Here’s a video of Alex and me talking about the book, what it means to us, how we struggle around self-care ourselves, and what we do about that.

The post Book Out Today: Hell Yeah Self Care! 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.

The idea is that they follow you round for a couple of hours while you take them on a tour of places that are important to you, walking and talking. For my journey I knew exactly where to start: getting my hair cut at the marvellous queer and trans friendly hairdressers Open Barbers. I’m really grateful to Felix for coming in early so that we could begin there. Afterwards I took James and Michael down to London Friend: the LGB&T health and well-being centre where I work as a counsellor once a week. And then we headed down past Kings Cross to the canal where I often walk along to the Open University branch in Camden, to put on events or host meetings.

We talked about lots of topics including therapy, love, gender, sexual and relationship diversity, the need (or not) for labels, kink, and what kind of cake I prefer! You can also see me enthusing about my favourite character from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, trying to explain Buddhist mindfulness in 60 seconds, and talking about the excellent new Open University module ‘Mad or Bad’ that I’m currently involved in producing. A lovely day and a great conversation.

I totally love the video. I’m just a little concerned that I come over like that ‘brilliant’ guy from The Fast Show. But maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

The post New video: All about love, sex, gender, Buffy and barbers appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

My project

My project is quite an unusual one for an academic. It doesn’t involve designing and conducting experiments or interviews, but it does include several different kinds of research. It fairly rarely involves me writing in academic language, but it does draw on academic theory. It doesn’t require much in the way of funding, but it manages to reach a lot of people.

My project is to produce self-help with a difference. A lot of self-help is produced by people without much knowledge of theory and research; mine is rooted in what we know from academic studies and philosophical ideas, and tries to communicate this in an engaging and accessible way. Most self-help takes a rather individualistic approach to people: ‘this is what is wrong with you and this is how to fix it’; mine takes a more psychosocial perspective: ‘this is what’s wrong with wider cultural assumptions, systems and structures, and here are some ways in which you might navigate them differently’. A lot of self-help promises a one-size-fits-all solution; mine emphasises diversity and the fact that different things work for different people and at different times. I’ve sometimes described it as ‘anti-self-help’ because it doesn’t locate our problems in us as individuals, and its starting point is a gentle criticism of mainstream self-help.

A research project?

But how is the project of producing self-help a research project, and what methods does it use? Actually my project weaves together various kinds of research and method in order to further the main goal of creating useful self-help materials. You can see this illustrated in the image below.

Drawing on academic research and theories

Starting in the top right of the diagram, perhaps the most obvious way in which my project is a research project is that it draws on academic research and theory: notably the research that’s been done on self-help itself. For example, academics have studied which self-help techniques are helpful to people struggling with different issues, and they’ve also done more critical research about the assumptions and norms that are perpetuated by mainstream self-help. Some of my projects are also attempts to develop methods that get the findings of a particular study – or the ideas in a particular theory – out to the general public in an accessible way. For example, The Secrets of Enduring Love presents the findings of Jacqui Gabb’s OU Enduring Love? Project. Queer: A Graphic History (with artist Julia Scheele) is a comic about what queer theory is and how it might be useful in people’s lives.

Researching self-help

Moving anticlockwise to the top left, I’ve also conducted my own research into self-help, which informs my wider project. For example, Ros Gill, Laura Harvey and I are writing an academic book based on our research on sex advice. The method for my part of that was to study 62 sex manuals (I don’t recommend it!) to discover the messages they tend to give people about how to have enjoyable sex. My critical analysis of these books, and other media, informed the sex advice book that I’ve recently written with sex educator, Justin Hancock: Enjoy Sex (How, When and If You Want To).

Community-based research

Down into the bottom left corner, much of my self-help is informed by the research I’ve conducted over the years with members of gender, sexual, and relationship diverse (GSRD) communities. I’ve always felt that the common psychology question of how GSRD can be explained is a problematic one, and that it’s more valuable to ask instead what can be learnt from people who are doing gender, sexuality, or relationships in different ways to the current ‘norm’. As Darren Langdridge, Helen Bowes-Catton, and I have explored in our collaborative work, the methods and theories that allow you to openly reconsider what sexuality and relationships can be are very different to those that start from a closed definition and investigate within those pre-established boundaries. In my book Rewriting the Rules I drew on a lot of this kind of research to give people a sense of all of the different ways in which they could manage their relationships. There’s a feedback loop here too, because I want to keep learning from my GSRD readers. I’m currently starting work on a second edition of Rewriting the Rules and I’ll be conducting survey and focus group discussion research to find out what readers found useful – and less so – to inform how I edit the book.

