Happy New Year in the big bright world

A blessing and a curse: you are not alone

Here we are at the start of Year 3 with Write it Out!

Terribly exciting, really. Honestly I’m not at all feeling the energy of “let’s go over what we did in the past year,” even though conventional wisdom tells me that that’s what we’re all doing right now I guess.

But honestly, what I’m more interested in is: what am I going to do Now?

I think I have a sense of it. I believe I’ve found that a once-per-week cadence is the right one for me (my unannounced holiday sabbatical notwithstanding), at least until and unless I start charging. Given that I’m reluctant to do that (and that I still have a place where you can support me financially if you wish, on Patreon), it might be time instead to look at the Kinds of Things I Want To Do Here, and how to schedule them.

What it appears to be so far is something like:

1. Posts about therapy and trauma stuff, both my sense of practice and my personal therapy journey

2. My thoughts on artistic expressions and media, particularly the Old Art, New Eyes series

3. A reflection and usually recommendation of someone else’s writing on a topic that matters to me

4. Heavy-duty personal shit that I am, in the moment, writing out.

5. Bonus fiction by me, which will ordinarily be locked over in the Patreon.

That’s five big categories, not four, which would be the easier one to schedule around. Still, I like the flexibility here. I’m hoping to alternate these, perhaps not perfectly, but to notice these general categories and try to provide indications of what sort of thing you’re in for this week.

This week, for example, it’s trauma stuff.

Back to that subtitle: you are not alone. What do I mean by that this time?

A thing has been coming up pretty frequently for my clients lately, and I’ve felt it come up for me, too, for pretty much years at this point. There’s a lot of ways this thing might be described: late-stage capitalism is a popular one. “People suck” is one I hear from some folks. Systemic racism, institutionalized oppression, the billionaire problem, or put more simply, What The Fuck Is Wrong With Everybody.

The point is, I’m seeing clients who are suffering from their own individual issues, but none of them are suffering in a vacuum. And I think it’s really irresponsible to try and make them believe that they are.

I remember reading some time ago a criticism of the, shall we say, white therapeutic industrial complex, that the more mainstream forms of therapy tend to place all the pathology and responsibility for healing on the individual. Like maybe you get to blame your parents and your upbringing a little bit, or perhaps intergenerational trauma gets acknowledged if you have the right intersectionality, or maybe, if you’re really lucky, your particular axis of oppression gets a nod from the Liberal Guilt Machine. Maybe you get a land acknowledgment, or a lawn sign, or a ramp that’s too steep.

But honestly, much of the time, the therapy world is about how oh so very hard you, the individual just trying to survive this hellscape, must work to do so.

It’s all fucked up though, right?

Don’t get me wrong: I think it’s important to instill a sense of personal responsibility in people. I think it leads to greater personal and interpersonal effectiveness to help people see what they do have control over, and what they don’t. To help them learn to direct their energies appropriately. To restore their sense of agency.

All of these things are really important!

That said: I also think it’s vitally important to acknowledge and validate the fact that the world we’re living in currently is quite, quite fucked. And while a huge amount of that is outside any individual’s immediate control, I think it’s crucial to validate for people that yes, indeed: a lot of these things are Really Bad, and being continually stressed and hampered by them makes sense.

Another criticism of modern therapy I’ve heard is the one where its primary purpose is to help people better cope with the world as it is, and be effective worker bees and feed the capitalist system. Work 40+ hour weeks! See your loved ones and your home only in the dark! Send your children to be raised by strangers! Leave your animals alone in the house all day! Have a 60-hour-a-week job that doesn’t pay you enough to actually live in your own apartment! This is NORMAL.

And I cannot possibly argue with this. It’s bananas, but it’s all true.

Here are some other things that are true:

1. Most folks out in the wild world are currently pretending that COVID-19, to say nothing of RSV, flu, the common cold, norovirus and any number of other viral menaces either don’t exist, or don’t matter. People with disabilities, immunocompromised folks, the elderly, the young, and really the everybody because we don’t truly know how common it is yet for any given covid infection to turn into persistent brain damage, simply have to forgo social interaction entirely if they want to stay safe.

2. Kids are going to school every day in the US while school shootings just…continue to happen. Thoughts and prayers, everybody.

3. The election season is ramping up, and it seems pretty clear that the same guy who incited an insurrectionist riot denying the election results and killing several people not only got away with it, but is one of the major national parties’ frontrunners for the presidential nomination next time.

4. That same shitstain on humanity’s stacked Supreme Court has gutted the rights of women everywhere in this country, to the point where ten-year-olds are being made to flee their home states to get abortions from their rapists.

