We’ve already recently posted conversations between two other parts – Beastie and James – reviewing what this book has to say about trauma and plurality, and how we can work with them if you want to read more on this topic. For background on plurality, check out the plural work page on our website.

CN: Brief mentions of difficult childhood experiences and self-harm, no detailed descriptions. Brief mention of a tarot card as a metaphor, not as a tool of divination.

Ara: Hey Max-y, are you up for doing this one with me?

Max: I’d like that. It seems a good fit given that I was the part of us who struggled to practice mindfulness our whole life – when I thought we were just me – and you are the part of us who mindfulness seems to come most easily to.

Ara: It’s fascinating to me that we moved away from these practices, then returned to them, from a slightly different angle, and suddenly they made way more sense. Like before we understood them intellectually, but only rarely did we feel what others described feeling from them. Now they have become our go-to practices. I notice that we even turn away from things that would have been welcome distractions, or imperatives, in the past, in order to return to our version of these practices.

Max: Like turning off a TV show halfway through if we start to feel troubled, or remaining still rather than going to the next task if it feels like there’s more that we need to stay with.

Ara: That’s what I mean. Beastie and I discussed the way we’re practising ‘the gap’ rather than any kind of formal sitting in our blog post. Here I’d love to talk with you about how understanding and treating ourselves as plural unlocks various aspects of mindfulness. We can draw on the Janina Fisher book which we hadn’t read when we wrote the gap blog posts.

Max: Okay.

Ara: Before we start, how’re you doing right now? I’m aware it’s been a rough ride for you lately.

Max: It has. This trauma process, it ebbs and flows rather than being some kind of steady progress towards feeling less traumatised. It’s hard when the feelings are intense again to believe in the path we’re on.

Ara: That reminds me of the poem we’ve had up in our room from the start, by Ijeoma Umebinyuo. I often read it to you when you’re finding things tough.

“Healing comes in waves

and maybe today

the wave hits the rocks

and that’s ok,

that’s ok, darling

you are still healing

you are still healing.”

Max: That poem has helped me through some very hard times. It’s still helping me through now.

Ara: You particularly I think – of all of our parts – because being to the fore all our lives means that the traumatic experiences we’ve been through have often hit you the hardest.

Max: Mm, and I’m also the part of us who perhaps has to change the most. It’s so hard to see that the strategies I employed in order for us to survive have hurt us so much, and other people too. It’s so hard to confront that without collapsing into shame, and so hard to have any sense of who I might be on the other side of this. Oh I’m crying as I write this.

Ara: Your tears are very welcome Max. When you feel this way we remind you how very grateful we all are to you. As Janina points out, without disowning the sides of us that we learnt were ‘bad’ growing up, and foregrounding only the ‘good’ in you, we would never have survived. Without repressing the feelings associated with trauma and developing a side of ourselves who could get on with everyday life, we could never have made it through. 

And what’s more, as you were surviving by becoming what the world told you you had to be, you were also learning – all the time – psychology, sociology, psychotherapy, philosophy. You learnt all the things that we needed to finally make sense of our own suffering, and the suffering that it came from: the systems and structures around us, the intergenerational trauma playing out through us, the patterns we’d developed that were hurting us. You enabled us to survive, and you kept learning. It’s a huge feat, gentle warrior. You got us here.

Max: I did. 

Ara: At great cost too. So much pain each time you tried to find safety and belonging for us in ways you’d been taught, but which didn’t really work. So hard when your learnings took you in directions which resulted in you being dismissed and ridiculed, even attacked publicly.

Max: So many times Ara. Each time I find the way of seeing things that helps us the most, it always seems to push right at the edges of what people are up for. Like ‘I know you were with me about the relationship rules being questionable, and about gender being fluid and on multiple spectrums, and about the erotic being way bigger than the sexual, but now I need you to believe that I am multiple people sharing a body – and you very well might be too!’

Ara: Thankfully we’re finding some validation for our experiences in others’ writings, and in the way many people respond to our writing. It seems that there’s much agreement, from social justice and intersectional feminism through to the physical and mental health literature – that a huge problem in our current culture is children learning that they have to cover over themselves, and repress their authentic feelings, and pretend to be okay as you did: people being alienated from themselves, from others, from their work, and from nature, as Gabor Maté puts it. 

This is the individualism of neoliberal capitalism which disconnects us from ourselves and others, makes us feel we’re never enough and can never have enough, makes us police ourselves and others – literally and metaphorically, and puts a huge toll on the ecosystems we inhabit.

Max: Sitting alone in our room during lockdown trying to befriend every part of us seems a far cry from addressing systemic violence, the epidemic of addiction, or climate change, but it does seem that they’re all connected.

Ara: The process can be very painful at times though, I know Max. It’s like Janina says: our inner systems develop in ways that reflect the outer systems we grew up in. Schools, families, communities, cultures, where our feelings weren’t welcome, our needs weren’t heard, we weren’t protected from danger, and/or our boundaries weren’t respected.

Max: We keep coming back to that image of the tower, from the tarot deck, again this month.

Ara: We do, although James and Beastie continue to regard my openness to such things in a highly skeptical manner. 

The tower is about a structure collapsing to the ground. It’s perhaps the most frightening card in the deck. But it’s only when systems and structures are dismantled that we can see that the foundations were rotten: that we need to create stronger foundations before we can start to rebuild on top of them. 

That’s true for each individual’s inner system. It’s true for the family systems built on unaddressed intergenerational trauma. It’s true of organisations built on unjust principles like valuing different forms of labour unequally. It’s true of education systems built on the non-consensual ownership of children by adults, and the desire to create conforming citizens. It’s true of criminal justice systems built to protect the owners of property, which included humans when they were first developed. It’s true of economic systems built to make rich people ever richer, and to encourage consumption far beyond what the planet can sustain, by making people believe that they are lacking.

Max: You may be open to the spooky stuff, but you can bring the politics too it seems Ara.

Ara: It does seem that way. Maybe I know that it helps you to open to these painful, vulnerable, processes when you remember how it’s connected to our wider work, and to our politics and values, Max.

Max: That’s true. Holding so much shame and responsibility, it helps me to always return to that question of how I can be most helpful for others and for the wider world. The answer right now is to prioritize this inner work. Shall we talk about mindfulness?

Ara: I think we may have already given some sense of what we’re about to say, and of our process *smiles*

Buddhism and plurality

Max: We were happy when we got to chapter 3 of Janina’s book and saw a quote from our favourite teacher, Pema Chödrön.

