Frog?  If not, look it up. It’s worth knowing. Essentially, in the case of this character, will her lack of memory about who she was truly change who she is?

Will erasing a scorpion’s memory allow it believe it is something else? For the rest of its life?

Long ago I was talking to hubby about trusting people and feelings of betrayal. I said I pretty much take the approach that everyone is who they are – a scorpion is a scorpion and a frog is a frog. I have the ability read people pretty quickly, thus I can always trust them to be true to their basic nature as I understand it. Words mean little, even some actions mean little. If someone surprises me, it means I didn’t really see their nature in the first place. To that, they will be true.

The only person I’ve ever truly felt betrayed by was me, and this always boiled down to me failing to recognize my own nature and then putting myself in situations which I could not honestly support.

You can only ever trust someone to be who they are.

The episode had a lot of potential to really dig into this question but they chose not to. They remained light and fluffy. Disappointing. What is fascinating is that through that series you can really see the American shadow hero. It’s very interesting from that standpoint.

Result of Emotional Ignorance

“I am sad. Therefore I cry,” Shanti said unabashedly. “I realize big strong men are trained not to show emotion in this land. It is a shame. It makes you brittle.”

K.F. Breene – “Chosen” (The Warrior Chronicles, #1)

YES!!!! This is such succinct, beautiful wording to sum up precisely what I was stumbling around here attempting to articulate.

Inability and unwillingness to recognize as valid the full range of human emotion may outwardly give the appearance of being strong, but the truth is that individual is brittle. Easily broken if the wrong pressure is applied, because each of those unrecognized emotions is a stress fracture in the seemingly tough shell. The stronger the emotion and/or the more it is denied, the bigger the fracture.

On the Edge of An Abyss … or A Larger World

I was musing on the last Great Expansion that we as a culture went through, which began in the late Renaissance and the discovery that the world was twice as big as we thought it was. Not that it wasn’t flat, please. They knew darn well it wasn’t flat, but they did miscalculate the size. All grade-schoolers should know this.

Back in that era, we saw a massive shift in all different areas of life. The rise of the printing press, the rise of Humanism fueling the Reformation, discovery of the New World and all the new foods (corn, squashes and potato being most famous) plus the telescope’s ability to view heavenly bodies along with the proof that the sun was the center not the earth, etc etc. This was an era in which the very precepts of How The World Works were kicked out from under people in many different areas of life and it left them floundering and seeking meaning. Enter the Era of Enlightenment, my personal favorite era of them all.

Essentially, within 100 years not only did the world as we know it double in size, but the universe itself was reordered and reimagined. That’s BIG, folks. BIG. HUUUUGE (or YUUUUGE). Try to imagine… Oh wait, we don’t have to. We’re in another era of massive expansion, or right on the cusp of it.

The internet was a massive move, shrinking the world so that I can play a game on my phone with team-players in my own guild who are from Greece, Turkey, Japan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Columbia and the USA. Real time. No delay. Each of us co-operating to accomplish the mission of the moment to further our team and ourselves. That’s huge folks. HUUUUGE. But that’s not all.

We have figured out how to create wormholes, like real wormholes. Astronomers have discovered multiple earth-like planets just a mere 40 light years away in conjunction with the “impossible” microwave propulsion engine that might actually be a feasible drive system for space travel but it’s also not the only space travel design on the table. The creation of actual time crystals. The discovery of the long-theorized Dark Matter. The growth in understanding of Quantum Physics. To top it all off, as with most other eras of expansion, astronomers are finally starting to close in on the existence and location of the 9th planet in our solar system – birth of a new archetypal pattern! Much closer to home, we are undergoing a massive climate shift and with that we’ll be facing massive migrations as populations flee starvation in search of survival.

Once again, as in the 1450-1650 time frame, we are undergoing a massive expansion in our awareness of the world and universe that we live within, and by necessity our place within it. See the early part of that 1450-1550 was about expansion, the 1550-1650 can be characterized as reflection and exploration. It’s not a neat division but from a macro view that works. 1650-1750 was about integration and settling everything into the psyche in a workable manner. That expansion period? That was also a very bloody period which includes the Reformation and the Inquisition.

