Acknowledgments

Thank you to the many people who have been part of bringing this book into the world, who shared ideas, critiques, edits, support, and encouragement. I would like to thank my editor at AK Press, Andrew Zonneveld, for meticulous editing, for believing in the project from day one, and for kindness as the generative work took its twists and turns. Thank you additionally to Charles Weigl, Zach Blue, Molly Uzzell, Colin Beckett, Suzanne Shaffer, and the AK Press collective, who all work tirelessly to bring challenging, ethical books into the world and get them onto bookstore shelves and into readers’ hands. Thank you to Cindy Milstein and Tanya Andrusieczko whose editing of significant sections of the manuscript was indispensable, and to Nat Marshik, Shanaya Nelson, and Rebecca Coates for clerical, formatting, and proofreading support.

An enormous thank you to the contributors, Aravinda Ananda, Serena Bhandar, Alix Johnson, Natalie Knight, Ruby Smith Díaz, and the anonymous contributors, for sharing your wisdom and expertise in these pages. Special thanks to cover art designer Siana Sonoquie whose tremendous cover beautifully captures the spirit of the book. Thank you to Kit Dobson, Ben Korta, Wayde Compton, Agustina Vidal, Maryse Mitchell-Brody, Jeff Derksen, David Chariandy and Sophie McCall, Michael Barnholden, David Gray-Donald, Jónina Kirton, Larissa Lai, Proma Tagore, Benjamin Lefebvre, Marshall Soules, Steve Collis, Gillian Jerome, Tuval Dinner, Dorritta Fong, Laura Moss, Clarissa Rogers, the Institute for Anarchist Studies collective, and others, too many to name, for encouragement, advice, and belief in this work that helped me believe in it too. Thank you to Harsha Walia, Harjap Grewal, David James Hudson, and Gwen Benaway, whose generosity in reading and discussion at various stages of the project transformed the way I think, and for your willingness to turn toward and challenge me. I am grateful for your insight and generosity of spirit. Thank you to Proma Tagore and Yasmin Jiwani for critiques on an earlier project that significantly shaped the direction of this one. Thank you to all of my department and faculty colleagues at Douglas College, for cultivating a caring workplace. Thank you in addition to Deans Meg Stainsby and Manuela Costantino for support, and to my colleagues Janet Allwork, Liz McCausland, Dorritta Fong, and Wilhelm Emilsson, for kindness around accommodation when in their role as department chair, which made more of a difference in my life than I can properly express. Thank you as well to Dorritta, to Ivanna Čikeš, Jasmine Nicholsfigueiredo, Nancy Earle, Leni Robinson, Farah Moosa, and colleagues from both Douglas College and Simon Fraser University who have come out to events, lent their moral support and encouragement, and generally made this project more meaningful, and more possible, than it would have been otherwise.

I would like to acknowledge a significant intellectual debt I owe to the No One Is Illegal-Vancouver collective 2004–2009, including Harsha Walia, Harjap Grewal, Mandeep Dhillon, Andrea Lofquist, Valerie Zink, Magín Payet Scudellari, Tracey Jastinder Mann, Sozan Savehilaghi, Proma Tagore, Nassim Elbardouh, Cecily Nicholson, and others, who taught me much of the analysis that underpins this work and that continues to inform my thinking every day.

Thank you to The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University, including Hiromi Goto, Wayde Compton, Andrew Chesham, my amazingly encouraging and supportive mentor group, and the TWS 2018 cohort for helping hold up this project.

Thank you to Miranda Worthen, Simon Dougherty, Christopher Lyon, Ian Caplette, and Tasha Bassingthwaighte, for decades of ethical rigor and care in friendship that continues to help me learn and grow, as well as to David Zinman, Gillian Jerome, Swathi Nirmal, Kai Rajala, and Curtis Burrowes for insights that have helped shape this work. Thank you to Eve Rickert, AV Flox, Chelsey Rhodes, Gwen Warman, Pepper Mint, Chach M. Heart, Aida Manduley, Eva Blake, and the rest of the Badassery crew for sharing vital resources and for seeing together. Thank you to Rachel Zellars, whose McGill class on Black feminist theory and organizing was eye opening and worldview-shattering in the most necessary of ways. Special thank you to Kira Page, Alix Johnson, Jon McPhedran Waitzer, Avi Gross-Grand, Simone Lucas, David Zinman, Karine Rogers, Leetal Cuperman, Lily Schwarzbaum, the pod who taught and learned with me, and without whom this and much else would not have been possible.

Thank you to Dahlya Smolash and James Noyes, Leetal Cuperman and Dan Spiegelman, Shanaya and Shane Nelson, and Tom-Pierre Frappé-Sénéclauze, who have over and over again caught me when I fell, and whose immeasurable care, meals, laughs, and safe places to hide and heal have repeatedly set me back on my feet. I am more grateful to you than I can express. Thank you to Christine and Graham Lyons, Andrea Lofquist, and Aleks Besan, for enduring friendships that have helped in so many ways. Thank you to my sister, Dahlya Smolash, for lovingly putting up with me in the early caterpillar and pupa stages of this work (and generally), and for connecting me with Brian Goedhart and Pierre Larouche. Thank you to Brian and Pierre, Leanne Lloyd, Pam Hirakata, Morgan Kalani, and Corianne Bell for helping me recognize this path could be possible, and helping me heal enough to walk it. Thank you to my mother Hilda Smolash and my aunt Naomi Jacobson, to my cousins Ruth, Elana, and Dina Smolash, my uncle Alex Smolash and my aunt Henya Gordon, my brother Michael Smolash and sister-in-law Jen Green, and to my entire immediate and extended family whose values and ways of being in the world have shaped mine. Thank you to Tom-Pierre and to Kevin Lloyd Young, who taught me how trust feels. And thank you to my niece and nephew, my godson, and my chosen family kidlets, whose experiences and wisdom sparked several of the chapters in this book.

Thank you to the wide, only partly seen web of people whose economic contributions and moral and practical support have buoyed the project. To everyone who has helped, too many to count by name, you have my gratitude.

Thank you to the readers, without whom this book would not have been possible.

May we call forth one another; may we all nurture one another’s best gifts.

All errors and oversights remain the responsibility of the author.

Introduction: Nurturance Culture Means Holding the Circle

At Windsor House, a free school in Coast Salish territories (also known as Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), every child has an internal map of how harm is handled by their school community.1 In this school, the only public democratic school in North America and one of the longest-running brick-and-mortar free schools in the world, any student who experiences harm can “write up” the other person who they feel harmed them. When someone is written up, they are required to go to what the school calls justice council, which is a circle of their peers who then help repair the harm.

Going to that circle is not an option. It is a requirement for anyone who wants to be a member of the school community. This is especially notable because it is one of the only concrete requirements at a public, accessible, democratic school that has almost no coercion or compelling of any other kind. In the free school system, deeply invested in beliefs about autonomy and keeping kids whole, if a student wants to skateboard or paint all day, that is what they do.

In a community so steeped in an ethic of consent and self-determination, with so few kinds of ordinary, everyday compelling in place compared to regular schools, I was curious how this requirement worked. What is the relationship, I wondered, between the commitment to individual autonomy that is such a dearly held value of the school, and this justice council that can compel students to repair harm?

At the beach one day, while watching kids pull up seaweed and pile it into stacks, I asked my close friend’s twelve-year-old son, who goes to the school, “What happens if a kid who gets written up doesn’t come to council?” He barely skipped a beat before he answered, as though it was the most natural thing in the world, “If someone doesn’t go to council, council goes to them.”

A day later, I asked my friend’s nine-year-old daughter, who had not heard my earlier conversation, that same question. She too is a student in the school.

I got the same answer. She barely paused in her playing, glanced up, and said, “council goes to them,” as though this was the obvious answer to a silly adult question, and then immediately resumed her game.

What their answers say to me is that these kids experience justice council as self-evident and ordinary: when you hurt someone, you get called to council and you have to go. You are expected to make it right. This concrete, practical structure, and the kids’ regular use of it for handling harms large and small has, it seems to me, hardwired an ethical framework for a functioning, everyday model of interdependence into their assumptions about how the world “just is,” how reality works, and how human beings “obviously” get along.

Attachment theory teaches us that true autonomy relies on feeling securely connected to other human beings.2 Current developments in the field of attachment science have recognized that bonded pairs, such as couples, or parents and children, build bonds that physiologically shape their nervous systems. Contrary to many Western conceptions of the self as disconnected and atomized, operating in isolation using nothing but grit and determination, it turns out that close-knit connections to others are in large part how we grow into our own, fully expressed, autonomous selves.

It seemed to me, thinking in attachment terms, that there is a relationship between this requirement to heal relationships and the children’s sense of freedom to be themselves.

The students who go through justice council are not necessarily best friends and may not be freely choosing one another. They exist in relationship nonetheless. They decide how close they want to be, but an underlying sense of a shared humanity exists in a bigger container that can hold everyone in the school community, that can expect certain basic relational capacities from them—don’t bully, don’t gossip, don’t exclude peers when in group activities, don’t harm or violate one another—regardless of whether they are close, regardless of whether they even like one another.

At justice council, students are not punished. Punishment can disconnect people from empathy and lead them to focus on whether they got caught, or on shame, rather than on the feelings and needs of the people they have harmed. Instead, a circle of their peers listens as each of the people involved gets a turn to share what happened. Then the circle expects whoever caused the harm to mend it in a way that helps meet the needs of the person who was harmed. This, again, is not optional, but required.3

As my friend’s daughter patiently explained to me, her feet planted as she stopped swinging for a moment to help me understand, “The goal of justice council is to stop that same harm from happening again, and help them both feel good and stronger together again, so they’re not hurt by what happened.”

Kids at Windsor House use justice council often and easily, because they know they will be cared about, protected, and heard. They also know that the kid they write up will be helped and taught, not punished. These students reweave the fabric of their community as a routine part of daily life in this school, just as they are expected to take good care of their books or coats.

Imagine how this container for handling harm transforms the culture in which it is rooted. Imagine the kind of safety to be oneself that this container can create. Taking this further, and thinking about it in relation to our current political moment: imagine how this unbreakable feeling of belonging can provide those who experience it the security to stand up against harm when they are bystanders to it, or targets of it, knowing that their community has a way to grapple with it well. Imagine how it would feel to have no fear of social repercussions when standing up to violence, because a structure is in place that means their fundamental humanity and worth will be legitimated and taken seriously.

What would it be like to live in a culture where we all could be socially embraced in this way, where we could speak up about harm, could say no to it, without fear, because we know without question that no one in our community will dehumanize another? What would it be like to know without a doubt that the culture in which we live will require the one who causes harm to empathize with those harmed, grow, and become able to do appropriate repair, while humanizing that person too? What would it feel like to trust the fabric of our human community so fully that we could take the risk to belong in this way, belong as our whole selves?

While the attachment literature typically discusses secure emotional connection in the context of families or close intimates, this book proposes that the insights of attachment theory may help us recognize larger kinds of belonging—social, ecological—as well. It has become increasingly clear to me that the idea that we are “wired to connect”4 is helpful for understanding not only our families but also our broader human communities, as well as the deeply interwoven ecological systems within which we exist and without which we do not, in Judith Butler’s terms, “persist in existing.”5

If the insights of attachment theory are correct, it is quite likely that we do not have a choice in this matter. I see that as a good thing. We do not have a choice about whether or not we need air to live, and yet we trust that our next breath will continue to enter and exit our lungs while also not viewing this kind of trust as coercive; it is simply a condition of our existing. It is a foundation upon which our every independent action depends. Our physiological belonging in human and nonhuman communities, it seems to me, is something like breathing in the invisible substance that sustains our life. When we can recognize that fact, we can turn our attention to the quality of the webs that contain and sustain us, and grow their health and well-being, which is the same thing as growing our own.

In “just knowing” that when someone does not go to justice council, justice council “goes to them,” my young friends are learning that handling harm in a good way—one that recognizes the existence of the connected circle of human beings, and acts with that consciousness in mind—is essential for these kids to feel able to be themselves, to speak up about harm that occurs on their watch, to stick up for one another: in short, to become ethical, empathetic, trustworthy people.

This kind of secure connection, I believe, is related to, yet a distinct experience from, the more chosen forms of intimacy such as friendships, partnerships, or families. My friend’s daughter is learning—by doing—how to protect and strengthen the relational responsibilities that exist even with those she has not chosen as close friends. The school is creating a social fabric that fills in the space between “the close intimate whom I have chosen and care about” and “the complete stranger whom I have no obligations toward whatsoever.” The reason that this structure works is because it recognizes that each person is already inherently part of a larger unbreakable web of connectedness, and gives every member of the community the knowledge of how to mend that web on which human independence so fundamentally depends, and the obligation to engage in that mending when called to do so.

In a healthy human ecosystem, most interactions between human beings exist in this in-between area, in which we have relational responsibilities to one another regardless of our emotional closeness. In a functioning human community, we do not get to choose the baker, the butcher, the crossing guard, the person who sews the clothing or handles the sewage system that carries wastes away and the plumbing that carries clean water into our bodies, or the person who grows the food that keeps us alive, and they do not choose us. Yet in a healthy human ecosystem, we would know one another and understand how to live our relational responsibilities to one another. When we begin with this awareness of our already-existing interconnectedness, we can look at harm in an entirely inverted way, in which we are connected from the start. Harm, whether in the form of violation or neglect, is then understood as a harm to the integrity of those bonds, or as a failure to meet relational responsibilities, not only as a violation of a presumed disconnectedness.

Our bodies are not distinct and separate from the systems that sustain us but instead are dynamic, with air, nutrients, water, pathogens, sunlight, sweat, and wastes all continually moving into and out of us. Our nervous systems are not closed systems but rather are interwoven with those of other beings, as certainly as valence electrons connect atoms. This continual interwoven quality is physiologically necessary for all life. Our boundaries, understood in this way, are utterly necessary, but they are more like cellular demarcations in a larger liquid of life than they are like walls between cut-off individuals who can act without profound effects on one another. To bring this back to the example of the free school, the autonomy that these kids experience depends, it seems to me, on the container of the justice council, which, I would suggest, sits at the heart of any such community. Indeed, one might even argue that a community without such a structure is not a community at all, but a series of fractures just waiting to happen.

Under the stepped-up version of neoliberal capitalism that has been in ascendancy these last three or four decades, and a settler-colonial culture that has sought to dehumanize Indigenous Peoples in order to take control of land, these lived relationships are often erased from cultural awareness. Human dependency is converted into a market exchange that keeps us circulating the things we need to live while disguising or denying relational responsibility, turning us into “lone individuals” supposedly without need for others beyond a partner or atomized family.

At the same time, complex matrices of violence and oppression structure the cultures into which we are born, dehumanizing many people in the process. Social movements that challenge and refuse these forms of systemic violence also develop critical analyses, ways of understanding the systems of violence that shape the dominant culture.6 The expertise that has developed processes like the justice circle is most often generated by Black, Indigenous, and other POC feminist organizing and theorizing.7 To disrupt systemic harm requires growing the capacity to listen to analysis that allows us to comprehend such seemingly disparate structures as police violence against Black people, anti-immigration laws and border regimes, a colonial system that seeks to dispossess Indigenous Peoples, gendered violence, or ecological destruction. These systems of harm are all deeply interwoven, and we can learn from and listen to directly affected people who know the most about these systems of harm, who are producing theory and analysis as they organize.

Many of us feel these systems in operation around us, yet until these and other systemic harms are history, so to speak, we too are caught in their web. So we have to work together to see beyond our current social conditioning and ways of treating each other. This change is not about being “good people” in an individualistic sense. It is about strengthening our understanding of our position within these massive systems of power and oppression that structure social existence, so that we can better recognize systemic harm occurring, even though it is typically masked. We need to work to become better able to recognize it and then become able to say no to it.

For that to be possible, we have to push ourselves, collectively, to expand capacities for care and empathy, to learn how to listen to human beings who walk in the world with the physiological and neurological impacts of hidden forms of systemic violence. This will and must happen in an uneven and differentiated way. As adrienne maree brown proposes, “Where we are born into privilege, we are charged with dismantling any myth of supremacy. Where we were born into struggle, we are charged with claiming our dignity, joy, and liberation.”8

We need to think with complexity and nuance, and grow our ability to come to one another with open hearts and spirits about the ways in which we benefit and are complicit in harms not of our own choosing. If we become collectively willing to grow until we recognize even the most hidden kinds of ongoing systemic harms, and become able to support one another even as we challenge each other and struggle together, we will have found one part of the path to a healthy community that can handle these kinds of harms, both internal and external, without continual fracturing.

The opportunity to write Turn This World Inside Out arose out of an essay that I composed at a time when I wanted to make sense of several bewildering forms of harm that I had observed in my life and in the lives of people around me. To my surprise, this essay, “The Opposite of Rape Culture Is Nurturance Culture,” went viral and then grew into the book you hold in your hands. However, I didn’t write that essay because I felt certain, or wanted to explain, but rather for the opposite reason: I wrote because I was confused and trying to figure some things out. As it turned out, many other people were trying to figure out some of the same things. I would like to offer this book in that same spirit.

We will each come to nurturance in our own ways. As brown proposes, where we walk in the world with unearned privileges it is our role to unlearn and “dismantle myths” of entitlement, to reconnect with empathic capacities dulled by acculturation into dominance, and to become accountable. Several of the chapters in this book grapple with challenging acculturation into domination in masculinity and whiteness, as these are inflected within capitalism. Where we walk in the world as targets of systemic violence, we are tasked, as brown writes, “with claiming … dignity, joy, and liberation”; three of the chapters in this book speak of modes of this kind of claiming.

In keeping with the impulse to do this thinking in a relational way, with others who speak from their own social positions, especially when it comes to lived experience that I do not share, this book interweaves essays on nurturance culture with dialogue pieces that delve into some of the ways these questions are taking shape for people around me. The initial dialogue, with “John Snow,” is a creative composite piece formed out of conversations with several masculine-identified people who have shared personal inner transformation they have moved through as they read “The Opposite of Rape Culture Is Nurturance Culture.” While they chose to remain anonymous, my hope is that for masculine-identified readers who are coming to the idea of nurturance culture for the first time, being able to read how others engage with it may help build the sense that they are not alone in striving to reclaim lost parts of the self, deepening self-awareness, and becoming better able to take care of and nurture others. This piece is paired with a dialogue, with Serena Bhandar, that pushes the analysis further, articulating the ways in which any understanding of masculinity, or of gender, will be most effective when it positions transness at the center of the analysis.

The next dialogue piece, with Ruby Smith Díaz, delves into what thriving physically and culturally can mean for Black people in a white supremacist culture. This is followed by a dialogue with Aravinda Ananda that examines how cultivating wholeness and shame resilience can begin to help undo white people’s conditioning into white supremacy, while grappling with some of the risks and drawbacks to that practice. In this way, the idea that “violence is nurturance turned backward” can perhaps act as a challenge both within masculinity and whiteness. These are followed by a discussion with Natalie Knight about how colonization acts through gendered violence to dispossess Indigenous people of connection to land and culture, and explores ways of reconnecting across these ruptures. The book closes with a discussion with Alix Johnson about transformative justice skills, thinking through the constructive tensions that arise in putting a culture of meaningful care and accountability into practice in our daily lives. These dialogues hold together, expand upon, and connect three nurturance culture essays: “The Opposite of Rape Culture Is Nurturance Culture,” “On Gaslighting,” and “Own, Apologize, Repair: Coming Back to Integrity,” which all appear in full here.

While it is tempting when writing a book to present oneself as an expert who has the answers, what is more genuine and I hope will resonate more with readers is sharing the ways in which, like many of us, I am attempting to make sense of an era that anyone with a heart can recognize as marked by immense upheaval, including fascistic shifts and tremendous cultural transformation. Nurturance culture is not a five-step plan that can tell us how to solve the world’s problems. The emergence of nurturance culture is just that: an emergence.9 This book is intended as a living, breathing engagement with readers and community, asking questions together, and struggling together as we find one small answer at a time. I invite readers to think of nurturance culture as a prompt, one that can help us ask questions of one another, challenge systemic harm, and strengthen the bonds needed so that we can resist together.

So rather than offering a big answer, I want to share some big questions that organize and bind this book.

What would it look like to belong in the world as our whole selves? What kinds of culture, knowledge, and community structures would we be able to create if we could nurture one another without our armor on, if we could draw out and develop the gifts in one another, if we could care for one another in concrete, meaningful ways, and could protect one another from systemic harms and forms of structural violence, even as we’re struggling to dismantle them? What do we already have waiting within us that can guide us in that direction?