Ara: It suggests that the Buddhist perspectives that help us so much are very much in alignment with this neurobiologically and psychotherapeutically informed plural/trauma perspective that Janina is presenting. The quote she uses from from Pema is: 

“We think that by protecting ourselves from suffering we are being kind to ourselves. The truth is, we only become more fearful, more hardened, and more alienated. We experience ourselves as being separate from the whole. This separateness becomes like a prison for us, a prison that restricts us to our personal hopes and fears and to caring only for the people nearest to us. Curiously enough, if we primarily try to shield ourselves from discomfort, we suffer. Yet when we don’t close off and let our hearts break, we discover our kinship with all beings.” – Pema Chödrön

Max: That speaks to me so much. We have the image of me, for much of my life, as an armoured up warrior: presenting masks to the world that would gain me some degree of acceptance. I was battling and battling to get love and respect, and covering over my vulnerability, my shame, and my conviction that if anyone saw the ‘real’ me – beneath the masks – they would be disgusted.

Ara: The image of you now is the spiritual warrior that Pema describes in her writing. Prepared for this final act of bravery: removing the armour and the masks and standing there naked, ready to face what comes. But you’re not alone any more.

Max: I have all of you standing with me. 

So Janina understands the disconnection and separateness from the self, that Pema describes, as developing because we disowned vital parts of ourselves: leaving them behind in the past at the times we were taught they were unacceptable.

“By disowning the trauma, or the anger, or the need for contact with others, we lose or deny important aspects of ourselves. By over-identifying with the trauma-related shame, hopelessness, and fear of being seen, we constrict our lives and make ourselves smaller than we need to be. Both strategies, adaptive in a time of danger, become liabilities when the individual is ready to live a ‘life after trauma’, free of the constrictions and restrictions needed for living in a traumatogenic environment.” – Janina Fisher

Ara: And this sounds very similar to Buddhism doesn’t it? Buddhism is all about finding the middle way between hurling things away from us that we don’t want, and grasping hold of things that we do: between aggression and craving. We always use this quote from Martine Batchelor to describe it.

“Let’s imagine that I am holding an object made of gold. It is so precious and it is mine – I feel I must hold onto it. I grasp it, curling my fingers so as not to drop it, so that nobody can take it away from me. What happens after a while? Not only do my hand and arm get cramp but I cannot use my hand for anything else. When you grip something, you create tension and you limit yourself.

Dropping the gold object is not the solution. Non-attachment means learning to relax, to uncurl the fingers and gently open the hand. When my hand is wide open and there is no tension, the precious object can rest lightly on my palm. I can still value the object and take care of it; I can put it down and pick it up; I can use my hand for doing something else.”

Max: So this sense of not disowning any part of us, or identifying with any part of us, is much like that idea: holding it lightly.

Ara: Pema talks about not repressing thoughts, feelings, sensations, but equally not reacting out of them or focusing on them at the expense of everything else that is going on in our bodies and surroundings. The mindful practice involves being with every feature of our experience in a way that is both welcoming and spacious: not too tight, not too loose. 

Max: And we could see our lives as having been a process of disowning some parts of ourselves – and some experiences – and over-identifying with others. So this here-and-now practice of not disowning and not identifying is a way of counterbalancing that.

Ara: Right, we are up for being with the parts we disowned as ‘not me’, and for loosening the grip around those we over-identified with: saw as ‘me’. In our case disowned were our fight, attach, and freeze capacities. Over-identified with was you and your flight tendency to avoid feelings and stay busy, motivated by a strong fawn desire to please others at all costs, because the disappointment, disapproval and disgust of others was what had been so dangerous to us as a child.

This is the ‘no part gets left behind’ ethos that James and Beastie spoke about. Interestingly I found that echoed in a Pema audio I listened to this morning. She says that the aim of Buddhist practice is never to cultivate one part of ourselves and to to try to get rid of another. Splitting ourselves into good, virtuous and bad, irredeemable parts is a form of biased, fixated thinking. Instead the idea is to train in staying open to the whole thing.

Self-compassion

Max: That brings us on to self-compassion right? Self-compassion is a key feature of mindfulness and something that we always struggled to find through mindful practices, until we added plurality to the picture.

Ara: Mm and Janina explains why self compassion, and loving yourself, are so hard – if not impossible. It’s because we had to hate ourselves, or at least parts of ourselves, in order to survive. Any form of self compassion would actually have been dangerous. 

Janina says that, as vulnerable children, we have to believe that we can get love by being what we’ve learnt is ‘good’ and never what we’ve learnt is ‘bad’. This is far safer for a child than believing that they are out of our control and have no-one to turn to: that they’re alone in a dangerous world. 

So we disconnect from anything in us that we’ve learnt is ‘bad’ – because it was disapproved of or rejected by others. Those things are ‘not me’. We also disconnect from the victim child that the bad things happened to as ‘not me’. We hold onto the good child who can be acceptable and therefore safer in an unsafe world. And we minimise any sense that we’ve been a victim of traumatic situations. The good child might be precociously mature, perfectionistic, and/or invested in being helpful to others, for example.

Max: Sounds strangely familiar!

Ara: So we use dissociation, denial and self hatred to keep the ‘not me’ parts out, in order that the ‘good’ parts can keep developing. The ‘bad’ and vulnerable parts of us therefore stay stuck in the past, when they came into being. But we lose vital parts of ourselves in the process.

Max: Janina says that the bargain we make when we disown parts of ourselves as a kid in order to survive – as ‘not me’ – is that we have to hate the self. We have to keep out the parts we’re intimidated by and ashamed of. Again this links to Gabor Maté who says that disconnection from the self means not being able to connect with others authentically, not being in touch with our feelings, being unable to have boundaries, and being unable to treat ourselves kindly.

Ara: Think about that Max, that’s our Tony, Jonathan, Beastie and Fox right there. In order for us to survive, you had to disown the part of us who can confidently be himself and assumes that others can love him. You had to disown the part who is sensitive and vulnerable and feels things deeply. You had to disown the part who feels enraged when people treat us non-consensually and can let them know it’s not okay. And you had to disown the part who is a genius at gentleness and playfulness.

Max: I’d never quite seen it this way before though, that self-compassion would have been actively dangerous to us, that it would put us at such risk of being ‘not-me’. I always struggled to understand why I was so incapable of loving myself when people spoke about that.

