I was invited to imagine a world without heteronormativity for the podcast. You can also hear amazing interviews with people imagining worlds without injustice, ableism, single-use plastics, private transport, and many more to come. This is the trailer for the whole series:

The Parallel Effect

You can listen to my episode on The Parallel Effect Substack on the following links, as well as reading a summary there, and watching a video about the wonderful creation artist Audax Mrozik Gawler made in response: A kit to help young humans find their nodes of belonging and steward world-making between species, the KINNECT.

Substack link

Apple podcast link

Full transcript link

Below are the notes I wrote in preparation for my interview with Daz Chandler on the show. Read on for a little more written detail if you’re interested…

Just before we take a deep dive into the world you visited, how it looks and how it functions, would you mind elaborating a little on the concept of “benign variation”? How does it relate to the idea of normativity?

Benign variation is a concept from Gayle Rubin’s classic paper, Thinking Sex. It’s the idea that – instead of there being good and bad sexual identities, desires and practices – humans naturally have a whole range of sexualities (including asexualities) which are all equally valid & valuable, so long as they’re only ever acted on ethically and consensually.

Dominant cultural normativities create hierarchies between supposed normal and less normal sexualities, as well as genders, relationship styles, appearances, bodyminds, and all kinds of other things. Actually, the ways our bodies work, combined with the world we’re born into, and what happens over the course of our lives combine to form a vast array of different ways of experiencing and understanding things, including sex.

Benign variation is aligned with approaches like open normativities or pluriverses. In such approaches we recognise that people and communities will all have their stories, understandings and ways of doing things. But these are never imposed on others, and other stories and ways of doing things are held as equally valid and valuable. We might connect this to the ways in which ecological diversity is essential for ecosystems.

Sahana Chattopadhyay writes that pluriversal approaches regard many diverse, interconnected worlds, or ways of being, as coexisting, rather than a single, unified reality. Pluriversal approaches emphasize the value of multiple perspectives and experiences.

Alexis Shotwell defines open normativities as collectively crafted ways of being that shape our experiences and understandings, and are oriented toward widespread flourishing.

In terms of parallel worlds and alternative timelines, we know that many of the worlds we’ve visited so far have been almost identical to this one, until something happens that sets it on a different course. In this parallel world you’ve just arrived back from, were there any historical or cultural events that inspired this shift away from heteronormativity, or has it always been that way?

The world we visited was very much like ours until the point where people recognised – much earlier than we have – the links between personal and social disconnection and ecological crisis. They realised that if we didn’t address disconnection we would lose everything

This disconnection included any sense that some people, experiences, or ways of being were inherently more normal, valid or valuable than others. People realised that there is benign variation at all levels of experience. They woke up to the violence involved in disconnecting into better/worse, normal/abnormal, good/bad, etc.

In order for people to really get this – and to want to do something different – it was necessary to make it both global and personal. People had to see that we’d all lose everything if we carried on this way and they had to realise that normativities hurt them personally. 

This latter point involved understanding that normativities hurt both those who are excluded by them and those who are caught up in them. For example, normativities around sex hurt those who are sexually marginalised, they are a huge part of why so much non-consensual sex happens, and they are why people feel so unfulfilled sexually and have so much shame around sex. Normativities around gender hurt gender divergent people, and they hurt men and women who are trying to fit norms of masculinity and femininity. Normativities around how bodyminds should work exclude disabled and neurodivergent people, and they hurt those who conform to norms about how bodyminds should function, for example in education and in the workplace.

In the world I visited, people recognised that easing our suffering, others’ suffering, and the suffering of the planet were utterly interconnected.

What challenges has this world faced in implementing the benign variation model? Was there any significant resistance or unexpected consequences?

Two major challenges were around:

• Bringing new people up with this model, in families and education systems, and 
• Enabling those who had been brought up with the old model to shift to the new model

It was particularly challenging for everyone to face and forgive the personal and collective harms that had been done to them in the old model, and the harm that they had done or been complicit in themselves. 

Everyone was given a period of at least five years – over the course of a twenty-five year transition process – to really focus on making these shifts internally, with deep support from the people and systems around them, and flexibility to do this work in whatever way fitted best for them. Support included space to engage in solitary practices, mentorship from those who had already been through such periods, peer-support with others who were focusing on this work, and regular meetings in groups and communities engaged in similar practices.

Practically this period was enabled by things like: universal basic income, recognising all work as valid and not requiring unnecessary work, community living, and people downsizing to a much smaller sense of what counts as ‘enough’.

There’s so much to ask but I suppose my first question relates to your initial impression of the place. How did you know that you had travelled somewhere different? What immediate clues did this alternative realm provide?