I think right now, we’re just beginning an Expansion phase on the magnitude or more than the 16th century saw. It’s just a matter of time before it’s confirmed that we are not alone in the universe and for many that will trigger an existential and theological crisis. As always, with large expansion comes the fight against it, with old systems struggling retain their power in the face of new systems coming online. Unfortunately, we today also have some serious firepower to bring to bear in that fight that our ancestors did not have. If fundamentalists of any flavor, who are struggling to make sense of rapid changes by looking to solidify the fundamentals as they see it, get a hold of nuclear weapons or chemical weapons or biological weapons…. This is terrifying. Truly terrifying. It’s an ideological struggle, not a struggle against a state or nation. There is no uniform to target.

What’s truly interesting to me is that, unlike the expansion of the 16th century, this one will and is encompassing the entire world … whether ready or not. Much of the world is still in a feudal or war-lord level of existence! In the parlance of Caroline Myss, these are 1st and 2nd chakra societies. We in the West are largely on the 3rd and heading toward a 4th chakra society. That is a massive jump in terms of energetic awareness. That much of the world is reacting poorly is hardly a shock. It’s to be expected. How to respond?

That’s a tough question. The Sophist Gnostics believe that Armageddon will be triggered by a struggle between the Educated and the Uneducated. *looks at the proliferation of anti-intellectualism* Interesting. Not sure where to take this, but I’m looking at literally hundreds of years of psychic momentum. It would take a LOT to derail that momentum. It’s possible, but the act of doing so would derail humanity far more than the Dark Ages did for Europe. I think if we’re looking toward a 4th chakra or heart-based society, responding from heart is the wisest course of action. That is with empathy for those who are terrified and angry, compassion for those who have been hurt, and a hand up for those ready to move forward.

Victims Need Saviors

This will likely be unpopular, but it’s been rattling around in my brain so I have to explore it.

Only victims need saviors. I never really understood the whole “save us!” and “saved” thing. It never spoke to me, at all. That approach flat out assumes that I am powerless and merely tossed about by the vicissitudes of a wretched life. In order to embrace the concept that I need a savior of any sort, I first must embrace being a victim … and remain one. I must embrace a lifetime of disempowerment, to be content with what I have been given because it was willed that way.

I was watching “Mad Max: Fury Road” and that scene when one of the War Boys sprays chrome on his mouth, turns to his pals and shouts “witness me” before dramatically leaping to his death in order to take out an enemy combatant (Featured Image) … that was a moment of stark realization for me. That our belief about what is within our power, within our control, is expected of us on a higher level, is awaiting us — all of those things are powerful and I do mean POWERFUL. In the face of a true belief that my glorious death taking out enemies will be rewarded in some way beyond the here/now should be genuinely terrifying to any foe. In that moment, I understood the mindset of suicide bombers.

In Norse faiths, the idea is to live boldly and die well. This approach does not make for a peaceful society. In fact, it encourages fractiousness and constant skirmishes because everyone is trying to secure for themselves this Bold status and the real rewards which lie beyond this ugly and harsh life. Indeed, the Norse rulers of the 1000s actively voted (VOTED! ELECTED! CHOSE!) to turn away from their old ways in favor of Christianity precisely BECAUSE of this radical shift in mindset. Victims are easily controlled because the very premise requires looking to others for leadership, for saving. It says “I am a sheep and I need a shepherd that will protect and guide the flock.” Indeed, the metaphor of the shepherd is a pretty common one, but that flat out calls all followers sheep without explicitly saying “thou art sheep.”

…

I am not a sheep. I don’t need saving. Witness me.

Personal Inventories

I had a thought today while driving home and listening once again to Ohotto‘s Saturn in Sagittarius series. The part he was talking about was taking a personal inventory of where you are in relation to your concepts of truth. This is an idea I hear a lot of teachers include which essentially I translate as “interview yourself to find out where your blind spots are.”

Huh. If I knew where my blind spots are, they wouldn’t be blind spots.