Ara: Gabor says that when we disown those parts of us we end up prioritising attachment over authenticity, looking outside of ourselves for things we’ve disowned in ourselves, often in unboundaried relationships with work and with other people, and in addictive patterns more widely.

Max: But none of those things could really fulfill us, because we are like a mask with nothing behind it until we can reclaim those parts of ourselves, their capacities, feelings, and experiences.

Ara: I was interested in our reading on shame to hear shame described as ‘soul-murder’. That is literally what kids are encouraged to do in our culture: to murder their soul. They operate on shame logic: always pretending that they are better than human, because they are terrified that they are ‘really’ far worse than human. 

Max: But when you live like that you know that it is a pretence, and you are convinced that you really are worse, perhaps because you can sense that emptiness within you, that sense that you’ve murdered your soul. That’s precisely how I felt much of the time.

Ara: Janina describes plural work as ‘soul retrieval’: practising self-compassion one part at a time. Of course this is made more difficult by our cultural insistence that we are singular selves, or unified souls, but there are many cultures around the world who recognise multiple souls sharing a body. One even has seven as the norm, you’ll be glad to hear.

Max: I think this soul retrieval, and selves-compassion, was the main feature of our inner work for a long time actually.

Ara: The way Pema puts it is that you have to create a ‘cradle of kindness’ before you can do any of the other work of mindfulness: observing your thoughts and feelings, cultivating compassion for others, becoming comfortable with uncertainty, and so on.

Max: I always balked at that idea and tried to crack on with all the various mindful practices without that cradle of kindness. But now I think it’s right. In many ways we’ve only been able to get to our version of mindfulness now that we have selves-compassion. So interesting that the very first time we felt your presence, Ara, it was as a sense of cradling.

Ara: Jonathan felt me cradling him: our body as both cradled and cradler. I’m so sorry that I wasn’t able to give you all that sooner Max-y. I so wish that I could have cradled you through the hard times.

Max: We got to something like that occasionally I think. Janina helped to explain that experience too. Self-harm can be a way of regulating intolerable emotions. I guess the times I self-harmed were when disowned parts of us threatened to be revealed, or when I felt that they had already been seen. I felt totally overwhelmed by them, with their massive feelings of repressed rage, fear, yearning, or grief. The only way to calm them was to hit myself. After that I do remember feeling that cradling feeling: being able to put myself to bed and soothe myself, almost as if somebody else was doing it. You.

Ara: Babygirl.

Max: I know. I’m so glad that we’ve found another way now. However painful it can be at times to feel all these feelings, it’s so much better than that.

Ara: I guess the self-compassion piece of mindfulness, done in a plural way, involves welcoming all parts of yourself that you previously disowned. In our case it involves cultivating parts who are capable of deep compassion for all of you – the inner carer and protector that Beastie and James described.

Max: And what’s shifted for us in recent months is that you’ve both felt way more available to us, as we have brought you forward more and more. Like we can wake up with you to the fore, draw on you to do everyday tasks, and easily access you whenever we’re struggling. 

Ara: So cultivating a cradle of kindness, for people, could involve an act of self-excavation/self-creation to develop such inner parents. For us it began with journaling with an imagined voice – of how a kind nurturer or solid protector might speak with you if you had one.

Max: Patchworked together, in your case from memories of the kind moments we did have with caregivers and partners over the year, from Pema herself, and from a few wise, compassionate mentors we had recently: Sophia, Lokhadi, and now our current therapist. Do you include any fictional characters, the way James does, Ara?

Ara: Interestingly I think I’m more built from the real encounters we’ve had, whereas James is more built from fictional folk.

Max: I’m sure Beastie would have some theory there about the patriarchy.

Mindful observation

Ara: Okay so as well as helping us to achieve self-compassion, plurality has been a way to unlock the kind of mindful observation which has been so hard for us to date, despite you writing an entire book about it, our beautiful overachiever!

Max: I was trying to get here I guess! 

In mindfulness you’re meant to observe all the thoughts, feelings, and sensations which bubble up, by continually returning to a point of focus in the present: often the breath going in and out. But, for me, mindfulness generally involved being swept away by memories and plans, by fears and doubts, for fifteen minutes until the alarm on my phone went off and reminded me that I was rubbish at mindfulness as well as at everything else! It wasn’t always quite that bad, but not far off. 

Ara: Fortunately Pema is very open that that was her experience for a long, long time too, and still often is.

Max: So how is plurality helping us with this?

Ara: Again Beastie and James described Janina’s concept of ‘dual awareness’ at some length in their posts, including the neurobiological understanding of how it works, and some of how we’re practising it. Basically dual awareness involves one part – who is in ‘everyday life’ mode – holding whichever part is struggling, or having the tough thoughts, feelings or sensations.

Max: And that’s mindful observation unlocked right there! As soon as we can experience it as one part of us holding another, it becomes way more possible for us to do this. Can you describe a few of the times you’ve done it lately?

Ara: Mm yes, well this last week or so we’ve had the amusing image of James and myself in our tiny studio caring for five fractious kids. First we got sick, then this heatwave hit, and perhaps because you’re all finally feeling safe enough, there have been a whole lot of feelings around for everyone. The minute one of you starts crying it sets the others off, and it’s often hard to tell who is actually struggling, and what the problem is.

Max: Nice image. I’m not sure what I think of myself as a screaming child!

Ara: It fits with the tower idea too, like we’re finally safe enough to go back to our foundations, to rebuild them in a way where all of you are welcome, and all of each of your feelings are welcome too. No wonder there’s a lot of feeling there when you’ve been keeping them crushed down all this time.

Max: But we’re still not adept – shall we say – at locating the source of the feeling or what needs to be done about it.

Ara: It’s a wonderful process for me, coming to each of you in turn, exploring where you’re at, helping you to finally feel held and heard.

Max: I’m not sure whether James agrees with you about the ‘wonderful process’. He compared it to the time when our electrics went off, and he just had to turn all the fuse switches off and then flip them back on in turn, to determine which one was tripping the circuit breaker. He wishes he could just switch us all off and then back on again in turn to find out where the trouble is and fix it.

Ara: A very James response. And you know sometimes his approach reaches one of you when mine doesn’t. He’s more skilled at finding the humour in the situation, for example, which can often cut through the struggle. With Beastie that sense of the deep respect he has for her is a big deal.

Max: But you are badass with patience. I have no idea how you do it. 

Ara: I’m so glad that I can. It seems like I just know… you know that this is part of the process, that we will find our way through it, and I can help you to slow down and put a big space around it.