The free school, Windsor House, is but one of many places in which these skills and values are already in practice in everyday life. Like many beads of water that expand until they meet, what would it take to make this culture of repair, exemplified by a handful of children in one small corner of the world, into the obvious response to harm in all of our everyday lives?

Hopefully we too will eventually “just know,” intuitively, that any rip or fray in the social fabric is a threat to the well-being of the whole and so will turn toward the hurt, toward threadbare connections between human beings, and mend them, just as we would mend a tear in a perfectly useful coat before the whole coat needs to be discarded.

Let’s turn this world inside out.

1 Free schooling, or unschooling, is a way of organizing learning that is noncoercive. In free schools there are typically no set curricula; the students decide what they want to learn, and the adults act as resources.

2 Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon, A General Theory of Love (New York: Vintage Books, 2001); John Gottman, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2000); Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight (New York: Little, Brown, 2008); Amir Levine, Attached (New York: Tarcher Perigee, 2012); Stan Tatkin, Wired for Love (Oakland: New Harbinger, 2012).

3 Notably, consequences and boundaries whose purpose is to create safety for those harmed are not inherently punishments. A student at Windsor House who has caused harm may, for example, lose access to a given space in the school where those they have harmed spend time, until they can prove that they can be in that area without harming others. On a related note, as Mariame Kaba observes, “a person in a position of power losing their position of power is not a punishment, it is a consequence of bad action / behavior. If I were to ensure that you could never again make a living to support yourself and your family, that would be punishment. If I were to take your liberty, that’s punishment. If I were to kill you, that’s punishment. A powerful person losing [their] powerful position because [they] abused that power is not a punishment.” (“Education for Abolition.” Allied Media Conference, Detroit, June 17, 2018).

4 Stan Tatkin, Wired for Love.

5 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004). Or, as Jeannette Armstrong writes: “The physical self, which is body as one part of the whole self, is dependent entirely on everything that sustains it and keeps it alive in an interface with the parts of us that continue outside the skin. We survive within our skin inside the rest of our vast selves. We survive by how our body interacts with everything around us continuously. Only in part are we aware in our intellect, through our senses, of that interaction. Okanagans teach that the body is the Earth itself. They say that our flesh, blood, and bones are Earthbody; in all cycles in which the Earth moves, so does our body. We are everything that surrounds us, including the vast forces we only glimpse. If we cannot maintain and stay in balance with the outer self, then we cannot continue as an individual life-form, and we dissipate back into the larger self.” (“Keepers of the Earth,” Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, eds. Theodore Roszak, Mary E. Gomes, Allen D. Kanner [New York: Sierra Club Books, 1995], 316–324.)

6 Thank you to Harjap Grewal and Harsha Walia for this insight.

7 For more on transformative justice and prison abolition, see: Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003); Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Indict the System: Indigenous and Black Resistance,” Briarpatch, November 24, 2014, https://briarpatchmagazine.com/blog/view/indict-the-system; Charlene Carruthers, Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018); Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present (Black Point, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing, 2017); Mariame Kaba, “Transformative Justice,” TransformHarm.org, March 1, 2019, https://transformharm.org/transformative-justice/; Mia Mingus, “Transformative Justice: A Brief Description,” Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, January 9, 2019, https://leavingevidence
.wordpress.com/2019/01/09/transformative-justice-a-brief-description/; INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, Color of Violence (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016); Kai Cheng Thom, “#NotYet: Why I Won’t Publically Name Abusers” GUTS Magazine, November 30, 2017, http://gutsmagazine.ca/notyet/. See also the work of Sandra Kim, Rachel Zellars, Project NIA, Philly Stands Up, and Critical Resistance.

8 adrienne maree brown, “Report: Recommendations for us right now from a future,” Sublevel, n.d., http://sublevelmag.com/report-
recommendations-for-us-right-now-from-a-future.

9 adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Chico: AK Press, 2017).

1: The Opposite of Rape Culture Is Nurturance Culture

The opposite of masculine rape culture is masculine nurturance culture: men increasing their capacity to nurture and becoming whole.10

The Ghomeshi trial is back in the news, and it brings violent sexual assault back into people’s minds and daily conversations.11 Of course, violence is wrong, even when the court system for handling it is a disaster. That much seems evident. Triggering, but evident.

But there is a bigger picture here. I am struggling to see the full shape emerging in the pencil-rubbing, when only parts are visible at a time.

A popular meme shared on social media reads, “Rape is about violence, not sex. If someone were to hit you with a spade, you wouldn’t call it gardening.” And this is true. But it is just the surface of the truth. The depths say something more, something about violence.

Violence is nurturance turned backward.

These things are connected; they must be connected. Violence and nurturance are two sides of the same coin. I struggle to understand this even as I write it.

Compassion for self and compassion for others grow together and are connected. This means that men finding and recuperating the lost parts of themselves will heal everyone. If a lot of men grow up learning not to love their true selves, learning that their own healthy attachment needs (emotional safety, nurturance, connection, love, trust) are weak and wrong—that anyone’s attachment or emotional safety needs are weak and wrong—this can lead to two things:

1. They may be less able to experience women as whole people with intelligible needs and feelings (for autonomy, for emotional safety, for attunement, for trust).

2. They may be less able to make sense of their own needs for connection, transmuting them instead into distorted but more socially mirrored forms.

To heal rape culture, then, men build masculine nurturance skills: nurturance and recuperation of their true selves and nurturance of the people of all genders around them.

I am discovering a secret, slowly: the men I know who are exceptionally nurturing lovers, fathers, coworkers, close friends to their friends, who know how to make people feel safe, have almost no outlets through which to learn or share this hard-won skill with other men. They may have had a role model at home, if they are lucky, in the form of a nurturing father, uncle, or brother, but otherwise they have had to figure everything out through trial and error, alone, or by learning with women rather than men. Whether or not they have been able to access that knowledge shapes everything: assumptions about the significance of needs, how one ought to respond to them, what closeness feels like, how to love your own soul, and what kind of nurturance is actually meant to happen in intimate space.

Meanwhile, the men I know who are kind, good-hearted people, but who are still growing into their own models for self-love and learning how to comfort and nurture others, have no fellow men to ask for advice. Certainly, growing can entail growing pain, but the journey can be smoothed when one does not have to learn everything alone.

Men do not talk to one another about nurturance skills: doing so feels too intimate, or the codes of masculinity make doing so frightening. If they can’t ask and teach each other—if they can’t even find out which other men in their lives would welcome these conversations—then how do they learn?

Men have capacities to heal that are particularly masculine and particularly healing. They often are not fully aware of this deep gift and how helpful it can be for those close to them, whether family or close friends.

To completely transform this culture of misogyny, then, men must do more than “not assault.” We must call on masculinity to become whole and nurturing of self and others, to recognize that attachment needs are healthy and normal and not “female,” and thus to expect of men to heal themselves and others the same way we expect women to be nurturers. It is time men recognize and nurture their own healing gifts.

In Ursula K. Le Guin’s book Gifts, an entire culture lives by the rule of what it calls “gifts”—powers to do harm, possessed by certain of its members.12 Some families possess gifts of Unmaking, where they can turn a farmer’s field into a blackened waste or a puppy into a sack of dissolved flesh. Some possess the ability to create a wasting illness, or blindness, or the gift of calling animals to the hunt.

By the book’s end, the child at its center has struggled, against all signs in his culture, to realize something profound and fundamental: the gift they call Unmaking is actually a gift of Making turned backward upon itself and rendered unthinkingly into a weapon. The gift of calling animals is turned into a way to hunt them, when it is meant to let humans understand animals and live in balance with them. The wasting disease is the backward use of a gift of healing illness and old age. He finally asks his friend and closest confidant, “What if we are using our gifts backwards? To harm instead of to help? What if they were meant to be used the other way around?”

Nothing in the boy’s culture would tell him this is so. His entire society has been built around fear of these gifts used as weapons. Yet he has seen his father use the gift of Unmaking in reverse to gently undo a knot or mend a creaking gate. His best friend’s gift of calling animals also gives her an aversion to hunting them, an aversion she must overrule in herself to meet her culture’s expectations. These images knock on the door of his mind until he makes sense of them; he has to struggle to see the truth without a single signpost or mentor to help him find this knowledge. Nothing in his world reflects this reality back to him, and yet it is real. He at first can hardly believe it or understand it.

Something odd happens when you google “man comforting a woman.” As I write this, many of the top hits are about women comforting men. The suggested search terms came up this way, too: “How to comfort a guy,” “How to comfort a man when he’s stressed,” “How to comfort a guy when he’s upset.” Apparently, lots and lots of people on planet Earth are googling how to comfort men—and fewer are googling how to comfort women. Strange, isn’t it, considering patriarchal culture views women as the emotional ones and men as the strong ones? Perhaps something is a bit backward here.

I tried to find an image that would capture the way men have actually comforted me, which for me is the most intimate image of holding me in their arms, skin on skin like a young baby, rocking or singing, letting me be at my most vulnerable, held safe. There when needed, when it matters. I could find only one image that looked remotely like the real thing.

Could it be that a lot of men have no models for how to nurture, comfort, soothe, and thus strengthen, people whom they care about? If you happen to not have a highly nurturing model at home, where would you learn how to nurture? A top search hit is a bewildered humor piece about how utterly terrifying and confusing it is when a woman cries and about how men have no idea what to do. Could it be that the things that come naturally to many of us—hold the person, look at them with loving, accepting eyes, bring them food, hot tea, or medicine—that these are unfamiliar terrain for some, can’t even be imagined, let alone acted on consistently?

These things seem connected to me. And here is where my friend Rebekah, a drama therapist, comes in, who one day handed me the books Hold Me Tight and A General Theory of Love, and blew my mind. This is where attachment theory comes in. Bear with me, as this takes a little background knowledge—a quick summary of these books—before I can go on.

Attachment Theory

According to Hold Me Tight and A General Theory of Love, current advancements in neuroscience have completely transformed understandings of human relationships from birth to death.13 What used to be called Freud’s “unconscious” is actually located in the body, in a knowable place. Specific understandings of how the limbic brain works have replaced old ideas about love as a “mystery.”

Apparently about 50 percent of the population, people of all genders, have a secure attachment style: they were raised by responsive, attuned parents who recognized their need to go out and explore as well as their need to come back and be comforted and responded in a timely, attuned way to both. According to A General Theory of Love, this experience of attunement—having all their developmental needs met by attuned parents—literally shapes their limbic brains.

These folks as adults find closeness comfortable and enjoyable, they easily desire intimacy, and they know how to create a secure attachment bond in which autonomy naturally emerges and daily nurturance is the norm. This shapes the brain in material, physiological ways. This is how you build secure attachment: through daily attunement to the subtle cues of other people and lavishing love and care, while letting them come and go as needed. In this kind of connection, you know your home base is always there for you, so you feel comfortable going out into the world, taking risks, trying new or scary things, because you can return to safe arms when you need to.

Securely attached people know how to comfort one another when they need each other, and so they naturally know how to create healthy autonomy and healthy intimacy, which emerge in balance as they get comfortable with one another and create trust. Securely attached people are comfortable being vulnerable; they have had positive experiences of trust. There can be no joy of trust without the risk of vulnerability, letting your true self show and experiencing others catching you, mirroring you, liking you, and letting you go, when you are all there, visible, open.

Just like the first time you walk on ice or sit on a new chair, at first your muscles are clenched, waiting to see if the ground under you is secure or about to fall away. If the ice has always been solid, or you have never had a chair break under your weight, you may assume that you can relax quickly into your seat or head out onto the ice and skate. You have no reason to think otherwise. If, however, you have had a chair break under you, you may think hard about sitting down again and may take longer to relax into the secure base. If the chair has never been there for you at all, you may decide you simply don’t need chairs and prefer to stand. These are insecure attachment styles.

Secure, Anxious, Avoidant

Attachment science also has learned that about 50 percent of the population has an insecure attachment style. This breaks down into about 23 percent anxious and 25 percent avoidant styles, which are apparently both physiologically insecure styles but look and feel different on the surface. The avoidant style breaks down further into anxious-avoidant and dismissive-avoidant styles. A very small percentage of the population, around 3 percent, has a style called disorganized, which is a mix of the other styles.

People with an anxious attachment style actively seek closeness and are afraid of losing it, and have a harder time trusting and knowing that their partner will be there for them. The chair may have broken for them many times, or in a formative early relationship that was significant. Their limbic brains and entire autonomic nervous systems are built differently than those with secure styles. They need extra reassurance and comfort to get secure, and enjoy lots of closeness, especially with a new trust figure—though they have the same need for autonomy as anyone else, and it emerges as they become secure. They engage in protest behavior (i.e., become upset) to try to seek closeness if they cannot receive it by asking directly. However, once they are secure and feel safe, they become exceptionally loyal and loving nurturers and feel immense gratitude and loyalty to those who give them this safety.

People with a preoccupied-avoidant style crave closeness but are afraid to show it, and will show it instead through sulking or silence, hoping their partner will guess. They can come to name their needs with a secure, loving partner, but will struggle to do so.

People with a dismissive-avoidant attachment style also have a need for intimacy—every mammal has this need hardwired in its brain—but at a very early age they complete a transition to a belief that they are autonomous and do not feel their need for intimacy. They decide if the chair isn’t going to be there, they will just stand, thank you very much. They can come to open up and become secure as they come to recognize their distorted beliefs about intimacy, but they need lots of time, space, and compassion about how difficult this is for them.

Having thoroughly repressed their attachment needs, these folks may have learned to act “fine” at a very young age in order to keep a dismissive attachment figure close, or may have learned to create constant nonverbal barriers in order to keep an unattuned, invasive, or dismissive attachment figure at arm’s length. They may feel suffocated or trapped when people get too close, and will unconsciously and involuntarily use deactivating strategies—body language and facial expressions—to tell even their most intimate people to back up, even in the most intimate moments.

In other words, the nonverbal cues that other people use with strangers on the subway to maintain distance are the daily communication that dismissive-avoidant attachers use with their closest family members, often without even understanding they are doing it, which may feel very confusing both to them and to those close to them. They may feel that no matter how hard they try, those who depend on them never get reassured. They may blame this on the other person and call them “needy,” without ever realizing the nonverbal distancing cues preventing secure attachment that are leading to the signs of “neediness” in the other person.

Nurturance, the literature teaches us, recognizes and responds appropriately, in an alive, moving dance, to the other person’s need for intimacy and need for space, learning how to engage in nonverbal communication that comforts, reassures, and breathes. In addition to talking openly and honestly, the quality of care that creates a feeling of safety happens moment by moment, through mainly nonverbal cues. The limbic brain does not use language but reads the small muscles around the eyes, the set of shoulders, the breathing, the posture of other people.

Earned Secure Attachment: Where Nurturance Creates Growth

It is possible to change your attachment style by creating an earned secure attachment as an adult. It is possible to create an earned secure attachment between two insecure attachers, but it takes a lot more time, effort, and compassion: both have to recognize nurturance is entirely good and expected.

Of course, nothing can replace talking things over and calibrating with people you are close to. No one should be a mind reader. But it takes more than talking to change these patterns. The avoider has to risk opening up and letting their true self show in order to give and receive nurturance. The anxious attacher has to trust and let go more, knowing the avoider will be back. Both of these changes are difficult—limbic responses happen very, very fast, below the conscious level, and often outside of language.

The easiest way to form an earned secure attachment is by having a relationship with a secure attacher, and learning healthy intimacy from them, in which needs are responded to as they arise. However, secure attachers usually date a few people, then pick one and settle down early. They know how to create a big warm home bond. Avoidant attachers tend to prefer anxious attachers, and anxious attachers tend to be drawn to avoidant attachers, because each reinforces the early rules about “reality” (actually just haphazard chance, what happened to be going on between them and their caregivers at the time) laid down in their limbic brains before the age of three.

There is no need for shame or guilt over which kind of attachment style you have. Our attachment styles are wired in at an age when we are much too young to choose. It is no one’s fault. However, shame and guilt can be quite convincing to the person experiencing them, even when completely unwarranted.

What Does All This Have to Do with Assault?

Fundamentally, a healthy, secure attachment style is what lets people effectively protect and care for the well-being of others. It allows for the skill of attunement: recognizing when someone wants to come close and when they want space, not only by asking but also by reading subtle nonverbal cues.

Attachment styles can land in any gender, of course, and people can combine in any combination. However, when attachment styles land in particularly gendered ways, we see certain patterns emerge that are all part of the bigger pattern, and maybe they can be understood as part of the answer to the question of violence.

People with secure attachment styles are better at recognizing and being comfortable with this dance of approach and retreat, better at supporting others while letting others do what they need to do. They know deep down they are loved and loveable, and thus are more likely to be loving and nurturing toward others, both to be there for them when needed as sources of strength and solace, and to be able to recognize and honor when someone does or does not want to be touched. Shame prevents this skill from emerging.

We Misunderstand Shame

Attachment science tells us that human beings need mirroring and containers in others.14 Whatever is in us that does not get mirrored or held in a larger container of acceptance by others becomes a source of shame simply for not being accepted. And if you have shamed something in yourself—like a normal need for intimacy—so early and so completely that you don’t even notice you are doing it, you will interpret that same need as shameful when you see it in others. Shame is entirely subjective in this sense. This is all happening in the body, below the conscious level, not in a vague “unconscious” but in a recognizable region of the brain: the limbic brain, which does not have language.

Shame and guilt unhealed and unaddressed remain powerful and, like volcanoes, erupt in surprising ways. For instance, shame can lead men to shut down, run away, blame women, or act defensive instead of offering comfort and nurturance when someone they care about needs them. It can, alternately, lead men to ignore signs that someone does not want them close.

These are two sides of the same system and must be understood together, because in a culture that does not expect men to show up for their own emotions, women get blamed for unaddressed male shame.

In other words, it seems possible that shame and guilt, left subterranean, interrupt attunement and can lead to an inability or unwillingness to properly respond to the needs of others, whether for nurturance or for space. Structural shame of this kind is often so old and convincing that it becomes almost invisible. It just appears as “the way the world is,” laid down in patterns in the limbic brain. This kind of shame hides, appears as nothing in particular, until questioned with compassion and curiosity in safe company.

Anxious Attachment Styles and the Mystery of Human Relating

In a patriarchal, misogynist culture, both of these imbalances (which are common to all humans), when they appear in men, are laid in women’s laps as blame and misogyny when men do not do their own emotional healing.

Men with anxious attachment styles may feel distress when an attachment figure seeks to back up a little, or a lot, and may not develop a healthy capacity to recognize and respond appropriately to someone’s nonverbal cues communicating the need for space.

They may come closer or become upset as the other person signals their need to disengage. If a man who happens to have an anxious attachment style does not know how to understand and accept his own needs for nurturance, he may attack a woman for rejecting him.15 The typical “Hello, cutie” on the street followed almost instantly with “Fine, be that way, bitch!” is an example many of us will be familiar with.

They may not notice or register or—in extreme cases—be concerned that someone they want to touch has frozen up, is giving off signals of paralysis or distress. Thus, we sometimes find men who don’t think of themselves as bad men, who nonetheless rape and assault their partners, girlfriends, wives, or women on a first or second date. (This is how the majority of assaults happen, of course: the “man jumping out of the bushes,” while more spectacular, is much rarer.) They may resort to seeking power-over and dominance, because normal intimacy needs, when distorted and denied, emerge in distorted ways. They are caught up in their own pain and can’t name it or find appropriate avenues for it. Given the larger social norms that center men’s experiences, this imbalance isn’t addressed as such but instead gets projected out into the world. A society that actively, financially, politically, and socially privileges traits it deems masculine (non-emotionality, strength, independence) and actively disparages traits it deems feminine (interdependence, nurturance) leaves few opportunities for these patterns to be openly loved, addressed, and changed.

In another example, those with a preoccupied avoidant style, who feel the need for closeness but have a hard time asking and do not expect others to be there for them, may sulk if they feel rejected, putting silent pressure on women they are with to meet their demands. Perhaps the sulking partner who turns away in anger when sexual desires aren’t met may be having a limbic attachment experience that needs to be addressed as such, in a mature way, a way that takes ownership of the experience and works to heal it rather than project it outward onto women.

Avoidant Attachment Styles: Holding Trust

Those with a dismissive-avoidant style may simply need to develop attunement in order to hold the trust they are given. They may want women to get close to them at first, and begin to build trust, but not actually know how to maintain trust once it begins, which can create destabilizing and confusing experiences for everyone involved.

When men happen to have a dismissive-avoidant attachment style, they may simply not know how nurturance and comfort look and feel. They may have a very difficult time recognizing and loving their own deepest selves, and may not even be aware of what they have lost. Thus, they may blame women for being “too needy” out of not recognizing their own needs for closeness and nurturance of self and others, having learned early that closeness is suffocating and that needs are to be denied.