I was immediately struck by the way that, in this world, people were encouraged to find the kinds of relationships, intimacies, life projects and so on that were nourishing to them and enabled them to flourish. They weren’t expected to fit others’ expectations, or cultural assumptions about how best to live, work and relate.

This meant that people were much more fulfilled, and more supportive of others being equally fulfilled. They weren’t trying to make themselves be a certain way in order to fit in, or to be what would be convenient or comfortable for somebody else. Nor were they putting pressure on others in that kind of way.

People seemed much less masked, more open and curious, and more okay with having periods of not knowing, of trying things out

I want to talk now about social structures and family dynamics…In a world without heteronormativity, how have family structures evolved? Are there new forms of kinship or caregiving arrangements?

All different relationship and family structures are seen as valid in this world. Care and domestic labour are valued as highly as other kinds of work, with everybody being given enough time to be with the close people in their lives. It’s expected that most children will have several adults involved in bringing them up, and all adults will be supported in how to parent well.

Also inner parenting and inner partnering is valued as highly as the outer kinds. Everyone is supported to get solitude for, and support around, their inner work. This means they learn how to be intimate and loving with themselves, honest and kind about their capacities and limitations, and able to ask for – and access – the support they need.

Everyone is seen as both needing of care and capable of offering care. They are supported to discover – and to communicate – what they need, and what they can offer. Again there’s a shared understanding that there’ll inevitably be benign variation in people’s needs and offerings.

How does this model affect parenting? What changes in how children are raised and educated about relationships and identity?

Children are raised that whatever shape their gender, sexuality, or self ends up taking is just fine, and it’s also fine when it shifts and changes over time. If physical or psychological support is needed for young people to feel comfortable and congruent in their bodyminds, that’s supported.

With heteronormativity gone, there’s a huge shift in how adults are with young people’s feelings. Instead of trying to programme boys not to be fearful, and girls not to be angry, for example, young people are encouraged to experience all their feelings. They are helped to learn how to be with themselves through tough feelings, instead of blaming out, shaming in, avoiding their feelings, or withdrawing from anything that risks bringing up pain.

Similarly all bodyminds and their capacities and limitations are valued, rather than some people being seen as better, more attractive, or more intelligent than others. 

What replaces traditional markers of adulthood, like marriage, in a society not built on normative ideals?

There are both celebratory and grieving rituals around key transition points. These recognise that different transitions will be meaningful to different people, and at different points in their lives. 

For example, key transitions might be major relationship formations, deepenings, changes or endings, with equal value placed on friend, family, erotic/romantic, colleague, and other kinds of relationships. Other key transitions might relate to major bodymind or life path decisions, struggles, openings or changes.

In contrast to our world where so many individuals struggle with normative ideas of desire and identity, it must be so liberating for folks – particularly children and teenagers – to be supported to grow into their authentic selves. How are young people guided in discovering and expressing their desires in a non-normative context?

This world is informed by Audre Lorde’s expansive concept of the erotic and a similarly expansive concept of intimacy.

This means that children and young people are encouraged to explore what ‘lights them up’ or ‘makes them feel most alive’ and to orient towards this in all areas of life. They don’t restrict desire to sex, or intimacy to romance. For example, this might include tuning into what gives them: a good feeling in their body, a sense of mental immersion/excitement, an experience of flow or being in the zone creatively, or a feeling of expansiveness, playfulness and curiosity, and/or safety, trust and comfort.

This has a huge impact on the world of work. All contributions that need to happen in this world do happen because there is benign variation in what people love doing, and because people are fully valued for what they contribute, including cleaning, serving, caring, and manual labour. It’s also totally okay to change direction in work through a lifetime, and just to try something for a while.

This also has a huge impact on the world of relationships. People go towards the relationship forms, and the people and other beings, that are a good fit with them and feel mutually nourishing. There is equal value placed on fleeting connections, long term ones, and everything in between. And there is a recognition of impermanence and loss in relationships without seeing this as a problem, or something to blame on others, or ourselves.

How does this world approach sex and relationship education? What does the curriculum emphasise to support the “benign variation” model?

A big shift is that relationship education is given at least as much time and energy as skills and knowledge education. It’s a cornerstone of the curriculum. 

It is recognised that people need teaching and practices about how to relate well with themselves, others and the world. Also, embodied and emotional learning is valued at least as highly as intellectual learning and learning practical skills.

It is also recognised that people have different ways of learning and different callings. Curriculums give a lot of time to play, and to helping people find the ways of learning and the kinds of work/play that are the best fit for them (e.g. learning through visual, audio, sensing, relating, etc.)

With benign variation there is no grading whatsoever! There’s just lots of support for people to find what ways of contributing are the best fit for their capacities and enthusiasms.