Max: The other night with Fox, you were looking out of the window together. It was one of those times where the trauma feelings kept flickering up in our body like lightning strikes. Each time we felt calmer, it would flash again. We were all so sick of it: just so tired, so desperate for some rest.

Ara: I held Fox under the big sky, and we just watched it happen, like watching a real thunderstorm – something we all love. Each time the trauma flashed: a moment of fear or shame, attached to a distressing thought or sensation, we named it and noticed it go away. And we remained watching the sky till the next one happened. It was like the lightning was the thought or sensation, the feeling the thunder.

Max: Which is mindful observation precisely isn’t it? To notice the thoughts, feelings, and sensations without following them or attaching to them, and without resisting them or trying to get rid of them.

Ara: James did it a different way with Jonathan later. We tried to enjoy a novel but the flashes started up again. They lay in bed together and James got curious about the feeling. What is this emotion we’re so terrified of when it flashes up? He helped Jonathan to get curious too, to feel safe enough to go towards it instead of closing his eyes, backing away, and putting the duvet over his head every time the feeling flashed. The image was of James holding Jonathan by the hand and helping him look under the bed or in the closet to check for monsters.

Max: That time when they tried to go towards the feeling there was nothing really there.

Ara: Other times there is something, and we’ll talk you through practices like focusing, or imagining it as a cell in front of us, in order to explore the feeling at a distance. Other times working through Janina’s befriending questions have helped you to feel held and heard when you’re struggling. The creative part – which I really love – is shifting the container: finding out what’s needed this time. And then that attunement feeling when you hit on just the right approach for this part on this occasion.

Max: If it was me I’d grasp hold of that – the goal of attunement – wanting to get it right. But that would fetch us right back where we started wouldn’t it?

Ara: I fear so. The beauty is in the process, not just the endpoint, as Meg-John and Justin would say about sex of course! Also, Janina points out how moments of rupture and repair are vital for building trust. So times when James or I ‘get it wrong’ but are able to realise that – or you are able to tell us – then we can acknowledge that and apologise and get curious with you about what would work better. Those times are perhaps more helpful than the times we ‘get it right’ first time, in building that sense of ‘earned secure attachment’ that he and Beastie discussed.

Max: Like when he joked that he wished we’d all calm down a bit, and Fox got the grumps with him, because they’re trying really hard to bring their difficult feelings to him now and not just be this easy, delightful kid.

Ara: The fact that Fox could express that and he could hear it and reassure them was so valuable. It’s like in therapy: rupture and repair are often the most helpful moments in building trust and showing us where our struggles are and how they manifest in our relationships.

Max: I’m thinking that too, how such moments in our inner system reflect struggles we have ‘out there’.

Ara: Always so helpful to see how things play out in here, and how that relates to how they’ve played out in the past, and how they play out in the rest of our life.

Max: So here we’re saying that dual awareness unlocks mindful observation for us. If we conceptualise it – and feel it – as a containing part of us holding another part. Then it becomes possible to sit still and observe the thoughts, feelings, and sensations with open curiosity, rather than getting caught up in them or trying to get rid of them.

Ara: Back to holding the golden object, yes. Sometimes we can just feel that sense of holder and held in silent sitting, often we use slow, gentle self talk to guide ourselves through it: like a guided meditation you might listen to. 

And I think again that the compassion piece drives the mindful observation. Because we love you so much, James and I are genuinely curious about you all and how you work. We really want to learn you better, to earn your trust, to improve our bonds with you. 

It makes sense that it’s a slow process though. As Janina says, it was adaptive in your early life to avoid comfort and self compassion, and to shame yourself and self judge before caregivers or others could find you lacking. It was also adaptive to distrust others as potentially unsafe and uncaring: to assume they will likely disappear or let you down.

Max: So hard for us now to trust even inner parts to really be able to hold us and hear us.

Ara: Such trust has to be slowly earned and built. Janina says that child selves need a palpable sense of someone very glad to see them, tender when they are wounded, unafraid when they are hostile. They need the same experience to be repeated many time over in order to trust it.

Max: That is the sense we’re developing, slowly.

Ara: I know you prefer to go fast, my little fleer.

Max: Janina says ‘slower is faster’.

Ara: She does indeed.

Embracing uncertainty

Max: So the final aspect of mindfulness that plurality seems to help us is with embracing uncertainty. This is what we talk about in Life Isn’t Binary with Alex. People – particularly in the west – tend towards binary thinking, polarising into us and them, right and wrong, good and bad… and me and not-me, I guess.

Ara: Exactly, and as Alex said in that book and elsewhere, trauma makes us polarise even more. In Life Isn’t Binary we explored various alternatives for non-binary thinking: the in-between or middle way; both/and instead of either/or; and holding multiple stories simultaneousy: embracing the paradox and uncertainty of the situation.

We’ve already explained how Janina’s plural perspective helps us to find a middle way between rejecting or disowning parts of ourselves – on the one hand – and overly identifying or merging with them – on the other. Instead of repressing emotions or reacting out of them, we can see all feelings as communication from traumatised parts and move towards them.

Max: Dual awareness is a both/and approach right? We are both the part holding and hearing the traumatised part, and we are the part being held and heard.

Ara: Yes. A misunderstanding about plurality that we’re always keen to challenge is that the aim should be to ‘integrate’ our fragmented selves into a singular self. Janina sites trauma scientist Daniel Siegel as making a strong case against defining integration as fusion. Instead he says that integration required differentiation and linkage. Before we can integrate any two phenomena we have to differentiate them as separate entities, then we can link them up. So instead of either rejecting them or merging with them, we can both discern the separate parts and (re)connect them together.

Janina also talks of holding the bothness of ourselves as one physical individual – in terms of our body and brain – and the fact that that body/brain is fragmented and holds many parts of different ages, stages, attachment styles and defensive responses. That way we get to a sense of ‘we together’ not each part ‘abandoned alone’. 

Max: That helps us to tolerate and understand the unnerving sense that we contain such radically opposing capacities. For example for the last year or so we’ve felt impossibly fragile, as well as knowing that we can be pretty robust. And now simultaneously we can feel that vivid sense of being cradled and of cradling.

Ara: Yes. For quite a long time we felt each one of us come to the fore separately, never together. It’s been under two years that we’ve come to sense two of us together simultaneously: initially mostly when we wrote dialogue in our journal, then increasingly in verbal conversation between our parts, and now much of the time there is a vivid sense of two of us present at once.

