Many of us with radical politics likely formed them in
response to histories of trauma and abuse – sometimes in the form of discrete,
identifiable traumatic events, sometimes in the form of cumulative
interpersonal micro-traumas (e.g. rejections, invalidations, humiliation, exclusion,
etc.). To acknowledge the common role of trauma in forming radical politics is
by no means an indictment of them, but instead, a recognition that wisdom is
rooted in the transformation of pain and suffering.
Within the context of political upheaval and overt threat, many
of us are struggling. It sometimes
feels like we’ve been transported back into previous worlds, previous lives,
and our trauma responses are taking over. Many haven’t had the luxury to fully
extract themselves from those abusive contexts, especially when the abuse is
coming from the state or society more generally.
It can be difficult to identify when we’re reacting out of fear
from when we’re acting according to our values. It can be distressingly
difficult to figure out how to connect with others who do not share our
assessments of risks, threats, and acceptable strategies. These challenges can
span across a wide range of relationships, and especially strain ones that are
already tumultuous. Even more insidious, it can be an overwhelming challenge to
figure out how to connect with ourselves.
The task of healing is as daunting as it has ever been. Some
of our wounds are inextricably tied to the configuration of society and cannot
fully heal until our society is transformed into one that upholds justice,
compassion, and equality. However, individual healing where it is possible is
critical for effectively building that world.
In order to more methodically work toward healing and
committing to action, I aim to create a series of posts about topics relevant
to mental health within our movements of resistance. My goal is to provide psychoeducation
and activities for improving our mental health in a way that is sensitive to
our needs in the context of rising fascism – not just so that we can resist
fascism, but importantly, to work toward building the worlds in which we
believe.
I welcome feedback, requests, questions, etc. The more
interaction and feedback I receive, the more useful this can be.
Getting in the Present
Moment
Before going any further, let us engage in a brief grounding
exercise:
- Take a few moments to notice your breathing. Observe for a
few breaths as the air flows in and out of your nostrils.
- Shift your attention to notice any physical sensations you
feel. See if you can feel your feet on the floor, perhaps wiggling your toes if
you need. Notice your posture as you’re sitting. Notice the sensations in your
hands, your fingers.
- Now shift your attention to your surroundings. Notice
what, or who is around you. Take a quick inventory and name a few things you
can see.
- Sit and listen for a few moments. What can you hear? Cars?
Birds? People talking? The hum of your computer? See how many different things
you can hear in your environment.
- Reflect a little on what it was like for you to take some time
to ground yourself in the present moment. What did you notice? Did you notice a
change before and after grounding?
Grounding is a common tool in psychotherapy for learning how
to be more in the present moment. It is often taught in the context of
treatment for PTSD, as PTSD symptoms can sometimes take us out of the present
moment and transport us back into our traumas. I will talk more about grounding
and the utility of learning how to be more present later, but this was a brief example
of the kinds of tools this series will cover.
Learning to Drop the
Internal Struggle to Pick-up the Revolutionary Struggle
The main framework I aim to use for this series is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), which became one of my main frameworks for approaching therapy for
numerous reasons. But I believe it can be especially useful for activist work
due to its focus on clarifying values, committing to valued action, and
providing tools for being able to engage in those actions more effectively. It aims
to foster psychological flexibility, allowing us to more nimbly navigate the
challenges of our own internal experiences as well as the external world.
One of the most important aspects of ACT for our movements
is its ability to help us create psychological space from distress in a way
that can give us a powerful advantage. ACT helps shift us from a defensive,
automatic, reactive orientation to our challenges, to a more mindful position
of acting according what is important to us. The ability to act mindfully may
well be necessary in the fight against fascism, as fascism aims to dominate
through terror and social control. We must build the capacity to gain space and
perspective from our automatic reactions, especially as fascism aims to dictate
the rules of engagement. In short, we need to be more creative than our
oppressors.
ACT
operates on six core processes:
Acceptance, Cognitive Defusion, Being Present, Self-as-Context, Values, and
Committed Action.
Acceptance
In individual therapy, I tend to wait and get to know my
client a bit better before introducing the concept of acceptance, because boy
howdy, it can bring out some powerful reactions. Considering that our politics
are often fundamental rejections of the status quo, “acceptance” risks being
conflated with complacency and resignation. However, acceptance here means of
our internal experiences, not of injustice. A central tenant of ACT is that psychological
suffering and distress is magnified by experiential avoidance.
Experiential avoidance is when someone is unwilling to
remain in contact with a particular private experience (i.e. emotion, physical
sensation, thought), and they take steps to alter the form or recurrence of
them. Examples of this would include substance abuse as a way to drown out the
distressing memories, or isolating ourselves so as to try to escape social
anxiety. On a larger scale, we can see how experiential avoidance manifests on a societal level, such as constructing elaborate narratives to rationalize
the murder of a black child by the police in order not to feel guilt, shame,
uncertainty, etc.
Experiential avoidance is not a categorically harmful
impulse, and has some limited utility at times (e.g. avoiding showing nervousness
in an interview, tempering anger so as to be able to engage in a delicate
conversation with a valued friend, etc.) While there are times when we must
employ experiential avoidance in order to survive, the effects of using it as a
long term strategy can be profoundly damaging. Further, paradoxically, the more
frequently and consistently we attempt to experientially avoid certain internal
experiences, the more we guarantee an increase in their frequency and
intensity.
A common theme in ACT
is that of learning how to “drop the struggle” with our inner demons, to stop
trying to avoid feeling our feelings. Our emotions are invaluable to us – they provide
us with critical information for survival and about what is important to us.