In this particular part, he’s talking about inconvenient truths. They are inconvenient in that by recognizing them we have to decide what to do about them. I will add in that instinctively we know that by recognizing a situation’s truth we have to make a choice, and that choice will ultimately either be right or wrong to greater or lesser degrees. Better to ignore the situation then make the wrong choice, because I can blame inaction on “how I was supposed to know?” as opposed to “Yeah, I knew full well and did it anyway.”

So to retranslate into this example, “interview myself to find out what inconvenient truths I need to recognize but haven’t yet.” *blink*blink* That’s a tall order. I absolutely agree it is something that every thinking person needs to do, but I don’t think it’s a moment in time where I can sit down and say “what am I not seeing about myself and my situation?” I’m not seeing it for a host of reasons! There are some I can rattle off, but definitely not the deeper or larger ones.

What I would need is a mindset shift and a set of tools to help trigger me into recognizing “wait a minute, is this one of my inconvenient truths?” Not only a set of tools to help me recognize either in the moment or afterwards, but also tools on working through the emotional system which was forcing that truth to go unrecognized in the first place.

This is actually what I think my Hall of Mirrors training provided for me. By owning that I am indeed IN a Hall of Mirrors I put the first tool of recognition into my kit. The rest of the Hall includes steps on different types of recognition – internal and external. The more I used it, the easier it got until right in the middle of a projection flare-up I could recognize what was happening to me and consciously choose what my next step would be.

Interestingly, with those tools in my arsenal, I’ve found them exceedingly useful when it comes to feeling out when familial and cultural wounds are running amok in my psyche in real time.

Anyway, that was my thought on this approach. An inventory is great, but it’s not a one-time thing and being able to do it well requires a bit more emotional savvy than most people are experienced with. Anyone can learn it, of course, and once learned it is applicable in SOOO many ways.

An Unpopular Cultural Wound

There’s a topic that popped into my head one day while doing my usual “talking to myself” shtick. This time, what came out turned into a rather heated rant revolving around a specific, unaddressed, unacknowledged … actually denied cultural wound. It’s a long standing wound and by this point in time it’s gangrenous and has caused a great deal of harm. It is long past time that someone, somewhere, give this wound a voice. Not to vent or spew poison — but rather with the intention of healing.

Those who’ve read this blog know of my work with familial wounding, and through that alchemizing process I hit upon some pretty nasty cultural wounds which go beyond my family. Most of them are gender related, but not this one. See, a cultural wound affects everyone to some degree who identifies with that particular culture. As to just what a “cultural wound” is, I shall you point you once again to the brilliant work of Robert Ohotto.

In this case, I’m talking about the wounded Southern cultural ego.

What is that wound? Well, it actually revolves around the Civil War and specifically the aftermath. My mom is a huge Civil War buff and I spent my childhood eventually visiting every single major battlefield with the exceptions of Antietam and Shiloh. I’ve been to every major surviving plantation home, from presidents (Hermitage, Monticello, etc) to families (Shirley, Bel Meade, etc). I was steeped in a strongly Confederate-leaning upbringing, and with that I am also very socially liberal. I see no conflict between individual sovereignty and social equality – in fact, they go hand-in-hand.

Despite all this exposure, I always thought “that was over 100 years ago; the issues are long dead”. Then I attended the 150th Battle of Gettysburg re-enactment. The final event was Pickett’s Charge. The two sides then stopped to face each other – Yankee and Confederate. Women walked between the lines carrying wreaths in honor of all the Americans who died during that battle. Then the two sides were supposed to come together and shake hands. What literally blew me away and hit me to my core was watching just how many of the re-enactors turned their backs and walked away … on both sides. The expressions of the men who chose this action were all different levels of furious. It was in that moment that I truly realized … “It’s not over. Not by a long shot.” I then remembered catching my mom once in a rant against Sherman and what an evil bastard he is. IS. She was on a roll, angry and impassioned, and speaking entirely in present tense. Truly, it’s not over for the cultural psyche if those who are plugged into it speak in present terms.