Max: What about embracing paradox and uncertainty.

Ara: I have a few thoughts about this. One relates to the cradle of kindness. While we were building that cradle together – bringing each of us forward and nurturing the bonds between us – we were terribly polite to each other, in a way.

Max: Yes, there was a weird sense that we agreed on most things, even though we knew that we were radically different characters, driven by very different motivations.

Ara: That loving kindness between us that we so desperately needed perhaps required us to all pull in the same direction for a while.

Max: And there’s a sense of our inner system replicating early outer ones, where it didn’t feel safe enough to ‘rock the boat’, and we were all very scared of hurting each other, or of ‘ruining the day’ for other parts. Each of us tried to remain in our most palatable forms: Fox being delightful and pretending not to be scared, Beastie being forthright but never letting herself fly off the handle, and so on.

Ara: This last month we’ve noticed less politeness, and much more sense of the inner conflicts being available to us.

Max: As soon as it began you took that as a good sign.

Ara: I’m sure it is. Because Pema and Janina agree that embracing uncertainty, being comfortable with not-knowing, and holding paradox are vital life skills. We’ve written before about the Buddhist teachings on accepting praise and blame, success and failure, pleasure and pain, fame and disgrace as part of life, in fact questioning which counts as which.

Max: Who knows what’s good or bad?

Ara: Janina talks about how all of us contain the seeming opposites of vulnerability and control, shame and pride, longing to be seen and to be invisible, preferring closeness and distance, clinging to others and pushing them away. Understanding our plurality enables us to contain all of that within this system, and work with it to ensure everyone is heard and has their needs respected, rather than pretending that everybody wants the same thing.

Max: Going back to each part as a trauma response pattern, she suggests that attach wants help, love, and protection. Fawn wants to please. Fight wants control. Flight wants safe distance. And freeze wants to stay invisible.

Ara: Although in our case freeze did set up our Instagram account.

Max: To share pictures of animals, not of us though. Although we do occasionally allow Tony to get a selfie in!

Ara: The ability to tolerate paradox and to embrace uncertainty is so vital in the work we’re doing. For a start, as I said before, what we’re doing requires adaptability: an ever-shifting container to hold and hear parts in the way they need each time they are present. That’s much like how actual parents need to adapt how they respond to their different children, in different emotional states, and as they grow over time.

Also there is a huge paradox that learning to do things differently to how we’ve done them in the past can actually cause more tough feelings before we get to a point of feeling more able to deal with them. This makes sense because we’re letting go of our long-held habits and survival strategies, with only faith to go on that the newer ones we’re developing are really going to be more helpful.

Janina describes the paradox that as soon as we relax our anxiety escalates, because softening, letting our guard down, and trusting ourselves or others, have always felt dangerous.

Max: That’s one I experience a lot.

Ara: Pete Walker likens trying new habits to going to the dentist. You know that it will bring more pain in the short term, but less in the long term. 

Max: The area of life that happens in all the time at the moment is around boundaries. We’re trying so hard to honestly let people know what our boundaries are around the type and amount of contact we want. We know that such things should be consensual: that people in our life shouldn’t ask of us to have more contact, or contact of different kinds, than we actually want. That would be just as non-consensual as asking a partner to have more sex, or sex of different kinds, than they actually want.

But pretty much every time somebody assumes that we’ll want a kind – or amount – of contact that’s more than what we want, we go into a trauma response. It can take hours, even days, to process the fear/shame feelings and to formulate a reply to that person which feels both kind and honest.

Ara: I’ve held you through that one a few times haven’t I, using the befriending questions?

Max: Yep, I know where it comes from now: all the times my boundaries have been violated. I’m so scared the person will just push through, will annihilate me, if I hold my boundary. And I guess Jonathan – our fawn part – feels as though we need to give people what they want or they’ll abandon us.

Ara: Luckily we have Beastie now who can bring clarity and protection to those situations, and Tony who doesn’t mind being ‘a bit crap’, rather than feeling he always has to go the extra mile for people who aren’t treating us very well or respecting our boundaries.

Max: But we notice the paradox that doing the thing that’s better for us in the long run, can bring up more trauma and pain in the short term. So we can’t use the intensity of our trauma feelings as any measure of how well we’re doing at all this.

Ara: That can be really confusing love, no wonder you feel frightened and self-doubting at times. This work requires such a leap into the unknown.

Max: Now then, you know that you can always get me on board with a Frozen reference don’t you?

Ara: Just let it go Max-y *chuckles* You are so our Elsa. 

Plurality helps us to be with those paradoxes and uncertainties. Of course parts of us are soothed by us holding our boundaries, but other parts of us are scared by it because people have pushed, or rejected us, when we did that in the past. Parts of us long to trust me and James to hold them through this time, and other parts are very reluctant to trust. Parts of us would love to expand out into the world again, and other parts are terrified by the prospect. As Janina says, it’s about being up for engaging with all those parts, and about having a steady inner presence to hold the bothness. 

Coming home

Max: Nearly there Ara. D’you wanted to finish with coming home?

Ara: It seems appropriate. Just click your heels three times Max-y! Yes this was one final theme we saw in Janina’s plural/trauma writing that rang bells with our Buddhist reading. In fact the Wizard of Oz reference is apt.

Max: It’s one of many childhood tales where a person travels to a fantasy land and meets all these characters, but then has to come back to the ‘real world’ and ‘grow up’. 

Ara: Winnie the Pooh, Peter Pan, Labyrinth, Alice in Wonderland, the list goes on and on. An alternative plural reading of such fiction is that in childhood we have this capacity to be all these parts, with different characteristics. Our culture – for the last century or so – has forced us to kill off those capacities in order to be what we perceive as ‘adult’: a singular, consistent, rational, self. 

Max: Many of the so-called ‘adults’ are causing untold destruction at the moment in the name of keeping hold of that way of life.

Ara: It relates also to the ways that ‘the other’ has always been portrayed as more ‘childlike’ or ‘primitive’ in order to justify oppressing them: women, disabled people, people of different races or nationalities, the working classes.

So perhaps we might want to flip the ‘home’ that Dorothy longs to return to as Oz, rather than Auntie Em’s. Whatever the case, welcoming home is a key theme in both plurality and Buddhism. Janina says:

“Resolution of past painful events cannot truly be achieved without reclaiming the lost children and disowned parts of ourselves, extending to them a helping hand, welcoming them ‘home’ at long last, creating safety for them, and making them feel wanted, needed, and valued.”