How does this world define and enforce the principles of consent and ethics?

This world moves away from capitalist-colonialist ways of relating with ourselves, others and the world. This is a deep shift because it means people are endeavouring never to speak or act from a place of trying to get something from someone, or to make them feel or behave a particular way.

There’s a valuing of all kinds of relationships. For example, there’s no hierarchy of biological over chosen relationships, romantic over friendship, or human over non human.

Non-consensual and unethical behaviours are understood to be rooted in personal and/or collective trauma. People are deeply supported to address this, both in themselves and in the systems they’re embedded in.

What role does language play in this society, particularly in relation to pronouns, labels, or identity terms?

With benign variation it’s possible to be more playful with language, rather than there being a sense that people have to use a limited number of words and agree on their meanings. There’s a culture of respecting the pronouns, names, labels and so on that feel the best fit for the person or community, and also of being open to this changing over time. There’s an open curiosity that asks ‘What does that mean for you (if you want to share)?’ rather than assuming. 

There’s also a valuing of non verbal forms of communication at least as highly as verbal ones: helping people to find the ways of expressing themselves that are the best fit for them.

How do art, media, and literature reflect this model of benign variation? Are there distinct storytelling styles or themes that emerge?

There’s a much more diverse range of creativity that is valued, and no hierarchies around high/low art, or what counts as ‘proper’ art. 

There has been quite a move away from linear storytelling which suggests people should be on paths towards certain kinds of ‘success’ or ‘happiness’ or ‘recovery’. Stories are often more cyclical and reflect the fact that there are inevitably times in our lives of more/less clarity, more ease and more challenge, endings and beginnings

There’s been a big move away from celebrity, towards recognising everyone’s value, and the value of small gestures, having/being enough, and easing suffering in simple ways

In a society free from heteronormativity, how is fashion affected? Do styles become more diverse, or is there a shift in how people use clothing to express themselves?

There are definitely more diverse styles and more diverse orientations to fashion. There’s acceptance and celebration of those who use clothing to express their energy or creativity, and those for whom it’s purely functional, and everything in between.

There is similar diversity in things like food and physical activity and creative pursuits: a recognition that it’s very meaningful and important to some, with support and community around that, but an acceptance that it’s fine for it to not be important as well.

How does the workplace accommodate or reflect this diversity in desires and relationships? Are there policies that support alternative family or relational structures?

Absolutely, for example there is a lot of support for people to take breaks from other forms of work to focus on outer/inner parenting or caring for themselves/others. There are some whose work is focused on these things.

People are always asked about who the close people and other beings in their lives are, rather than assuming any kind of relationship.

In housing, people are supported to find ways of living that are a good fit for them, with likeminded people. Support systems are embedded in these homes for when relational challenges inevitably come up. Such systems are viewed as vital as utilities like power and water.

How has this shift influenced global movements, such as feminism or LGBTQAI rights? Are these movements still distinct, or have they merged into broader frameworks?

With everyone recognising benign variation there are fewer movements around rights for particular marginalised groups. There are more movements towards everyone recognising and feeling their interconnectedness, and for addressing any remaining areas in the world where some are treated less well than others in any way.

Such movements are always led by those with lived experience, and the emphasis is on finding out what support they need around any challenges they still face and implementing that support.

When it comes to addressing any harms that still occur between people, and/or between people and other beings or the natural world, the emphasis is on hearing all of the stories and working together to heal trauma and to transform systems so that harm doesn’t continue.

In your view, what lessons can our current world learn from this other realm?

Everything! I want to live there! My only reservations are…

• We can’t ever really know for sure what would help. We need to embrace uncertainty and invite change, rather than creating new normativities to force on everyone in a further attempt to dominate and control. Even the kind of vision I’ve outlined here could lead to great suffering if it was made solid and static and grasped and imposed.
• Imagining such worlds can set up a gap between where we are and where we want to be. It feels really important to be with reality as it is, in order to be as wise and compassionate as possible with how things actually are. Otherwise there’s a risk that we end up constantly seeking for it to be how it was in some imagined past, or how we wish it could be in some imagined future (or parallel world). Can we recognise the deep pain and suffering that is present here without setting ourselves in opposition to this reality?

What would you say to someone in our reality, who is struggling to reconcile their sense of “normalcy” with this vision of diversity?

Start where you are. Whatever area you want to focus on (e.g. gender, sexuality, relationships, neurodiversity…), begin with deep self-reflection on the norms that you grew up with and those that are around in your culture at the moment. Explore how these have hurt you and disconnected you from yourself, others and the world. Then, instead of opposition, you can get alongside others who’re striving for justice and diversity in this area, and all areas.