The wounds inflicted in that war were triaged somewhat, then picked at and picked at and picked at before being left to fester. The Reconstruction era was a dark chapter that doesn’t get talked about much, indeed it’s typically glossed over as if “and then we rebuilt yay! koombayah” No. My mom always said that the absolute worst thing that happened to the South other than the war itself was Lincoln’s assassination. Knowing history as I do now, I agree with her completely. My great-grandparents lived in a home built in the 1840s and expanded in the late-1860s and it included traps specifically to defend against Carpetbaggers. That blew me away when I was shown the cubby holes where the family would hide when the looters came. Or the trap door which allowed defenders to drop down on top of anyone at the front door. “Reconstruction” was roughly 40 years of deliberate abuse aimed at punishing the culture which dared to defy the powers that be, and part of that abuse was ensuring blame got heaped aplenty. Scapegoat anyone? Here’s what it goes like:

*cue the music* The North was the righteous hero who fought for the moral cause and won.  They were innocent of any wrong doing. It was those ill-bred, dirty uneducated Southerners who fought to keep slaves. They are bad people and it was all their fault.

*raised eyebrow* Really? How simplistic.

Do you honestly think that brothers would feel so strongly about whether or not rich people could buy other people that they would literally face off to kill each other? Especially for a single statement/issue. It was indeed a war that tore families apart, with the whole “brother against brother” and “father against son” being LITERAL. Not figurative. Literal. And you want to convince me that brothers were willing to kill their brothers over THAT issue? Hell, if you know anything about history you know that the institution of slavery was dying all on its own and rightly so. Rightly so! Hear that — rightly so, but if you think slavery is over then think again — “human trafficking” is just a PC term for “slave trading”. It’s not legally sanctioned here, but we sure do loose a lot of people to slave traders and I’m not about to church it up so we can pretend the gritty truth is less ugly than it is. *clears throat* My apologies for the digression.

So if the Southerners got all the blame for the war and had to accept the moral judgment to boot, what do you think this did? Bear in mind, there was pretty much not a single whole male left after that war, and by “whole” I mean that literally – as in “not missing body parts”. It’s eye opening to read the accounts of the hardships the women faced in that period because SOOOOO many men were missing hands, legs, feet, arms or were otherwise so scarred as to require operating at less than full capacity — if they came home at all. Being a largely agricultural economy at the time, this was beyond devastating. Then the carpetbaggers come in, aiming to pillage and loot the larger wealthy looking homes which were all the support many of these communities had left. There wasn’t much organized opposition to these bands of murderous robbers because … hello! Devastated to begin with. So, in the midst of this poverty hardship and pain, now start with the moralizing and judgments, the scapegoating and the blame throwing, and allow the poverty to go on and on and on. Anger goes somewhere, and who do you think is the unfortunate group to get shit on even more?

If you said the black community, you are indeed correct. Scapegoats for the scapegoats. The saying is “shit rolls downhill” and that definitely includes bearing cultural shadows. Let’s move forward a few decades, a century. The Civil Rights movement comes along, long overdue for sure. Voting rights for blacks. Equal access to amenities and services, education and jobs. HUZZAH! So the cultural wounding for the black Southerner is somewhat being addressed, but in the process now the white Southerner is once again being told “you are bad” and “you are evil” and “you are wrong”. That cultural archetype was angry and wounded to begin with! Let’s let this anger fester for another few generations, with the occasional violent flare-ups but otherwise unaddressed and unacknowledged as a legitimate wound. Now we’ll throw in a black President. I will admit that I was caught up in the “I hate him so virulently that I can’t look at him” emotionality. I actually had to stop and actively look at the “why” before I could unravel the rejection and see its source more than 150 years in the past. Then I was free of that crap and glad for it because that rage wasn’t mine as in me-personally – it was the voice of my cultural wounding. Alas, most people are not self-aware and so never once ask “why am I so unreasonably angry about this??” So after this presidential episode let’s trot out the white guy who says all the “right things” to a group who by now is caught firmly in the activation of a flamingly infected cultural wound.

Given all this, it now makes absolute sense to me where “this” is coming from. Where all the vile rage that I’m hearing pouring from the mouths of people I call friends but I know, KNOW are good people who wouldn’t even think such things on their own.  Aaaah, yes. I see. I understand. I empathize. Now it’s time to heal.