Reflection and client-work

Finally, moving around to the bottom right, my self-help is also grounded in methods of personal reflection and therapeutic work. My own experience – and that of my clients – is a constant testing ground for what is actually useful in people’s lives. For example, I publish a lot of zines to take people through activities that I, and clients, have found helpful. I’m currently doing some autoethnographic work (that’s where you do in-depth research on your own experience) about what people can learn from tuning into their sexual fantasies. The first glimpse of this work can be found in The Psychology of Sex, which is coming out in 2017. My forthcoming books on gender and on moving beyond binaries with Alex Iantaffi also draw on our own lives and reflections, as well as years of therapeutic work.

Finally, moving back to the centre of the diagram, there’s a kind of research method involved in the creation of the self-help materials themselves: perhaps more akin to the research conducted by people in the humanities, particularly in creative writing. I’m constantly engaged in a dialogue with people about what they’d find most useful, and what formats would be most accessible to diverse audiences, hence my experimentations with different kinds of books, blogs, podcasts, videos, comics, and various other media.

There’s a lot of joy, for me, in the dance between the five related sub-projects depicted here. I enjoy moving between methods, topics and formats – from talking with clients, to collaborating on a zine, to attending a community event, to recording a podcast, to reading a colleague’s latest paper, to writing my personal journal, to analysing some blog posts about a particular issue, to speaking on a panel. I find a deep pleasure in the way that all of these parts of the project weave together and inform each other in a kind of ongoing conversation, and I love that this way of doing things may help to rewrite the rules of what academic work looks like as well!

Find out more:

Keep your eyes peeled for the new megjohnandjustin website which Justin Hancock and I are currently putting together. There’s also more information about my anti-self-help project on the CCIG website.

Other blog posts I’ve written on self-help are:

• Self-help on the radio!
• Self-help
• Oliver Burkeman and the future of self-help
• Self-help or not self-help?

My self-help books are:

• Rewriting the Rules
• Enjoy Sex (How, When and IF You Want To)
• How to Understand Your Gender
• The Secrets of Enduring Love

My self-help zines are:

• Staying with Feelings
• Hell Yeah Self Care
• Plural Selves
• Make Your Own Relationship User Guide
• Make Your Own Sex Manual
• Understanding Ourselves Through Erotic Fantasies
• Social Mindfulness

The post My self-help project 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.

You might also be interested in the other interview she’s conducted so far with Prof. Emmy Van Deurzen, foremost existential psychotherapist in Europe.

Briefly tell me your story (who are you? Where do you come from? Where are you going?)

I’m Meg-John Barker (MJ for short). I grew up in Bradford in the 1970s and 80s. I studied psychology at university, did a PhD in that area, and stumbled into working as a lecturer. But my passion for exploring and writing about people’s relationships with themselves and others didn’t really develop until I was around 30. It’s been a gradual process of allowing myself – more and more – to study what really fascinates me, drawing on the ideas and approaches that make most sense to me, and writing in the ways that I feel I’m best at and find most fulfilling.

In the last few years I’ve been writing more about more self-help style books – and other materials – for general audiences rather than for academics. I see myself going increasingly in that direction, weaving together my therapeutic work with my writing, and producing the kind of creative and critical self-help that I think would be useful for people. I’m particularly excited about projects involving comics and animations, for example, or mashing up self-help with other genres such as ghost stories, or memoir.

What do you see as your true purpose in life?

I see my purpose as being somebody who brings together and synthesises a lot of information and ideas about the topics that I’m passionate about, and then finds ways of putting that across which will be accessible and engaging for folks. It’s all about connection for me: connecting with the people who I learn from through reading, conversations with colleagues, and my therapy work; and connecting with the people I’m talking to through my writing, workshops, mentoring and counselling.

Another important element for me is that my work locates individual experiences in wider culture, and encourages people to engage critically with the messages around them, rather than getting caught in a spiral of blaming themselves – as individuals – for their struggles.

How did you discover this purpose?

I’m sure that a major element has been my ongoing reflection on my own life, and what has been helpful to me: wanting to put stuff out there into the world that might be useful to others who are struggling in ways that I’ve struggled.

Also there’s been a process of gradually allowing myself to pursue what I see myself as being best at. We receive so many messages about what we should do in life, or what a ‘proper’ person in our line of work should be doing. I try to hold those messages lightly and focus more on the question of what seems most useful and valuable. I know that it’s when I pursue those projects that I feel most alive, and that what I produce is of the highest quality.

What are the key qualities in yourself or others that you value and why?