The final chapter of the new edition of my book Rewriting the Rules, explores how we might take the first tender and tentative steps towards this kind of work, individually and collectively.

The post The Parallel Effect: A World Beyond Heteronormativity appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

The research on trauma and mental health suggests that a huge part of the way we generally got into them was non-consensual treatment at the hands of other people and/or the world around us. So whatever we do to recover, heal, or otherwise address our issues, it has to be done differently: from a place of consent, care and friendliness for ourselves instead of a place of fear, shame, and harshness.

The master’s tools

Audre Lorde famously wrote that ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’. This means that we can’t dismantle systems and structures of oppression using the same kinds of mechanisms and tools that were used to put them there in the first place. If we try to do it that way we generally re/create corrupt systems rather than finding our way to some genuine alternative. 

We can see many mental health struggles as a set of inner systems and structures which were put in place when we were treated non-consensually during our lives, often in childhood, but also through traumatic experiences which happened later on. Most of the main therapeutic approaches agree that when we’re taught that we have to be a certain way in order to receive care and protection – or to avoid punishment or rejection – we develop survival strategies in order to cope.

Trauma and survival strategies

It’s these survival strategies – in the form of habits and patterns like addictions and compulsions, fear and anxiety, depression and distancing, anger and acting out – which we end up addressing as adults, when we realise that they’ve become a problem. They may be rooted, for example, in physical, sexual or emotional abuse or neglect at home, in particular traumatic events that happened to us, in the discrimination and hatred we experienced due to being part of any marginalised group, and/or in being repeatedly sent back into unsafe situations such as bullying or otherwise hostile school environments.

In our current culture few of us escape such experiences entirely. Few girls reach adulthood without experiences of sexual harassment and assualt and without learning the ways they will be denied agency and regarded as second class citizens throughout their lives. If you are part of an oppressed group you will soon come to realise how differently you are treated: how your body, labour and life are valued less. School is a pretty non-consensual situation for even those who escape the more obvious forms of trauma there, much of which is normalised. Most families pass on messages that children should override their self-consent in order to conform to normality, hide their feelings and/or meet others’ expectations. 

All of this occurs within a wider culture which rests on teaching people that they are lacking and should be different to how they are in order to ensure docile and productive citizens, and in order to sell everything from drugs to diets, fast food to fashion, soft drinks to spirituality.

Treating ourselves non-consensually in the name of recovery

The problem is that – once we become aware of our mental health struggles, our habitual patterns, or our unhelpful survival strategies – the way we go about trying to address them often mirrors the very way they were put there in the first place. We try to fix ourselves, we push ourselves too far too fast, and we force ourselves to do all the things we’ve been told will help, punishing ourselves we don’t find ourselves improving as quickly as we felt that we should.

This has been brought home to me recently in a few ways. I’ll share my own experiences here and then give a few further examples where this might apply.

Trauma work

First I’ve been struggling particularly in the last year or so with what I’ve learnt are called emotional flashbacks: quick plummets into fear and shame which result in feeling very small, fragile and incapable of anything. I realise I’ve experienced these at greater or lesser intensity throughout my life, but the literature on cPTSD has helped me put a label to them. After reading a few books on trauma I fixed onto an idea – also common to many schools of therapy – that it could be useful to use current triggering experiences to connect back to earlier memories of traumatic events, and to revisit those in some way to loosen their grip.

Being somebody whose survival strategy tends towards the overfunctioning end of the spectrum, I grasped this idea and ran with it. One day, for example, I decided to write down all the traumatic memories I could think of in order to start revisiting them as a regular practice. Needless to say the result of this was not in any way pretty. I’m learning that the only way to do this kind of work is slowly and gently. If you try to push through, or force it, you end up retraumatising yourself and doing nothing to loosen the grip of the habits you’ve developed in order to survive.

Mindfulness

Another example is mindfulness. As regular readers will be aware, I’ve always been skeptical of the mindfulness movement from a social justice perspective, and a lot of my work involves attempting to weave Buddhist thinking and practices together with social understanding and engagement. 

However, I definitely bought the Buddhist mindfulness idea that it was generally a good idea to put time aside every day to sit, to notice your thoughts, and to keep bringing yourself back to the present. I figured that should be helpful to enable me to become more present to everyday life, to learn how not to get carried away into reactivity when hard stuff happens, and to notice forms of oppression acting through me and working to dismantle those as much as is possible.

What I actually found was that my fifteen minute meditation at the start of every day ranged from – at best – sitting with my noisy mind carrying me away for fifteen minutes and feeling a bit bad that I hadn’t come back to the present at all by the end to – at worst – taking a fifteen minute journey into precisely how bad I felt about myself.