5. Climate change is so profoundly, demonstrably real at this point that anyone denying it is simply a dangerous person, but the U.S. is still clearing natural gas exports and pipelines.

There’s plenty more; this post is plenty angry enough and I don’t want to belabor it. But my point is that there is a lot going on in this world — and a lot more ways for every one of us to constantly hear about all of it than ever before. This combination of things, as many smarter people than me have written, makes an especially potent recipe for widespread mental health challenges.

So if you’re feeling a little nuts…it’s not your fault.

The weight of the entire world’s suffering has always been too much for any one person to hold. It’s hard enough just to hold your own damn suffering. But it’s what most of us are being asked to do, every day, from every corner of our lives. And we want to! We’re compassionate people, who want to help the world, right? That’s the idea, anyway.

I recognize that I’m sort of coming at this from two different angles. On the one hand, it’s unfair, untrue, and the height of privilege to suggest that every individual person is solely responsible for their own mental health, and that proof of that mental health consists in the capacity to operate “healthily” within standard societal expectations. There are far too many intersecting, systemic, societal problems, up to and including the collapse of civilization, to ethically continue to promote such a model.

On the other hand, I suppose I’m suggesting that part of the problem is all of us knowing too much. I wonder what would happen if we included, as part of the personal responsibility we insist on, the idea that we should pay a bit less attention.

I couldn’t care less

I think about this expression sometimes, which I heard a lot growing up, along with its cooler-seeming but less semantically-correct brother, “I could care less.”

Could you?

It’s a question I put to clients sometimes: is there a way that you could care less about this, without it doing damage to you? Sometimes it’s not possible, of course: a person truly needs to leave a relationship, or a job, or a state, because deciding not to care won’t solve the problem, just prolong it. For some people there are oppressions they experience daily simply by virtue of who they are; those things cannot be ignored. Other times, trying to care less about a thing dulls a person’s senses, becomes a form of dissociation that deadens them over time.

But sometimes, one functional solution to the overwhelm of Holy Shit Everything is to begin to focus your attention and concern differently.

I’m not suggesting this is easy: in and of itself, the practice could constitute a big piece of therapeutic work. Letting go of things we’ve wrapped our identities around can be painful, but is sometimes necessary. Recognizing that a particular person or even group of people in your life can’t or won’t change, and letting them go, is difficult. Deciding what you’re going to keep putting energy into and what you’re not is a process we go through over and over again in life, and it’s one of the hardest things we do.

And then, of course, there are the things we don’t have a choice not to care about. The systemic oppressions some of us face just by being in the world. The need to make a living in some way or another. The people who matter to us most.

Zoom in, tune out, turn on

There are people out there whose raison d’être is activism of some kind or another. These days it’s so visible and omnipresent that it’s hard to ignore. But we can’t all be Greta Thunberg. (That would be weird.) I don’t think I’m alone in feeling vaguely guilty, a lot of the time, for not having the temperament, energy, focus, and perhaps courage to make a huge difference in the wide world. In fact, I often feel quite impotent in the face of it all.

The one thing I’ve found that helps at all is focus closer to home, do one or two things with conviction and purpose, and try not to pay too much attention to all the other stuff.

Like I said, it’s not easy. But much like “don’t think of a pink elephant” makes you think of nothing but, tuning out from the things you can’t control is more a matter of turning your attention towards something else. And when you start to recognize things and especially people that are important to you, and to put your energy into the places you most desire and that you feel best doing…well, it can be a kind of magic. And a nice side effect? You start helping people more, too.

Not everyone. Not world-changing. But a few people. A community garden. A local theatre company. A shelter you volunteer at. A kid you become an honorary uncle to.

It’s harder to see this incremental changes, this little-helps, at first. But it ends up being much more personally fulfilling — and indeed, more actually helpful — than the overwhelm, depression, and inaction that has taken me at times when the world has simply seemed Too Much.

I don’t know, for example, what to do about the Mental Health Care System; I am not officially a part of it, so all I can do is pick up the clients who run from it toward something else. But what I can do is help those individual people, to the extent that they are in a place to be helped by me.

I can’t save everybody, as I have found out repeatedly in my life. But like the man in the starfish story, I can make a difference to that one.

Well that took a turn

This went to a different place than I expected when I started, but I’m glad it did. It’s hard to know where to go from “hey, the world is colossally borked, don’t let the therapy world make you feel like you’re crazy for noticing/not being able to handle it all that well!”

But I suppose when I’m saying is that there is a path out, if a difficult one, that’s about learning to conserve and direct your attention.

What do you do when the overwhelm gets too much?