Individuals with a dismissive-avoidant attachment style may not recognize their own body’s need for comfort and connection. However, these feelings evoke the same elevated heart rates and changes in neurochemicals as they do in anxious attachers, but in a way that the avoidant attacher does not understand or recognize, because they learned early on to repress these needs in themselves and others. They may not know how to simultaneously meet their own needs and those of others, a highly developed nurturance capacity.

Even if avoidant attachers do not act in invasive ways, their style may inadvertently interrupt the creation of honest and nurturing relationships, in which women they sleep with or get close to can feel emotionally safe with them.

In striving to be good people, they may make rules like “a good man doesn’t touch” and have a very logical approach to checking if a woman wants to be touched, but have a harder time responding to her nonverbal cues or even sometimes responding to verbal cues for comfort and reassurance, creating an odd gap feeling.

The attachment needs are still there, but they may transmute into other more recognizable things: instead of giving and receiving nurturance, they may seek sexual connections, while feeling utterly bewildered about how physical love relates to intimate or consummate love. They may experience immense, paralyzing guilt and shame when someone needs them to be comforting, and lash out, freeze up, or run. They may hurt people they care about by having sex with them in a strangely cold or distant way, without even knowing why they are doing it.

If a man with an avoidant attachment style experiences internal distress when someone he cares about expresses nurturance needs (such as the need for trust, reliability, availability, closeness, responsiveness, attunement) he may blame the woman for being “too needy” instead of dealing with those intensely confusing feelings of shame.

Men with avoidant attachment styles may not notice the confusing nonverbal signaling they are actively doing very early on that prevents safety from happening with women they want to nurture and support, who may become more and more imbalanced toward them in response.

Since “absence of nurturance” is an absence, it can be hard to recognize early. When early avoidant responses to requests for closeness are not noticed as such, attachment science teaches us, protest behavior—the distress when needs aren’t met—may get louder over time, in ways both people are contributing to and neither understands. It becomes all too easy in a patriarchal culture that values rugged individualism over interdependence to call an anxiously attached woman “crazy,” without noticing the parallel avoidant responses that are contributing, that are legitimately distressing, and that are, arguably, just as much an effect of mental health issues as is anxious attachment. In other words, it takes two to enter into the avoidant-anxious trap, but patriarchal culture normalizes an avoidant style and stigmatizes an anxious style, wherever they appear.

None of this is worthy of shame. Fundamentally, all of the insecure styles are based in an unquestioned belief that people will not be there and that nurturance is somehow a problem rather than wholly desirable and good. Avoidant attachers “know” from an early age that the ice will break, the chair will collapse—best not to try. Insecure attachment styles are not chosen, are not conscious or intentional, and it is an understatement to say they are not easy to change. They deserve understanding, compassion, and empathy.

And yet, living without loving and secure attachments can be the loneliest experience in the human repertoire.

Community Care and Cultural Transformation

The solution is not to pile on more shame and guilt. This is tricky, because insecure attachers have limbic systems structured by shame and guilt. They may hear accusations where there are none. The solution is not to shame people for feeling shame. Instead, the solution is a complete transformation of social relations to allow wholeness back into our world. Yes, models of healthy interdependence exist if we know where to find them and how to recognize them. But no one stands in a shining circle of light and no one lives in the dark abyss; it is time we finally abandon these Western dichotomies.

What we need is a model for slow self-love that brings shame into the light and finds reality checks with those who accept you unconditionally, hold you accountable, and aren’t going anywhere. We need a model of justice that recognizes the lived reality of interdependence and learns to do it well, not a justice of shame that frightens us all out of looking at our shadow selves in a world in which most men are expected to begin cutting off parts of themselves from the time they are quite young.

The solution, in tangible terms, is community care and an awareness of how most of us did not have our needs met at key developmental stages, which means we did not move out of those stages and must do so now. Collective healing is possible. We can heal when we can finally be our whole, unguarded selves, in human community, without shields or guards, and be liked, accepted, seen, held. This is systemic change, spiritual change, at the core levels of our culture, lived each day.

Once shame can be reduced to manageable levels, both personally and culturally, people can become more able to expose their raw spots, trusting they will be accepted, and can respond to the needs of others rather than freeze and become defensive, invasive, or paralyzed.

Turning the Gifts Around: Masculine Nurturance Culture

The answer to all of these difficulties is to openly discuss nurturance: how it looks, how it feels, how men can learn to practice it from the men who already know how, in addition to communicating through women or fumbling around for years learning by trial and error.

Simplistic answers gleaned through this fumbling do not help. For instance, some men may actually avoid nurturing or protecting women out of fear of “white knighting.” But white knighting isn’t synonymous with all forms of protection. White knighting means acting protective in ways that are not attuned to the person you are intending to help. Paternalistically telling her what she needs instead of listening to what she says is white knighting. To stop white knighting, don’t stop protecting; just protect while you also listen and believe. Protect her, actively, in the ways she actually wants protecting and not in the ways she does not. Protecting people you care about—in ways that are attuned and responsive to their actual needs—is a normal, needed, and healthy part of nurturance.

Why is there no high-profile institute for men teaching nurturance skills to men?

Men need to do this work with other men—not alone, but in addition to working in accountable social relationships with women. In other words, men who are learning must continue to learn as they have been doing, but then share that learning with one another. Further, our research and educational institutions need to recognize this work as valuable, rewardable labor.

It may be a long time before a nurturing masculinity is recognized and rewarded socially the same way an abstract intellectual masculinity currently is. In the meantime, men need to do this healing work every day, behind the scenes, reaping the rewards of having women and people of all genders feel safe with them, and of growing their own self-love and love of others.

The reward of creating safe bonds is that in these places of trust, a warm glow of meaning and purpose emerges. An inner circle of trust and vulnerability allows movement and rest: it lets the bees come and go from the hive. It creates shelters of chosen family and beloved community from which action—challenges to racism, sexism, institutional violence—can arise, a safety net to catch each other’s bodies and souls, the foundation that allows risk.

The opposite of masculine rape culture is masculine nurturance culture. This is men’s work to do, and yet it is needed by people of all genders who have men in their lives. The rewards are waiting.

Are you a nurturing man? Do the women in your life—partner, daughter, sister, friend, coworker, parent—tell you or show you that you make them feel especially safe, close, and cared for? If so, how did you learn? How do you open up spaces for men who want these conversations to begin to have them?

Every single man I asked this of said, “Both men would need to want it.” Fear of closeness and certain masculine codes of interaction are real and are part of the picture. But many men are struggling with these questions, locked alone in their own little boxes.

Men have to do this with other men, despite the difficulties in doing so, for three reasons. First, men understand what it is like to be a man much better than women do, and they can teach one another while understanding what it actually feels like and having compassion for one another. Second, women cannot be responsible for healing men while also protecting themselves from male violence and neglect, which is still endemic and thus a daily part of women’s lives. Finally, one of the great patriarchal distortions of the human spirit is that each man lives in solitary confinement, thinking he can and should solve problems alone, that he should not need others. Jumping the barriers that keep men from talking about emotions with other men is itself a fundamental change, one that reduces shame and confusion.

So how do you know when men around you—the friend you just met for drinks, the colleague you have collaborated with on projects for years, the hockey buddy—may actually be quietly confused and thirsty for this kind of learning?

How can you signal your availability, to let men in your life know you are doing this yourself, so that those men who want to learn about nurturance can find each other? It can be as simple as starting a men’s discussion group based on this article. It can be as simple as giving this essay to the men in your life and asking, “Does this ever come up for you?”

It can be as simple as passing this essay along and saying, “I’m here.”

10 The term “men” as used here is intended to signify all masculine-identified people, including trans men, and nonbinary people who may only partially identify with the term.

11 Celebrity CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi, for many years a household name in Canada, was the subject of a high-profile court case concluding in 2016. During and before the trial, over twenty former colleagues described unwanted behaviors ranging from sexual harassment and abuse of power to hitting and choking. See “Complainant in Jian Ghomeshi Case Issues Statement,” The Star, May 11, 2016, https://www
.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/05/11/complainant-in-jian-ghomeshi-case-issues-statement.html.

12 Ursula K. Le Guin, Gifts (Orlando: Harcourt Books, 2006).

13 Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love (New York: Little, Brown, 2016). Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon, A General Theory of Love (New York: Vintage Books, 2001).

14 Johnson, Hold Me Tight.

15 My thinking on this question has since shifted and broadened. I am still very curious about the ways that attachment experiences may influence these kinds of responses. However, after reading Lundy Bancroft’s Why Does He Do That? (New York: Berkeley Publishing, 2015), and other literature on gendered violence and its causes, I have come to a more complex analysis that includes questions of acculturated entitlement, which are explored more fully in the dialogue pieces in this book. For the sake of preserving the thinking present at the time I wrote this essay, here I have kept the argument as it first appeared.

2: Dialogue: How Masculine-Identified People Might Use This Book

This first dialogue, with “Jon Snow,” represents an amalgam of conversations with several readers who have male privilege or experiences of masculine socialization, who are using “The Opposite of Rape Culture Is Nurturance Culture” as part of their work to reclaim lost parts of themselves and grow their capacity to nurture others. In a culture that provides few signposts and discourages masculine-identified people from speaking with one another about how to nurture, this dialogue is intended to shed light on parts of the path, so new readers know they are not alone.

ns: So, we have had a number of conversations about how you have been working through your gender socialization as someone who has male privilege. I’m interested in hearing what this process has been like for people who are using the nurturance culture essay as part of their inner reclaiming work.

js: I’m still figuring it all out.

ns: That’s why I want to have this conversation with you!

js: Interesting, can you tell me more about that?

ns: This book, and arguably the work of nurturance, is about the relationships that we have among us in the day to day, about what we do on the ground in our regular lives, grounded in the bonds that knit human beings together when no one is looking, or when the spotlight or markers of prestige are elsewhere. We make our politics by living them together.

So, when I was thinking about the shape of this book, I wanted to bring in the experiences of people I organize with and learn with, and deemphasize looking to famous people for guidance. We learn by working through hard things, committing to our communities, and building the soil together. To me that’s where the good things are, and one of my core motivations for doing this book.

Another is that I want to explore the experiences of people who have been working with the nurturance culture essay to do that inner repair and reclamation of lost parts of the self, growing their capacity to nurture and show up emotionally in an ethical way with integrity and accountability.

I would like to map out a bit of how you have been using the essay to do some of the work of undoing the gender socialization you have experienced.

My hope is that for new readers, hearing other people’s experiences of growing their capacity to engage in nurturance culture can be helpful. Maybe you can help make a few more signposts for those who are coming to this book for the first time, or who are curious what may unfold as they read and explore further.

js: That sounds good to me. There is an inhibiting factor, though, where I feel some responsibility to represent a “finished” position, and I don’t think that is possible with this work. So maybe we just chat?

ns: Exactly. We build the soil and see what emerges. I am inspired in part by what adrienne maree brown has described as emergent strategy, and invite you and anyone reading the book to engage in that way.

So, if that is comfortable for you, I would like to hear a bit about how the process has been for you of working with the nurturance culture essay as one of your tools.

js: I read the nurturance essay two different times in my life, a couple of years apart.

The first time, I had some cognitive understanding about my experience of being socialized into masculinity and what that meant. I had read a few things on attachment theory, and the first time I read the essay it helped me understand it better. But that understanding was still only intellectual. I was not connecting with it emotionally or physiologically.

Then as I dug into this practice more, as I began unlearning things, I was able to get deeper in. I read the nurturance essay again a long time later, and the depiction of the dismissive-avoidant attachment style, the metaphor of the chair, the idea that “it wasn’t there for me, so I don’t need it, thank you very much,” impacted me on a much deeper level when I came back to it that second time.

Reading that after having done a lot of deeper inner work was a breakthrough moment for me. It allowed me to connect the coping mechanisms I have now to the disconnection I had experienced developmentally and I began to reconnect with those emotions.

ns: What was the feeling, can you describe it?

js: The immediate feeling was things clicking. That I had felt that way for so long. And then I think, because I had been spending so much time turning toward these emotions, it felt like a dam breaking. It let in a huge amount of grief for all of the times in my life that I had been looking away from emotional needs, my own and those of others, in ways that I had not understood.

I had been refusing to allow myself to feel certain needs for connection. And on top of the grief of that realization, I was also flooded with a heightened feeling of wanting that connection. (laugh) It was a long night of reading and writing and crying.

ns: Can you tell me a bit more about what that process might be like, and how it might relate to socialization into masculinity?

js: It worked in layers. On the surface it seemed like nothing was missing. I have always felt the need for connection with people; I have always had close friends, long-term relationships.

But there was a level underneath, where I was denying myself, and therefore others, a need for deeper connection.

In my relationships, it would often take years for any effects of this to come into focus. And even then, it would be difficult for people to understand or name what was happening. This made it hard for me to identify for a long time.

ns: That makes sense. That the layers or parts of the self that are lost can be so lost that we don’t even know they are missing. And that this perception would be difficult to describe. We have very little language for these experiences.

It also makes sense that when you begin doing the work of reconnecting, the access would happen in waves. The more we use neuronal pathways the stronger they become, while pathways that are not used get pruned. The inability to know one’s own emotions is in some way physiological; it can be understood in part as a function of physical neurological matter.

js: A big part of my personal work is trying to integrate those two things: attachment, connection, emotion, on one hand, and cognition and intellect on the other. So much of the work I am trying to do is to integrate them.

ns: That makes a lot of sense to me. It is not always easy to build that capacity if it did not develop optimally initially. Asking “What do I feel?” may genuinely be difficult.

Taking that idea a step further, it seems those who have turned away almost entirely from their true selves very early on perhaps may develop a range of coping mechanisms, some of which may be helpful, and some of which can be quite harmful to those close to them. For those who have a core shame self that has become entirely numbed or out of access, shame aversion behavior can be very intense, and can become gaslighting behavior.

At the same time, it seems this can also be worked on, with significant effort. The same way you learn rudiments on a musical instrument, you can strengthen those neural connections by focusing on connecting cognition and emotion. It takes significant will and sustained effort. Reconnecting with parts of the self that are buried under shame—even beginning to reconnect with them—requires recognizing they even exist. And then of course the goal is not to dwell in these revelations but at every stage to turn them into growing the nurturing you are doing of the people around you. It can be very painful when people realize how they have not been taking very good care of others, but it can be done better at any point, beginning from where people are.

js: Yes, exactly. What I realized is that at a very young age, I was turning to people for love and receiving absence or harm instead. So, in response, I decided, “No thank you, I’ll just stand, I don’t need that.” But it was not apparent to me on the surface that this was disconnected.

The interesting thing was how this attachment style can apply selectively to certain kinds of need. Whenever I would start to feel one of those feelings, I was hardwired to shut down that feeling completely to the point where I would never actually experience it.

I understand now that I’ve spent most of my life shaming myself for needing this kind of love or support. But that process was totally obscured to me, it was so many layers away from my conscious reality. In that moment where I was feeling grief, it was grief for realizing this was happening, finally accessing that awareness on an emotional level rather than an intellectual one.

ns: Yes. Shame is odd. Often grief underlies shame, grief over finally realizing that a kind of connection you believed was shameful never actually was.

And if you have shamed something within yourself—for example a need to be held tenderly or looked at with care—then that need can appear shameful to you when you observe it in others. You may shame others for expressing healthy connection needs that you have disconnected from within yourself.

This practice combines with the entitlement in systemic oppression, the power that those conditioned into entitlement claim to define what is real socially and culturally, what they take to be universally the case, not just individually, in complex ways that I am still thinking through.

Did you ever have the feeling when you finally did access the feeling of shame and the emotions underneath it, that it had been there all along, but was so much part of the landscape that you couldn’t notice it, because it just seemed like baseline reality?

js: Sort of. On one hand it felt like this was happening quite removed from my conscious mind. But on another level, there were value judgments I would make that I didn’t realize I was making, that were an extension of that logic. And that’s how I found it.

ns: That’s it! Value judgments that make no sense once you stop and question them, that lead you into the areas of the self that are distorted or need transformation.

js: There were intellectual residuals, rationalizations for what was going on subconsciously that I would notice. And I would think, “Wait, that doesn’t make sense. I don’t actually believe that!” And that’s how I found it. There were bread crumbs.

ns: Yes. Bread crumbs. Beliefs or shame frameworks that seem so obvious that you cannot even question them or notice they are there.

And yet when you do turn toward them and question them, they are the doorway to reconnecting in a more whole way with self and with others, recognizing and reducing shame about needing to trust other human beings, and becoming more able to respond to others in a nurturing, empathetic way.

After you have done that reconnecting for a long time, it becomes clear that those feelings were never shameful at all. But that sense of shame can be hidden in plain sight: you cannot look at it or examine it, because it appears so self-evident, just how the world is. What you are seeing as shameful in others—vulnerability, need, nurturance, connection—can be just the noise of your own inner disavowed shame. And yet when that inner experience becomes formed through systemic power it can become a very dangerous kind of psychological control. But it was never actually anything shameful, and it can take unlearning this inner shame in order to recognize where you have been putting this shaming onto others.

js: It appears like a universal constant.

ns: Background static. And those are the most beautiful parts of the self that get buried, that’s the irony. I think this is generally the case with shame. To connect to some of the larger concepts we grapple with in this book, it may be even more the case when shaming happens along lines of systemic harm and oppression. Wherever people experience systemic oppression, the most beautiful and most powerful aspects of the self are turned around by the larger culture as weakness and as shameful.

If those who hold power have killed off parts of their own self, they will attempt to discipline and control those whom they oppress. When that is normalized, as it is in Western culture, widespread systemic gaslighting pressures people facing systemic harm to view strengths and beauty through a distorted lens, as weakness or abjection. Pressure is applied under which people’s whole selves become compressed or contorted to survive inside oppressive systems.

And then those targeted in this way also experience grief, when the understanding comes that these most beautiful and whole parts of the self have been lost. Grief comes of recognizing that no part of oppressed people’s wholeness was ever shameful. On the contrary, these lost parts of the self are beautiful, are needed, and belong in the world.

Systems of oppression repress that kind of thinking, dignity, or wholeness, because people who are systemically oppressed, speaking and acting from their whole selves, knowing their own worth and dignity, have the power to topple those systems.

js: Following that line of thought, I was similarly impacted by the essay “On Gaslighting.” That piece helped me realize that if I do not understand the coping mechanisms I’m using, and if I have not faced the rationalizations I have built around those coping strategies, I’m going to have a pretty distorted view of myself and my motivations. And that means I’m going to be offering the people around me not just a limited view of myself, but a distorted view of reality.

ns: Right—shame unaddressed, in a culture that conditions those with privilege into an entitlement to define reality not only for themselves but for others, will come out as implicit attempts to shame those who hold less social power. That shame can get enacted as an unquestioned belief in one’s entitlement to control how those around you perceive or recognize reality, if you have not done the work to recognize the location of the sense of shame.

js: Exactly. And as men we are able to get by with so little self-examination for so long! The more disconnected from my emotions and the less genuinely connected to other people I am, the easier it is to get ahead in the larger culture. While every step I take toward unlearning patriarchal masculinity creates friction or puts me more out of step with the dominant culture.

ns: Hopefully we can be part of creating a sea change, a cultural transformation. So you will not be alone in doing this kind of work.

3: Dialogue: Turning Gender Inside Out

Serena Bhandar works by day as the Community Relations Coordinator with the Anti-Violence Project, and at all other times as a writer, activist, and educator. A mixed-race Punjabi Sikh/Welsh/Irish and genderfluid woman, her stories and essays have been published in the anthologies Fear This Queer and Nameless Woman, among other places. She currently lives, works, and writes on the unceded territories of the Lekwungen and WSÁNEĆ peoples. Find more of her writing at serenabhandar.com.

ns: Hi! I was happy to chat when you got in touch and said that you work with the sexual assault center at your university, were a fan of the nurturance culture essay, and also had critiques of it.

sb: I really connect with attachment theory and I appreciate the succinct way you described it in the essay. As I read the relationship descriptions in the essay, I could also tell that this could help me understand my own relationships. It does apply to a lot of different kinds of relationships.