I’m now reading an awesome book by David A. Treleavan called Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness which brings mindfulness into dialogue with trauma-informed therapy and social justice. It’s helped me to make sense of these meditation experiences. As someone with regularly recurring cPTSD symptoms, meditation like this can be counterproductive unless engaged with in a trauma-informed way. In fact many – if not most – people experience some mild to major re-traumatising when they try to just sit with themselves without having any awareness of how trauma works. In pushing myself to meditate every day like this, with the idea that it must be good for me, I think I’ve been making things worse, and certainly not better.

Staying with feelings

A final example is staying with feelings: something that I’ve always been a big advocate of, as you can tell from my zine of this name. But engaging with the work of blogger and trauma-informed counsellor Love Uncommon showed me a vital missing piece of these practices. It’s only a good idea to stay with your feelings when they are in the manageable range. When they have reached a high intensity – or tipped into reactivity – then it is far more helpful to soothe yourself until they are manageable again. As with the other points, trying to stay with feelings when they are overwhelming is often retraumatising and unhelpful, making the feelings more scary and harder to stay with, rather than less so.

A similar thing is true for conflict and staying with each other’s feelings. A lot of people have the sense that the best thing to do in conflict is to stay and hash it out. But if any of the people involved has tipped into high intensity reactivity – or a trauma response – then that is a really bad idea. Far better to take time out, self-soothe, and cool down, perhaps making a time to return to whatever the conflict was about when everyone is in a good place to do so. Staying when one or more of you is in a place of trauma is again a recipe for retraumatising yourselves, acting out your survival strategies in ways that tighten rather than loosening them, and making further painful conflict between you more, rather than less, likely over time.

Other examples

Other examples where people often take a non-self-consensual approach to addressing their mental health struggles would include forcing yourself to go to a form of therapy or support that doesn’t feel right for you, staying with a therapist who doesn’t feel good, insisting to yourself that you must ‘be better’ by a certain point, anything which rests on the idea of ‘pulling your socks up’ or ‘getting over it’, and engaging in any form of self-help which is based on the idea that you are broken and need fixing rather than that you are okay as you are and deserve support. 

I’ve also had some interesting conversations with people recently who’re moving away from abstinence and restriction approaches to addressing addiction, self-harm and self-soothing to models where you allow yourself all the things you want, but engage with them consciously and intentionally with curiosity. One person said that any habit that harms us is oppression acting through us, so we cannot and must not respond with further self-harm and oppression.

It may seem paradoxical that some people experience way more radical shifts when they move towards the latter model, but it makes sense from the perspective that progress is only possible when we stop treating ourselves in the way that put the survival strategies or unhelpful habits there in the first place.

The role of fear and shame

Another part of this clicked for me after reading Pete Walker’s book on cPTSD (yes I am becoming a trauma nerd). He puts a lot of emphasis on the fear/shame feeling combo as being the key feature of emotional flashback and also – I realise now – a low level everyday backdrop to life for most of us with these kinds of past experiences.

Related to the idea that we can’t help ourselves using the same non-consensual approaches that hurt is in the first place, is the idea that fear and shame will not get us out of fear and shame. When we’re struggling we often try this kind of approach. We feel that we are bad people for struggling in these ways so we try to shame ourselves into addressing them or sorting ourselves out. We try to frighten ourselves into action by pointing out all the terrible things that might happen if we continue to employ our survival strategies.

There’s a whole additional post to be written about how fear and shame-based strategies don’t work for changing other people’s behaviour in a world where these seem to be the go-to strategies everywhere. Justin and I recently podcasted about this in relation to the fearmongering and shaming responses we’re seeing in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Fear and shame tend to make people frightened and defensive, and therefore more – rather than less – likely keep right on doing the things you don’t want them to do. The same is true with ourselves when we’re struggling. Like what could be a worse strategy for trying to cure ourselves from fear and shame than giving ourselves a load of fear and shame about our fear and shame. Think about it.

So what can we do?

So what I’m saying here is that if we treat ourselves in the ways that put our survival strategies, habits, or stuck patterns there in the first place this will solidify and tighten them, rather than dissolving or loosening them. 

What is the alternative? Well it is a massive challenge within our current cultural context because it involves us treating ourselves – and each other – in the radically different ways which intersectional feminists from Audre Lorde onwards have been encouraging us to do: valuing ourselves and others equally, practicing self-care, sitting with the places in which we are oppressed and victimised and the places where we oppress or hurt others. 

Such thinkers also point out that individual and systemic shifts need to happen alongside each other, given our interdependence. It’s hard – if not impossible – for individuals to change their inner landscape if the non-consensual outer landscape remains the same, and the idea that we should be able to do so harms us more. Engaging with others to share our experiences and work collectively is vital if possible.