So what happens now? Well, firstly, recognition. The number of people who actually deny that white Southerners have a wound or deserve to have their wounding validated is staggering. Another manifestation of cultural wounding! There’s plenty to go around! And do you know what? Saying “the wounds suffered by the white Southerners deserve to be recognized” does NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT in any way take away, negate or diminish the wounds suffered by the black Southerners. Remember I said that shit rolls downhill? Energetically speaking, the lowest tier is trying to rise up and throw their own shit plus the projected shit they’ve been carrying which is NOT theirs onto another group, and that other group is rejecting the attempt.  I tend to think of societies as interconnected pieces, and if we want to heal one part we have to also heal another as well. That means acknowledging the wounds that are present … without judgment.

This is just as true of the cultural wound inflicted on the Native Americans! As I said, there’s plenty of wounding to go around and acknowledging one group’s wound does not diminish the impact of another group’s wound. I’m not Native, I’m not plugged into the Yankee cultural psyche, etc. But I can still see where the wounds they are dealing with are just as invasive, painful and damaging. It’s not a competition.

I actually think that right now our many and sundry cultural wounds are tap dancing down the center of the street practically begging us to be adult enough to own them. Just look at Trump having even the slightest degree of political success, then toss in the Black Lives Matter movement, the amazing cooperation and unity of the Native Peoples in their fight for control of their land, then the governmental responses across the board to this, and then the women’s march is a cherry on top. Holy shit balls, Batman! Something is energetically afoot and if we as a people don’t stop and ask ourselves “whaaaa?” then we’re going to be in even more trouble. This shit is coming up for a reason. We are being asked to own it and then alchemize it – turn it from led into gold. Heal the many wounds and move through them. Not past them, through them. Each of these groups and cultures has the right to be angry about the wounds suffered. It’s ok to be angry – but it’s the disempowered victim that demands everybody apologize and grovel and cater. Don’t be ‘that guy’. Be adult enough to ask what is your personal relationship to your cultural inheritance (whatever your personal one is) and what can you do to ease the suffering?

 

About the featured image: from the 1981 movie “Heavy Metal”. It’s my answer to the question of: “what happens if we refuse to question the wounds that we carry?”

Lessons in Bullihood

I used to be a bully when I was very little. I admit it. Here’s the thing, I never bullied people directly. It’s not like I confronted anyone and pushed them into the dirt. Or stood as part of a circle to taunt someone to their face. That’s not what I did.

I only made comments when I thought the target couldn’t hear me. Why? Because I never actually wanted to hurt the target. That was NOT my goal. My goal was to gain social acceptance with the group I was already a part of who decided to target the unfortunate recipient.

There’s one I recall very specifically. I don’t remember her name, and I was like in 2nd or 3rd grade. She lived in the trailer park at the last stop before reaching the school on a route that otherwise went through a very moneyed neighborhood. She stood out in poor fitting hand-me-downs and bad haircut and being overweight (a crime for a kid in the 80s and earlier).

I was newish to this neighborhood and only had one friend. I wanted to keep her! So when my friend started to make fun of this other girl from the back of the bus while she was in the front, I joined in. I don’t think we were yelling. Besides, I do remember that I never wanted her to hear us, and in my childish naiveté I actually honestly did not think our voices could carry that far. Children get odd ideas about things, and I apparently thought I couldn’t be heard.

This went on for maybe a month and it gave me acceptance with my new friend. I felt safe then, because I had my little group of one other.

Then one day, this poor girl shot a look of hurt and anger to the back of the bus. To us. To me. In that instant I realized with no small amount of genuine shock: ‘she can hear us!’ No amount of acceptance was worth actively hurting another person! I remember that feeling very clearly, and I remember being ashamed of myself for hurting her. Especially since it wasn’t my intention that she should ever even be aware of it. I then remember sitting back in my seat and saying “I don’t want do that anymore”. Surprisingly, my friend readily agreed. We found something else to do to while away the bus ride and we never picked on that kid ever again.

