Tag: Trauma

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Media

Day 1350 and Dumb and Angry

“They want you dumb and angry”

Riling up the people (the proletariat if you are nasty) is a time honored method of keeping us under control. Socrates did it. The Roman emperors did it. The New York Times and the Walk Street Journal do it.

Not getting all caught up in being stupid and reactive is a huge responsibility. And not everyone wants to hand “the people” the type of responsibility that staying free entails.

Freedom at scale requires some surrendering of responsibility to others. We outsource what we can’t possibly know to people we trust. It’s clear some of us have forgotten how to trust. And who can blame us. Institutions rise and fall. Priests, Lords and Kings fell to the people.

We then promptly built up new ways to assign authority. For a while we trusted academics, reporters and politicians. Perhaps a few celebrities and billionaire entrepreneurs retain some authority now. I honestly don’t know. The lone man with his own opinion can scarcely compete.

I’m not sure if there was ever a time when an individual could have a “good bead” on reality. The mythos of the American post World War 2 GI Bill educated mass media literate Baby Boomers sure thought they had a grasp on reality. Being directionally correct about Vietnam and Nixon helped I’m sure.

That’s the fantasy I miss most from my childhood. I read “Manufacturing Consent,” Howard Zinn and AdBusters. I thought it was possible to see around the machine. Maybe and I are both Noam Chomsky kind of simple minded. At least now I’m only certain that I’m part of the machine. Perhaps there was never any separation from it.

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Emotional Work Travel

Day 1336 and Pick & Pack

It’s possible exposure therapy has worked for me. My worst recurring nightmare always involves packing. And yet recently I’ve come to find packing to be a neutral to even positive activity.

The dream has many forms. Sometimes it’s a permanent move, often it’s about rushing for some type of upcoming unexpected travel like a flight change or worse an “evacuation emergency” like a fire or natural disaster.

My subconscious likes to chew on packing up crucial items and leaving. I moved a lot as a child. My father also valued traveling while my mother and siblings did not.

I assume some of these nightmares are a related to those experiences. Instability is a classic reaction formation process for a child seeking safety. And I’m now as an adult finding that safety to be in reach.

I still have these dreams but I take a lot more pleasure in picking items for travel and packing them up now than I could have imagined. Even over the lifespan of this writing experiment I’ve seen changes in my emotional relationship to packing.

I have whole systems for managing the types of unexpected problems that crop up in modern travel like my three bag cascade. I’ve taken this activity that has had a negative valence for me and turned it into positive experiences.

I travel a lot for work and I can manage that even with health conditions. I have done work on disaster preparedness for myself and for my friends. Always be prepared is a terrific motto for the Boys Scouts and for myself.

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Emotional Work Startups

Day 1320 and Being “You-er”

You may recall the old aphorism about marriage. Men and women have very different goals for the institution and how it will or won’t change them.

“Men marry women with the hope they will never change. Women marry men with the hope they will change. Invariably they are both disappointed”

I don’t recall having any ambitions for changing my husband when we got married ten years ago. I thought quite highly of him when we got married. I still do.

The irony is that we have both changed significantly not because of any goal the other has for each other but because of the work we do together. Fast growing startups simply demand so much emotional change from their people.

A recent piece in the New York Times discussed how coaching has become the hack that drove emotional chances

Venture-backed startups simply must scale faster than all but the rarest of human beings can acquire emotional intelligence. As a result, startup founders and chief executives, many of whom are trained not in management but in software engineering, face extraordinary risk of coming unglued in ways that vaporize immense amounts of capital.

How Coaching Became Silicon Valley’s Hack for Therapy

Acquiring emotional intelligence quickly becomes a “do or die” skill in startups. And most of us do die. Ego death in mediation like jhanna are within reach because failure and rebirth are such common experiences for the technologists that build quickly moving companies.

Both my husband Alex and I have done family systems therapy as well as multiple forms of professional and personal coaching. If Alex didn’t want change from me as his wife then he is surely disappointed. As his wife if I wanted change from him I very much did get it.

Neither one of us is disappointed, aphorisms aside. If anything, as we’ve done more work to acquire the emotional intelligence required of us to growth and thrive in our work, we’ve become more ourselves.

There is a real joy in becoming “you-er” as essential personality, skills and ambitions become clearer. It’s well worth investing in therapy and coaching to become yourself. Being “you-er” is quite freeing. It’s hard to be disappointed by that outcome.

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Biohacking Emotional Work

Day 1319 and Gimme Fuel, Gimme Fire

I’m a little bit underfed at the moment. If I don’t have someone feeding me I basically don’t eat. And I didn’t eat much this weekend because I was alone. The joyful peace of solitude means I’ll skip every meal I can.

I don’t mind a little feast and famine because I’ve always found food to be at best inconvenient and at worst an actively hostile force that would make me an undesirable fat woman. Elder millennials had terrific culture for women what else can say.

I didn’t come from a family that had a strong culture of food. Scandinavian foods are kind of gross when filtered through American agribusiness. Happy family mealtimes and nurturing through food seems like the stuff of movies not real life. It certainly wasn’t my experience as a kid.

I mostly absorbed the wider culture around me which said food was dangerous for women and should be actively restricted. The experiences I did have in my family’s relationship to food were not uniformly positive.

I’ve had years where I was able to look at food as fuel but those were mostly when I was very dedicated to athletic pursuits.

Alas that’s in the past for me thanks to age and disease. I’m happy I’m healthy enough to squat a few times a week and be out of bed for multiple hours at a time. And that’s still a struggle with my ankylosis.