For me a key starting point is self-consent. I’m trying to slow down my everyday life sufficiently to notice every time I’m drawn to override my self-consent. This is proving easier to notice now that many attempts to do so result in an emotional flashback plummet into fear/shame (trauma humour). But I’m also trying to notice the micro-moments of overriding my consent, the flickers of fear/shame that come up when I do that. I try to pay attention to what happened to elicit that response, to bring self-compassion to the situation to understand why that was my response, and to consider ways in which I might engage with whatever happened differently, in ways that don’t override my self-consent.

Slowness is another key here. This just can’t be done fast. Speeding up inevitably involves pushing through and getting overwhelmed. It’s helpful to tune into when I’m stepping out of my comfort zone into my stretch zone, and ensuring that I pull back into the comfort zone before I hit overwhelm. I was having a lot of quiet nights in before they became the default.

If fear and shame are a big part of the problem, then the solution is the opposite: cultivating protection and care to counter the fear and shame. Pete Walker talks about reparenting yourself and reparenting by committee. Other authors talk about cultivating a compassionate witness within yourself or befriending yourself, often alongside receiving a safe-enough and kind-enough therapeutic relationship to model what this might be like. 

I’ll be writing more about how I’ve gone about this from a plural perspective, but basically it’s anything you can do to be kind and protective towards yourself rather than shaming or frightening yourself, and to treat yourself consensually instead of non-consensually. 

Useful questions to ask yourself are: ‘what do I usually/habitually do under these circumstances?’ and ‘what would the opposite of that look like?’ You may find that there are several different ‘opposite’ options to play with. They may also be the ‘opposite’ of the experiences that resulted in your stuck patterns or survival strategies.

At this point you can bring those other practices back in. For me it’s not about stopping addressing traumatic memories, meditating, or trying to stay with my feelings. All those practices are immensely valuable, but only if done consensually, gently, gradually, and in ways that feel good rather than bad, and stretching rather than overwhelming.

Patreon link: If you liked this, feel free to support my Patreon, it will certainly help this self-employed person to maintain some income during these uncertain times.

Plural tag: This post was written by Beastie.

The post The master’s tools and mental health: We can’t get out of our struggles the same way we got into them appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

I will be talking about the ending of the film though so have a spoiler alert for that up front. TLDR: It’s better than the giant spider in the book, but not much. However at least there was an ongoing joke though the movie about horror authors who write bad endings.

Historical and Intergenerational Trauma

When I saw the first movie of this Stephen King story I wrote this post about intergenerational trauma because the film did such an excellent job of demonstrating how we pass trauma down through the generations. While I enjoyed the sequel immensely I feel like it lost the powerful message of the first movie, as well as missing an obvious opportunity to say something helpful about how we can face demons and prevent these patterns from repeating themselves.

To recap on my first blog post, the story of the first It movie links historical and intergenerational trauma and demonstrates how these things will just continue down the generations if we don’t address them. The first film focuses on the children facing It – in the form of Pennywise the clown – in the small town of Derry 27 years ago.

In terms of historical trauma there’s a sense that the monster in It came into being around the time of settler colonialism and the genocide of indigenous Americans. In that way It can be seen as a reflection of human evil: holding up a mirror to the violence we do to each other, to other species, and to the land. The monster in It reappears every 27 years and the horrors it perpetrates relate to the human evils that are present at the time. So we see It whipping up racism and white supremacy in the 1930s and homophobic hate crimes in the latest incarnation. There are also scenes relating to violent patriarchal treatment – and sexual and physical abuse – of women. In this way there’s a clear message that historical trauma unfaced will just find new forms and continue. Some bodies and lives will always be valued less than others, subject to oppression and violence. We can see this vividly at the moment in the way that the current trans moral panic echoes the 1980s moral panic against gay men.

In relation to intergenerational trauma, each time It comes back it preys on children, and each time the parents are oblivious to what is happening. In the first movie this is clearly related to the way each generation of parents perpetuate the traumas that happened to them on their own kids: from ignoring school bullying, to physically punishing their kids, to emotional neglect, to over-protectiveness and controlling behaviour, to the sexual abuse of a bereaved father. The message is that if we don’t look at what happened to us – and do our work around it – then we won’t see what’s happening to the next generation. Even worse we may well go from victim to perpetrator: acting out the same abuses ourselves.

Confronting our Demons

In the second movie the kids who battled It in the first film are all grown up. It returns to Derry and they are called back to face it again in the hope of eradicating it entirely this time, rather than just sending it away for another 27 years.

There’s a huge potential in this film, then, to address the question of how we – as adults – might acknowledge historical and intergenerational trauma and their impact. What ways might there be to put a halt to these recurring patterns rather than continuing to act out the very violences that were done to us? The metaphor of the demon who keeps returning presents a powerful opportunity to address what we might do with our own personal and cultural demons.