In 4th grade another class scapegoat rose to the fore. Her name I remember. I never said a word to her, but I watched her with a degree of pity and fear. A pretty enough girl with long glossy straight blonde hair, always held back with a plastic barrette over her ears. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I’d say she had one hell of a rough home life. At the time, with all the wisdom and life experience of a 4th grader, I only saw a girl who let snot run down her face until it literally dripped into her mouth. A girl who could never find her homework though she’d slowly and listlessly poke through the piles of crumpled up dirty papers in her desk. A girl that others in the class relentlessly picked on and made fun of. I think of her now and my heart breaks for her and I wonder how she grew up. She was only in my school for that one year.

Many years later, another girl, similar, but instead of being beaten down and broken she was angry. At the time, I was taking riding lessons and she loved horses. Apparently she lived nearby where I rode. When I saw her and witnessed her obvious longing look at the horse I was working with, I invited her in to brush the other side. We had maybe two or three shared grooming sessions before the stable owner chased her off rather soundly. Sadly, she never came back to the stable after that though I did look for her and missed her company. I later had a gym class with her, but she kept to herself. I saw from her notebook doodles what an extremely talented artist she was. Told her so when the locker room was empty. She gave me a guarded look to see if I was making fun of her, but apparently saw I was being sincere. She gave me a nod. The next year I ventured into the wrong girl’s restroom during class to discover the Gang Of Girls With Which You Do Not Fuck. The ones who will literally cut a bitch. She’s one of them. Since I needed to go, I did. On my way out, the leader is giving me the “tell and I’ll cut you” death glare with the others doing the same. Quietly, this girl says “she’s ok” and the others nod and back down. I never felt so profoundly grateful to hear two words as I did in that moment. After that, this group of girls never bothered me again. Several years later, she came to school with a pet rat, using it to scare the girls and smirking as they squealed and flinched or ran away. She thrust this fancy rat at me, I guess expecting the same but instead I cooed and petted it. It was very friendly. She stopped after that, at least that day, letting it ride on her shoulder under her hair before she cut school. That was the last time I saw her.

In college, my group of friends decided this one girl was a good target. I could feel the swell of emotion, the need to prove themselves superior. I turned away and said “I have better things to do”. What truly shocked me is that I could feel the energy deflate, like a balloon punctured. My words and attitude reminded my friends at the time that there were indeed better things to do, and making fun of someone was not a good use of time or energy. Since then, I’ve found that I actually have a pretty strong effect on my friends with regard to this. I’m not at the mercy of social acceptance – I help create it. At work one day, a friend from India had some seriously ugly things to say about someone we were walking past. I gave her my view without calling hers wrong. She tried to stop and engage her target, but I kept walking. So she abandoned her effort to catch up to me and listened to what I said. The next time we walked by this person, she didn’t even react to him.

I understand viscerally the temptation to pick on others, and I know the reason I started doing it as a youngster. But I’m also far too empathic to actively watch the hurt on someone’s face and then keep causing it. I feel sorry for those so caught up in the emotional need for acceptance that it outweighs anything else. I don’t hate them for this though. I hear people say “I hate bullies!” but I don’t. I do not approve of the actions, but the root cause is all too human and that pain I have compassion for. I address that now when I’m confronted with it. It’s not the same precisely from case to case, but typically it’s something along these lines. Publically shaming bullies may or may not work. Instead, find their humanity and address that. Be emotionally savvy enough to see past the hurt on all sides. It doesn’t mean it can ever be excused or tolerated, but firm lines can be drawn with heart. Anger only results in more anger. If people can’t listen to each other out of a need to defend themselves then nothing will be fixed. There’s enough hurt in the world already.

Co-Dependence and Shame

There’s a few themes I’m internally working on.

One of them is the gender divide and how to heal it. It’s damaging to all involved and must be addressed with firm compassion.

Related to this is my work with co-dependence, its cultural pervasiveness, and how to identify it in action.

The other theme which is rising to the fore is working on the concept of shame in our culture and just how damaging and pervasive that is. Interestingly, I’m discovering that it’s actually tied with the first, and also the second.

