Discomfortable

Savouring   This week I talk about an ongoing experiment I’ve been engaged in during the pandemic in an effort to enjoy myself in spite of being alone virtually all of the time.  I’ve noticed a pattern in my life of conflating people, accomplishments, or things with pleasant feelings. For example, I’ve been working on a book about shame all year, and when I finally sent the book off to the publisher recently, I expected to feel relief and a sense of accomplishment. But I didn’t. I felt nothing.  Likewise, I’ve been going on socially distant pandemic walking dates with various guys, and I often assume that hanging out with a guy I like will result in pleasant feelings of comfort, excitement, and joy. But it doesn’t always work out that way either. I’ve started to realize that what I really want are just the pleasant feelings themselves. The feelings I assume I’ll get when I’m finally dating someone I “like”, or finally accomplish something I’m “proud” of, or finally acquire something I “want”. But it’s an indirect strategy, and one that often backfires or just doesn’t pay off at all.  So now I’m focussing on the pleasant feelings directly. I’m imagining what I think I will feel in all of these fantasy scenarios and then just trying to cultivate those sensations directly in any given moment. And I’ve actually had some success! This episode takes you through the steps of my thought experiment so you can try it for yourself.

Cancel Culture   The podcast is back after a little hiatus (more on that in the next episode), to tackle an issue that has been coming up in the news a lot lately and which people often bring up with me thinking they know what my opinion will be. And while I am of course not a proponent of cancel culture, as I know that shame is not an effective strategy for getting through to people, I increasingly think that decrying cancel culture is a misdirection.  When it comes to many social justice topics, the only associated issue that really affects me personally and emotionally is often the threat of shame and cancellation. This can easily become a distraction from the larger, arguably more important issues.  For example, racism. As a white man, the only issue surrounding racism that really threatens me personally is the spectre of shame and cancellation for being a racist. And because we are essentially biased by our own emotional reactions, it will feel to my body like shame and cancellation are therefore the most “important” and pressing issues related to racism. My emotions will propel me to fight against this threat, which is, of course, a distraction from the real problem of racism. I see a lot of people getting caught up in this exact same misdirection and it presents a big opportunity to refocus our concerns such that we aren’t blinded by our own emotional perspective where we can’t see the forest for the trees.  But cancel culture is still an issue in itself, albeit an arguably less pressing issue than some of the social justice movements it often obscures. I think we can still work against cancel culture, but it requires a skillful strategy that doesn’t just hypocritically shame the shamers or cancel the cancellers. Given that I believe we shame others with our own shame, my approach is to deal with the shamers as the victims of shame, rather than the perpetrators of shame. Instead of cancelling the cancellers, we can empathize with them and help them heal their own shame so they no longer need to go around projecting their shame onto others.   

Hierarchy   Shame is an unpleasant sensation in our body triggered by moments of social rejection or isolation that naturally pressures us to conclude that something must be wrong with us in comparison to other people. So by merely feeling shame, the idea of hierarchy gets implanted in our mind. And these feelings of “lesser than” and “better than” gradually get enacted in the very structure of our society. Ideas of worthiness, status, superiority and inferiority get encoded into our culture and play into all kinds of social issues like classism, capitalism, sexism, racism, homophobia, nationalism, etc.  This suggests that while hierarchy is natural and normal, it has also increasingly become an impediment to our well-being. Like shame, hierarchy probably made a lot more sense in our hunter-gatherer past. We presumably arranged ourselves much like other social animals, like chimps and wolves, with a successive series of dominant “alphas” at the top who led the group. This obviously helped us survive hundreds of thousands of years ago, promoting clear leadership and physical fitness in our gene pool. But now it is adding unnecessary oppression to our modern society that no longer relies on brute force to survive. The world has changed, but as usual, our instincts have not caught up. So we have an opportunity to re-interpret the way shame makes us feel so that we don’t get caught enacting these fictional hierarchies over and over again. Once we understand that the felt sense of inferiority that shame creates in us is actually an illusion, we can just feel it and let it pass, without believing it or acting on it. We can embrace an ideology that says all humans are of equal value, instead. This doesn’t change the fact that there are still very real and tangible inequalities in our society, like poverty and prejudice, but I think it’s a powerful psychological step towards addressing those issues.  But, with this new ideology of equality comes the challenge of looking at the people we think are “below” us on the fictional hierarchy of human value, and psychologically raising them up to our level. This includes the people we judge, the people we disagree with, the people on the “wrong” side of the political spectrum. The people we think are bad, or evil, or morally repugnant. What if all those people have just as much “value” as we do? What if they are completely equal to us? How would that change the way we treat them?