I also love the language about the dance of secure connection. And it got me thinking about my relationship with my gender. In navigating my burgeoning femininity, I was doing this awkward, jerky dance of moving toward the idea of “woman” and then withdrawing from it, given the danger of being out as a trans woman in our culture.

ns: I have understood that many trans women know that they are women very early on, while for others who are perhaps more genderfluid, gender is a lifelong exploration. How has it been for you?

sb: On the one hand, I identify as genderfluid, on the other I identify as a woman, but not always. When I was younger I would have seen “male” and “masculinity” as a place to venture out from. For example, I was very flamboyant as a child and I cross-dressed, but I didn’t really question my masculinity. For a time in my early twenties I identified as genderqueer, and these days I see “woman” as the home I venture out from and back to from different areas of gender.

ns: Wow. It sounds like you are articulating gender as a kind of security in the body, something you can leave and come back to. It makes sense when considering that people who are optimally nurtured develop security in themselves; this could be another dimension of that kind of security.

sb: That is definitely very apt. Maybe dance is not quite the right metaphor; for me, living out my gender, with the constant potential to experience violence for it, has felt more like a bear—if you get too close to it, it will attack you, but if you watch it from a distance, it won’t. So, you ignore it for a while, or look at it but keep your distance, and you think, “This isn’t me, but it could be.”

ns: I like that, the lived experience of gender as a bear: it is there and you see it out of the corner of your eye but you don’t get too close.

sb: Yeah, something like that. Interestingly, my gender expression was facilitated in part by being able to see people’s performance of gender out in the world. If we are thinking in terms of attachment theory, other people’s gender expression gave me room to know mine. It offered a kind of mirroring, something like what the nurturance culture essay describes.

ns: Do you mean the parts of us that do not get mirrored developmentally, we may perceive as shameful when they may not be objectively shameful at all, and that when we are mirrored as our whole selves, we can understand that this shame was never legitimate?

sb: Yes, seeing people’s gender in the world can be a kind of mirroring, and can act as a container. I gained this friend who was a trans woman at a time in my life when I had retreated into my masculinity, into what would not make waves. I had known trans women before and I had always felt a strong kinship with trans women for reasons unknown, until, of course, I realized I was one of them. I went on a retreat with this particular friend with our university pride group. We went skinny dipping, and I found myself so drawn to her. I was seeking guidance and kinship. Just seeing her gender expression out in the world made room for mine.

ns: Just by seeing the people around you being themselves, you became more able to see how aspects of the self were never shameful to begin with?

sb: I think so. And to break down the concept of performing gender further, I know a lot of very sweet and nurturing men whom I have had really good relationships with. A lot of those relationships got me through a lot of my gender as well.

The first person I came out to was a trans man, who is probably the most nurturing guy I have ever known. We were in various forms of a romantic relationship for a few years, and I still count him as one of my best male friends. I think about how safe I felt coming out to him. And perhaps that was because of the nurturing masculinity he presented to me. On one hand that feels reductive, that I just felt safe because he is a “good guy.” And on the other, that element of our relationship may be part of why I felt safe coming out to him.

ns: Which maybe comes back to parts of the nurturance culture essay, around masculinity having certain kinds of shelter that it can offer. Does that connect?

sb: Yeah, I think that connects, but it is also more complex than that and the categories can be reductive.

ns: On that theme, I would love to hear more about the aspects of the essay that feel reductive, that re-inscribe a binary or feel addressed to a cis audience.

sb: On one hand, I think cis men do need to hear these things you raise in the essay, and at the same time I think it has a different level of resonance with trans folks and non-binary folks. There is a kind of deciphering that trans folks have to do when they read writing that centers on a cis audience—because most of the writing we read is aimed at cis folks, and often does not speak directly to our experiences.

A lot of writing I have seen reduces violence to a cis male–cis female dynamic, where it is presented as though there is nothing beyond and nothing between. Any arguments directed toward a trans audience are tacked on, even though trans folks, and trans women in particular, face disproportionate and severe levels of violence. It is as though trans readers are a secondary audience, when instead transness should be built right into the argument from its conception, especially since everybody has the potential to be trans. Everyone has a complex relationship with their gender identity. Cis people perform their gender just as much as trans folks do. Putting transness at the center of our understanding of gender makes apparent that cisness has also always been complicated.

ns: Yes, that makes sense. I can see how the piece adds trans readers on, as you have described, rather than writing in a way that builds transness right in to the fundamental way of thinking about gender.

sb: Totally. In one passage, you write, “Men have to do this work with other men despite the difficulties in doing so,” and one reason given is “men understand what it is like to be a man much better than women do.” And I would push back against that phrase, because it reinscribes the idea that gender is a binary, that every person is either male or female, and that men’s experiences and women’s experiences are so different and exclusive of each other. That reification also fuels the harmful implication that trans women cannot actually be women because they supposedly “have the experience” of being men, which for many trans women is simply not the case.

ns: Yes, that’s helpful, thank you. Tell me more?

sb: When we say that only trans people transgress gender identity, then we do not permit room for cis people who feel shame about their gender identity, like cis women who struggle with their body hair or who have broad shoulders or are tall or have other traits deemed inappropriately unfeminine.

That happens when we reproduce this assumption that there is a cis audience that is primary and a trans audience that is secondary. We should be prioritizing them differently.

I think a lot about the way that cis women perform their gender and the questions that cis women have about their gender are very similar in many ways to the questions that trans women have about their gender, even if some may encounter these questions a bit later in their life maybe. Like, are my breasts too small? Is my voice too deep? How do I feel comfortable in my body when society tells me that my body is too fat or too masculine? Because cis women have similar issues with being perceived through masculinity. The hate and violence that trans women face, transmisogyny, is an extreme magnification of the misogyny that cis women face every day—both spring from the same culture.

So I see a certain disconnect in arguments that come from a trans-exclusive position, that cis women and trans women are not at all the same; there is just such a shared experience when we actually break it down and talk to each other.

When we permit that violence against trans folks, and create structures that permit that violence against trans folks, we also permit that violence against cis folks who experience those kinds of gender policing.

ns: It’s one big connected system of harm, which impacts trans women in specific and significantly compounded ways.

sb: Yes. You can’t make a secondary argument about trans folks because these violences affect everybody.

It’s not that we are all the same. Instead, we all have the potential to be similar to each other. And we still have different levels of power that are imbued by society and the expectations of gender, and we all have to be accountable for our actions, because we also all have the potential to experience harm and we all have the potential to cause it.

NS: Right! And that gets at an important complexity that I had hoped to draw out: it seems to me there may be a productive tension, in which we want to recognize the gender binary was never the whole picture to begin with, while preserving the capacity to analyze power, just in more complex or less reductive ways. We need nuance here.

There can be a temptation to say that in expanding beyond a simplistic binary, there is no power in operation at all. It is tempting to say that since there are many more nuanced and multifarious genders than just two, that gendered power is not relevant. And I feel quite strongly opposed to that line of thought, which abandons observing the function of power, in the otherwise very important move to recognize the lived reality and complexity of gender.

I have seen, for example, how the culturally conditioned response to harm patterns out, in which folks who do have more gendered power by having masculine privilege—not necessarily along a simplistic gender divide, but who do have forms of it—are protected from ever hearing how their actions impact others. We have a very hard time as a culture looking with any accuracy at the actions of people who possess that privilege, and a very hard time even gently telling them not to act in harmful ways. Meanwhile this culture still conditions people to perceive women and femmes who express distress in response to harm as crazy or unreliable.

Those power-informed patterns are still deeply entrenched culturally. So, the question becomes, how do you keep the power awareness while not getting mired in these false binaries?

sb: I think the answer is just acknowledging that the binary does exist socially, but that we have to work in order not to give it the power that it has. So, yes, men committing violence against women does occur disproportionately to other forms of violence.

Also, violence against trans women and trans women of color happens disproportionately, and we should be recognizing the reasons why those acts of violence happen disproportionately.

ns: We definitely are of a mind there. When it comes to gendered violence, I am fascinated by cultural conditioning: the social patterning of how information about gendered violence is received in the community around it.

When the person experiencing harm is more female-identified or genderqueer, I think they are listened to less. The nurturance culture essay was precisely arguing not that men are more harmful in some inherent way, but rather, that harm enacted by men is amplified massively by the terrain of power in which it lands. To me, those are very different things

sb: Masculinity is also just so tenuous. We talk about masculinity, how it is so easily broken, and that is true. I used to identify as a cis man, and I filled that role and accrued various forms of privilege with it. At the same time, I also had an incredibly tenuous relationship with masculinity that I embraced and also feared. I remember in high school, doing stuff that was read as gay and my masculinity card would be immediately revoked. When men have this tenuous relationship with masculinity, that can be shattered at the mere perception of being gay or effeminate, then we see how male privilege can easily be turned against the people who have it.

That is not to say that masculine privilege cannot still be used in very violent contexts. But when I think about transfeminine folks I know who are read as masculine, who don’t pass as women, I just think about that tenuousness of masculinity and how when we ascribe masculinity to a person, we ascribe it as a stable, definite attribute. We don’t recognize how it can break and change and be tossed aside.

ns: Building on your idea of one’s gender as a secure base could allow us to think about masculinity in a different way too: how beautiful it would be if masculine-identified people who experience the rigidity of gender norms had this experience of secure connection with gender instead, one that allowed them to come and go into different aspects of gender.

sb: I also flip it back and think about the conversations about gender that have endured for years and decades and centuries about what is a man and what is a woman, and what society expects a woman to be. I would translate transgender identities as a natural extension of the ways gendered power already works.

ns: OK, so that centering transness theorizes gendered power more accurately? Which turns how we perceive cisgender inside out; looking at it in the way you have suggested can turn that whole system of power inside out. It would mean we can all be more free to be held in the world as our whole selves. When we perceive trans and genderqueer people as they are—whether by recognizing that trans women are women, or respecting the complex gender identities of nonbinary people—those changes can increase conditions of safety throughout the fabric of the culture.

sb: I am so hopeful for future generations. Someday maybe we will have the technology to just change our bodies at a whim, cyborg-style, trying different configurations to see what best fits our gender identity. It reminds me how we can already break gender barriers down in something as basic as clothing. Having no barriers of gendered clothing, where you can try on any clothes in a store, because screw the sections and colors that differentiate gender. I know that day is coming.

ns: When I imagine a good future, it’s one in which people want to act accountable for harm they cause, and in which the terrain of gendered power does not distort that process so profoundly. That would make me happy, but it may be a long haul to create that kind of culture.

4: On Gaslighting

I keep having the same conversation over and over.

That thing where someone undermines your perception of reality and says you are crazy, or denies that something is happening that is in fact happening?

When people we love and trust do that to us, it really messes with our minds.

Over time, or when it is about important things, this experience of having words deny reality can fundamentally shatter our sense of self-trust and our ability to navigate reality.

“There’s a word for that,” I say, hearing yet another such story from a female friend. “It’s gaslighting.”

Friend says, “What’s gaslighting? I’ve never heard of that.”

“It’s when someone undermines your trust in your own perceptions and you feel crazy because your instincts and intuition and sometimes even plain old perceptions are telling you one thing, and words from someone you trust are telling you something different.”

“Oh.” (Looks it up.)

“Oh,” friend says again, reading. “But gaslighting seems to mean when someone does that to you intentionally. I don’t think he was doing it to me intentionally. Actually, it’s even harder to pin down because I don’t even think he was fully aware he was doing it, and he got upset when I talked about it. But he was. And it makes me question my sanity.”

Do you understand the depth of the harm of making someone question their sanity? This is serious shit. This is not like “Whoops, I brought you the strawberry ice cream and forgot you like banana better.” It is poking a hole in someone’s fundamental capacity to engage with reality. Understand it in a context in which women have been told every day for their entire lives that their perceptions cannot be trusted—when in fact our perceptions are often bang on—and you have a systemic, pervasive, deeply psychologically harmful phenomenon, insanity by a thousand cuts.16

And this matters not only because of violence; the implications are greater. If you think of the power, the strength, the capacity to effect change that women and femmes who trust themselves are capable of, what we are losing when we doubt ourselves is a force for social change that is indomitable and therefore, to some, frightening. In other words, our capacity to know ourselves is powerful—and power in people who are situated as abject is squashed at every turn for the very reason that it has the force to overturn injustice.

On whatever axes we experience oppression, our best qualities are fed back to us as weaknesses to disguise our own tremendous power and size from ourselves. Because of the nature of structural violence, which creates the conditions in which these acts land in our bodies, this undermining of reality does not need to be conscious or intentional in order to cause significant harm.

People undermine the perceptions of those who have less social power for a variety of understandable reasons:

• They feel ashamed about something they are feeling, wanting, or doing, so they dissemble and act emotionally dishonest about it, or blame the other person, instead of taking ownership over their own feelings, wants, and actions.

• They are not self-aware and have not done their own emotional work, so when asked a direct question about something confusing in their behavior (such as incoherent emotional distancing, irritability, conditioned entitlement, or attachment issues), they cannot give an honest answer, and give a plausible but emotionally dishonest one instead.

• They are attached to a certain image of themselves (as nurturing, as a feminist, as very responsible and dutiful) and are not ready to perceive shadow sides or less emotionally developed sides that contradict this self-image or public image.

• They were raised in a conflict-averse household where skills were not taught for how to meet your own and other people’s needs simultaneously, so they unquestioningly believe a zero-sum game is the only option, and they want what they want.

• They have a physiological level of arousal or alarm that feels overwhelming when talking about uncomfortable topics, so they smooth them over with excuses or logistical dissembling.

• They are anxious about healthy amounts of normal intimacy and on guard against it, so keeping things vague protects their feeling of control over emotional intimacy.

• They do not have lived experience of emotional safety and healthy nurturing responsiveness, but do not realize this about themselves, so they experience people they are intimate with as having unreasonable or excessive needs.

• They have grown up watching a male parent speak to women or children in the family in a paternalistic, condescending, or manipulative way and have not taken the time to recognize and change this pattern.

• They have “narcissistic qualities.” This is actually not uncommon (7.7 percent of the masculine-identified population, apparently). “Narcissism” describes a human experience: an abandoned, rejected original self, buried under layers and layers of shame, with a seemingly highly self-confident personality developed on top. For those who struggle in this way, the original or vulnerable parts of the self are tucked away under a firewall and are emotionally undeveloped, and so this inner guide to empathy, trust, and connection that emotional adults have to guide them is to varying degrees offline. These folks are unusually susceptible to gaslighting others without even realizing they are doing it. Unfortunately, they are also the least likely to take ownership of or recognize their actions and are more likely to try to cover their ears, deflect, prevaricate, change the subject, attack, or flee when someone they do this to attempts to ask them for help or clarification. The level of self-awareness of people with narcissistic qualities is very low—they are unlikely to recognize this in themselves or to change once they do, which makes them tricky to get close to.

• More serious mental health issues can at times come into play; narcissistic personality disorder, for instance, entails a good deal of gaslighting, along with raging and an utter inability to follow emotional logic from point A to point B. For the small percentage of people whose narcissistic traits might meet the criteria for full-blown narcissistic personality disorder, shame aversion is a powerful emotional logic that connects otherwise incoherent emotional manipulation, switchbacks, and logical incoherence. However, these are less common than the more everyday garden variety kinds of gaslighting.

If the impact on the other person is literally to lead them to doubt their sanity, at a certain point we have to be able to talk about what is happening without getting mired in “But I didn’t mean it!” Effects matter more than intent.

Here is a small example. I phone a close male friend I’ve known for many years. I’m upset and I’d like to vent, maybe hear some supportive, loving words and maybe ask advice. This friend sometimes feels physiologically overwhelmed by emoting, and sometimes finds it brings him closer to people and welcomes it. In this moment he snaps, “I can’t talk right now. Here,” and tosses the phone to his female partner, who enjoys these kinds of conversations.

I feel mildly hurt by the abruptness, and since we’re all very close, I mention it to the partner, who relays that to him. He says from across the room, “No, no, I’m not upset at all with you. I just am washing dishes and getting dinner ready, that’s all.” She relays this to me: “His tone of voice had completely nothing to do with anything you said, it’s just him feeling stressed about dinner.” We all agree that’s all it was, and I repeat those words. I believe it completely. I think I must have misread him, and say, “Oh, sorry! It’s totally OK!” and apologize for asking to talk when he’s got things on the stove. Somehow my perception—that he has just snapped at me while I am upset and tossed the phone away without any kind words, as if I’ve done something to make him angry—I decide must have been just me completely misreading him.

I abandon my perceptions and calibrate my understanding of his needs with this new information: he’s OK with listening to emotions, just not at this time of the day.

When I say sorry, however, I feel a little funny—some part of me is not sure if I’m apologizing for my timing, or for having emotions. I think I am wrong to feel shaken at being snapped at. I doubt my perception. His words directly contradict what my limbic brain is telling me is happening.

We don’t talk about it, and I add to my repertoire of knowledge that this is just what my friend looks like when he’s multitasking, and that it wasn’t a response to me being upset at all. Because that is what he said.

A few months later we are talking, and he’s been doing some reflection on some of his own feelings, increasing his capacity to handle emotion. He says, “Hey, you know that time you called needing an ear and I snapped at you and threw the phone away without checking with you, then said I wasn’t upset with you and was just busy doing dishes and making dinner? I actually was having a really big physiological response to your emotions and couldn’t deal.” This isn’t shared as a big revelation; he’s known for a while it was the case and just is sharing because he’s excited about what he’s learning. Nobody is upset at anybody in this moment—it’s just an interesting conversation about feelings.

I stop. I realize that my perceptions had been accurate the first time. I try to take in that I had erased my perceptions of that small moment. And not only that. In order to be a good and loving friend, I had internalized a new pattern of information about the meaning of my friend’s behavior, which means I had continued denying my perceptions for weeks, any time I thought back on that moment.

And maybe I didn’t need to; maybe my perceptions were fine. He had snapped at me and tossed the phone off like a hot potato and seemed really emotionally overwhelmed, and I had taken in “just doing dishes, not upset with you” and recalibrated my reading of him with that info because I trusted him and I wanted to take in his words about himself. And yet in a very ordinary, everyday way, his words about himself were not actually true.

More to the point, they did not match my body’s knowledge about what had just happened—his emotional overwhelm—which was not in itself a big deal; people can have different bandwidths for emotions at different times. If he had said, “I’m feeling overwhelmed by emoting right now,” we would both have been in the same reality, and my response would still have been, “Oh, OK, all good, I’ll talk to her instead.”

I realize that while I can, in the moment, respect his needs either way, it would have been much less harmful to me to trust my own perceptions over his words, which were emotionally dishonest.

I could have heard his words “not upset with you at all, just have my hands full with dishes and dinner” and thought, “OK, he seems to just be feeling emotionally overwhelmed and I guess he doesn’t feel able to say so, so he’s saying something else. That’s OK.”

Either reason for not being available is OK; but one is true, and the other is not.

One gives me an accurate ability to calibrate my internal compass; the other disrupts it—if I trust his words over my perceptions.

This is tricky: second-guessing someone about their own feelings can itself be a form of gaslighting. It’s a strong value of mine to believe people when they say how they feel, because when you come down to it, we are all experts on our own inner realities.

But having had my perceptions undermined all of my life, I have to learn to temper that information I’m being given with the evidence of my senses and hold the two together.

When I can hold these two sets of information at the same time, I can be more willing to trust him on what he is experiencing when he needs me to be, while not automatically discarding all the really quite reliable information my body is telling me.

I don’t have to tell him he’s being dishonest in order to trust myself. I can just learn that my perceptions are really accurate most of the time, and allow myself to hold as a gentle additional option the possibility that he may not be being entirely up-front: that people are not perfectly self-aware, that humans are complicated.

When I know inside myself that my perceptions are accurate, contrary to a lifetime of having them undermined, I feel less like I’m trying to hold on to reality through slipping sand. When I feel less like I’m hanging on to my perceptions by a thread, I can approach these situations with more ease, solidity, empathy, and understanding.

If I need to, knowing I am perceiving things accurately despite his words, I can gently query the info I’m being given and see if a more honest answer might be just under the surface. “I’m reading you as a little overwhelmed, is that accurate? It’s OK if you don’t want to process feelings or be there for venting, not everybody wants to do that all the time, just let me know if that’s all it is, OK?” If I skip the erasure of my reality and trust that little voice inside myself that says, “Hmm, no, wait, these words and these sense perceptions are shearing off each other,” maybe I’ll be strong enough to ask a clarifying question, offer understanding, and get a more accurate answer.

Here is another example. I am house-hunting with a close male friend who generally treats me very well. I say, “I’ll drive around and look for signs of places to rent in windows.” He, under stress, disparagingly waves away my idea with a condescending tone that communicates that I must be a complete idiot. “No one puts signs in windows here,” he snaps impatiently. “Have you ever seen a sign in a window? People just use Craigslist.” I, automatically trusting his perceptions over my own, immediately think, “Wow, I must be stupid. Why didn’t I notice that this city is different from where we grew up?” and abandon that plan. I think somewhere in the back of my mind, “Oh, but I thought I saw some signs in windows in that neighborhood just north of here,” but I am confused and I think I must be remembering wrong.