Related to this is my work on owning and accepting the entirety of myself, for which my Hall of Mirrors is a key step. Culturally, what gets rejected are aspects we are ashamed of. Ex: women can’t own their anger or assertiveness, men can’t own their submissive or loving aspects.

Why are those things (whatever they may be) being rejected? If discovered, they are used as weapons to shame … to control. By whom? Others in society – the trolls, the family members, friends, that lady at the grocery store whose lip curled in disgust but otherwise said nothing.

Shame is an emotional weapon used to control. Want someone to stop doing something? Publically shame them and get others to join in. It’s as old as humanity itself. It’s not new. Social media certainly didn’t invent it! Women have been shamed for being female. Men are shamed for having any emotion deemed “feminine” which is anything other than anger. I’ve heard Indian women say that husbands who actually care for and treat their wives well are looked down on as being weak. So yeah, simple human decency is something for a man to be ashamed of in some cultures.

And you know what? It works. Shaming people to control their actions WORKS. But only, and I repeat, ONLY if the individual being shamed actually feels any degree of shame for their actions, choices, or being. Try shaming someone who’s actually proud of or just doesn’t give a fig about the very thing you’re trying to shame them for. The response I hear when someone attempts to shame me for something I’m not ashamed of: “Have you no shame?!” It’s usually hissed or said with incredulity.

But I digress. So these are the themes that I’m working on and I’m starting to see just how tied together these all are. Disown what is culturally unaccepted, prove to culture that we toe the line by shaming others to feel better about ourselves or secure our place of safety, but when huge swathes of our own self is carved out and cast away, SOMEONE has to carry it. In the case of gender, masculine carved out of itself everything it deemed unworthy and dumped it on feminine with orders to ‘carry that shit, it’s yours now’ Guess what? Then feminine replied ‘ok, but now you have to carry this crap for me’. So if one is carrying half the other’s junk while we carry theirs …. now in order to be whole we HAVE to have some relationship with the rejected other half in order to feel complete, whole, safe. Hello co-dependence! Hello recipe for resentment and bitterness!

And this is NOT restricted to gender. I’m looking at the various strata of society and seeing the same thing. All those at the top saying “eeew, I’m not like thooooose people” just push their shit down the social ladder until folks at the bottom are the ones forced to carry all kinds of shit. Why do you think it’s so hard to engage with the homeless or whatever other “untouchable” level your society has? They are covered in shit not their own, including MINE, but now I have the luxury of turning away to energetically say “no, I’m fine with you being the dirty one. Thanks for your service, but if I acknowledge you than I might get dirty myself. Can’t have that, so I have to ignore you.”

I’m starting to realize that even though I’ve called myself a whole and complete person for many years now, I didn’t recognize just how much of myself I was still rejecting and expecting the masculine or others to carry for me. (“could you flag down our waitress? I don’t want to make a scene.”) Well I didn’t realize it until I walked into my Hall of Mirrors and eventually started to find my way out. Now I see that in order to recall home all these parts of me I have to de-shame them first. I have to take shit-covered aspects of humanity and embrace them without making a face. It’s hard to own something I don’t even want to look at, let alone acknowledge. But every aspect that tries to come home also runs the Judgmental Gauntlet, provoking others to react, and thereby forcing me to act. What will I choose? Rejection of myself in order to gain social acceptance, or acceptance of myself and gain social rejection?

We are human, and we are social. Our ability to survive is dependent upon the social connections we have. To be rejected socially is literally interpreted by our emotional system as a threat to our very survival. That’s why shaming someone in an attempt to control them is so  effective – it’s hitting that primal part of ourself which says “MUST be part of a social unit for safety and survival MUST”.

So in trying to own myself, I’m actually risking social rejection. To my emotional mind, I’m risking my very survival. That’s not small, and it definitely is NOT for the feint for heart. It’s hard work and demands emotional fortitude and a willingness to stand alone.

 

 

About the image:  I snagged this off of a youtube video. I loathe how everything is getting a syndrome or a disorder now. I’m all for finding support and a way out, but labels don’t usually offer ways out. Labels NEED for adherents to continue subscribing to them, not moving on from them. But I liked the picture.