Racism   This episode is difficult to listen to and was even more difficult to record. My touchpoint for racism is homophobia. One of the fascinating aspects of being gay, in my experience, is that I’m acutely aware of both my gay pride and my internalized homophobia. This seeming contradiction reveals to me that you can be one thing in your cognitive, conscious prefrontal cortex, and the exact opposite in your unconscious childhood conditioning.  I am now reverse engineering this experience to look at racism. And the implications are that while I am consciously anti-racist, on another level I am also deeply conditioned with racist prejudice, as this episode illuminates in stomach-churning detail. I am both the “good guy” and the “bad guy” at once. And so are you, I imagine.  Prejudice is a natural part of being human. Our brain loves to simplify and categorize, and it has a powerful out-group bias against people it deems “different”. These biases helped keep us alive as hunter-gatherers for generations, but now we live in a modern world where they are becoming increasingly maladaptive. These biases are pitting us against our neighbours based on superficial and cultural differences and the result, as we are witnessing on the news daily, is inequality, violence, murder, and the erosion of everyone’s well-being. When it comes to dealing with my internalized homophobia, the most useful strategy has always been to just be as honest about it as I can. The more I talk about it, the more I understand it, and the less it seems to control me. The fact that I am gay makes it socially acceptable for me to be open about the disgusting contents of my internalized homophobia. Racism is a different story though. Being racist is one of the biggest sources of shame in our society right now. As a result, it is extremely uncomfortable and arguably even “unacceptable” to talk about one’s racist conditioning publicly. This means that possibly the most effective solution to dealing with our conditioned racist beliefs, being honest about them, is blocked. And I know from experience, that when we disown, reject, hide, and shame parts of ourselves, they get even stronger and control us from our unconscious. To quote Brené Brown: When we deny our stories, they define us.When we own our stories, we get to write a brave new ending.  So I have an idea. Based on the model of Alcoholics Anonymous, I am imagining groups designed specifically for people who identify with having conditioned racial prejudices. These groups, “Racism Anonymous”, would meet weekly in a nonjudgmental, anonymous environment in order to investigate the dark recesses of our conditioned biases in an effort to learn to manage and control them. I’ve put together a rough and preliminary template for how these meetings might be structured. Like AA, I see these as meetings anyone can run and attend. I encourage anyone who is interested to copy the template, adapt it, and try it in their own community. And if you do, let me know what worked for you! Racism Anonymous (Race-Anon, RA) meeting template: 1. Hello and welcome, this is the regular meeting of the __________ group of Racism Anonymous. My name is __________ and I am racist [or “I am conditioned by racism” or “I have conditioned racism”, whatever feels right to each person].  2. We will open the meeting with the Serenity Prayer followed by a moment of silence to do with as you wish:  Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.  3. RA is for people who:  recognize that they have been conditioned into many forms of prejudice, including racism, and  have a desire to overcome that conditioning. The primary purpose of RA is to honestly acknowledge our conditioned biases, especially racial prejudices, in order to learn to consciously manage and control them, so they don’t control us. In RA, the central strategy for managing our conditioned prejudice is to cultivate self-awareness, through honesty, non-judgement, and compassion.  In RA, the only thing more valuable than recognizing your own prejudices is talking about them. Since our prejudices come from a larger culture, talking about them helps everyone who was conditioned by that culture. RA is founded on 3 core beliefs:  Prejudice is BOTH a natural part of being human AND an impediment to the well-being of all. Prejudice is a chronic condition. In spite of our prejudices, all humans are actually of equal value. 4. Are there any newcomers who wish to introduce themselves?  5. This week’s theme is ___________ [general prejudice, racism, homophobia, sexism, etc]. It is now time for round-robin sharing. We will go around the group and share for 3-5 minutes each. You may pass at any time. Please share the specific conditioned prejudices that come up for you around this week’s theme, as well as how it feels to talk about them. We remind you that feedback and crosstalk are discouraged here (crosstalk is giving advice to others who have already shared, speaking directly to another person rather than to the group, and questioning or interrupting the person speaking at the time). This meeting is anonymous, we ask that all attendees and what they share be kept confidential. Who would like to begin?  [~45 minutes or more of round-robin sharing, someone keeps time for each share] 6. Responsibility statement: I may not have consciously chosen to be conditioned by prejudice, but I am taking responsibility for it now.  END UPDATE: Since posting this episode, a few friends of the podcast have reached out to note that a couple of versions of Racism Anonymous already exist!  Social Worker Gail K. Golden came up with her own 12 steps for overcoming the addiction of white privilege in 2011. Pastor Ron Buford at the Sunnyvale, California United Church of Christ started a group called Racists Anonymous in 2015 with his own, more religious leaning, 12 step program. You can watch a glimpse of a meeting in progress here. The group has been profiled in media several times, for more info see more here and here.  