Max: In many of her case-studies Janina encourages clients who are holding traumatised child-parts to show them that they have a safe home which they live in now: like to literally to take them around that space.

Ara: We do that too. Looking around our room and telling the stories of various objects can be a soothing and grounding activity for our traumatised parts. We even bought an armchair which we felt was a good representation of me and James, as the chair we go to when we needed to be heard and held.

Max: That was the most money we’ve ever spent on ourselves, other than for our top surgery which brought Jonathan forward, and for the fox tattoo on our arm. How interesting.

Ara: Inner parents and children are worth a few quid it seems!

Imagining the fantasy home that we all live in together, and where each of us are in or around that home, can work in a similar way to looking around our actual home.

Max: Finding Jonathan a place in the kitchen – the heart of the house – has helped him a lot lately. He can nourish us all, and listen to all our feelings as he cooks without getting overwhelmed by them.

Ara: It’s such a good alternative to the chalkboard room where he was disconnected from us all, and stuck trying to figure out all that confusing emotional input. It’d be great to keep talking between us about our roles and spaces within that imaginary home.

Max: Recently a plural system tweeted about how many plurals imagine a house like this, some larger innerworlds or mindscapes.

Ara: Shaping our imaginary homes is a nice way of reshaping our inner system along different lines to those that originally shaped it, having gone all the way back down to our foundations. Moving between fantasy and reality in this way is something we’ve always found very helpful.

Max: Like tuning into what our fantasies tell us about where we’re at, what our fears and yearnings are. And also using fantasies as ways to deliberately try different ways of relating.

Ara: Recently we tried deliberately meeting all of our ‘shadow’ sides in fantasy. That was powerful. 

I also wanted to mention somatic elements to our work here: increasingly embodied touch is something we now bring into the holding and hearing time.

Max: Mm, like self-talk, nurturing self-touch is not something that people are encouraged to do. It’s seen as pretty weird.

Ara: We need a whole further post to cover how solo talking and solo touch are stigmatised, while talking and touching with others are encouraged. And if you are going to solo-touch, then erotic touch is allowable, but not nurturing touch: cuddles, strokes, and the like. That’s similar with fantasies too, few people try nurturing fantasies even though they might try erotic ones. Sari Van Anders’ theory would suggest that we should treat the solo and partnered, and the nurturing and erotic, aspects of our experience as equally valid.

Max: How does the welcoming home part relate to Buddhism Ara? 

Ara: I’m reminded of Manu Bazzano’s work on hospitality. In Buddhism the aim is to be able to welcome all sentient beings: the image of inviting them all into your home for a feast. That’s one that Jonathan would like. Islamic poet, Rumi, captures a similar idea in his poem The Guest House, which Zen Pencils did a great comic of here: very plural.

James and Beastie didn’t love Janina’s idea of the ‘getting on with normal life’ part. But towards the end of the book she suggests ‘host’ as an alternative word for this part: like they are hosting the other parts, and their body is literally a host for all. Janina says that you need a host, otherwise the kids feel ‘home alone’.

Max: This sounds like what Beastie and I were discussing in our accompany not abandon post. If we can welcome all of our parts home, then we’ll be better able to welcome all sentient beings, because there’s nothing ‘out there’ that we aren’t somewhat familiar with ‘in here’. Part of why the outer world has always been so frightening to me is that I was encountering things out there that I was terrified of in myself: particularly other people who criticised me, became angry with me, or demanded too much of me.

Ara: Recently we realised that the responses you fear when we hold our boundaries are other people becoming furious, or them feeling abandoned. Interestingly those relate very much to the ways in which our Beastie or Tony might respond: our two most disowned parts.

We can see plural work as a way of welcoming all parts of us home, and mindfulness as an act of hospitality towards ourselves, no matter what. Janina suggests that if we do this work it will have a knock on effect on our relationships with others as well. We’ll be better able to tolerate them not being there, and keep our hearts open when they are.

Check out the previous two blog posts in this series to find out more about the theory and practice of plurality and trauma. For much more on plurality, check out the plural work page on our website.

Patreon link: If you liked this, please feel free to support our Patreon.

Plural tag: This post was written by Ara and Max.

The post Plural mindfulness / mindful plurality 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?

The post Fighting or Feeding Your Demons? It and Facing up to Historical and Intergenerational Trauma appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Why regret?

Intersectional feminism and other social justice movements remind us that we simply can’t help feeling and acting in racist, misogynist, classist, homo/bi/transphobic, ableist, etc. ways because we live in a society that is structurally racist, misogynist, and so on. Relatedly we’re never going to behave in a perfectly consensual way in a culture which is steeped in non-consent, based as it is on some lives, bodies, and forms of labour being valued far more highly than others: a system we’re all implicated in and can’t escape. Also – as Sarner’s article highlights with the example of a man who experienced extreme poverty going on to impoverish his own kids in a different way – we all operate under intergenerational trauma. The trauma of unjust and non-consensual culture – and the ways of treating people that engenders – has been unwittingly passed on to us and shapes our own ways of doing things, in ways that become habitual for us.

This is why the ideal of having no regrets isn’t going to work. Individualistic culture gives us the message that we – as individuals – could and should be able to choose to be good, nice, safe people who never do any harm and therefore need have no regrets, but this would be impossible. Indeed, the idea that we – as individuals – are good, nice, and safe, and are only capable of helping – never hurting – others, is one of the most dangerous ideas around. It prevents us from seeing these systems and structures of injustice and how they operate through all of us all the time. It leads to us denying and minimising the harm that we do in ways that hurt those we’ve already hurt all the more.

So it’s vital to regret on a political level: to notice where we’ve been implicated in harm, to take responsibility for the impact of our actions – however unintentional – and to keep asking the question of how we can collectively work to do things differently.

An Alternative to Blame and Shame

As Sarner suggests, regret is also vital on a personal level. Embracing the inevitability of regret – and finding ways to practise regret – offers an alternative to blame or shame, which are our go-to responses. When our actions have harmed others we either focus all our energy on blaming someone or something else for it and defending ourselves because we must be seen as a good person (by ourselves and by others). Or we go the other way and focus on shaming ourselves: holding ourselves entirely responsible, assuming this means that we’re utterly flawed as an individual, and continuing to beat ourselves up – often for years or decades. Frequently we oscillate between the false binary of blame and shame: it must be all your fault, or all my fault. Both blame and shame operate from that individualising perspective, failing to recognise the inevitability of hurting and being hurt by each other within the toxic cultures we operate in. Neither generally results in us acting any less harmfully in future.