The key qualities for me would be walking the walk, balancing criticality and kindness, and engaging with others in accessible and inclusive ways.

I value people who put their ideas into practice in their own lives as much as possible and who reflect on their own experiences to inform their work so that it’s grounded in what actually works in practice. I think that kindness is probably the most vital human quality: it counters the self-criticism that lies at the heart of most mental health problems and emotional suffering; and it counters the judgement of others that is the root of so much human conflict. So I value people who treat themselves and others with kindness, and manage to balance that with a critical approach towards the wider structures, systems, and dynamics that often exacerbate suffering. Finally, I value highly people who are able to put forward their ideas in ways that are engaging to others, and include everybody, so that people can take away practical and helpful suggestions, and feel embraced rather than alienated by what is being said.

Did you always have such a clear and honest voice? If not, what changed? How did you develop your voice?

I think as a kid I did have a tendency to point out things that I found baffling in the world in something of an ‘emperor’s new clothes’ manner! However, the strong messages I received at school about how you had to be in order to fit in managed to stifle that for a long while. At the same time the experience of being bullied also gave me a much better insight into how other people might be struggling and how to engage with people more compassionately.

I think my voice is still developing, and it comes best when I manage to get out of my own way. By that I mean dropping all of the ideas I have about who I should be and what I should be doing, and allowing myself to go with my gut and write and talk about what feels most important to me, in the way that feels right, and drawing on the ideas that I find most useful.

Are there times, places or people where you find it harder to maintain the integrity of your voice?

Definitely. It is when I find myself caring a lot what other people think of me so I start trying to speak in a way that I think they will approve of, or saying what I think they want me to say: trying to be ‘cool’ or ‘nice’ for example, so that other people will think well of me. That’s a real ongoing struggle for me, and for many of us I think. I try to remind myself of the following things:

• That doing that generally makes what I’m saying or writing lower quality
• That even if I get the approval I’m looking for it will be precarious because it’s not based on who I really am, and the other person or people may feel let down when they get to know me better!
• That I can’t be all things to all people and it is totally fine if some people really connect with what I produce, and other people don’t like it – how could it be otherwise?
• That everyone makes mistakes and has limitations – and if somebody does criticise what I’ve done in ways that are spot on it is fine – and important – to own up to that.

What advice would you give to someone seeking a more authentic life?

I think the most important thing is developing kindness for yourself, and that is incredibly hard and a lifelong journey. When we can treat ourselves kindly we can manage to get out of our own way more and speak more authentically. We’re also less concerned with putting on a front for other people, or justifying ourselves, so we’re more able to hear what other people are saying, to connect with their experience, and to act in the most compassionate manner in any given situation. Practically I find Buddhist mindfulness and journalling to be helpful daily/weekly things to do in order to develop more kindness towards myself and openness to others.

The post Purpose and integrity appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

When I saw that the main characters in Inside Out were a person’s emotions I knew that I absolutely had to go see it. I wasn’t disappointed. In fact several times I was moved to tears by how familiar the experiences were, and by this hugely important, complex, and rarely-expressed message being communicated so simply and profoundly in a ‘kid’s film’.

If you’d rather not be spoilered for the movie then please do go see it before reading the rest of this post. Also do be aware that it may well tap into lots of different emotions as you’re watching it – if you’re anything like me – not just the joyful ones. As we’ll go on to see that may not be a bad thing!

The rest of this post is divided into three sections:

• Experiencing all of our emotions
• Shutting down our emotions
• How to sit with our emotions: A practical guide

Experiencing all of our emotions

Inside Out follows an eleven-year-old, Riley, and her emotions – Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Anger and Fear – as her family moves from Minnesota to San Francisco. Previously her inner world has been dominated by Joy. Joy has made it her business to ensure that Riley remains as happy as possible, building up a store of mostly joyful memories which have, in turn, shaped her personality. However, following the house-move, many of these memories become tainted by Sadness – who can’t seem to stop herself from touching them and turning them blue.

In her attempts to prevent Sadness from causing any more damage, Joy manages to get both of them ejected from the control room to the outer reaches of Riley’s inner world. This leaves Anger, Fear and Disgust in charge while Joy and Sadness try everything they can to get back before Riley runs away from her new home.

The message of the movie is that we require all of our emotions: not just the so-called positive ones. We soon realise that Joy’s tendency to ignore and suppress Sadness is actually getting in the way of them finding their way home. It seems like things work pretty badly when just one of the emotions takes charge, and much better when they all work together through being equally valued.