Two weeks later I am visiting a friend in their new apartment and I ask, “How’d you find this place?” She says, “Oh, I answered a sign in a window. Some of the best ones you find that way because the older generation who have been renting for a long time and don’t jack up rent are used to doing it that way and don’t use Craigslist.” I stop. I realize that I have discovered a moment in which I had automatically superseded my own self-trust with an assumption that a male friend must know better.

And yes, women gaslight people too. But patriarchy and structural sexism mean that the effects land differently. In that last example the friend agreed that he had been taught all his life to trust his perceptions, and so he would not have skipped to abandoning his own ideas when presented with mine. People gendered female are relentlessly undermined.

Were this just one moment, there would be no harm done. But there are a thousand such moments in every day, and we only rarely catch them so clearly.

The depth of the impacts, realizing that all of your life you have undermined your own perceptions, that all along you were not crazy and could have trusted yourself, is dizzying. The scope of the distortion, when it hits you, is a brick wall.

And guess what? Feeling angry when you have had reality undermined in this way is normal and healthy.

The essence of gaslighting is this: actively doing something to another person that, quite expectedly, leads them to feel feelings (sadness, hurt, confusion, fear) and then telling them or implying that they are crazy to feel those feelings because you did not do the thing that you did, in fact, do.

When people we trust tell us, in a nearly continuous daily onslaught, that real things are not real, we experience a pernicious fragmentation and undermining of our most powerful, most beautiful, and most effective source of guidance: our perceptions, intuition, and instincts.

We live in a world that does not want women to trust themselves and literally tells us in thousands of different ways that what we know to be happening is not happening. Maybe, as a man with his own abusive tendencies told me not too long ago, “Even good men don’t really want women to trust themselves, because that would give back some of the power and control that patriarchy gives men.” “Good men” can destroy a woman’s sanity, if they have not seriously, seriously worked on this.

If, as may happen, a man is in a relationship with a woman who has been seriously gaslighted in the past, small moments of telling her not to trust her perceptions can land right on top of the more intense manipulation she may have endured before. Those of us who have lived through abuse have to struggle more than others to know that our perceptions of reality are accurate—often spot-on.

The effects of having people we trust and count on to help strengthen us undermine reality are serious and deeply damaging.

Why does it matter if he did it on purpose or not? I mean, doing it on purpose might make you a genuinely bad person, sure. But very few of our loved ones actually set out to harm us, and yet harm us they do.

A person’s sanity is not something to be played with lightly. If a man harms you this badly because he just doesn’t realize he’s doing it, or because he feels too ashamed to admit something that probably isn’t shameful at all, or because he has grown up in a world where he can get away with it and not think too much about it, or because he just feels entitled, aren’t the effects the same?

In fact, being in this kind of morass of dissembling can be all the more confusing when you can see plainly that the person you love, the person you trust and have faith in, believes what he is saying himself—even if it is not real.

The trouble is that masculinity tells us all, whatever our gender, that women do not know what they are talking about and that information coming from a mouth that is in a body with a certain pitch of voice and a certain gender presentation ought not to be taken as seriously.

Sometimes a whole circle of people will do this to someone and not see it at all until later. In my community, for instance, some years back, there was a woman of color whom I had initially been told was “angry all the time.” She was in a relationship with someone I heard described as an “easygoing” white guy. Turned out he had been sexually abusing her for years and denying reality when she said it was happening. For years. Much later, I heard the horrifying details. When she spoke up, many people around this situation got hit with a brick wall of our own: we had let it happen. We had seen her as an “angry woman of color,” without stopping to think what could be happening to her, or what she might truly have been feeling.

I have been among those called in to help with accountability in one such situation, where I recognized much too late that the person who had been causing harm was unwilling or unable to fully acknowledge the extent of the abuse. Does an abuser’s refusal to fully admit to the harm reduce the impact of having an entire circle of ostensibly radical and feminist people abandon and gaslight the survivor? Do we really need the person causing the harm to see the harm before we will name that it is there?

Isn’t that an awful lot of power to give those who gaslight, that they get to decide whether or not the person they have harmed can be heard?

This dynamic becomes massively amplified when the abuse occurs along the nexus of race, class, and gendered violence, in ways that normalize violation and brutally tip the playing field.

And yes, gaslighting happens to masculine-identified people too. Those who have experienced it need to help and support others who face this kind of harm rather than being in competition. We experience it in different ways based on how our surrounding society colludes with it. When men gaslight women or femmes, this action picks up the larger cultural gaslighting of people socially positioned as feminine, as well as the cultural training to center men. This combination massively amplifies the harm; it has the effect of policing the survivor, throwing the survivor under the bus to protect unspoken social norms that tell women to be quiet, pliant, and silent. The same is true of children who experience gaslighting: they are often not believed. The best thing you can do if you are a guy who has experienced this is to use that intimate knowledge of how deeply distressing this experience is, to connect with and support women who survive in a context in which an entire culture gaslights them every day.17 That cultural context means when an individual guy engages in the more extreme gaslighting abuse, women and femmes are much more susceptible and much less able to get heard. The landscape of power in which the behavior lands magnifies its effects by orders of magnitude that need to be experienced to be fully understood.

So, do we need another word?

Is there a word for “messing with your sense of reality and undermining your sanity by saying something is not happening when it absolutely is” that does not connote “doing it on purpose,” but instead recognizes the deeply systemic, pervasive, and devastating quality of these moments? A word that says “center the survivor”?

It feels tremendously important, and can be difficult, to keep our empathy directed toward the survivor18 in cases of gendered violence, including significant, long-term, ongoing gaslighting. Patriarchal culture teaches us to empathize with those who have power, and in particular to empathize with men who harm, and to “skip” or “forget” to feel what it is like to survive this type of abuse when it is ongoing, systemic, long term. We need to turn this around, centering our empathy and attention on the deeply damaging ways gaslighting affects female-identified people. This culture can heal when we hold these things together: when we consciously direct empathy toward the women who have been harmed and keep it there, so we can respond in a caring way, without centering abusers, while offering a path for repair and learning when masculine-identified people and others who hold systemic power recognize they have engaged in this kind of psychological undermining of someone else’s mind.

“Gaslighting” is such a powerful word and has helped so many people I know finally begin to trust themselves. I don’t want to leave it only to the extreme situations, because it is the very ordinariness and naturalization of this systemic disruption that can make it so difficult to pin down. We can center the impacts while recognizing that the causes of this kind of abuse are not always intentional, without letting that awareness continue to have the violent and detrimental effects on women that it currently has. We could call this “unintentional gaslighting”—sure.

Of course, there are those for whom any inch of room you give them, they gaslight a mile. There are those for whom it is not wise to give any room to discussion of their intentions, because they are largely or entirely unable to act accountable or empathize with the one they have harmed. In these cases, straight-up “gaslighting” is probably the best word. Because centering the survivor is so damn hard for these people, it can be best to begin by centering the survivor—and then staying there. Effects are what matter in gaslighting. Not intentions.

16 Rebecca Solnit, “The Archipelago of Arrogance,” TomDispatch.com, August 19, 2012, http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175584.

17 Solnit, “The Archipelago of Arrogance.”

18 Thank you to Kira Page for this insight.

5: Dialogue: Building Strength through Movement and Afrofuturism

Ruby Smith Díaz was born to Chilean and Jamaican parents in Edmonton-amiskwacîwâskahikan (ᐊᒥᐢᑲᒖᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ). She is an arts-based anti-oppression facilitator, a multidisciplinary artist, and a personal trainer supporting marginalized communities in feeling powerful and grounded in their bodies.

ns: What does nurturance culture mean to you?

rsd: Imagining a world that is much more oriented toward life, thriving, and a future.

Violence against Black people often reaches the extent of death. Not to lessen the impacts of other harms, but for us it often results in death. So, for me, self-care to build resilience and joy are essential. Self-care is so often denied to us, and we often deny it to ourselves. It can mean care of the body to build physical strength, as well as connection to culture and art to build inner strength.

Art is an incredible way to challenge and heal from white supremacy because you can create art that has nothing to do with the current reality that we’re facing, and instead, create a reality that isn’t solely created in resistance to an oppositional force, but is created in a noncoercive way, on our own terms.

For me, nurturance culture has meant looking into my own history, it has meant wearing clothing full of patterns that are reflective of my own identities and trying to learn about them, participating in DIY culture and creating food, literature, art, and clothing that are reflective of my identities, and also participating in projects that defend and enhance the lives of those communities whose very existence is threatened by the state. A lot of it is also rooted in joy.

The Afrofuturism Trading Cards that I’m creating with young people, for example, are based in joy. We do character sketches, and the youth imagine that they are living in a time that is free of racism, homophobia, classism, and all of the other oppressions that exist today. We ask what it would look like if we were truly free and unafraid to be who we are. What would you look like? What would you wear? What would your superpower abilities be, and how would you use them to bring healing into the world?

For me it is important to create a project that is based on imagining a different context, which is important especially for youth today who see the amount of violence that is directed at young Black people like themselves—and the vicarious trauma that they experience and that I experience watching those things—to create representations that aren’t just about Black death. That connects to joy and identity. Afrofuturism gives us a lot of possibility.

ns: Robyn Maynard, in a class visit last term, said that it shouldn’t have to be some science fiction future to imagine Black people’s lives being valued.19

rsd: Yes.

ns: So, making art, painting, artistic expression, the jewelry you choose to wear, the pleasure in it, and movement, being alive in your body—those things feel connected, right? For you, how is creating art and feeling joy a form of resistance?

rsd: Well, yes, because as an Afro-Latina person I feel like there’s so much to get defeated over in our communities. When I met Fred Hampton Jr. in Chicago a few years back, he would often speak of people being demoralized; so, for example, people who use drugs as a means of escape from the trauma that they are facing, or drop out of movements because they feel ineffective or get depressed by what we’re facing, and I’ve often thought about demoralization as the way the systems around us work together to make us feel like giving up on life by excluding us from basic things like access to health care for our bodies, or imprisoning us, or isolating us from our true histories and cultures.

So, I try to find those little things that bring me joy because I try to remain afloat. I like being able to create spaces where the people around me can feel joy. Sometimes it is in the act of taking back time for myself, because I often overextend myself in paid and unpaid work. So instead of rushing to the next appointment or fitting one more thing for someone or something else, I’ll take back my time to do two minutes of flossing, or of putting on coconut oil on my skin. Even when I don’t have access to financial resources that will pamper me I have to find ways of doing that within my financial resources. The notion of self-care is often marketed as needing to purchase something, and for me it’s about finding ways outside of capitalism to care for yourself with what you have, building resilience for yourself. These are acts of radical self-love.20

ns: How does that connect to movement and to bodies, to your work as a personal trainer?

rsd: There are many Eurocentric ways that bodies are idealized in the North American fitness world. And for me, as an Afro-Latina person whose body looks very different than what’s represented in the media, strength training has helped me appreciate my body more for its larger frame and build, its natural muscular strength, and has also helped me to feel proud of that and take up more space. It allows me to shift that narrative in my mind, which brings me more joy and makes me hold myself differently because I know the things that my body is capable of doing, whether it’s dealing with a lot of chronic pain or feeling especially energetic. And because I know all of the amazing things it has done for me and continues to do, challenging it and bringing movement into it through exercise can bring me ease and joy.

When I was younger, I always wanted to shrink, because as a person socialized as a woman in this society I was taught that it’s desirable to take up less space. I also wanted to shrink because I didn’t have a body that matched the Eurocentric body standards that were being glorified in the media. So, when I started working out, it was mostly sparked by me disliking the way that my body looked and wanting to achieve a certain kind of body.

When I started my own practice, it mattered to me that it should be a body-positive one that is affirming of people’s racialized identities, of queerness, of gender identities, and that honors their stories. Gyms don’t offer that, and obviously they can be very intimidating and hypermasculine spaces.

The mainstream fitness industry, as we know it, tends to work on the basis that our bodies are flawed and exercise is punishment. Whether it be that your body won’t look good on the beach, or that your body is not cishetnormative, I believe a lot people develop estranged relationships to movement because of how fitness is marketed. In my practice, I encourage people to do things that feel good, and to find out what the movements are that they really enjoy or do not enjoy doing, and what would feel good for them. It’s important to recreate those relationships of joy to our own bodies, and acknowledge how they shift and change. Not everybody is training for a marathon. I want to include people who want to participate in things that feel good and that create a little bit more health in their life in whatever way that means for them.

I think there is also a connection in thinking about resistance to capitalism and oppression, when we think about the lifespan impacts of not being able to move in ways that you want to, and who tends to be most impacted by this. It is often people who are from poor or working-class backgrounds, or who live in areas that don’t have proximate access to recreation facilities, who are often working multiple jobs and don’t have time to incorporate specific movement that isn’t associated with paid work. And if we look at who is doing a lot of strenuous physical labor, it is predominantly Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color. In addition, trans folks and people with disabilities often can’t even access spaces where they can move their bodies in healthy ways. On a larger scale, this is connected to mental health, and ultimately the resilience of our communities.

ns: So, you create ways for people to exercise when they might not feel comfortable at a regular gym, and make it as accessible as much as you can.

rsd: My work is a body-positive personal training service dedicated to empowering people to feel their best in their body, according to their own terms. The gym where my practice is based, and the training I do, offers support in gaining strength, power, endurance, and confidence, while leaving diet talk, fatphobia, transphobia, and Eurocentric body standards at the door. We welcome and center the participation of Indigenous people, Black people, people of color, queer fam, gender-binary breakers, radicals, and beyond, in any shape and at every size.

In contrast, trainers at most gyms are required to sell packages that require you to shrink, and that is something that has never aligned with me, that will never align with me. Specifically, being a person who’s Black—our bodies have been sold and auctioned and stolen. Our bodies have been genetically modified specifically to make slave owners more profit, in order for people to be genetically stronger, to genetically resist disease, to genetically be bigger or stronger so they can pull more cotton off shit. Our bodies have been essentially created in the imaginings of a capitalist system.

ns: Slave owners bred people.

rsd: Yes. When Africans were brought off ships, they were auctioned firstly for their condition that they were in. And then they would also often force people to have sex with each other so that their offspring could be lighter skinned or could be stronger or more resilient. And then we think about a lot of how Black folks now, especially people who identify as Black women or who are assigned as female at birth, are often shamed because of the stature of our bodies. And it’s like, you are shaming us for that even though it’s something that served you for capitalist purposes. So that piece in particular is partially why I named my business “Autonomy,” but also why I consider it very important to listen to people in terms of the goals they want to achieve for their own bodies. It’s important that we define health for ourselves and for our own bodies first. That we are the ones who know our bodies best.

ns: How would you connect this with cultural understandings about nurturance, of how we take care of one another?

rsd: On one hand, self-care for people who have been asked to give of themselves in particular ways is a form of resistance in a different way than it is for people who have not had as much of a load to carry.

At the same time, I think what makes this complicated is the way of thinking about it, the way that we think about it in this Westernized society. This society is very about binaries, and about objectivity, and can’t hold multiple realities simultaneously existing, which makes it complicated to talk about. I think about how many Indigenous societies have a version of the medicine wheel, I think about the Yoruba people in Nigeria, how they have a version of the medicine wheel, and the Mapuche people have their version of the medicine wheel, and they all represent different cosmologies, but what all of those cosmologies have in common is that they represent multiple layers upon multiple layers, they represent multiple things all at once. So, the basic understanding is that it is a collective of multiple experiences, that the individual is really important but is also part of the whole, even as the whole is really important, which gives back to the individual.

Therefore, taking care of yourself is also taking care of the collective, but you can’t just do that, because if you just take that one piece and you remove it then you don’t have a whole part of the circle anymore.

ns: What are the models that work for you? What kinds of care have you seen that resonate for you as making sense, maybe when harm happens, or even just in daily life, since harm is continuous and ongoing? Have you had experiences where it’s been done well, where you’ve felt it mean something as more than just a theory?

rsd: It can show up in seemingly simple things. I can think of one experience when I went to Colombia. I was maybe twenty-two or twenty-three years old. I was working with a nonprofit, and we were doing an exchange of approaches to working with youth. And we were all going out one night and people said, “Oh I really want some snacks.” So, we stopped by the corner store and a few people went and got snacks and then the group comes back and people open up the chips and start passing them around without even asking for them back. And I wanted to say, “Wait, those are your chips, you bought that, it’s going to get all eaten.”

ns: Western individualist mind.

rsd: Right, just a basic level of care there, that this is just everybody’s now, that was a shock for me at first. It’s just embedded culturally.

ns: So, what would you want readers of a book about nurturance culture to know, from your perspective?

rsd: Nurturance is one of the ways that we reclaim our own agency. There are different sites of resistance—a lot of the resistance that we see is performative and comes from looking at systemic things that are happening in our society, which are important, but we also need to understand our own identities and experiences, which shape how we interact with others because of the ways that we were raised, and also how others interact with us. Nurturance allows space to heal among us as well as social resistance. For somebody who has experienced a lot of trauma from white supremacy—growing up in an environment where they were told that the color of their skin was ugly or unattractive and that they would never be loved because of the color of their skin—healing might mean having time with a counselor and nurturing those wounds. Or perhaps creating spaces for people who have gone through similar things to create networks for people to share and feel connected.

I think it’s important to value our own processes and allow them the time they need to happen, as much as the things we do outside of ourselves. If we want a world that is different and that leaves behind all of the oppressive systems and values that we have, we need to be able to heal ourselves, because we embody so many of those oppressive values and systems and perpetuate them in our lives.

I often say this in my workshops—I believe it’s Angela Davis who named this concept—how we absorb and replicate consciously and subconsciously the toxicity of the environments in which we are living.21 I often use the analogy of elk in northern Alberta. They are hunted by folks who are living off the land—now when the hunters are opening them to skin them and process them, they are finding that their insides are rotten, or smell like petroleum. And obviously the elk are not participating in the oil industry, but because they’re living in this very toxic environment it is reflected in their very core of being and in health—just like us humans, who are living in a toxic society that exhibits and contributes to harming us in many different ways. We often inhabit and replicate the toxic behaviors of the society and the state we live in. We need to be able to understand what is happening to us and heal ourselves so we don’t perpetuate those toxic behaviors and ways of being.

19 Robyn Maynard, guest lecture, English 1102, Douglas College, Vancouver, November 8, 2017.

20 Sonya Renee Taylor, The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love (Oakland: Berrett-Koehler, 2018).

21 Angela Y. Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016).

6: Dialogue: Cultivating Empathy and
Shame Resilience

Aravinda Ananda is a social ecologist living on Massachusetts land. Her life’s work is supporting a shift in dominant human relationships from linear extractivism and the resulting devastation of the community of life on Earth to regenerative relationships of mutuality and healing. She calls this work Living rEvolution and is working on a book of that title. She does group facilitation, particularly with The Work That Reconnects, and over the past four years has been attending more and more to the dynamics of human oppressions as they appear in group facilitation contexts. She brings the complexity of her identity as a white-presenting mixed-race woman to her anti-oppression work.

ns: I think both of us connect nurturance culture to a much larger project of dismantling systemic oppressions. Even though “The Opposite of Rape Culture Is Nurturance Culture” focuses on masculinity, beneath the words is a process of grappling toward a broader cultural transformation, a way of turning our current world inside out. You are doing work with white people on unlearning white supremacist conditioning, and I have been inspired by the way that you have approached this practice.

aa: In The Chalice and the Blade, Riane Eisler talks about dominator culture and how to counter it.22 When I read about nurturance culture, it seemed to me it is the opposite of dominance culture.

ns: Yes, that is how I think about it as well. For many of us, I think, conditioning into cultures of dominance can be all that we know. And yet our bodies have this inherent gift to trust and depend on one another. In a time like this, when struggles are so intense and coming so fast, the way we gain strength is in knowing that we have one another’s backs, and I think a lot of people are finding that it takes work, on ourselves, on our boundaries, and on our bonds. And yet it can be immensely worth it. When people know that they won’t be discarded in moments of danger, and when they know that they will be heard when systemic harm is happening, we can face and take on so much more than we can when we live in isolation.

aa: Doing this well takes learning about the function of shame. I like to distinguish between guilt, shame, and healthy remorse. Shame is when a person feels they are inherently bad or have no worth. Healthy remorse, on the other hand, is quite different—it is when you acknowledge that you did something to hurt someone, and because you don’t want that harmful impact to continue, you would like to not only apologize but also repair that harm. Systems of oppression can activate an enormous amount of shame-conditioning whenever anyone does something that causes harm.

ns: Shame is an incredibly powerful social process. We need to better understand how it might work in a healthier, more delicate way. One possibility if we want to get rid of prisons and punishment could be that social shame, used very carefully and sparingly, could have a place. For example, in a tightly knit community where belonging and social standing matters, social approbation by the community can be one way to help reduce intimate partner violence. However, if shaming were to have any role at all, it would need to be employed much, much less than it is now in order to have any meaning.

aa: What I have described—that shame is when a person believes they are inherently bad—I would not ever want to employ in any way. What I would want instead is to become more skillful with understanding how it is a factor in work for liberation. I have seen a turning away immediately from people who have done something harmful, when that harm does get recognized; suddenly someone is a bad person and disposable. What can be dangerous is that one of the physiological responses to that shame is to want to hide. Some people have an exceptionally strong physiological response to thinking or hearing they are bad.

ns: I see, yes. So, for you, shame is not a helpful emotion at all, and it has to be navigated carefully because it can lead people to close up or turn away. I can see how shame can block people from expressing remorse, or feeling able to hear others. Shame has other fascinating responses as well—I have seen what appears to be strong inner-shame scripts result in a common pattern of using bizarre control strategies, deflections that avoid feelings of shame by denying or distorting the truth. A risk can come in when we give this kind of shame-evasion patterning too much room to control how the group or larger culture behaves.