Shame can be just as much a defence against responsibility as blame. We can give off the message to others that they must never let us know that we’ve hurt them because we can’t cope with seeing our capacity to cause harm. This kind of fragility can mean that those who are marginalised, oppressed, or harmed continually have to do the emotional labour of protecting those who have done the harm from this knowledge, shoring up their belief that they are really good people.

The culture of individualising – and of binary blame and shame – exacerbates the tendency to operate in this way. When people recognise a bad situation, the answer is often to search for one individual to hold responsible and to publicly blame, shame, and exclude, rather than to looking for the problems in the wider system and culture that enabled these dynamics. Fear of being identified and rejected in this way results in other people feeling even less able to be honest with themselves and others about their harmful actions. But as authors like Brené Brown have pointed out, we’re all going to mess up, we’re all going to get it wrong, and we’re all going to fail. Trying to avoid doing so limits our creativity, our potential, and our relationships with others. These things are inevitable and we need to cultivate a culture where it’s possible to bear this truth, and to be open about our mess, mistakes and failures.

Regret practice

Given the powerful forces pulling us to deny our harmful actions and/or to disappear into shame, how might we find another way with regret? I’m increasingly thinking that – given that these problems are always systemic, structural, and cultural – if we are to shift them then we need systems of support, structures, and micro-cultures in order to we do things differently. We can’t just rely on some kind of willpower or changing ourselves as an individual, as some forms of self-help, therapy, and mindfulness suggest.

I was re-reading Pema Chödrön’s book Start Where You Are and was struck by a ceremony she describes which is done in some Buddhist monasteries on the days of the new and full moons. I like the idea of rituals that mark specific times, like the changing seasons, or the phases of the moon. It seems like a way of connecting back to the world around us, as well as being a helpful reminder to reflect on certain things regularly: providing a structure. While I haven’t done this practice with others yet, it certainly has scope as a collective activity, and it’s possible to feel connected to others who may be doing the same – or similar practices – at the same time.

Regret ritual

The four stages of the ritual are:

• Regret – noticing what we do and putting it down
• Refraining – not doing your usual habit
• Remedial action – doing some practice to support us to do things differently
• Resolution – gently and openly committing to doing things differently

I imagine that I’ll adapt these stages differently each time I do the practice, but these are the kinds of things I’ve been playing with so far. Generally I’m taking an hour or so on the evening of the new and full moons to do this. First I set myself up with everything I need, creating a space for the ritual, maybe lighting a candle and taking a few breaths to ground myself. Then I do something like the following.

Regret

I’ve found it helpful to start by journaling about the things I regret – either everything that occurs to me or focusing on a particular theme. If you did the practice with other people you could start by telling each other these things. In between rituals you could keep a note on your phone of things that occur to you to reflect on, so you already have a list. It’s all about gently noticing the habits of thinking or behaving that we fall into which hurt ourselves, others, and the wider world. The first time I did this practice, I noticed that writing things down didn’t connect me enough with the feelings, so I also sat quietly for a while, remembered the events I regretted, and let myself feel my response in my body.

Refraining

Instead of launching into acting, we start by refraining. It’s a bit like the idea in medicine ‘first do no harm’. Often when we feel bad about something we’ve done we immediately rush to rectify it, or to get forgiveness from the person we’ve harmed, often regardless of whether that would be the best thing for them. This can end up requiring others to do even more emotional labour, or even retraumatising them. When harm has happened perhaps instead we can slow right down and refrain from acting until we can see the situation clearly, and know that we’re acting out of care for the others involved rather than trying to make ourself feel better. It can also be useful to reflect on why you did whatever you did: was there something you wanted from acting that way which you could notice if it came up again and refrain from? In the practice this phase might involve slowing down to really notice where we’re at with what happened and what we feel capable of for now.

Remedial action

This might be a practice that supports you now in doing things differently, like a compassion meditation, or putting yourself in the shoes of the other person or people involved. It could be planning what you might do to support you doing things differently in future: for example planning to explain the situation to trusted friends and get support in what you do next; or committing to learn more about an area where you’ve messed up because you didn’t know enough about it; or planning to do something you know to be helpful in a different area. Something that I’ve found supportive at this phase is to remember times in the past when I’ve felt similar confusion, guilt, shame, or whatever, and to imagine sending support back to those versions of me, as well as to other people who I know – or don’t know – who may be caught up in similarly complex situations.

Resolution

I found journaling helpful at this stage again to write down some resolutions, and to try to synthesise it into a couple of key points that I wanted to remember until the next ritual. You could also make something visual to symbolise what you want to refrain from and what you want to resolve to do differently. It could be creating drawings, or choosing objects like stones, buttons, or tarot cards that symbolise those things, which you leave somewhere you can see them every day. You could move your body in some way to represent what you want to refrain from and resolve: maybe some particular music or song to represent each one. Whatever works for you.

At the end you could take some more breaths, blow out the candle, or do some other grounding practice to mark the end of the ritual, perhaps inviting yourself to feel gratitude for the people, practices, and ideas that support you.

Cultivating the practice

I’m thinking that it might be useful, each time, to check out my notes from the previous time/s, in order to remind myself of my habits and resolutions. The ways we cause harm can be extremely hard to face so – as well as going gently and kindly with ourselves and remembering the wider situation we’re all operating within which makes this so difficult – it might be helpful to do this practice regularly in a way that builds over time: maybe not looking at everything all at once in a way that would just overwhelm us and prevent us from wanting to look at it again. Teachers, therapists, or supportive groups could be helpful if we get into territory that feels too hard to bear alone.

Find out more

I’ve written elsewhere about how it’s useful to sit with our role on all sides of the drama triangle (victim, persecutor, and rescuer) personally and politically, as well as how it can be helpful to connect with both our privilege and oppression. My social mindfulness zine also covers this in detail, and staying with feelings includes practices for how to stay with the emotions it brings up.

The post Practising regret appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

In this new zine I discuss both why we get so shut off from our feelings in a wider culture which values some emotions far more highly than others, and how we can go about shifting our patterns of avoiding and fighting some feelings, and craving and grasping for others. It covers both therapeutic and spiritual practices for staying with our emotions.

You can download or read the zine here.