One of the most poignant moments in the movie is when Riley’s old imaginary friend is devastated to realise he’s lost his last chance ever to be with Riley. Joy’s attempts to cheer him up or force him to keep going fail. However, when Sadness sits with him and shows that she understands how hard it is for him, he’s able to experience his own sadness, to cry, and eventually he’s ready to move again.

The theory that kept coming back to me as I watched the movie was Emmy Van Deurzen’s compass of emotions. In this, Van Deurzen imagines the emotions on a wheel which we travel round all of the time, moving from ‘high’ feelings like joy and pride, through anger and fear to low feelings like sadness, and then up the other side through envy and hope, to joy again.

Critically, Van Deurzen argues that we need to be able to experience all of the emotions to go around the compass like this. If there are emotions which we shut down or avoid then we’re likely to get stuck in certain places. Paradoxically, as in Inside Out, if we disallow one emotion – like sadness – we’re likely to become stuck and find that we stop experiencing joy much too. If we lose the capacity to experience some of the emotions entirely – as when Sadness and Joy are lost in the film – we risk falling into depression and all of our emotions becoming shut off. This is rightly depicted as the darkest moment in Inside Out.

It may not be that we always move in the same direction on the compass, or that certain emotions always follow others. Indeed, as Inside Out shows, we can often experience seemingly opposing emotions at the same time (e.g. joy and sadness, anger and hope, fear and determination). Indeed, when the first memory comes in that reflects these kinds of mixed feelings we see that it is perhaps even more beautiful and valuable than some of the ones which reflected only one of the basic emotions on its own.

Shutting down our emotions

The problem is that, through our lives, most of us learn that certain emotions are not acceptable: either to express or – often – even to experience.

This is what moved me to tears several times during the film as I remembered moments in my own childhood and adolescence when – like Riley – I learnt that certain feelings were unacceptable. It made it even more powerful that – for me like Riley – a critical time was the sudden experience of starting a new school with strange and different rules. However, of course, these moments are different things for different people, they happen at different points in life, and they can be gradual, or sudden, or both.

The film underlines what a terrible impact such messages can have as elements of Riley’s personality – that we’ve previously enjoyed watching – turn grey and gradually disintegrate entirely when her emotions are lost. Most devastating for me was the moment when Goofball Island disappeared. Now that it wasn’t safe for Riley to experience all of her feelings there was no way that she could goof about in the way she used to as a child.

Where does this shutting down come from? We can see it on multiple levels like those I wrote about in the recent zine that I posted about here.

On the outer level our wider culture gives us strong messages about which emotions it’s okay to feel and which it isn’t. Generally in western cultures we’re encouraged to have happiness and ‘positive’ emotions and not ‘negative’ ones. The British ‘stiff upper lip’ also discourages expressions of fear. And messages also differ depending on our individual identities, with certain emotions being seen as more or less acceptable for people of certain genders, classes, ages, or nationalities, for example.

On the next level in, our communities and institutions also reinforce many of these messages. In the movie we see how, in her new school, it isn’t acceptable either for Riley either to show too much enthusiasm for the things she’s passionate about, or to show sadness about what she’s lost. The cool girls will judge her for it. It’s easy to find ourselves joining in this kind of tone-policing in our communities – of whatever kind – whereby certain emotions are deemed unacceptable to admit to or express – for certain people or across the board. It’s worth being mindful of this whenever we find ourselves judging how somebody ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ feel about something.

At the interpersonal level we learn a great deal about acceptable and unacceptable feelings from our close relationships, particularly from the family and friends who are around us growing up. In Inside Out Riley’s parents inadvertently give her the strong sense that they appreciate her being happy and strong during the house move. She takes this as a message that it isn’t okay to be struggling in any way about it. Riley is even described as their ‘happy girl’: fixing her in this way. We then see how Riley’s – and Joy’s – attempts to keep her joyful tragically have the opposite effect. By trying to sustain her joyful persona in the face of great pain she actually becomes angry, anxious and cut-off, and risks losing the love of her parents as they don’t recognise her any more. In another key moment Riley’s old friend doesn’t seem to realise how envious Riley will be of her new friendship. When envy doesn’t feel acceptable, Riley goes straight to anger, and ends the friendship.

How to sit with our emotions: A practical guide

Fortunately for Riley, Sadness and Joy are able to make it back to the control room – once Joy recognises the value of Sadness. Then Riley is able to take the risk and show her parents how sad and frightened she is. Even more fortunately, perhaps, her parents are able to accept her emotions, to share some of their own, and to let her see that they love her as much when she’s sad as they do when she’s happy.