How many of our behaviors are taken in order to avoid feeling certain emotions?
Acceptance can help us drop the struggle with our distressing internal
experiences in order to better engage in the struggle for liberty.
Cognitive Defusion
In an ACT framework, we make a distinction between the "observing self" and the "thinking self." They interact and operate with one another, but sometimes one process will be more dominant than the other. Cognitive fusion is when certain distressing thoughts, feelings, or judgements take us
over and gets conflated with “the truth.” It’s when we cannot see the thought
for what it is – a thought, a product of the mind. Being fused with a
distressing private experience can consume us, it can keep us stuck and cause
us unnecessary pain. Cognitive defusion is an effort to unhook from those.
The degree of accuracy or truthfulness of a thought,
feeling, or judgment, ultimately does not matter if it does not serve us. This
does not mean that we ought to ignore evidence that upsets us, but instead,
suggests that we learn how to unhook from dwelling and beating ourselves up. ACT
teaches us to consider workability –
to examine how useful a strategy for behaving or relating to our private
experience is. Remaining fused with thoughts or feelings that keep us
complacent, discourage us from pursuing the work we need to do, is not a
workable strategy. Cognitive defusion exercises can help us build the
psychological muscles to pull away from our thoughts, to see them from a
distance, and to examine them as they are – as thoughts. Perspective gives us the chance to decide how
we want to act.
Being Present
ACT can help us foster non-judgmental awareness of our
psychological and environmental events. This capacity for non-judgmental
awareness helps us to have a clearer understanding of ourselves and the
challenges we face. Working toward non-judgmental awareness allows us to better
see past our cognitive biases, be more honest with ourselves and others, and
helps us break out of harmful patterns. And who can argue with having more
accurate understandings of ourselves and environments? (The answer is fascists
and abusers, as they aim to confuse, sow doubt, and demoralize.)
Self as Context
Being a human is hella complicated. Over the years we tend
to develop conceptualizations of ourselves that can sometimes constrain our
actions or limit our ability to know the full range of who we are. We get
attached to identities along the way that can sometimes overshadow other
aspects of ourselves, or limit the information we’re able to process.
One example of this process we might see in activist circles
is that of the ally identity. If we get attached to the identity of “ally,” it
can sometimes lead to an unwillingness to be confronted with evidence that our
behaviors are harmful to someone, because we’re invested in a self-concept of not being racist/sexist/ableist, etc.
The converse can also happen, where, as victims, perhaps we have had to fight
desperately for the recognition that we’ve been harmed and so we can end up
attached to that identity. This can lead us to feel weak and powerless in the
face of challenges that remind us of our past traumas, or on the other side, to
perhaps dismiss evidence that we are capable of hurting others. Learning how to
step beyond our self-concepts and understand ourselves in various contexts
leads to more psychological flexibility.
Values
Ah, values. Our bread and roses. ACT encourages us to clarify
what is important to us, to disentangle values from goals, and identify priorities.
How much of our society’s problems are influenced by inherited sets of values
that teach us to strive for wealth and power at the expense of true human connection?
While many of us have spent a lot of time reflecting on values, we may not have
spent much time making them explicit and methodically assessing our progress in
enacting them. In times of confusion, when we’re overwhelmed with all that
needs to be done – clear values can serve as a compass to help guide us in the
direction we want to go, even if we don’t have a map.
Committed Action
Another aspect that might not need so much explaining for
veteran activists out there - but for some of the newbies, this is perhaps one
of the most important factors in mental health. Many activists have pointed to
the benefits of getting involved with causes you care about. Not only does this
contribute to building a better world, it is one of the most rewarding avenues
toward engaging in genuine human connection. Plenty can get in the way of following
through on our values, and ACT provides tools for diagnosing these problems,
and help us to implement strategies for living lives that feel meaningful.
Looking Forward
Hopefully some of the information presented above can
provide some helpful insight for how we can begin approaching mental health in
the context of rising fascism. Going forward, consider trying to engage in some
grounding exercises throughout your day over the next week. You can set a timer
on your phone or computer to remind you, or place a note somewhere in a visible
location. Grounding and other mindfulness exercises work best the more often
you practice them – they are not just things you do once a week and expect to
make a difference.
We’re up against a lot, and we need to find ways to be
self-disciplined. Establishing a mindfulness practice can help us develop the
capacity for self-discipline on a meta-cognitive level, which makes us more
effective in establishing self-discipline in other areas. We are not just up
against a new regime of fascists, we’re also up against our histories of trauma
and conditioning. One serious challenge is undoing the damage of the patriarchal
notion that emotions are bad or are a threat. We’ve been taught that to be
emotional is to be feminine, which is to be weak – we’re also taught that to be
weak is to be bad, rather than to simply be an unavoidable experience of the human
condition. It is essential to redefine our concepts of courage to include a
willingness to truly know ourselves.
Unfortunately, however, we cannot simply decide to know ourselves. It is a
complicated process, as we’ve been conditioned in copious ways to distract
ourselves from feeling discomfort, to deny certain aspects of ourselves, and to
submit to a world order that depends on our complacency. We engage in this work not just to take care
of ourselves, but to be able to better care for each other. At times, the
concept of Self-Care can and has been co-opted by capitalists to better exploit
their workers – but it can also be a radical act of political warfare.
Further resources on grounding:
Further resources on grounding:
- http://www.drcordes.com/blog/2014/11/24/easy-grounding-exercises-to-calm-the-nervous-system
- http://www.fortrefuge.com/grounding.php
amor fati
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