What the movie does do well is to be clear that we have to go back. Choosing not to engage with the past – and to pretend the pain of the present is not happening – simply isn’t an option. Others will be hurt and – in the end – we will also be hurt a lot more than if we did face our fears. Choosing not to engage is choosing a kind of death, or at least a life of remaining asleep rather than waking up to reality and doing something about it.

The adults in the movie all have to revisit the most frightening moments of their pasts as the first step towards battling Pennywise. Again this is a great message. Unless we can fully face – and feel – the impact of these traumas upon us then we can’t acknowledge how they’ve shaped us: the survival strategies and habits they’ve left us with. Without that understanding we won’t be able to shift those patterns and we’ll simply be doomed to repeat them: hurting ourselves and others in the process.

My sister also pointed out that the movie has a smart metaphor for the mechanisms that often prevent us from facing the past and its impact on the present. The characters have all forgotten the details of what happened to them in childhood. We could see this as a metaphor for the kind of cultural and familial gaslighting which many of us experience: a strong message that it isn’t acceptable to question the power dynamics in play or their impact; that we must protect the status quo, and other people from the painful truths of the situation.

The forgetting, dissociation and confusion experienced by the characters is reminiscent of the impact of receiving that strong cultural/family message that it isn’t safe to question, and that if anybody is suffering due to social structures or family dynamics then it must be their individual fault and responsibility, not a flaw in the society or system. Hence we see Bill blaming himself for Georgie’s death, and other characters being held – and holding themselves – responsible for the bullying and abuse they received.

The Demons within Us

However, where the second film falls down – in my opinion – is that it never gets the other piece of the equation. We see how the adults have to revisit their childhood traumas and look after the victim/survivor sides of themselves back then, acknowledging the impact that it had on them. But the adults in It are all presented is pretty good people, maybe a little flawed. We never get the sense of how they – as adults – have become the generation who are now doing the damage. This was clear in the adults in the first movie, but not in the second.

Also, in the second movie, we learn that It was some kind of alien monster which arrived from another planet to wreak havoc on humans. To me this takes away from the sense of It being something caused by human evil and reflecting it back to us. 

The film quickly becomes a battle between the good guys (our group of loser kids all-grown-up) and the bad guy (Pennywise). All they have to do is to face it and beat it and then all the intergenerational and historical trauma just goes away.

Fighting Our Demons

From this simple good vs. bad perspective the end of the film makes sense. The group confront Pennywise and they fight it using the Ritual of Chüd: an indigenous American ritual which Mike says was used to banish It before (the stereotypical depictions of indigenous Americans, and Black people, in Stephen King books and movies is an issue here, of course). When this doesn’t work entirely they come up with their own plan which is to shrink it down to size by making it feel small: shaming it and denying It any power by showing how they’re not scared of it. Once it has shrunk they can destroy it.

I think this gives a terrible message. It suggests that we can fight our outer or inner demons and just eradicate them. There’s no sense that the characters have to acknowledge humanity’s own role in creating this ancient evil and the damage it’s continuing to do. Nor do they have to acknowledge the demonic within themselves: their own potential for hurting others through their unacknowledged patterns and habits.

Finally – as my friend Anita who I saw the movie with pointed out – the way the Losers fight the demon is to use the very tactics that were used against them: bullying and shaming. This reminded me of this famous Audre Lorde quote :

For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.

It seems to me that exactly what the group does here is to use the master’s tools: the abuse, shame, bullying, and violence that were enacted against them, and that have been enacted against oppressed groups historically. In a way it would’ve worked well if they’d used this tactic at the end of the first movie, meaning that It inevitably came back and they had to find another tactic. But the message that this is the tactic that actually worked is a terrible one. They never do have to ‘reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside themselves and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there’. They never have to acknowledge their involvement in historical and intergenerational trauma. They never really have to face their demons.

Feeding Our Demons

I found it fascinating that the ritual in It was called the Ritual of Chüd because it is such a similar name to a Tibetan Buddhist ritual which I’ve been adapting in recent years as part of my own work: Chöd practice, or feeding your demons. Intriguingly, Chöd practice explicitly offers an alternative to fighting – or using the master’s tools – which is perhaps a better way of addressing our cultural and personal demons.

Briefly what you do in Chöd practice is the following:

• Locate your demon: Tune into whatever you’re feeling, find it in your body, and visualise it.
• Visualise your demon: Take this visualisation and imagine it as a demon sitting in front of you.
• Ask your demon: What do you want? What do you need? How will you feel if you get what you need?
• Embody your demon: Move across to take the position of the demon, feel how it feels, answer the questions as the demon.
• Feed the demon: Return to your position, imagine yourself dissolving into some kind of nectar – or food – which gives the demon what it needs.
• Welcome the ally: Observe what happens to the demon. There’s a sense that – on getting what it needs – it may well become an ally to help you instead of the demon that was making things so hard for you.