Most of us are not so lucky. Our parents – and the other close people in our lives – live in the same wider culture as we do with all of its crappy messages about unacceptable feelings. They’re also part of institutions and communities that have done a number on them. And they’re in their own family systems wherein certain emotions have been deemed too dangerous or threatening. So they may well have responded to moments like Riley’s by giving us a clear message that our fear, sadness, anger, joy, disgust, or other feelings, were not something that they could be around, or even that they couldn’t love us if we expressed them.

We will have internalised this. Either we’ll have managed to find a way of shutting down those emotions entirely, or – perhaps – in trying to shut them down we’ll have managed to make them shout even more loudly so we’ve become defined by them. Or a bit of both. There are so many ways that this can go.

The urgent question is what we can do now. Here we are, as adults, with all these imbalances, exaggerations, and silences in our emotional states. What can we do about it?

The answer that many different therapies, meditation practices, and belief systems have come up with is the idea of ‘sitting with’ our emotions. I’ll briefly describe one of these practices – a person-centred therapy technique called focusing – here, but there are several similar practices in other therapeutic and spiritual approaches if this one doesn’t work for you.

Focusing reveals perhaps the main flaw which I found in Inside Out which is the fact that the emotions are located in Riley’s brain and not in her body. It’s good that Inside Out doesn’t buy into the popular idea that emotions and rationality are separate things. Instead it expresses the existential view that we’re always in emotion: propelled towards things or away from things by our feeling states. However, the film does buy into another ‘dualistic’ split: that of separating the mind and the body, and seeing the mind as the most important bit. Actually, this kind of focus on the mind can be part of how we lose touch with our emotions: We stop being able to tune into our bodily sensations and the important things we can learn from these about our feelings, and instead try to figure things out, or fix things, on a purely intellectual level.

In focusing practice the attention is right on these bodily states. It’s most basic form goes like this:

• Sit comfortably and quietly and bring your attention slowly to your body and how it’s feeling.
• Ask what wants your attention. Focus in on any sensation that you notice in your body (a tightness of the throat, a clenched stomach, or a sense of emptiness, for example).
• Say ‘hello’ to that sensation: welcome it warmly, like Sadness sitting down with Riley’s imaginary friend.
• Really listen to the sensation, try to find the best way to describe it (e.g. it’s like a dense ball stuck in my throat).
• Check back in with the sensation to see whether that description fits well enough, or whether you need to change it or add to it (e.g. it’s not just stuck, it’s like it’s rammed in there, like a cork in a bottle).
• Sit with the feeling, with interested curiosity, not trying to change it, or to force it to communicate: just being with it gently and curiously. Try to understand it from it’s point of view. Notice any words, images, or metaphors that come to mind. In focusing books and websites you can read about different questions that you could ask it at this point, if it feels okay to do so.
• When it feels ready to finish you can express gratitude to the feeling, and to your body, and reassure it that you’ll keep coming back to listen to it – and other feelings – in this friendly way.

Going back to Inside Out this is a lot like Riley actually giving kind attention to each of the emotions inside her whenever any of them want her attention, instead of putting one of them in charge, or trying to get rid of others. However, when we do this practice what we often find is that the feelings we become aware of are the ones that are preventing us from feeling other feelings (like Joy in the movie). You might start feeling a sensation of fear or sadness, for example, and then a strong feeling of anger or disgust at yourself for having that feeling. When we have these feelings-about-feelings the thing to do is to sit with them just as gently and curiously as with the original feeling. It can help to remind ourselves that – like Joy in Inside Out –  these feelings are trying to keep us safe, even if what they are actually doing is the opposite.

Of course, given how many years most of us have spent suppressing and avoiding certain emotions, it can take a while to open up this kind of line of communication. Practices like focusing can feel very unfamiliar at first and can take a while to get the hang of. There are ways of doing them with a friend, or with a therapist, if that feels easier and more supported than doing them alone.

However I am convinced of the power of these kinds of practices. Elsewhere I wrote about what happened last year when I sat and noticed a couple of feelings that usually felt too overwhelming, or too insignificant, to sit with.

Earlier this year I went to a focusing workshop. In the first practice I found it fascinating to see how my own throat tightness shifted and opened up when I finally gave it some gentle attention. In the second practice I used focusing to go back to a specific memory when I hadn’t treated myself very kindly. sitting with the memory I suddenly became aware of a side of myself that I hadn’t seen there before: A playful side of myself that wanted to do something silly and outrageous to cut through the situation. I got a strong image of Mr. Tickle from the Mr. Men books. So much so that I went out a bought myself a Mr. Tickle mug the following week. Perhaps my own Goofball Island hasn’t been completely destroyed after all!