Precisely because of this kind of shame-patterned behavior, I have understood that even when the person or structure causing harm does not change—because they are not ready to work through the shame, or entitlement, or combination of both that is in operation—the community can protect those facing harm simply by containing it, by refusing to go along with that denial or those deflections. I do not believe that the feelings of people causing harm should be the focus of everyone’s attention. At the same time, I agree that creating spaces where people who benefit from oppressive systems can experience unconditional positive regard while being challenged to grow their awareness of the experiences and feelings of others can also be immensely valuable. When there is safety to delve into that conditioning without being judged for it, people do change. Sometimes inch by inch, and with slipping back and then stretching again into new ways of thinking and being.

aa: Right. This makes me think about the process of unlearning white supremacy that we have been working on in some of the groups I have participated in and facilitated. There is a prevailing narrative that white people are associated with goodness. A kind of superiority logic but one that is not based on a deep, genuine sense of self-worth, but is instead based on an external self-concept. So when white people get told that they did something that has caused or contributed to harm, or even that they exist within a system that causes significant harm, if they are new to that awareness, they can completely reject it because it’s at odds with their worldview. Often, they cannot even take in the feedback.

One of the processes for dismantling white supremacy is, oddly, building up white people’s sense of fundamental worth and belonging. Not entitlement or superiority, but a deeper feeling that they do belong among other humans and will not be discarded as they learn. The last thing I want to do right now in my stage of racial identity development is hold space for white people; I actually want to get really far away from them. But you can’t shame someone out of a shame aversion, and so working with white people has become very important for me. Caucusing in order to do that kind of hard work of drilling down into white assumptions and fragility in a way that can hold people and bring them through the work has been so valuable. It responds to that call to “hold your people.”

ns: Those dynamics are definitely present in white-dominated organizing spaces, that odd sense that each person is trying to individually perform and compete, one-upping one another, where perfectionism and policing one another’s utterances is in the service of trying to be the “better” white person, rather than being open and connected with one another in genuine learning and vulnerability. Perceptions appear to be more important than real connection or even repair in some ways, and there can be a lot of fragility. That is similar to the dynamics that arise when working with men who cause or participate in gendered violence. This fragility response may be caused both by internalized shame, and also by the conditioning into supremacy that creates an inherent expectation of entitlement.

Countering both at the same time seems to help: “We like you, we are not going to shun you or turn away from you, you belong and have inherent worth as a human being, and also this action, this ingrained entitlement and harmful behavior is not OK and needs to stop. We will turn toward you, connect with you, and tell you no.” I’m curious about this tension between empathy and what we might think of as coddling. How do people grow out of the emptiness that we might call narcissism? By being fully loved and nurtured, or by being challenged and pushed to become more aware of the feelings and experiences of others?

aa: If the conditioning of whiteness leads people to have to fight to sustain this false identity—that they are good because of the label of white—that can mean they can’t let feedback in that their actions have a negative impact because it challenges that sense of self-worth. In Janet E. Helms’s work on the stages of white racial development, it is only in the last identifiable stage that white people typically get to a healthy identity of what it is to be themselves, and thus have greater resilience to understand that acknowledging the harmful impact of their actions does not negate their worth as humans.23 Their worth is no longer tied up in the label of white, but rather in an authentic sense of self, which gives resilience to take in the feedback about the impact of their action being bad or causing harm, while knowing that they still have inherent worth and value.

Until you have a core sense of worth and belonging, it can be very difficult to get to healthy accountability to others where, upon hearing feedback about the impact of harm, your sense of self neither collapses nor a false sense of worth needs to be defended. I’m not surprised that it parallels working with men on becoming aware of the impacts of systemic gendered oppression. The mechanisms by which systems of oppression maintain and mask themselves are not identical, but they are related and work together in interlocking ways.

ns: There is some complexity here, which I would like to explore. On one hand, creating emotional safety in which white people can grow empathy and challenge conditioning into white supremacy without being shamed and shunned can be so powerful. Not everyone directly affected by white supremacy is going to want to walk through those emotions and beliefs with white people in order to change their thinking, and obviously people shouldn’t have to, so when directly affected people do choose to, it can be an enormous gift. It seems similar to women and femmes doing the close-up work with masculine-identified people who are challenging their conditioning; it is a gift. At the same time, I’ve also understood that it can be dangerous to center the feelings of those who harm in this way in a culture that already centers those who hold power in so many ways at the expense of those who are harmed.

As a culture, we are often so afraid to even so much as name or even think about any kind of systemic harm. When we do not name or interrupt it, out of a desire for those caught in oppressor positions to learn at a pace comfortable for them, we allow systemic oppression to continue, and we allow it to harm people for fear that even naming or recognizing the harm might in some way shame the person causing it. I have seen that dynamic play out many times, where everyone turns toward the person causing harm to comfort them, and leaves the person or people harmed to face systemic violence without protection or even honest naming. Whereas seeing the harm together can be what protects us from the experience of confusion and doubt that systemic violence can create. Even if you face harm from one source, if you can fundamentally trust in the humans around you to recognize it and name it openly with you, so you can agree that it is happening, then the harm does not become so destructive. There is a kind of deep, visceral betrayal of human trust that can magnify harm significantly, when those around you do not even perceive it occurring. And yet that is precisely how normalized systemic violence works: it renders the harm normal, and all resistance to harm “disruptive.”

aa: Right. Not only is this terrible thing happening to you and rupturing your sense of belonging, but then people—and the systems that are theoretically meant to protect you, which may be actively perpetuating that violence instead—not naming it, normalizing it, make it as though you deserved the harm, or as though it is normal for that to happen to you and crazy to resist. That can cause very distinct trauma responses that are beyond the harm itself.

One of the things I’m interested in is the way hierarchies and systems of supremacies cut individuals off from the wider human body, so they’re not able to empathize, or feel the pain of another. I once heard Jeannette Armstrong describe four Okanagan definitions of insanity, and one of them is “cut off from your whole earth part.” I feel like there is this dissociation of the Western-conditioned mind from that wider earth body, that can also result in a disconnection from empathy or awareness of others around us.

ns: Right. That betrayal, when systemic violence is unseen or normalized by those around the people facing it can be devastating. And yet that is precisely how systemic violence operates. And so, the question remains, how do we heal when the harm is the very fabric of the culture, and is ongoing? There is healing from what has happened in the past, but there is also creating conditions in which the people around you can recognize continuing oppression happening in an ongoing way right now and say “no.” That opens up small pockets of trust and increased interreliance, where we are taking care of one another in much more meaningful ways.

aa: Transformation is deeply relational. It’s not, “I’m going to go and receive enlightenment on top of a mountain by myself.” That’s a colonizer’s story of disconnection and self-sufficiency. While I have personal responsibility, it is in relation to the others. It is an illusion and quite dangerous to think that I can do it all on my own.

ns: Part of collective liberation is how we challenge and care about one another in this deep unlearning and reconditioning. This can be one vital way that allyship can work: if you are not the person being targeted, then it may be incumbent on you to know how to interrupt harm, to name it, to listen to those getting harmed about how it works and how you or those you have trust relationships with may be part of it, and to say, “That isn’t OK, it has to stop.” That doesn’t mean that the harm immediately ends, but taking clear action cuts down on the deep betrayal of bystanding that can cause such fundamental breaks in human trust.

I fully believe in the capacity of everyone to grow, to heal, to change. I believe in creating conditions of unconditional positive regard in which people who act as part of systemic harm can learn to stop, and be accountable. But we also have to be careful about this. When you sit down in private with a person who has caused or perpetuated harm and work very hard to create conditions of acceptance, that is when you can see what is operating to keep that system of power in place. Depending on where they are in their own development, either the person can hear the harm, recognize it as part of a larger system not just intellectually but empathically, express their own inner need to make things right and be grateful that they can be held in that change, or they cannot handle knowing that they have hurt another person. Shame-evasion behavior can become apparent very quickly in that case, and can be intense: deflection, distraction, gaslighting, word salad, turning things around, attacking, or fleeing if they cannot regain control any other way.

This can be shocking the first few times people encounter it, especially with organizers who have committed much of their lives to building movements against oppression. But it is not uncommon. For this reason, we need very clear structures in our communities for handling harm, which can be put into practice in our movement spaces. This requires setting up conditions of kindness and unconditional acceptance while also clearly establishing how actions that perpetuate systemic harm are not acceptable and need to stop. This can be very difficult work because of the temptation to collude in naturalized oppressive worldviews and actions, or the difficulty of even perceiving systemic harm in the first place.

aa: To reach a life-sustaining culture and world, we need to live it into being. It takes a deep process of unlearning and reconditioning in order to counter the internal conditioning and actively block the systems that enact violence. Just because you have this flash of insight and want to create a sustainable culture, or a nurturance culture, doesn’t mean that you’re automatically going to be able to because your conditioned learning and mind may pull you right back in.

ns: I agree, yes. That is why we need culture that can clearly say we are all valuable, while also firmly turning toward harm—whether that be in laws, policies, supply chains, or cultural and interpersonal norms—and halting that harm together. This capacity—to connect with one another’s fundamental humanity and need to belong, but to contain the harm one causes, without giving in to the very strong pull to collude—takes learning, training, and practice.

I have begun to think of everyday oppression as the direction that pressure moves. Do we turn to the survivor of harm and say, “Don’t be so sensitive, don’t rock the boat,” and punish them with silencing or shunning? Or do we make the brave choice: to center and protect those harmed, to become able to recognize masked systemic violence when it occurs, and to turn to the source of harm and firmly say “No, this stops now,” while maintaining care and connection for everyone involved? That is everyone’s role to play in transformation.

22 Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (New York: HarperCollins, 1988).

23 Janet E. Helms, “Taking Action against Racism in a Post-Racism Era: The Origins and Almost Demise of an Idea.” The Counseling Psychologist 43, no. 1 (2015): 140.

7: Own, Apologize, Repair:
Coming Back to Integrity

There is a variation on “Not All Men.”

It is called “I Feel Bad When You Say That.”

My godson Kyle is six. He is fairly emotionally perceptive for his age, as his parents have been working with him to create an emotionally responsible and self-aware boy who we hope will grow into an emotionally responsible and self-aware man.

He knows, at age six, that when you hurt someone, you go back right away to own, apologize, and repair the harm. If he hurts his friend while playing, he (ideally under his own initiative) is expected to promptly name what he did, apologize sincerely and lovingly, and ask his friend what he needs or how he can help make things right between them: a hug, a high five, or an offer to play. He is taught to listen to the needs and feelings of others and act in a responsive way.

He is being encouraged to develop and express his empathic capacities, capacities he will need as an adult. Whether with his parents, his friends at school, or his baby sister who cannot even speak yet, he is being taught to hear and notice how other people feel, to empathize and connect, to watch cues, and to act like someone aware of and able to embody his relational responsibilities.

He is also being taught that he is not shameful.

When he does something wrong, his adults show him how to make it right and they also let him know they love him and he is good just as he is. He is loved and good, he did a thing that hurt someone, and he has to make it right. These are not mutually exclusive but connected.

As he learns, sometimes he mixes things up.

Sometimes he can’t tell the difference between him feeling bad because he hurt somebody, and feeling bad because someone hurt him.

Kyle and his dad are at the table. Kyle is restless and grouchy about having fruit for dessert when he wanted ice cream. He is kicking. He is six, he has a lot of energy; when he gets frustrated he still sometimes flails and needs help knowing how to express his anger in good ways. His mother asks him, “Are you feeling angry because you wanted ice cream? It’s OK to feel angry. I hear you. All of your feelings are good. It’s not OK to kick people, though. If you feel angry you can say, ‘I feel angry!’ You’re always allowed to feel anything you want, but kicking is not OK.”

Kyle, still flailing, kicks his dad on the shin.

At the end of his rope—but still modeling for his son how to handle anger—his dad says, “You know what, Kyle, my feelings are hurt because you kicked me. I don’t want to sit next to you right now.” And he goes to a different room. Because this is a securely attached family, he is still available if Kyle wants him, and he is not going far and not going for long. Kyle runs off to his room.

Meanwhile, Kyle’s mum says, “Kyle, you kicked Dad. Come back and say sorry and make it right.”

Kyle comes back to his mum, crying, and says very intensely, his cute six-year-old face expressive and utterly for real: “You said I kicked Dad! You’re saying I’m bad! That hurts my feelings! You have to say sorry!”

This moment is kind of hilarious for the adults. He is using precisely the language we teach him to use (name hurtful action, name your feelings, ask for repair).

It is a good learning moment for Kyle. We can’t laugh. It’s tempting, but we don’t.

Let’s slow this down, sports-replay style:

Kyle kicks Dad.

Parent says: “Kyle, you kicked Dad.”

So far, so good.

Kyle says: “You said I kicked Dad! That hurts my feelings! You have to say sorry!”

Oy.

He is sort of getting the point? Except sort of not getting it at all?

He actually thinks that his bad feeling at being told he kicked his father is the same thing as the kick itself. Kyle is absolutely genuine in his distress, upset and crying. He really means what he is saying. He hasn’t made this connection yet, and we have to make it for him.

He is glowering intensely, crying, genuinely needing to be heard, and his great big eyes express his fury, fear, and confusion as only a six-year-old’s can do.

What is the appropriate response here? He is growing, and we guide his growing like a young tree.

His mum, suppressing a mix of bemused laughter and exasperation, hugs him and says, carefully, “Kyle, it’s true that we teach you no one is bad. I love you and you are good. But you did kick Dad. It’s OK for you to hear that, and I do not need to apologize. Now go say sorry and make it right.”

She is absolutely firm on this. She does not apologize for naming his actions or their effects, and she corrects his mixing up of one thing with another. He has to learn this at some point if he is ever going to be an accountable adult.

What if Kyle had not had such emotionally skilled parents? What if instead, they had shamed him by telling him he was bad, as many of our direct ancestors often have done? What if they silenced him, or coddled him and gave in, or all of the above? Kids need safe, sturdy, unbreakable, and loving containers to grow into in order to grow up to be whole, emotionally healthy, and accountable human beings.

What happens if no one helps him grow out of this? He comes from a family of physically big men and he is already a head taller than the other kids his age. He will be full-grown early and he already is big to the kids his own age.

What if he had made it all the way to adulthood with this confusion intact? This may sound absurd, but I see this same confusion play out among adults, particularly when we begin to “pull back the veil” of unearned privileges that mask power in our society.24 I see this play out in masculinity, in whiteness.

As a white person who teaches literature about racism and nationalism, I am not unfamiliar with this phenomenon. This same attack posture is present in most white people when we encounter the fact of colonization and racism, and our complicity in both of these. If we cannot feel “comfortable” while grappling with the reality of colonization, or if we cannot have our bubble of ego preserved and coddled while we learn the hard facts about racism, we expect that it is somehow normal that we can go on the attack and expect the people experiencing harm to coddle and apologize to us, rather than being responsible for our own feelings and making ourselves accessible and available to finally come to hear and see things that are happening every day to human beings all around us that our privilege lets us ignore.25

When Kyle grows to age twenty, or thirty, or forty, or sixty, and harms someone by action or omission, where will the parent be who can say, “You are good and loved and not shameful, and you did this thing. Now stop acting like an ass and go make it right.”

I ran into this again recently when a group of people close to me called in a man who was acting in psychologically abusive ways toward me. He recognized on some level he had done this harm and expressed tremendous guilt, which seemed to make him resentful and angry, and he showed no empathy and took absolutely no ownership or accountability. He left it up to everyone else to do his emotional work for him as he resentfully (and barely) went along. Instead of owning, apologizing, and offering repair, he continually centered himself and his intentions.

Stuck in guilt and resentment, he seemed to have no inner guide that could lead him to empathize with the person he had harmed, or to own, apologize, or make it right—all the ways we come back into alignment with our integrity when we have acted outside it.

After pretending to participate in a process for a bit—sabotaging it by making it clear he was standing near the exit, ready to bolt at any time, and didn’t really have any desire to hear—he went on the attack and told us all to stop talking, even to one another, or we would be “hearing from his lawyers.” Not because anything we had said was untrue, but because he “felt so bad” at hearing himself “described in this way” that when he could no longer control the narrative, he needed to silence the person he had harmed and all those around her. Never mind his lauded “ally” identity and his many books about organizing—when push came to shove, he could not initiate or actively step in to wanting to do accountability, simply because it made him too uncomfortable to try to understand or grow from what he had done.

There is a quality in guilt that paralyzes. Worse, it leads those who feel guilty to lash out like pythons or some kind of wild animal guarding a nest of self-loathing. “Do not look at the man behind the curtain,” says the guilt, “or I will attempt to destroy you just to stop you from getting near the core of my shame.”

This is the same demon that I feel arising in my classroom around week three as we talk about the hard facts of colonization, of our collusion with it for those of us who are settlers, and that it has not ended but is ongoing. This kind of wild serpent of fear and danger arises in the back of the room, and if I have done my job well, the students having these inner demons will come talk during office hours, saying wildly racist and historically inaccurate things. Even as I am also in an ongoing process of my own unlearning and relearning, I also try to listen and help them identify reality and where it diverges from their inner wildlings of shame. I do my best to siphon their demons out of the classroom, but I am aware that, depending on the topic at hand, Indigenous students or students of color in these classrooms are often asked to feel perpetually uncomfortable and traumatized in these spaces just so white students don’t have to experience even momentary discomfort. I see it as part of my job as a white person to notice that this massive discrepancy is happening, that it is naturalized. I see it as my job to empathize with, hear, and, to the best of my ability, guard the safety of those whom the classroom is not designed to serve and whose safety is structurally not seen as a priority. This is challenging, as my own subject position conditions me to notice the needs of the students from dominant backgrounds, who don’t even realize everything and everyone is centered around them.

As a white woman I can do this with white people about racism or colonization because I am not paying the personal cost in my body of being attacked by them as they work out their shame and guilt over beginning to understand reality.26 I can coddle and placate—(cough) empathize—and then find their edge, what they are willing to hear, and then offer a wider lens, because I am not in my body personally bearing the brunt of the violence.

I cannot do it with men.

As a woman I cannot ignore my body’s deep awareness of men’s potential to explode, attack, or flee if I pipe up about a thing they did that caused harm and that may as a result invoke guilt. I have been raised to sense that shit by the microsecond and act preemptively to coddle and placate and soothe the guilt before it can become a poisonous snake about to lunge at me, or become an abandoning friend about to leave when I need them most.

The cost to my body of coddling a scary, angry, fragile ego—coddling it to make sure it does not attack or abandon—is so great that I actually cannot do this kind of coddling any longer. I realize I have been doing it instinctively for a long time.

If you harm someone and then make it so that they feel afraid to tell you about it, be aware that women are likely coddling you constantly day in and day out in ways that exhaust them and that you take as normal and do not even notice. If you do this as a white person to people of color, be aware of the same.27 As Black feminist thinkers such as Audre Lorde have observed and articulated,28 it is so taken for granted in our culture that those with marginal subjectivity will constantly placate those who are dominant, that this is seen as perfectly unremarkable by those with more power, while those doing the placating have silence—and exhaustion, and trauma’s many bodily impacts—as their shelter and companion.29

You can live your life unaware of this. But do you really want to continue to live so oblivious to the emotions and experiences of the people around you?

If you harm someone and then when they tell you about it you are more focused on the fact that your feelings are hurt than on the fact that you have caused harm, can you stop and ask yourself if that is an adult response? Do you have your own inner desire to understand when you harm others?