So I remember one time I did this ritual I felt this horrible tight clenched feeling in my chest. When I felt into it I visualised it as old rusty metal all around my heart. When I turned it into a demon it became a terrifying huge transformer-type robot in front of me with fire burning deep in its dark eyes and massive mouth. When I inhabited it, it felt exhausted and in constant pain. I asked it the questions and the answers were that it wanted to destroy me, that it needed rest because it was so ancient and tired, and that it would feel huge relief if it got that. I imagined dissolving into lubricating oil finally easing the rusted metal. It eventually all collapsed (rather like the house at the end of It) and in its place was a pool (again rather like the lake at the end of It) and some kind of being made of water emerged:  a sense of cool, calm and fluid in the place of hot, tense and brittle.

There’s a sense from this practice that our demons are the kinds of survival strategies we developed as kids. Over time they have become harmful to ourselves and others, but if we can face them and listen to them, they can morph into allies. In this way the practice is similar to embracing our inner critics, something I plan to write about here in more depth soon and touch on in my Plural Selves zine. 

In the example I gave, I read this as the demon being the survival strategy of armouring over my feelings to protect myself, but there was the sense that this strategy got in the way of intimacy with myself and others, leaving me brittle and controlling in ways that risked damaging – or even destroying – myself and my relationships. The practice suggested an alternative pattern of loosening, or dismantling, the armour over time: becoming more vulnerable and fluid.

It: The Alternative Ending

So how would It have ended if the group had applied Chöd practice instead of the Ritual of Chüd: If they had fed the demon instead of fighting it?

What does It want?

It’s very clear that It wants to frighten people, that it feeds on fear.

What does It need?

But what does It actually need underneath that desire for fear? Again the answer is pretty clear in the film. Several times It – in the form of Pennywise the clown – speaks of being unseen and lonely. It tells a small child that nobody will look it in the face and expresses distress at this. If we remember that It is holding up a mirror to human evil then this makes all kinds of sense. What it wants – from creating all this fear – is for the people of Derry to look at what it’s showing them. Each time they refuse to look this hurts it terribly and it has to retreat into itself, alone, for another 27 years in the hope that the next generation might finally see.

It’s clear that the monster wants the Losers to return to Derry. It goes to great lengths to bring them back, and to scare them – without actually killing them – as children and adults. You could read this as it trying desperately, repeatedly, to get its message across. But even when kids are disappearing and bodies are turning up, nobody pays any attention.

So an alternative to fighting the demon would be for the group to finally turn towards it, looking at it directly (instead of trying never to meet its eyes), and listening to what It has to teach them. This would involve recognising the historical traumas which we’re all implicated in which just continue – and morph into new forms – through each generation instead of ever going away (colonialism, white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, disaster capitalism, ecological crisis, etc.) 

This would also involve the group seeing the perpetrators (or demons) in themselves as well as the victims/survivors. They would need to face up to their own capacity for evil and abuse, as well as being the victims of it. This would involve recognising that the only way not to reenact these abuses and traumas is to acknowledge them, and the strategies they left them with, and to continually work on shifting their patterns.

How would It feel if It got what It needed?

I would love to see an ending to the film where Pennywise could finally morph into an ally. When we face our demons and learn to work with them, instead of battling them, they can stop attacking us so violently in order to get their message across. If the group listened to Pennywise perhaps it would not have to keep retreating for 27 years and returning to cause chaos and agony. Instead perhaps it could rest, safe in the knowledge that this group would do the work of waking up Derry – and beyond – to historical and intergenerational trauma. Or perhaps it could remain within each member of the group as an ally they could keep returning to and talking with.

Interestingly there is a sense of this at the end of another horror movie, The Babadook. In this film the main characters quit trying to fight the demon – who represents grief – and instead make it a home in their cellar and feed it and care for it. They recognise that this demon will always be with them, and only by acknowledging it and looking after it can they stop hurting themselves and each other.

Of course when the first It movie came out, social media decided to ship Pennywise the clown with The Babadook to great effect, so perhaps on some level we all knew that this was the ending we needed.

I can’t think of a better way to end this post than the way I ended the last one on this topic. We need to recognise that the ancient evil hurts us all and that we’re all implicated in it. We need to band together with all the other losers and get down into the sewers to face it. Are you with me?

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If you download this pdf and print it out as a booklet it works really well. Also fine to read it online.

HellYeahSelfCare

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