Find out more

The ideas in the post are also presented in my Staying with Feelings zine.

You can find out more about the compass of emotions in this book and video by Emmy Van Deurzen.

A great book about the messages we receive about emotions is Transforming Emotion by Glenda Fredman.

If you want to find out more about focusing practising, The Power of Focusing by Ann Weiser Cornell is an excellent introduction to it (and nowhere near as wacky as it looks from the cover!) There are also lots of resources on The Focusing Institute and British Focusing Association websites.

Note: Some of the images in this post are Copyright (c) 2015 The Walt Disney Company and Pixar Animation Studios, to whom I express my grateful thanks.

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For the last few months I’ve been thinking a whole lot about the social side of mental distress. It feels really important to me to recognise how our suffering is embedded within our relationship dynamics; our workplaces, communities and other institutional systems; and our wider society.

I often notice what a relief it is for me – and my friends and clients – when we realise this social element to our suffering: particularly how the self-criticism that we do so constantly is something that everybody else does as well, because we’re all in this self-critical culture. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with us. It’s understandable.

This week I’m speaking at a few conferences which touch on themes of inequalities, individualising and intersectionality, and on mental health and mindfulness. So I thought – instead of the usual stand-up presentation – I’d make a zine that captures my experiences of these things, and makes some suggestions about how we might creatively engage with them.

It was also a good opportunity – for me – to get back into making comics: something I’d love to do more of, especially now I’m working on a comic introduction to queer theory with a professional artist. Here’s one of the comics I made for the zine. You can download the whole zine at the end of this post if you’d like to read it more clearly.

For my zine, the comics really helped me to understand how intertwined all these social levels are – as are the inequalities that we suffer from, and benefit from, and the ways in which we are individualised and individualise others.

You can download the zine as a pdf by clicking on the link below. I’d suggest printing it out as a booklet to get the full zine experience – or just reading it online. There’s also a whole book on mindful therapy by me here (including more comics!) if you’re interested in reading further on the topic.

SocialMindfulnessZine

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First I need to come out. Coming out is something I’ve done perhaps more than most people do in one lifetime. However this time it’s a bit different. After much reflection I need to let you know that I am a shape-shifter. Transmogrifier, lycanthrope, trickster, chameleon: call it what you will. I have the mutant superpower of magically transforming to fit my surroundings.

In the rest of this post I’ll use my own example to illustrate how you might come to identify, explore, and embrace your own inner mutant superpower.

Which mutant super hero/villain are you?

There are two ways of figuring out your own inner super hero/villain nature. You can either start by exploring which characters particularly resonate with you, or you can start by examining your own life for clues. My own realisation involved a little of both.

Read it, watch it, draw it, write it, pin it

If you want to start with fiction then the trick is to delve into genres that appeal to you where characters have magical powers. The obvious examples are the DC and Marvel comic universes (and/or the movies and TV shows based on them), particular the mutant-packed world of the X-Men, or the many and various superheroes and supervillains in the Superman/Batman/Spiderman series. If that doesn’t work so well for you then the fairy tales and myths of various cultures are packed with different kinds of monsters and magical characters, as are fantasy fiction, horror fiction, and science fiction. Check out recent shows like Lost Girl, Penny Dreadful, Being Human, or Once Upon a Time, or long term staples like Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Star Trek, or Dr. Who. For me the Red Dwarf and Buffy the Vampire TV series, and the books of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, are rich sources of material.

While you’re reading, listening or watching, ask yourself which characters you’re particularly drawn to. Which do you find attractive? Which scare you? Which do you relate to? Which do you fantasise about or long to ship? Check out fanfic based on the shows, books or movies you like, or write your own. Doodle and sketch the characters that you’re drawn to. Use an app like pintrest to bring together pics and clips that appeal to you.

Dream Hunters fox fairy

For me I started connecting the dots when I remembered how much I was drawn to the fox fairy story in Neil Gaiman’s book The Dream Hunters, and to so many other stories about foxes, to the extent that I’ve planned, for years, to get a tattoo of a fox. I found myself linking that to the werewolves in Penny Dreadful and Being Human (the characters I relate to most in those shows). I also remembered how Mystique in the X-men, and the T-1000 in Terminator 2, had always held a particular horror for me. And I thought about how attractive I found Tom Hiddleston’s Loki, and the episodes of Buffy where characters cast a spell which made everybody fall for them, particularly Superstar. Perhaps this could be seen as a kind of simultaneous shapeshifting like the Camille episode of Red Dwarf where the pleasure GELF appears to each person as their object of desire.