The post New Zine! Staying with feelings appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

As you can see, the session gave me an excuse to delve a little deeper into the history of self-help books, to understand more why they came to be the way they are and what is so problematic about that. I also managed to chart one potential future trajectory of self-help, building on this criticism. For this I particularly considered the writing of Oliver Burkeman: one of my favourite discoveries over the last couple of months thanks to his entertaining and radically different approach. I’ll outline some of his ideas here so that you can see what an alternative to conventional self-help might look like.

A bit of history

Examining the history of self-help we can see that books in this genre have tended to be of two types. The first type – empowerment self-help – emerged in America after the great depression and drew on the New Thought movement which believed in the power of positive thinking. Such books held out the promise that by imagining good things and striking the right attitude people could bring what they wanted to themselves: wealth, friends, success, etc. The second type of self-help became popular in the late sixties and seventies. Know as victimisation self-help, books in this category tend to blame the wider world for any problems that individuals have. Akin to the twelve step programmes for addiction, these books are concerned with reassuring readers that their difficulties are not their fault but down to something beyond their control like having toxic parents or a disorder or disease of some kind. Power is located outside the individual.

In the 1980s and 1990s there was a backlash against victimisation self-help and a return to an extreme form of empowerment self-help which argued that any problems were down to the individual and could be fixed by positive thinking. For example, a quote in the bestseller The Secret by the author’s fellow self-help writer, Bob Proctor, says “Why do you think that 1 percent of the population earns around 96 percent of all the money that’s being earned? Do you think that’s an accident? It’s designed that way. They understand something. They understand The Secret, and now you are being introduced to The Secret.” The Secret in question is the New Thought law of attraction, that successful people bring positive things to themselves merely by thinking about them.

Clearly both these forms of self-help are problematic, and together they set up a false binary around human struggles which is similar to the either/or view of mental health which I’ve discussed elsewhere. It seems that we have to believe either that we are personally responsible for all our problems but that we can fix them by changing ourselves, or that the world is responsible for all our problems but that we are powerless then to do anything about them. If we buy into the empowerment way of seeing things then it easily slips into victim blame, whereby we regard everyone, including ourselves, as to blame for any problems in life. If we buy into the victimisation way of seeing things then we have to believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with us and give up any sense that we could do anything about our difficulties.

A third way? Oliver Burkeman

In recent years it seems that a few authors have been looking for a kind of third way of doing self-help: a way that involves breaking out of this problematic binary. What I have called anti-self-help self-help starts from a criticism of the assumptions of the self-help movement in general. It asks questions about whether it is actually good to strive for the things that self-help suggests that we strive for: happiness, wealth, success, a romantic relationship, etc. Are these good things to have and, even if they are, is striving for them the best way of going about it? Anti-self-help self-help locates any problems that we have in the wider society that surrounds us, the messages we receive from it, and how we relate to these, rather than seeing us as isolated individuals responsible for everything that happens to us. But, at the same time, it sees us as actively engaged with this wider world and able to engage with it in different ways, rather than as powerless.

A great example of such anti-self-help self-help is the writing of Oliver Burkeman. Like his Guardian newspaper column, This Column Will Change Your Life, his first book, Help!, presented an analysis of existing self-help books, attempting to pull out actually useful suggestions from the overwhelming mass of contradictory messages that he found. His second book, The Antidote, builds of the criticisms of self-help that he came to when writing Help! and suggests a radically different approach. Positive thinking, argues Burkeman, actually makes us suffer. The empowerment self-help movement has got it completely wrong. What he offers in its place refuses the disempowering position of victimisation self-help, but instead embraces the potentials of what he calls a ‘negative path’. This draws on a cluster of approaches taken from philosophies from Buddhism to Eckhart Tolle, the Stoics of Ancient Greece to the Mexican Day of the Dead. What these have in common is that they all do the opposite of ‘positive thinking’, instead turning to face the difficult stuff of life.

Thus Burkeman argues for the benefits of meditating on the inevitable fact of our own mortality. He critically evaluates the way in which we tend to react to ‘bad things’ in our day-to-day life, and considers alternatives where we recognise our own role in categorising what is good and bad and trying to get all of the former and none of the latter. He explores meditation and building the capacity to be with difficult feelings, turning towards the things that scare us rather than away from them. He considers the power of just getting on with tasks we are avoiding, rather than assuming that we have to ‘find our passion’ or ‘get motivated’ before we can do anything. He explores the value in considering the worst that could happen (and whether what is happing is ‘just bad’ or ‘absolutely terrible’) as well as asking yourself whether you have a problem right now, in the present moment. He questions who this self is that we are trying to improve through self-help, and wonders whether it might be more useful to reflect on whether such a thing really exists in any meaningful sense, rather than assuming that it does and engaging in a futile quest to make it better.

I loved The Antidote because it resonates so well with the answers (and – perhaps more usefully – questions) that I have come to through my own journey through the ways in which psychology, psychotherapy, philosophy, and sociology have understood human suffering and what can be done about it. Like my work, the book is particularly rooted in Buddhist philosophy and it is very nice to see that engaged with so thoughtfully, rather than just being offered as another set of techniques to make people happier.

The anti-self-help self-help manifesto

Where to from here? I would like to see many more anti-self-help self-help books which start from a critical stance towards the self-help industry and offer something more valuable to people who want to think about how they are living and how they might do it differently. Such work would, I think, share some of the following things in common:

• A critical stance towards conventional self-help
• A critical stance towards normative taken-for-granted ideas about what makes a good person and a successful life, and whether happiness and wealth are the best things to be striving for
• An informed understanding of the problems with telling people that they are flawed in some way and need to change by striving after something different
• Drawing on research evidence from psychology and sociology, as well as philosophical understandings from across the globe (not just the ‘west’), in order to suggest what might be helpful to people
• Locating people’s problems in the inter-relation between them and the world around them rather than entirely internally or entirely external – regarding people as biopsychosocial beings rather than focusing on one of those aspects (bio, psycho, social) to the exclusion of the others
• Suggesting ways forward which involve engaging with the world differently, and recognising how difficult this can be and arguing for wider social change, rather than putting all responsibility on the individual
• An ethical commitment to putting something different ‘out there’ even though the publishing industry conservatively continues to try to publish the same kinds of messages as before

I’d be very interested to hear from others who are trying to write blogs, books, articles, etc. in this vein, and to continue to discuss whether a ‘negative path’ or ‘anti-self-help’ does present a valuable third way.

Find out more

There is more about self-help with useful links to other work here.

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