If your answer is yes, then what do you do to live that desire and make yourself available for it? Have you let those around you know how you would like to know when you have caused harm? Is the answer, “I want to know in theory, because I like that people think of me as a great feminist, but I have not actually developed a good way to help people speak up or to hear it in real life”?

Ask yourself who the people are you would want to hold you accountable if you behaved in an abusive way. If you are the kind of person who likes to know when you have caused harm, then there are some valuable questions about how to make that real: How do you invite this information? How do you welcome it? How do you thank those who help you grow this way if they have to tell you because you have not figured it out for yourself? Do you realize just how scary it can be to tell you before they know how you will react? Do you confuse their fear of you for anger? Is their fear in any way justified? How can you make sure it is not?

If your focus is more on the fact that harm got named than it is on the harm itself, does this strike you as peculiar?

Depending on the severity and longevity of the harm, and the body’s silencing effects when trauma occurs, do you make it the responsibility of those you have harmed to tell you “in a nice way”?

Is it possible they have tried to tell you in a nice way and you have clapped your hands over your ears or made it hard for them, and eventually they lost the capacity to be nice while they were being harmed? If you think back—really think back—how long were they trusting you and quietly asking you for help and empathy and support and compassion and honesty before they lost their buffer of capacity to speak kindly while drowning?

How long did you hear those requests and not really hear them? Imagine how it feels to speak and find it is as if you hadn’t spoken. Not that people don’t believe you, but that they actually cannot hear you, as though you are speaking gibberish or not speaking at all. As though in a nightmare where you ask for help and everyone answers as though you have said something else: where you say, “Help, I’m drowning!” and those around you reply, “Oh yes, I see. I like oranges also. Have a nice day!”

Put yourself in those shoes. How long, how many days and weeks and months, would you retain your sanity while speaking kindly and asking for harm to stop and having it seem as though you had not spoken at all?

Coming up from underwater to speak up isn’t always pretty or easy. What if one of the effects of trauma is that after speaking calmly without being heard for so long, or after having the words get trapped in the still waters of their body, the survivor can no longer speak and can only scream?

Just as Indigenous students and students of color in my literature classes are somehow expected to be quietly, constantly unsafe and deeply out of their comfort zones just to make sure the white students do not experience a moment’s discomfort, and the white students think everyone is having the same experience they are, if you make it hard for people around you to let you know you have caused harm, you’re going to invoke survival strategies in your friends and colleagues when you think you’re just having a regular hang-out with your friend.30

This is the block to accountability that leads many of us to quietly placate men in ways they take for granted and think are normal. With certain men who have not realized that this guilt script is inside them, this placating that others do for them is so normalized that they seem to take as a given that women around them will handle their emotions for them, and they don’t even see it happening. I have recently understood that men I have to do this for are not men I can trust. Because if they harm me, they expect me to remain silent about the harm, and they expect me to remain silent about the fact of remaining silent so that they don’t have to feel bad, so that I don’t feel scared of them. This is given as the normal state of affairs. As the saying goes, when you are accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.

Here’s another example. When I was a little girl, my father would have unpredictable multi-hour rages for what he perceived as slights or insults. Later I learned there is a word for this, but at the time all I knew was confusion. Outside our family he could be charming, charismatic, friendly. He reserved his true self for behind closed doors.

An insult to him could be anything from how we sat in our chair or how we moved our bodies to not coming to the door late at night to greet him with a kiss when he arrived home, even if we were already in bed.

He could feel personally insulted by things he witnessed between my friends and me while we were playing that had nothing to do with him at all. What he would perceive as an insult was completely random and completely unpredictable.

He was a large man. Once he had been “insulted,” he could scream, full volume, uninterrupted, for several hours. Sometimes two hours, sometimes four or five. Uninterrupted screaming. It was impossible to predict how long a rage would last once it began. His face bright red as he swelled up like an enormous, angry balloon.

While this was happening to us, we had to sit perfectly still, not moving, not making any facial expressions. We did not go to the bathroom or drink water or eat while this was happening. We had to listen and agree—but agreeing with a wrong facial expression, nodding the wrong way, could get him to expand and blow up further, so the safest thing to do was to stay perfectly, perfectly still, with the perfectly neutral but agreeing expression, for however many hours until he was done. He did this regularly, all the years of my childhood.

I learned to keep a very smooth expression in his presence, to be very still, to have whatever body language or emotion he wanted. Mainly he liked when his daughter acted happy. His idea of how a girl ought to behave is pretty, happy, subservient, and devoted.

If I felt afraid of him, he would scream he felt “bad” that I was afraid. Somehow, this was supposed to make him a good person.

There was probably guilt in there somewhere. Shame, certainly, deep down.

That didn’t help us.

Guilt is not empathy. Neither is shame. In fact, when people feel overwhelmed by their own inner feelings of guilt, they are more likely to attack the people around them rather than act empathetically. Feeling guilty does not make you a good person. Empathy and responsiveness make you a good person. Guilt blocks empathy.

Sometimes he would say he felt bad, that I was telling him he was a bad father, and I had to say, “No, no, you’re a wonderful father,” to make sure he would not attack me.

He would scream things like, “Children all love me! I am wonderful with children!” or whatever other narrative he intended to terrorize us into accepting as real. And he was good with other people’s children—charismatic, playful, childlike. As long as he was having fun and not responsible for their physical or emotional safety, he was good with children. Just not with us. But wait, no, he was. Or was he? I couldn’t tell. He terrorized us until we demonstrated complete internalization of his fantasy structure.

And we did. Whatever he said. His control over reality was absolute. I became foggy, dissociated, not-there, and whatever he needed me to do or feel, I did or felt until I could get away. But it was impossible to get it right. The paranoia over “insults” was a thing in him. It had nothing to do with me. No matter how hard I tried, there was no way to get it right.

When we were afraid of him, we hurt his feelings. He felt that we didn’t love him enough.

In order to regain safety, I would have to find a way to make it up to him. I would actually apologize to him for having felt afraid. Because my hurt and fear hurt his feelings.

In the world he created, his fantasy structure—loving, devoted, happy, and well-cared-for daughters—was the only one that was allowed, and deviation from that fantasy structure by any of us created terror and raging until everyone fell back in line.

I left at twenty years old, and while I am close with the rest of my family and tried for many years to set workable boundaries that he inevitably crossed, eventually I have had to accept that with him there is only the fragile narcissist’s ego, and there is no repair that can be done. After explaining healthy relating to him for decades, I eventually had to accept there is no reasonable person inside him who can empathize with another human being. I have accepted that with him, I have left, and I have not looked back.

I can no longer manage or coddle fragile male egos. I can no longer come to the door to give my angry father a kiss, in my incredibly vulnerable white cotton nightie and my bare feet, the sleep half-rubbed out of my six-year-old eyes, feeling the secret tremor of fear stiffen and shake my body as I paste a smile on my face (hoping it is convincing as my true self exits my body and floats somewhere up near the ceiling) and kiss his cheek, because if he notices my fear, if he feels disrespected, he could make me demonstrate how much I honor him by screaming into my tiny face until I do.

I have run into this—“I feel hurt that you are scared of me”—with cops, and I was struck by the similarity of the experience. Once, at a demonstration against police brutality where the cops were detaining people and beating people up, a cop in full riot gear with his visor up, when I said he was scaring me said, “What about me? You hurt my feelings when you’re scared of me. My feelings are hurt. That is as important as your feelings, isn’t it?”

How do we get here, with adult men unable to differentiate narcissistic injury from actual harm? How do we get here, where an adult man—a lover, a friend, a parent, a partner—can cause serious harm and, when that harm is named, can clap their hands over their ears and say, “I’m not listening! I feel angry because you’re saying I hurt you! It hurts me too much to hear what I did to you! Go away, shut up, stop talking, la, la, la, not listening!”

Thankfully, I don’t have to do this with most of the men in my life, the ones who take their ally work seriously and are thirsty to learn, the ones who understand what accountability looks like and who make it their business and do not wait for others to drag them along into it.

I do have to do it with guys who have not taken ownership of their own reactions. If a guy has not realized that women are doing this emotional management for him, I no longer feel safe alone with him.

I have run into it when I have said “I am asking for empathy” from the person who did this to me, in front of several of our mutual friends, and instead of acting empathetic, he glared as he said, “I feel lots of empathy.” As though he was more concerned with maintaining a narrative of himself than he was with actually responding in an empathic way. Saying the words because you feel guilt over a missing capacity does not make the words true.

Empathy can trump guilt.

It looks like this: Own. Apologize. Repair.

Say, “Here is what I did. I did this thing, and that thing, and this thing. They’re fucked up because …”

Imagine replacing guilt with curiosity. Imagine saying, “Wow, it is so cool to recognize what I did. I’m excited I can hear you and grow. I did this, I did that, here is why it is fucked up. I’m so excited to learn how to come back into integrity with you. I’m so happy I can do this, that it is OK to fuck up and say sorry and learn together. This owning warms my heart.”

Own. Completely. Do not hide what you have done. Then ask, “Have I got you? Do I understand?” and let the person clarify. Mirror until you get it. Give this the time that the person harmed feels is needed.

Say, “Wow, thank you for sharing that with me. I know how hard it can be to share something like this. I’m really grateful you took that risk, and I’m taking it to heart. Here is what I’m going to do (concrete practical things) to make sure I get better about this in the future. Does that address the need?”

For some, empathy may take effort, focus, or concentration. True empathy is not theoretical or abstract, it is a physiological relating with other human beings, stepping fully and deeply into experiences that are different from yours. If you find that empathy takes focus, then accept that you may have to cultivate this capacity within yourself, and do not lay this responsibility at the feet of anyone else. You can own that your empathic capacity is currently still limited and develop a daily practice of expanding it in demonstrable ways as part of being accountable to those you have harmed.

24 “living through the unveiling,” adrienne maree brown. February 3, 2017, http://adriennemareebrown.net/2017/02/03/living-through-
the-unveiling/.

25 “The Five Love Languages Expanded,” The Span of My Hips, September 21, 2016, https://thespanofmyhips.wordpress.com/2016/09/21/the-
five-love-languages-expanded.

26 Meg Sri, “Hey, White People,” Feministing, November 11, 2016, http://feministing.com/2016/11/11/hey-white-people-you-need-to-start-doing-the-ugly-work-that-isnt-safe-for-us-to.

27 Ijeoma Oluo, “White People: I Don’t Want You to Understand Me Better,” The Establishment, February 7, 2017, https://theestablishment.co/white-people-i-dont-want-you-to-understand-me-better-i-want-you-to-understand-yourselves-a6fbedd42ddf.

28 “Revolutionary Hope: A Conversation between James Baldwin and Audre Lorde” (Essence, 1984), Mosaic Magazine, March 9, 2017.

29 Tiffany Martínez, “Academia, Love Me Back,” Viva Tiffany¸ October 27, 2016, https://vivatiffany.wordpress.com/2016/10/27/academia-love-me-back.

30 Zack Linley, “It’s Time to Stop Talking About Racism with White People,” The Washington Post, September 7, 2016.

8: Dialogue: Free, Prior, and Informed Consent

Natalie Knight is Diné (Navajo) from New Mexico and Yurok from Northern California and lives on unceded Coast Salish territories. She is an organizer with Alliance Against Displacement, based in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. She is part of the editorial collective for The Volcano newspaper and a contributing editor for The Capilano Review. Natalie maintains a poetry writing practice and has also contributed a chapter to Learn, Teach, Challenge: Approaching Indigenous Literatures (2016), edited by Deanna Reder and Linda Morra. She teaches in the English department and is on the Child, Family, and Community Studies faculty at Douglas College, and is revising a book manuscript titled Doubly Dispossessed: Urban and Dispossessed Indigenous Peoples’ Relationships to Land.

ns: Welcome! Would you tell us a bit about yourself, and your writing and organizing?

nk: My name is Natalie Knight, and I am Diné (Navajo) from New Mexico and Yurok from Northern California. For the past six years I’ve lived on unceded Coast Salish territories. My writing and organizing focuses on urban Indigenous people and Indigenous people who are removed from both our territories and our nations. I think of those of us who lack relationships with both our territories and our nations as doubly dispossessed, due to the effects of colonialism. Alongside urban and doubly dispossessed Indigenous people, I also organize with low-income and homeless communities in an organization called Alliance Against Displacement.

ns: Tell me more about what you see as the importance of doubly dispossessed people.

nk: Part of it is our sheer numbers. In Canada, more than half of people identified as Aboriginal in the census live in urban centers.31 And in the United States, more than 70 percent of Native American and Alaskan Natives live in urban centers.32 This doesn’t necessarily mean that all urban Natives are also living outside their territories, or do not have relations with their nations and land bases, but many urban Indigenous people do not. And then Indigenous people who live outside of urban centers may not hold relations to their nations and territories either, for many complex reasons deeply tied to colonization.

Even though most Indigenous people in Canada and the US live in urban centers, our political agency and social positions are not really reflected in the contemporary articulations of Indigenous sovereignty movements. To me, the most inspiring Indigenous movements today are those that focus on defending Indigenous territories from resource extraction, revitalizing Indigenous languages and cultures, and “coming home” to our nations. But as inspiring as these movements are, they aren’t accessible to those of us who don’t have the ability to return to our traditional territories and nations.

The flip side to this is that urban and doubly dispossessed Indigenous people create our own kinship networks and build relationships to the land even if it isn’t our traditional territory. I want to help support urban and doubly dispossessed Indigenous people to realize our own political agency.

ns: I can see how the political and personal are deeply interwoven for you. Do you identify as a doubly dispossessed Indigenous person?

nk: I do. Even though I’m lucky enough to know the nations that I come from, my relationship to these nations is not straightforward. Many Indigenous women have explained how colonialism wields gender and sexual violence against Indigenous peoples. Colonialism depends on this. So, while I am committed to speaking my national affiliations as one effort to resist assimilation into colonized space, asserting my Indigeneity is not possible without an embodied acknowledgment of the gendered and sexual violence that produced my birth.

My birth mother, who is Diné, was raped. I learned this when I was eleven years old, and I can’t overstate how it has affected my sense of self and overall well-being. She was assaulted by two Yurok brothers, two people who were familiar to her. I was adopted out of community at birth in an open adoption and was raised in the US by two white parents; I have two Black siblings. I always knew my nations growing up, but until my very early twenties I had no Indigenous community or Indigenous role models. I amassed incredible layers of shame growing up. I felt that I didn’t deserve to live because no one deserves to be raped. I also felt that I had no right to claim my Indigeneity because I had no access to my communities or cultures. Four years ago, I reconnected with my birth mother and her family and this has been tremendously healing for both of us.

ns: Your experience connects to many threads in this book. Making the connections between violence done to you, and tracking back to the source of that violence, in order to undo the internalized shame, can be very powerful. Young people who face that depth of shame at such an early age do not know that those aspects of themselves that are silenced and suppressed by structural systems of power are what is most beautiful and powerful inside them. So even though you have become more able to know that you were never shameful to begin with, it has still been difficult not to be able to go back to your nations and connect to your cultures, is that right?

nk: Yes. This piece about shame is, I really believe, very central to many Indigenous peoples’ experiences in North America, particularly doubly dispossessed Indigenous people. Doubly dispossessed Indigenous people experience what I call an ontological dispossession, by which I mean that at the core of our beings is a contradiction: we are Indigenous, and our lives are defined positively and negatively by our Indigeneity, but we often lack the material conditions as well as the national, cultural, and familial relations that teach us how to practice Indigeneity. It has been my own experience, and I have heard from other doubly dispossessed Indigenous people, too, that we tend to internalize our dispossession from our nations as our own fault. I believe this is at the root of much of the shame that we may feel.

Syilx writer, knowledge holder, and matriarch Jeannette Armstrong says that in her Okanagan ways of knowing the world, the stories of her culture literally guide Okanagan people from a state of being “people-to-be” to becoming fully people. Without the stories that instruct us on how to ethically engage with all living things, we are, according to Armstrong’s knowledge, not fully people.33 So as a doubly dispossessed Indigenous person raised outside of my nations and therefore without my stories, I am relearning Indigenous stories to partially undo my experience of ontological dispossession.

ns: It seems to me that the reasons for your disconnection from your nations are entirely rooted in the violences of colonization. Undoing that disconnection is decolonial work, maybe of a kind that is not talked about as often right now?

nk: Right. My writing traces my journey to relearn stories told by Indigenous writers in an attempt to become a full person. Undergoing such a rehabilitation has been enormously challenging and also profoundly liberating. I have come to understand, as part of this process, that the story of my birth is also a story that I have been given, and that it is, ultimately, a story. I have been turning the shame inside out to recognize that it never was a thing wrong in me.

ns: What I’m hearing from you is that your own process of decolonizing is largely a process of undoing, untangling, disidentifying with colonialism itself.

nk: Exactly. To describe just one instance of this undoing, one of the most powerful experiences I’ve had on Coast Salish territories since I’ve been here was being part of a talking circle of urban Indigenous people. I was facilitating the circle, and I shared these very personal details around my birth that I’ve shared with you. It was the first time in my life I shared this story with a group of people. And in that circle of about thirty urban Indigenous people, three other women said they had been conceived in a similar way. Until that point in my life, I had never spoken with anyone who had the same story.

Of course, I knew intellectually that gendered violence is central to colonization. But I’d never emotionally connected with another person who had it in their story. Suddenly I was able to understand just how I was produced through historical forces. This allowed me to let go of a lot of that shame I had carried with me for so long because suddenly I wasn’t alone.

ns: It seems colonization and gendered violence generate not only the violence itself, but also the attempt to erase the violence in the minds of those who live it, making it instead into some kind of personal subordination, where it is disguised as personal shame. That shame belongs to the settler culture, not to you; it was never real, but was a way to prevent people from recognizing the depth and scope of the violence. It can be inverted to be seen more accurately.

nk: It’s tricky, though. Once you understand that, and begin to question and undo the shame, what comes up next can be anger. Rage, actually. There is a connection between silence, shame, and rage. I understood that I wanted to move through those emotions and ultimately, to let them go.

ns: Anger seems healthy and normal to me, given the magnitude of the harm. Anger about injustice can have a use; it can point to what is wrong when words don’t come easily. What’s on the other side when you walk through that rage?

nk: For me there’s a feeling of deep empathy for all people, even those toward whom I feel rage. This does not mean that I would soften my politics toward them. Sometimes this has felt like a contradiction, to feel empathy and yet recognize that politically they are embodying forces that are causing serious harm. We live in a society that encourages us to think individualistically, as if our individual actions are not embedded within, or do not emerge out of, structural, social, historical contexts. Practicing accountability is a way of showing care and also ethically dealing with the violent histories that have created all of us.

ns: This comes up in many conversations about gendered violence and large-scale systemic harms. When someone harms or participates in harm, consciously or unconsciously, you can hold them accountable while also holding and humanizing the whole circle. If everyone who is in that circle or community or family or knit web of humans can say, “We care about you and will not discard you, and we also will not accept that you do this; it cannot go on, we will not allow it,” then you can contain the harm. Nothing about that feels contradictory to me at all.

This can also be the case in any systemic harm that includes that quality of massive denial. For example, in Canada, where Indigenous peoples are resisting the state-sponsored Kinder Morgan pipeline, a repeated line of questioning in reporting is: “How much consultation (with Indigenous peoples) would be enough to get consent?” These questions are invasive, and do not seem to take into account the meaning of consent. The larger cultural framing currently does not recognize the need to challenge this framing. A fuller awareness of relationality could help the settler culture become able to recognize how inappropriate such questions are. I imagine if people in the settler culture could recognize and assert that these are not OK questions—that anger might be an appropriate response to that kind of invasiveness—that line of questioning might become harder to get away with.

nk: This gets at aspects of what free, prior, and informed consent really means. Indigenous women and two-spirit people commonly talk about the relationship between land and the body, the gendered body specifically. It’s not just a metaphorical relationship. Women and two-spirit people have held specific knowledges about land within many Indigenous societies, and have held specific roles that place us in direct responsibility for the land. There are so many connections between land and the gendered body, and it’s not surprising from this point of view that colonialism would simultaneously assault our bodies and our lands, insisting in both instances on denying us free, prior, and informed consent.

I believe it’s not possible to talk about colonialism without talking about capitalism, too. They are intertwined; they wouldn’t exist without each other in their current manifestations. And so, for myself, to practice decolonizing also means articulating and enacting anti-capitalist politics. And not only are alternatives to capitalism possible, they already exist in our contemporary world and are indeed found in Indigenous societies. As an Indigenous person, I conceive of and practice my sense of self and social belonging by positing the existence of Indigenous feminist ecology rooted in Indigenous knowledges—a framework that is wholly different from capitalist understandings of the world.