Your actual life

The other starting point for exploration is your life. Think back to growing up: What survival strategies did you develop to get through the tough things you experienced? Were these visible or invisible to those around you (or a bit of both)? What patterns have you noticed in more recent years in the way you engage with the world or relate to other people? What makes life worth living for you? What is your worst fear? What would you like to have written in your obituary? Are there any superpower/mutant metaphors that fit these themes particularly well? Talk to friends. What do they notice about you? Which characters do they think you’re most or least like? What superpowers would they say that you have?

Or you might delve into your dreams. Do you have any recurring ones? Are there common themes in the abilities that you have, such as flying or having great strength? What are your nightmares, for example do you dream of falling or being stuck in slow motion? What do you fantasise and daydream about?

Chameleon changing colour

For me, I remember a moment when a partner said that I was a chameleon. Thinking back to childhood I recollect how isolated and alienated I felt when I changed school: how I didn’t fit in with any of the cliques and crowds there, just as it never made sense for me that we lined up separately as ‘girls’ and ‘boys’. At first I survived this by standing apart, but eventually the pressure was too great and I learnt – clumsily and painfully slowly – how to fit in. By my next school I was drifting from group to group and finding a capacity to fit with all of them. I also notice – on an everyday level – how easily I slip into different accents and ways of talking in conversation, depending on how the other person speaks. Certainly recurring nightmares involve going back to being rejected and on the outside.

Quiz time

If you want a quick way to explore these things you could just take a bunch of these handy online quizzes (there are lots with similar titles) and see what comes out:

• Which superhero are you?
• Which supervillain are you?
• Which mutant are you?
• What is your superpower?

Exploring your hero/villain sides

Once you’ve determined your mutant superpower/s, or the heroes and villains, demons and angels that you particularly identify with (there may well be more than one), you’re ready for a bit more exploration. The way I see it, every superpower has its strengths and limitations. The hero/villain binary is not necessarily a helpful one because – as more recent movies and TV shows have showed us – it’s rarely that simple. We can understand both the X-men who want to find a way to live alongside the humans, and the ones who want a complete revolution after years of oppression. We can empathise with the dark-knight version of Batman, or the common trope of the criminal psychologist and the serial killer as flip sides of the same coin.

Superstar episode of Buffy

In my favourite episode of Buffy, which I mentioned before, Jonathan Levinson casts a spell which makes him into a superhero, adored by everyone. However, in order to create a version of himself that is only the positive, strong, heroic parts, the other parts have to go somewhere. A shadow version is also created: in this case in the form of a real monster. You might think also Ursula Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea, who summons – and has to eventually face – his own shadow. Or the Confidence and Paranoia, Dimension Jump, and Demons and Angels, episodes of Red Dwarf all of which imagine the best and worst aspects of the characters being made real.

So a useful point of exploration – to consider yourself and to talk about with other people in your life – is what the hero and villain sides of your superpower look like. You can’t have one without the other: the difficult parts are so interwoven with the great parts that they can’t be teased apart. It isn’t even always obvious which aspects are ‘good’ or ‘bad’. But it is definitely worth being aware of the possibilities and pitfalls of your powers. Here are some of the positive and negative shades of shape-shifting.

Superstar

Thinking about myself as a shape-shifter, the positives for me – and I think for those around me – lie in the capacity to flexibly and fluidly adapt to situations. I notice how I can feel ‘at home’ in many different places and communities. I can often get excited by multiple projects – even those that aren’t obviously interesting to me – throwing myself in and investing in them.

Odo: A shapeshifter who uses his powers for good

Also there is the capacity to empathise with different people. That is definitely helpful as a therapist. I find it relatively easy to pick up on how somebody is feeling, and to understand their way of seeing the world if they’re able to let me in. I also think that a strength in my writing is that capacity to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously or to see things from ‘both sides’. And I hope that I have something to offer to conflictual situations as I can often put myself in the shoes of two or more people involved. I find it hard not to.

Monster

But shape-shifters in fiction are rarely positive characters. There are, therefore, many clues to the shadow side of shape-shifting abilities.

Mystique, T-1000, and Loki

First if we think of Mystique, T-1000, and Loki, these are all manipulators who non-consensually trick people into believing that they are other than what they are, for their own personal gain or to further wider goals. There’s very little real empathy involved here other than the small amount it takes to know what other people expect – or want – to see. So the shadow side of the trickster is to be mistrusted and treated with suspicion, to be two-faced.

I don’t experience my shape-shifting nature as deliberate. It feels much more like the werewolf who has no choice but to change every full moon, or the chameleon who can’t help but adapt their colour according to their surroundings.

