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 knows at six that when you hurt someone, you back right away and own, apologize, and do repair.
• 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, and he did a thing that hurt someone, and he has to make it right. These are not mutually exclusive, but connected.
• Sometimes he can’t tell the difference between him feeling bad because he hurt somebody, and feeling bad because someone hurt him.
• [ Example of Kyle kicking his dad in a moment of temper, and when his mom confronts Kyle with the fact that his kicking caused his dad pain and now he needs to apologize, he says his feelings are hurt by that. ]
• She does not apologize for naming his actions or their effects, and she corrects his mixing up of one thing with another.
• What if he had made it all the way to adulthood with this confusion intact?
• 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. I see this play out in masculinity, in whiteness.
• As a white person who does antiracism education in the university classroom I am not unfamiliar with this phenomenon.
• this same attack posture is present in most white people when we encounter the fact of colonization, race 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.
• There is a quality in guild that paralyzes. Worse, it leads those who feel it to lash out, like pythons or like 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 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 as settlers, and that it has not ended but is ongoing.
• I do my best to siphon their demons out of the classroom but I am aware that (depending on the topic at hand) Indigeous or POC students in these classrooms are often asked to feel perpetually, extremely uncomfortable and to get traumatized by having to be in these spaces, just so white students don’t have to experience even momentary discomfort.
• 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 actually understand reality. 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, 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.
• The cost to my body of coddling a scary, angry, fragile ego–coddling it to make sure it does not attack or abandon me–is so incredibly great that I actually cannot do this kind of coddling any longer. I realize I have been doing it instictively for a long time.
• it is so taken for granted in our culture that those who face systemic oppression 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.
• 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? Is that who you are?
• If you harm someone and then when they tell you about it, you are more focussed on the facct 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 god way to help people speak up or to hear it, in real life?
• here is a wonderful Pod Mapping project from the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective. It asks you who your people are who you would want to call you on it if you behaved in an abusive way. If you can’t think of anyon eyou would want to call you on abusive behaviour, or your response is ‘I don’t need that, I would never cause harm,’ then this is for you. If you consider yourself a feminist, ask yourself why you haven’t already initiated something of the sort.
• This is the meaning of the phrase “Your allyship is meaningless if it isn’t accountable.”
• 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 htey 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 mix up 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 not strike you as at all 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 lose the capacity to be ‘nice’ while they are getting 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-realy-hear them? Imagine how it feels to speak and find it as if you haven’t spoken. Not that people don’t ‘believe’ you but that they actually can not hear you, as though you are speaking gibberish or not speaking at all. AS though in a nightmare 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 help and having it seem as though you had not spoken at all?
• Coming up from underwater into speaking up isn’t always pretty. What if one of the effects of trauma is that after naming and naming calmly without being heard for so long, or after having the words get trapped in teh still waters of their body, they can no longer speak, and can only scream?
• 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 owned that this guilt script is inside them, this placating others do for them is so continuous and 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 actually 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. When you are accustomed to privilege equality feels like oppression.
• When I was a little girl, my father would have random multi-hour rages for what he perceived as slights or insults. An insult to him could be anything from how we sat in our chair […] 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–or asleep.
• It was impossible to predict how long a rage would last once it began.
• 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 perfect neutral but agreeing expression for however many hours until he was done.
• 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 empathetic. Feeling guilt 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[…]. He terrorized us until we demonstrated complete internalization of his fantasy structure.
• And we did. Whatever he said.
• 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.
• I left at 20 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.
• I can no longer manage or coddle fragile male egos.
• I have run into this–‘I feel hurt that you are scared of me’–with cops, and it struck me how similar it was. At a demo about police brutality once where the cops were detaining people and beating people up, a cop in full riot gear, with his viser up, said to me ‘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?’ when I said he was scaring me.
• How do we get here, with adult men unable to differentiate narcissistic injury from actual harm?
• 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.
• Empathy can trump guilt. It looks like this: Own. Apologize. Repair.
• Imagine replacing guilt with curiosity. Imagine saying, “wow, it is so cool to recognize what I did. I’m excited I can hear from you and grow. I did this, I did that, here is why it is fucked up”
• 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?”
• 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.