The task then, for practicing decolonization and anti-capitalism, is to relearn diverse cultural knowledges that are rooted in land relationships. It is knowledge we only receive when we don’t reify our own human form, human capacities, and our abilities to produce. In other words, when we turn away from anthropocentrism. This relearning is just not possible under capitalism—which both destroys land relations and also produces, in Armstrong’s words, “people-to-be” who have forgotten how to fully be people.

ns: How does that relationship to land play out for you when you are in urban space, and on other Indigenous people’s territories?

nk: Well, there are two answers to that. First, it feels very important to learn and respect the protocol of the people whose land you are on. Even as an Indigenous person, I am not in my home territory, and I have not been welcomed through ceremony by the local nations, and so I am an unwelcomed guest here. That is one part of what it means to me. And second, my political organizing grows out of a sense of relational responsibility to take care of the land, and for me that includes the urban or built environment.

Western culture has constructed this idea of nature and wilderness, and with that comes the idea that Indigenous people didn’t manipulate nature and wilderness, when we know, of course, that we did. We cultivated the land, but sustainably. We burned, we planted, we manipulated elements of the land constantly.

So, the waterways that many are defending from pipelines, the forests, the mountains, that is the land; but the city is the land, too. Those awfully nice heritage houses are the land, and so is the three-story walk-up apartment building with shitty plumbing that low-income residents live in. This is a human-made environment, just as the forests and rivers have been manipulated by humans for millennia. If we understand that this is how we have manipulated and/or cared for the land, instead of having this false divide between supposedly unmanipulated land and urban space, we can ask, have we cared for the land in a good way? If the answer is no, then what is our responsibility to change our ways of caring for and stewarding the land? That is a form of kinship with the land.

ns: And maybe a way out of the collapse that we’re facing.

nk: Yes. Also a way out of the dominant narrative that believes that “authentic” Indigenous identity means on the land, and urban Indigenous identity means a partly assimilated person, not “authentic.”

The question then becomes not whether we are managing the land but how. As Armstrong has expressed, humans are not the only people.34 How have we managed the land, and how do we want to manage it in a way that centers the future generations and understands our relationality, our kinship to everything that has come before and everything that will come after?

31 Statistics Canada, “Aboriginal Peoples in Canada: Key Results from the 2016 Census,” The Daily, October 25, 2017.

32 “U.S. Census Marks Increase in Urban American Indian and Alaska Natives,” Urban Indian Health Institute, February 28, 2013.

33 Jeannette Armstrong, “Constructing Indigeneity: Syilx Okanagan Oraliture and Tmixwcentrism,” PhD dissertation, Universität Greifswald, 2009.

34 Armstrong, “Constructing Indigeneity: Syilx Okanagan Oraliture and Tmixwcentrism.”

9: Dialogue: Moving into Action,
Mapping Terrains of Struggle

Alix Johnson is a researcher and writer currently working as a postdoctoral fellow in Sociology at Queen’s University. A mixed-race (Chinese and white) survivor of sexual violence, she was a core and founding member of the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective (BATJC) between 2011 and 2016. Prior to that she worked as a crisis counselor, first responder, and advocate for survivors of sexual violence in Oakland, California. Her work has appeared in Culture Machine, The Toast, Anthrodendum, and Allegra Lab.

This conversation developed over a year that began with Alix’s three-month commitment to share BATJC skills with a group of people doing work around gendered violence in Montréal. A set of productive tensions emerged during this process that reveal in this conversation a topography of complexity often encountered when navigating repair of harm. The goal of this dialogue, therefore, is to map these points of complexity.

aj: In our work together, one thing that became a very clear, and fascinating, point of difference is how our past experiences—with our families, the communities we were raised in, our different organizing histories—shape the way we, and perhaps others, approach transformative justice work.

ns: Yes. Many of my formative experiences as an organizer were in contexts that take for granted that turning toward one another is what everyone would just intuitively do when harm occurs. By “turn toward” I mean something like what John Gottman has described in the context of attachment theory when he says “turn towards, not away.”35 He discusses “turning toward” in the context of romantic relationships—that to build secure connection entails turning toward one another, again and again, even when the temptation may be to turn away. However, I like to consider this idea of “turning toward” in a wider cultural sense as well: are we conditioned culturally to turn toward one another, or turn away, when violence occurs? How we are raised to respond to harm is culturally and family specific; we may all experience our own ways of doing things as though they are universal, when they are not.

In one of the first contexts where I began to develop a political consciousness, it was completely normal that when harm occurred, we would sit in a circle and talk things out. Meanwhile, in my family, while we don’t necessarily always have ways to address harm, there is a deep cultural value that you continue to talk no matter what. If any two members of the extended family aren’t talking, it is a kind of family duty that we do: every uncle and every cousin and every aunt immediately upon saying hello insists that you have to keep talking to whoever it is you’re not talking to. It is perfectly normal to get a breakfast phone call from a cousin you haven’t seen in three months, that even before hello begins, “So, I hear you are not talking to your father. I am having you both over for dinner this week and you have to talk to him.” It’s all good-natured and loving and stubbornly persistent, and if you grow up in it, this is completely unremarkable. My parents’ generation survived the war as refugees because cousins and aunts and uncles all stuck together. And so, the value that you continue to talk to one another is very deeply inculcated, to the point it is, for me, nearly unimaginable to think of why one would want to do otherwise.

Not to say that people always do continue talking to each other, only that cultural conditioning manifests in the many small insistences from all sides to turn toward one another. It does mean that when two people are not speaking, they can’t get away with it for very long, and eventually the conditioning wins out and they end up connected again because continuing to be connected is the direction the river flows—it is what is considered normal and what is supported. This is a value I love very much about my family. As I’ve seen more of how atomized many North American families are, I have come to value this deeply, because it is likely why I have this big extended family who continue to care very much about one another, despite all of our many differences, and in our odd ways.

aj: Yes! And I think that gives us such different, and differently valuable, approaches to accountability work. What I saw modeled in my family, and many other places, was turning away from conflict and not actively addressing harm. Overcoming that instinct has been a huge part of my own growth in transformative justice, so it gives me both a lot of hope that people can learn it, and also a certain skepticism—it makes sense to me that resistance is often the first response of someone asked to take accountability, so that’s built into my approach to transformative justice work. I’m used to trying, and hitting resistance. Then trying again and meeting resistance as a second response! But then you come back, engage their values and support system, and sometimes, that resistance shifts.

ns: Outside of a structure with some shared understandings and cultural agreements or processes about how we handle harm, it can be impossible to call the group of those affected by harm together to work things out. What I came to admire over time—even as I was destroyed by this realization—is that in your training, the understanding is that you are working with no larger container for resolving harm. There is no cultural context for you in which people assume that they hold together, and so you’re carving out solidarities one by one, relationship by relationship, in this kind of howling wilderness of harm. I had been assuming that there was some amount of safety in the world, assuming that we would know to turn toward one another. And that was not at all the case. But it can operate in some places.

aj: Totally. I know that can exist because I have seen it be cultivated, for instance in the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, a group I was part of for five years. But we had that safety because we chose it, we practiced it, and we built it together. It was really challenging! And there have been other collective spaces where I’ve experienced that assumption of holding together—but also many more where it has not been remotely the case. So, while I deeply believe in collective action and collective transformation, the place I start a transformative justice intervention is small-scale. I think, “Who are two people who are going to show up for you? Who are two more people you can talk to about this?” I think about building from the ground up, rather than assuming support is already there, because building trust one by one is where a lot of people and communities are starting from.

ns: I’ve learned a lot from you about how we build infrastructure for doing this. To me it was just the most natural thing in the world that when there is conflict, everyone would want to just sit down together and form a circle and work it out, because that is so much easier than suffering through decades of fractured community.

For me it just seems so obvious that working things out would be easier, and that we have relational obligations to other human beings. There is an enormous range of human relationality that exists in the area in between “complete stranger with whom I have no connection at all,” and “close chosen loved one.” In a healthy community, most human interaction takes places in this relational area in between closeness and complete stranger. The idea that we have relational responsibility only to those humans we love, and no responsibility toward anyone else, is destroying the very fabric of human connection in Western societies. Disconnection is not our physiological reality. That sense of disconnection is an illusion. To rebuild a healthy community, then, we need to understand that we have deep relational responsibilities toward even those humans whom we have not chosen and with whom we do not share deep intimacy, or even friendship.

aj: Yes, absolutely. This is something I’ve learned so much about from the disability justice movement, and from Mia Mingus’s writing and work in particular—we are all, always, inherently interdependent, and only a few of us have the privilege to pretend we are not. All our decisions take place within that fabric, whether or not we’re acknowledging it. And still, there are decisions to be made. And this is maybe another place we view things differently or might be inclined to make different judgment calls—for example, when to leave relationship. I think we can recognize our inherent interconnectedness, and still sometimes decide we can’t be in the same space with someone. Sometimes it’s OK that one person walks away. Sometimes it’s not at all OK, but we have to come to terms with it anyway.

ns: Well, and I’ve shifted on it, too. I’ve had to learn about that. It doesn’t have to be painful, but it can be some of the most painful aspects of this work. It connects to this tension—coercive control is something we resist. Saying, “You cannot leave a romantic relationship or I’ll harm you,” is abusive and dangerous, and we organize to stop that. On the other hand, ostracization is also a form of coercive control. Ostracization and the threat to shun survivors and bully them back into being quiet by cutting ties with them is a form of very serious psychological coercion and control. We need ways to hold the whole circle, then, both to protect survivors, and to expect that people who cause harm to others can make mistakes and grow and learn.

So how do we hold those in tension? Maybe by not cutting ties permanently with someone who has caused harm, but by establishing what is and is not OK to do, and saying, as a community or as individuals, “These are my boundaries, when you can respect them we will talk.” This has a double effect because some abusive people are unwilling or unable to work on it, and you accept that that’s not going to happen in this lifetime. But even in setting a no-contact boundary one can be in interdependence. This takes a group or community that can be very clear in what the conditions of their return would look like. But communities that prioritize protecting survivors have been few and far between in practice.

aj: And then there’s all the ways that power, both broadly, and in every specific situation, is going to compound that. There is the complexity of who is asked to do the work of responding to harm and violence, and who is recognized for it. For example, transformative justice comes out of Black women’s organizing for safety and justice outside the state—but too often, Black women are not held up as experts in this way. And then within each specific intervention, there’s balancing the need for all of us to show up, stretch, and even sacrifice, with the recognition of how that work gets distributed—I think about the ways that women of color are expected to give emotional labor to white women in organizing spaces as a matter of course. We need to recognize and value the skills folks have developed while also working to shift the burden of the work off the people who experience the most systemic oppression.

ns: If a dominant societal response were to turn toward one another in a way that could hold conflict and harm, then doing so would be no big deal. There would be a normalized process of helping one another work it out—hey, harm happened this morning, we sat down together and repaired it. What’s for lunch? We wouldn’t have to be intimate with those people, or be good friends or even close. The burden would be more spread out. There would be taken-for-granted things that we do to hold the fabric together regardless of degree of intimacy, as just what we do.

If everyone were to do that, survivors of harm would be less at risk. Because when people who are uncomfortable simply turn away, that tendency can massively magnify harm to survivors. When we move into the interstices between closeness and disconnection, we can say, “I may not want to be your best friend, but I can show up in a few specific ways. I’ll believe you and do one or two contained tasks to back the process.”

aj: I think that’s where so much bystander-ism comes from, when we tell ourselves, “I’m not intimate with that person, they wouldn’t listen to me; I’m not a coparent, or an intimate partner, or a best friend, so I don’t have stakes, or a say in this.” When in fact we can often build trust and closeness and community by choosing to actively support survivors, and actively interrupt violence and harm. But that is related to another nexus of tension in transformative justice work: is it possible to “hold someone else accountable” or do they need to “take accountability”?

ns: Oh, yes! There’s that bizarre bystander refrain that “you can’t tell an abuser not to abuse,” which is absurd. If the goal is primarily creating conditions of safety for the people being harmed, and only after that to change or heal the abuser, then of course we can tell people “don’t harm.” It can be true that in the end people don’t change unless they want to change. It can be the case that we can’t get into people’s souls and get them to change, but that doesn’t mean we go on letting harm happen.36 We can’t force change, but we can create conditions of safety for survivors. We can name harm and stop harm.

aj: And I think that’s something people figure out for themselves, in practice, and case by case: how much you can engage directly with someone who’s doing harm, how much you stay and work with them through whatever resistance, and at what point it may be unproductive, or unsafe, to do that. Sometimes you have to focus solely on protecting the survivor for a while before you circle back and try to address the person who is doing harm. It depends so much on what kind of support you have, what kinds of skills and resources. I can think of a few different interventions I’ve been a part of where a person who did violence did not want to be accountable. Maybe they refused to be part of a process, or maybe they agreed but then behaved in a way that revealed they weren’t on board. We—survivors and the people supporting them—had to reckon with, and really grieve that. But even in those cases, we were often able to make some change. Maybe the person who abused was able to name the harm they did. Maybe we could get them to shift some behaviors in a way that served the survivor’s safety or well-being. Maybe we laid the foundation for bigger work later on. I started thinking about these as messy successes—in a context where so many of us are still learning to build and be in community, this stuff can be transformative, too.

ns: On my most hopeful days I hope that that’s growing.

aj: Yes! And I think that it is.

35 Ellie Lisitsa, “The Sound Relationship House,” The Gottman Institute, November 20, 2012, https://www.gottman.com/blog/the-sound-relationship-house-turn-towards-instead-of-away.

36 See Sandra Kim’s blog, Compassionate Activism, https://compas
sionateactivism.teachable.com.

Index

“Passim” (literally “scattered”) indicates intermittent discussion of a topic over a cluster of pages.

abuse. See harm

African Americans. See Black people

Afrofuturism Trading Cards, 76

Amini, Fari: General Theory of Love, 22–23

Ananda, Aravinda, 85–95

anger, 105, 107–8, 118–19

anxious-avoidant attachment style, 24, 27, 29–34 passim

apologizing, 86, 97–101 passim, 111; inappropriate, 64, 99–100, 109

Armstrong, Jeanette, 92, 116–17, 121

art, 75–77 passim

attachment theory, 3, 5–6, 22–34 passim, 41, 44, 49, 124

attunement, 22–23, 27–36 passim

Bancroft, Lundy: Why Does He Do That?, 30

Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, 123, 126

Bhandar, Serena, 49–58

Black people, 75–84 passim, 129

body, 78–81 passim

brown, adrienne maree, 10–12 passim, 40–41

Butler, Judith, 6

bystander-ism, 130

Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (Eisler), 85

children: fostering empathy in, 97–100; gaslighting of, 72; in Gifts (Le Guin), 20–21. See also Windsor House School, Vancouver

coddling and placating, 90, 91, 103–4, 107

colonization and colonialism, 100–101, 102, 115, 117, 118, 120. See also decolonizing

comforting, 19–33 passim

consent, 119–20

consequences versus punishment, 4n3

“crazy” (label), 33, 55, 59, 69

Davis, Angela, 83–84

decolonizing, 117, 120, 121

denial, 9, 59, 70, 87, 88, 101–2, 119. See also self-denial

Díaz, Ruby Smith. See Smith Díaz, Ruby

disconnection, 3, 8, 41, 44, 93, 117, 124, 127, 130; from emotions, 47; from empathy, 4, 92; Indigenous, 117

dismissive-avoidant attachment style, 24, 25, 31–32, 41

earned secure attachment, 26–27

Eisler, Riane: Chalice and the Blade, 85

emotional harm, 107–10

empathy, 4–12 passim, 45, 72–73, 90–97 passim, 101–12 passim, 119

entitlement, 12, 44, 47, 61, 70, 88, 89

family communication, 97–100, 124–25

fear, 20, 91, 105–10 passim; in gaslighting, 69; of intimacy, 37, 62; in transgender people, 56; of “white knighting,” 36

fearlessness, 5

free schools 1–8 passim, 14

gaslighting, 43, 46, 47, 59–73

A General Theory of Love (Lewis, Amini, and Lannon), 22–23

Ghomeshi, Jian, 17

Gifts (Le Guin), 20–21

Gottman, John, 124

grief, 41–42, 44, 46

guilt, 27, 29, 33, 34, 86, 101–11 passim

gyms, 79–80

Hampton, Fred, Jr., 77

harm, 17n2, 69–73 passim, 105, 107–110, 130

Helms, Janet E., 90

Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love (Johnson), 22

human body. See body

Indigenous, 10, 81, 92, 113–22

interconnectedness and interdependence, 7, 8, 127–28. See also disconnection

intimacy, 27, 32, 33, 44; fear of, 37, 62

Johnson, Alix, 123–31

Johnson, Sue: Hold Me Tight, 22

“justice councils,” 1–8 passim

Kaba, Mariame, 4n3

Kinder Morgan pipeline, 119–20

Knight, Natalie, 111–22

land management, 121–22

Lannon, Richard: General Theory of Love, 22–23

Lorde, Audre, 104

Le Guin, Ursula: Gifts, 20–21

Lewis, Thomas: General Theory of Love, 22–23

male privilege, 39, 55, 57

masculine nurturance culture, 17, 18, 35–38

masculinity, 31, 41, 42, 47, 56, 70, 100

Maynard, Robyn, 76

medicine wheel, 81–82

men, 39–48 passim; apologizing and empathy, 97, 100–112 passim; attachment styles, 29–34 passim; boyhood training, 18, 35, 97–1000; defensiveness and denial, 90–91, 101–2, 111; emotional harm, 107–10; gaslighting, 69–73 passim; gender norms, 57; “good men,” 19, 69; narcissism in, 110, 111; nurturance culture, 17, 18, 20, 35–38; placating of, 107; relations with other men, 18–19, 37–38, 53; sexual violence, 70; shame, 29; trans women and, 51–56 passim; violence, 30, 56, 89, 103 See also masculinity; patriarchy

Mingus, Mia, 127

mirroring, 23, 28, 51, 112

misogyny, 19, 29–30, 54

narcissism, 62–63, 90, 110, 111

natural gas pipelines, 119–20

“needy” (label), 26, 32, 33

nonverbal cues, 28, 32, 33, 97

Okanagan People, 92, 116–17

“On Gaslighting” (Samaran), 47, 59–73

“The Opposite of Rape Culture Is Nurturance Culture” (Samaran), 11, 12, 13, 17–38

ostracism, 128

parenting, 22–23 passim, 62, 97

patriarchy, 21, 29, 33–34, 38, 47, 68, 69, 72

personal training (physical fitness), 78–80 passim

pipelines, resistance to, 119–20

placating. See coddling and placating

police, 10, 110

preoccupied-avoidant attachment style, 25, 31

privilege, male. See male privilege

protest behavior, 24, 33

punishment, 4, 86, 95

rage, 107–8, 118–19

rape culture, 17–18

remorse, 86, 87

schools 1–8 passim, 14

self-care, 77–82 passim

self-denial, 42, 65, 75

sexual violence, 30, 70–71, 115–18 passim

sexuality, 31, 32, 33

shame, 28–29, 34, 43–47 passim, 51, 70, 86–94 passim, 102–3, 108; aversion, 62, 63; rape and, 115–18 passim

Smith Díaz, Ruby, 75–84

toxicity, 83–84

transformative justice, 123–31 passim

transgender people, 49–58 passim, 79

transmisogyny, 54

trans women, 49–58 passim

trauma, 76, 77, 83, 92, 103–6 passim

trust, 23, 31, 106, 130

violence: anti-Black, 75; historical, 119; men’s, 30, 56, 89, 118; systemic/structural, 10, 12, 60, 91–93 passim. See also sexual violence

vulnerability, 21, 23, 37, 46, 62, 89, 110

“white knighting,” 36

white people, 85, 88–91 passim, 100, 103, 129

white supremacy, 75, 83, 85, 88–91 passim

Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men (Bancroft), 30

Windsor House School, Vancouver, 1–8 passim, 14

women, 129; Black, 81, 129; blaming of, 29–30, 32; cis, 53–54; comforting and, 21; “crazy” (label), 55; gaslighting of, 60–73 passim; gender norms, 57, 72, 78; harassment and assault of, 30; Indigenous, 92, 113–22 passim; “needy” (label), 33; placating by, 107; psychological harm of, 101–2; relations with men, 18–21 passim, 30–33 passim, 37–38, 69, 70, 101–3 passim; “white knighting” of, 36. See also sexual violence; See also trans women

Copyright

Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture

© 2019, Nora Samaran

© 2019 AK Press (Chico, Edinburgh)

ISBN: 9781849353588

E-ISBN: 9781849353595

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018961636

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