Trauma   Trauma is something we have all experienced to some degree or another, and it’s something that we are all probably going through right now during this pandemic. So I wanted to try to explore what trauma is all about, as much for myself as for anyone else. Bear in mind that I’m no expert on trauma (or anything for that matter). I’m in the process of figuring trauma out because shame is often seen as a form of trauma.  When I think of trauma, the metaphor that comes to mind is of being a kid stuck at the top of the high diving board at the local swimming pool. Your friend dares you to jump off the highest diving platform, and it looks easy enough from below. But when you climb all the way to the top, you look over the edge and freeze. It seems way too scary and dangerous! But you can’t turn around now either, just walking down seems scary and mortifying, what with the whole pool seemingly watching you. So you’re frozen and stuck. No way forward, no way back. It’s a seemingly impossible situation. So your system crashes, you dissociate from your body, or you collapse. Inevitably, some adult needs to help you down. But because our system shut down before it could resolve that intense emotional experience, it’s like some part of our nervous system is trapped on top of that diving board forever. This single traumatic event becomes an instantaneous lesson about survival that our body will likely never forgot. Trauma has just taught us not to try to climb up or jump off of scary tall things ever again, a lesson it will enforce in future by shutting down whenever something remotely similar triggers that trauma. So you won’t be able to climb up a diving platform again even if you want to.  But there are other forms of trauma, like shame, which condition us more gradually (especially when we are children) through bursts of unpleasant feeling whenever we perceive ourselves as being in danger of social rejection, scorn, neglect, or disrespect. This subtle but relentless conditioning is also a form of rapid, indelible learning, and it actually “helps” us construct our very sense of reality based on cultural pressure.