Werewolf in Being Human

Different versions of myself feel drawn out of me by different people and situations, rather than me deciding – in any conscious manner – that I want to be a certain way. However, like Mystique, T-1000 and Loki, there is often a wider goal behind it: that is the desire to be liked and approved of: to belong. And although I don’t deliberately transform my shape in order to achieve this, it can have the same effect as if I did. I know how it feels to have somebody look at you in disappointment or disgust as they see another side of you than the one they’d come to know and trust.

I mentioned the helpful side of shape-shifting as a capacity for empathy. One flip side of this is that it’s easy to get so drawn into another person’s way of being, or way of seeing the world, that I become somewhat lost myself. There’s a risk that I become very much what they want me to be, but that that is unsustainable and eventually I shift again. Perhaps helpful in the short-term, but harmful in the long-term.

What is your kryptonite? Who is your nemesis?

Of course all superheroes and villains have materials which remove their powers, which send them spiralling up to dangerous levels, or which flip them into their shadow side completely. They have nemeses who wield such weapons and who wish to destroy them. This is another thing worth exploring and remaining aware of.

Kryptonite

 As a shape-shifter there are many dangers. You can become stuck in one particular self, which eventually becomes brittle and may break under the pressure of trying to keep static what is, by its nature, fluid. And, in a world that it very invested in authentic, individuals who can ‘find themselves’ or be ‘true to themselves’, it can be scary to recognise that there is maybe no real, underlying self. It can also be easy to slip into wondering whether maybe there is a ‘real self’ and that it is something ‘bad’: This is exacerbated, for me, if I know that people have stories of me which fix me in a particular way and which I have no control over.

Shape-shifters can also struggle with situations in which they’re called upon to be multiple sides of themselves simultaneously, or in quick succession. I can feel exhausted and confused at the end of a day when I’ve been with many different people – or groups of people – all coming from such different perspectives, positions, or levels of awareness. The other day I felt overwhelemed in a situation where three people were seeing things in very different ways and I found myself flicking faster and faster between each of them. I have an image – I’m not sure whether it’s from an actual film or TV show – of a shape-shifter trying desperately to morph into one thing after another, faster and faster, in order to find the ‘right’ shape, and eventually exploding, imploding, or dissolving into nothingness.

So my kryptonite would be becoming stuck – particularly in a self that I didn’t like or respect, or being called upon to shift too much or too quickly.

Awareness of the danger of becoming stuck helps me to remember to cultivate different sides of myself, and the different relationships, places, and projects which bring them out. It’s important to me to have multiple close people in my life instead of becoming focused on one. It’s also important to move between different spaces (particularly country and city) and to take on different roles and study different areas (e.g. moving between time each week where I’m writer, activist, therapist, and academic).

Awareness of the danger of shifting too much helps me to take time alone, which enables me to find some kind of equilibrium and equanimity when I’ve been spinning too fast. It reminds me that I need grounding, and I cultivate places, practices, and relationships which help me to do that. And it helps me to see the importance of boundaries, to prevent me from getting too lost.

Of course I don’t always get this ‘right’ by any means, but I feel like with each deepening of understanding I get a bit more of a handle on it.

Letting it go and opening up

In Frozen, princess Elsa has the superpower of being able to freeze things. When this harms her little sister, Anna, her parents hide her away, wipe Anna’s memory, and keep Elsa’s powers secret until she can get them under control. After their parents die Elsa has to become queen. She emerges from her room but tries to hold back her powers in any way possible. However, she can’t repress them forever. Eventually they explode out when she’s in an emotional state. She’s exposed as monstrous and, fearing the harm that her powers might do, she retreats to a solitary ice palace. There, at least, she is able to ‘let it go’ and stop holding back this vital part of who she is.

Eventually, with Anna’s help, Elsa is able to return to the world. It seems to me that Elsa finally becomes able to channel her powers when she is open about all of who she is with others, as well as about her own vulnerabilities and fears, and the shadow side of the powers. She needs to be okay with herself and prepared to connect with others. Paradoxically the powers are most dangerous when she attempts to force control over them or hide herself.

Whether we’re a shape-shifter or an Elsa, a hulk or a dark knight, an invisible person or a firestarter, it’s important to embrace our inner hero/villain and to find ways of expressing it to others.

Many thanks to Helen Bowes-Catton who started this train of thought, to Erich and Ludi because I’d never have got here without 9 Worlds, and to Melissa for making me think more about Frozen. The cold never bothered me anyway.

If you want to read more about these kinds of ideas, check out my zine on Plural Selves.

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Such a great way to end 2014.

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