Andrea

I see the #metoo movement, at its core, as a call to talk about shame.

Take away, for the moment, the questioning about whether allegations are true, the grappling with cognitive dissonance when people we’ve imagined as exemplary are revealed to have behaved in harmful ways, and the gendered cultural tropes that get assigned to both accused and accusers.   

Put that down, for now, and instead imagine that the people – women, men, transgender, queer, and non-binary – who decide to share their stories of being violated (at any place on the scale of trauma and abuse) are saying:

I will no longer carry the shame that belongs to another.

I will no longer carry this story alone.

I ask everyone in this story to acknowledge their responsibility and carry their own shame.

All the polarized arguing just serves to distract us from what we would most like to avoid admitting:

We have a hard time dealing with shame.

Can we simply start with accepting that truth without hiding from it?

We don’t have to go any farther than that for now. We don’t have to deal with the actual shame yet. The most powerful first step we can take is to start with acknowledging that we want to avoid shame.

In his Carnegie Medal acceptance speech for Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson points to the critical connection between shame and injustice:

“We need to change the narrative in this country about race, and poverty. We’re a country that has a difficult time dealing with our shame, our mistakes. We don’t do shame very well in America, and because of that we allow a lot of horrific things to go unaddressed.”

This is the truth: Nothing is stopping us from talking about shame.

The more we talk about shame, the less power it has and the more free we are to nurture a culture that not only delineates justice, but embodies it.

The violence and disconnection from one another that we are collectively enduring is worse than facing the shame we fear. If we do it together, facing the shame in our collective story will free us to create the healing in our systems that we long for.

Where do we start? With two things.

We each take our own piece of shame to face. And we each put down any shame that we have been carrying that belongs to someone else.

These are essential and unavoidable steps towards healing.

This labor is how we give birth to justice. And the miracle is, that each of us is free to take up this labor.

We can do this. And we must, if we want to see health, if we want to see an end to systemic racism and sexism,  if we want to see an end to violence.

It might sound dramatic to say that capitalism is killing us. The real drama we are living is much more insidious.

As a society we are operating with high rates of loneliness, a 25% increase in suicide over the last two decades, and a collective struggle with believing that we are not enough.

We are chronically bombarded with messages that reinforce this. In fact, our current capitalist structure relies on our disconnection from others and our perceptions that we aren’t good enough.

Gabor Mate, a thinker I trust and respect, believes that healing our social systems is impossible under capitalism. The problem I see with this is that we are functioning under capitalism. Does this mean we are incapable of healing?

The aspects of capitalism that thrive on our disconnection and struggles with self worth are stuck, but not inevitable. These aspects of capitalism are not inevitable because we have the power to choose to heal ourselves.

Can we have healthy communities, live in deep connection with our ecosystems, and thrive under capitalism?

If we want a chance at this, we have to start with acknowledging the places we engage with capitalism that are harmful to ourselves and others. We have to acknowledge that the dominant model of capitalism we are living right now requires things of us that are in direct opposition to health and justice.

We have to acknowledge that the life we are living of consumption and disconnection, of not enough and do more, is literally killing us.

We are living in service to rules that most of us as individuals don’t value. We are living in service to capitalism rather than choosing our values first and letting capitalism serve them.

We don’t have to live this way.

Current capitalism kills us by relying on our perception that we are not good enough as we are. But capitalism isn’t a living entity. The rules of current capitalism can only continue if we as collective individuals agree to live by them.

When we recognize that the chorus of not enough is deeply embedded within our minds and bodies, when we accept that truth, then we can write a new line for our chorus.

We stop capitalism from killing us by choosing a new chorus. A chorus like, I choose health, I choose justice. We stop it from killing us by putting our values first. And we do this by first understanding what values we are living by that aren’t truly our own.

This, like all healing, starts with a decision to be curious and ask questions. When we do this, we do the important work of building a story that connects us with others. First, we train ourselves to get comfortable with digging deeper into our own story.

There is paradox in this. On the one hand we need to pull ourselves out of being engaged with only our own story. On the other, we desperately need to know our own story better in order to realize we are missing parts that we need in order to be whole.

Work with me to find the lost parts of your story.

A life without healing is a stuck life.

The majority of people in our society are living without healing, and as a result our society’s policies, laws, and systems of health and education remain stuck.

Take a breath and think about that for a moment. Let yourself sit with the awareness of the collective pain we are in. Let it sober you and also open your heart.

We can heal by understanding, with compassion, the story we are a part of.

This is what you need to know to begin:

1. You have to decide to know your story.

I say you have to decide to know your story because it requires brave mental action.

You have the remarkable capacity to investigate your own story with curiosity and learn how it fits into the web of living stories around you. It may be that your life pushes you to ask yourself difficult questions. It may be that the pain of living outside of your own values is uncomfortable enough that you are driven to investigate the story you are abiding by that isn’t your own. But it may be that you are comfortable enough, but don’t feel alive. This state is difficult to wake up from, so you have to harness your power of decision.

Begin by asking yourself questions with a tone of gentle curiosity:

Am I behaving according to my own values? If no, what values do my choices reflect? How do I feel when I act against my own values? How do I feel when I think about living my life based on what is most important to me?

You are teasing out what your story is about, what’s important to you and where you have conflict with those values.

2. Emotions keep parts of your story stuck.

Emotions are the glue that holds a story in place. In order to unstick a story, you have  to be curious about the emotions that are holding it in place. To unstick a story, you essentially have to simultaneously observe and feel the emotions that are attached to the story. In other words, you have to both tell the story honestly while also feeling the story.  This will feel awkward at first. Let the awkwardness lead.

3. You need a healthy support team.

Healing doesn’t happen alone. It happens through a continuous chemistry of awareness, connection, safety and decision.  Two of those important elements of healing, connection and safety, require relationship with others. It is essential for our health that we learn to allow healthy connections with others. We need at least one person we trust enough to ask for support. More importantly we need to feel safe and connected enough to share our story honestly with at least one other person.

Start here: Practice reaching out for support even when it’s uncomfortable.

Start with one person you trust and share the reflections and emotions that arise for you as you get to know your own story. Connect with teachers and mentors who have already gone through what you’re experiencing.

4. Your whole story is part of you.

Creating a world that is actively just requires our full commitment to our our own wholeness. The tendency, individually and culturally, is to want to erase the parts of our story we don’t like. The good and difficult news is that we need our whole story in order to be whole. What this means is that we have to first accept as truth that we need all the parts of ourselves. We’ll probably want to run away or turn our noses up at this. This is part of our story too.

I’ll leave you with these wise words from Pema Chodron and an invitation to schedule a chat with me if you feel excited to learn more about how to understand your whole story.

“The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.”

― When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times