Productivity   Though logically I am completely on board with the growing sentiment that needing to be busy all the time and measuring my worth against my productivity isn’t really healthy, on a deeper level I have clearly been conditioned into it nonetheless. It demonstrates the difference between what I consciously value in my Prefrontal Cortex, and the latent values that are ingrained into me on an unconscious level—my conditioning. And at the end of the day, my conditioning often wins.  One of the big distinctions Brené Brown talks about is between “hustling for worthiness” and “healthy striving”. But I’ve always struggled to figure out how exactly to tell the difference between the two. It took a pandemic for me to finally figure it out! I think. I view shame as the negative reinforcement towards our core need for belonging. And I think productivity is really just a strategy towards belonging. But belonging is also reinforced positively through pleasant emotions like joy, love, and connection. “Husting for worthiness” is motivated more by the negative reinforcement, shame, whereas “healthy striving” is motivated more by the positive reinforcements. So when I find myself being motivated by shame, by “should”, “have to”, “need to”, etc, I have an opportunity to get discomfortable with the feeling of shame until it passes (because all emotions are temporary). And on the other side, once my system has returned to neutral equilibrium again, I find a space away from shame to reality check whether I really need to keep grinding away at work. Do I actually need to hustle for more belonging in this moment? Or do I need to meet some of my other needs instead, like rest, relaxation, self-care, and autonomy? Given that belonging is no longer as necessary for my survival as it was when my instincts evolved, probably the latter. In the space that opens up after I allow my shame to pass, the answer usually becomes clear. That’s when I can get in touch with the positive reinforcement, which is what I really want. So dealing with my desire to be productive is about accepting, feeling, and expressing my shame so that I can move through it to a place where I can see my authentic desires more clearly. And then it’s about trusting that my authentic needs and wants are actually more valid, wise, and healthy than the external, cultural messages of shame ever were. https://twitter.com/rosannecash/status/1238700345548627969?s=20

Isolation   When the self-isolation measures of the pandemic first began, digital technology, and especially video conferencing, felt like a lifesaver. There was a flurry of activity and experimentation as everyone attempted to recreate their old lives, their old hobbies, their old businesses, and their old relationships, online. And it was fun at first! There was a convenience and novelty to video events. You didn’t have to prepare to get there until literally 1 minute beforehand, and you didn’t need to shower, or look too good, or even wear pants. But slowly, I have started to notice some subtle but insidious side effects… I would spend hours playing games or “hanging out” with friends in these virtual environments, but then the next morning, I would look back and I couldn’t remember anything about the night! It was all just this blur of frozen faces in small rectangles smudged with digital artefacts. It was as if nothing had actually occurred at all! Which I guess is kind of accurate. Objectively, all I did was stare at a screen all night (to say nothing of the day). At the time, it felt to me like I was having a real and meaningful interaction, like I really was with my friends. But in truth, it was all an illusion. I was alone. When you couple these digital phantasms with all the TV and movies I’ve been watching, not to mention all the surreal, anxious dreams I’ve been having (which I also can’t really remember), it all starts to blur together and make me question reality. I’m having trouble figuring out what is real, what is imagined, what is digital, what is physical, what is a dream, and what is a movie. My days and nights are all the same, it’s me lost in a screen or lost in a dream. It feels like Plato’s cave, where the shadows on the wall are mistaken for reality. I’m also reminded of the concept of the Uncanny Valley, which is the space where digital animation looks good enough to almost pass as real, but not real enough to look right. It leads to this creepy, cold, inhuman quality where everything is just subtly off somehow, as if you were hallucinating or in some kind of twisted funhouse or simulation. The same is true when I look back on a Zoom call. It feels like I must have been inebriated because everything is mushy and vague and mixed up. And I can only imagine what will happen if we continue to live in this liminal space for much longer! I have some ideas for solutions, which these two memes demonstrate well:

Death   We’re all thinking and talking and speculating and worrying about the COVID-19 pandemic. But really, deep down (or not so deep down), I think one of the real issues we are concerned with is death. Of all the things that every human experiences, death is probably the one we talk about the least. This makes sense, of course. It is our primary value, at least on a physical level, to survive. And death is the opposite of survival. So our system produces all of these prohibitive measures, including powerful unpleasant emotions, to stop us from dying, or even thinking about, talking about, or looking at death. And while I think it’s important to honour our emotions, I also think we have an opportunity to transcend them in order to normalize, discuss, imagine, and even accept, appreciate, and welcome death (without, you know, actually dying).  During a dark night of the soul last year, I realized that the concept of Heaven that our society seems so enamoured with is really nothing more than an extension of our natural desire to survive. If an afterlife involves consciousness, emotions, and memories, then it’s not substantially different from life itself, and I see no reason to expect it to produce significantly less suffering. As long as I am aware that my family or loved ones or humans in general are still on earth suffering, then that pretty much spoils heaven for me. It can’t be a paradise as long as I continue to care. And the thought of living with suffering forever is kind of overwhelming. There must be a better solution… And there is! Death. To me, the only desirable ending to the intensity, responsibility, care, emotion, struggle, and suffering of life, is death! Complete and utter non-existence is the one antidote to life that makes sense. And when you look at death with that in mind, it becomes a gift. A beautiful reward for having lived that we could never in good conscience bestow upon ourselves, but which we will all inevitably receive anyway. And so I am left at once wanting to avoid death, naturally, to maximize and enjoy my life to the fullest, and yet at the same time, kind of looking forward to the sweet relief that death promises. 

Uncertainty   In these uncertain times, I find myself going back to a micro-ideology I came up with a few years ago, basically reminding myself, “Everything works out in the end, even when it doesn’t!” This little bit of self-advice came about when I realized that I was walking around with a chronic sense of worry that if I wasn’t always careful, everything would go horribly wrong and I would experience some kind of calamity from which my life would never recover. This in spite of the fact that over close to 4 decades of living, none of the traumas, mistakes, disasters, tragedies, failures, deaths, or heartbreaks I had experienced had ever managed to ruin my life completely. In fact, all of those events taught me valuable lessons and some of them ultimately proved to be the best thing that could have happened to me! So I realized that it always worked out in the end, even when it didn’t. Which is to say, despite some hardships that seemed insurmountable at the time, I’m still alive, I’m carrying on and I’m relatively happy and comfortable.  Naturally, this micro-ideology has been arising for me in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic, a global crisis about which I feel no certainty things will “work out”. Reminding myself that everything works out in the end, even when it doesn’t, helps me relax into a kind of existential acceptance. That it will all be “okay”, as long as I can continue to find meaning or lessons from whatever occurs. Or that someone or something will still be around to do that. This little saying reminds me that anything can happen, and nothing was promised to me in life, including life itself. It forces me to look at our uncertain reality without all of my expectations about what my life “should” be, and instead say, take it or leave it? And I take it. 

PANIC   What is the correct way to feel about waking up one day inside a surreal dystopian science fiction film? There’s no right answer, of course. But if you’re anything like me, it’s probably a mix of panic, fear, anxiety, grief, sadness, shock, confusion, but also curiosity, excitement, fascination, hope, awe, and much much more. You feel what you feel. The problem isn’t that we find many of those feelings unpleasant or downright unbearable, it’s that we try to avoid feeling them altogether. I’ve seen this message over and over again since COVID-19 began, “Don’t panic!” But it’s important to remember that there is a difference between feeling panic and panicking. I think this is where many of us go wrong when it comes to managing difficult emotions. It’s not about not feeling them. Quite the opposite, in fact. I think the best way to deal with unpleasant emotions is to feel them completely!  I like to think of feelings as a kind of primitive but powerful form of communication. Emotion is our first language. It’s a way for our body to give us important messages about what we are experiencing. When we ignore, numb, or deny our emotions, we force our body to work harder to get the message across, so we actually end up prolonging the feeling or freezing it into trauma.  I find that one of the most useful reactions to any emotion is simply saying, “Of course”! As in, “Of course I’m feeling panic right now, that’s a totally normal reaction to this situation”. And even if it doesn’t seem “normal”, there’s always an important reason why we’re feeling what we’re feeling. So “of course” is like the gateway drug to acceptance and self-compassion. It helps me welcome and embrace a difficult emotion, rather than run from it or reject it. And when we allow ourselves to really feel an emotion, it passes. Because that’s how the message is received!  So when dealing with the inevitable panic of an unprecedented global pandemic, it’s important to remember that ironically, the best way not to panic is to actually feel the panic so it can pass. Then we are actually in a better position to react.