I don’t crave food or have intrusive thoughts about it. I mostly just don’t like to eat and it has surely contributed to a genetic propensity to weight gain especially when it’s been combined with steroids to manage my autoimmune condition. If I were my body I wouldn’t speed up my metabolism either.

I better force myself into a meal right now because as tempting as it is to just not eat it’s a bad habit. But if someone just solves the problem of food I’d be the first person in line. Especially now that the American food system is beyond tainted. Like truly how can we have the fire to burn if our fuel is this bad?

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Emotional Work Politics

Day 1294 and Like Shit

I mentioned on Twitter yesterday that I’d been breaking down crying at regular intervals since the assassination attempt against Donald Trump.

I’m not a Trump supporter. I am and will remain a small government libertarian and I can’t see that changing short of fundamental shifts in material reality. Which is possible but human nature doesn’t change much.

I feel like absolute shit physically and emotionally about where we are at. The rapid changes that are proceeding in the wake of this violence cannot be undone. We are here.

I feel incredibly stupid saying this which is almost always a sign I should say it.
I’ve been breaking down into tears every couple of hours since the assassination attempt on Trump.
My emotional metabolism isn’t up to the acceleration unless I let myself feel it a

We are in a chaotic time and even I do not feel up to the rate of change. I’m afraid of what will happen no matter the outcome of the election.

I don’t think we should underestimate the trauma of political violence. A fellow citizen died for exercising his fundamental rights. He’s not the first and unlikely to be the last.

I want to feel less impacted emotionally but I can’t just stuff these feelings. I wish I could write more and at length about all of this but I’m simply not there. It’s all too painful.

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Politics

Day 1291 and Gabby, Steve, and Donald

I started getting coded as right wing sometime in the last four years. I found this confusing. I have significant public opposition to Republican policies and Donald Trump in particular.

I’ve been small “l” libertarian for most of my adult life. I’ve vote for quite a few Democrats as I opposed neoconservatism. I registered Republican as the Democrats went from embracing business and technological growth to opposing it. I didn’t see free enterprise as a threat but as the engine of our progress.

I vote for Biden as I sincerely thought it was the best choice after a tumultuous four years under the ostensibly Republican Trump where I saw nothing but a bigger government and frayed norms around containing that government’s authority.

I don’t like a large state apparatus in principle and feel America is the nation that most sincerely pursues the liberty of its citizens. The state has been granted the sole monopoly on violence. That monopoly must exist for civilization but necessarily must be constrained by the rights of the citizens who consented to be governed.

I’m proud of the American experiment as a citizen, a Christian (in particular a Protestant) and a capitalist. That may sound conservative to some but in practice tended to get me left coded as I support less government involvement in nearly everything.

Drugs, sex work, reproductive freedom, medical freedom (which ranges from vaccines to sex & gender choice), speech (which includes compute), religion freedom and commerce are liberties best decided upon by responsible adults of good conscience.

We have codified this in our constitution and democracy is the working progress of finding a way to agree to be governed together. Whether it leans left or right is hardly the point. Each generation reacts with the choices it inherited from the one before it.

The political fight is to remain a citizenship that consents to be governed. America isn’t a monolith. We respect the liberties of our fellow citizens who have agreed to respect each others rights. If we disagree we arbitrate that through the government we’ve consented to be governed by. That is only possible insofar as we respect each others fundamental rights.

Violence is not meted out by individuals. The state alone has that monopoly and it ends at our personal rights. No citizen should ever claim the mantle of irreversible violence. Violence against those who we choose to govern us considered the most unacceptable to all citizenry. Political violence is never acceptable.

When we discuss a crisis of democracy and invoke mortal or existential threats we override the bonds that make us Americans. My respect for my fellow citizens must be in equal measure their respect for me. We are responsible for ourselves so that we may be responsible amongst and to other.

When I think of the violence that we’ve seen in the political process of deciding who represents us in our state I am furious. It is unacceptable that any of our representatives have been subject to violence. Since 2011 we’ve had three attempts at deadly political violence against Gabby Giffords, Steve Scalise and Donald Trump. This is terrorism and untenable.

The shock I feel today after witnessing an attempt on Donald Trump’s life last night substantial. I probably should have felt it more intensely for our Congressional representatives. I have taken so much for granted as an American.

The liberty I’ve felt to articulate my own views is unprecedented. We as a nation have tremendous capacity for disagreements. The political is a negotiation and we all accept compromises. All three of those politicians have positions I find to be unacceptable infringements on my liberty. Which is why I speak my case and vote for my positions.

I’ve felt perhaps wrongly that living my own freedom was politics enough And that means I have to speak when I see unacceptable things. We cannot continue to escalate the stakes.

I want America to remain a United States. I recognize I hold positions others disagree with. I may disagree with you. I don’t know how I’ll be coded from here and I don’t care. I am committed to being an American. I remain committed to the protection of my fellow citizens full liberties.

That Americans would die for them has been made more than metaphor too many times. Let us do all we can to prevent that so we can continue to live together in freedom. Let the blood of patriots remain imagery so we can continue to live united.

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Politics Preparedness

Day 1276 and Not Just A River in Egypt

I’m pretty comfortable with being embarrassed. I get stuff wrong and I have to come to terms with it even as my ego complains bitterly. The ego protects itself with denial but that doesn’t mean its conclusions are correct.

Being impartial about your reality is hard. Denial is such a normal part of catastrophic events the CDC even has handy public health explainers. I hope post pandemic everyone can enjoy the irony of that.

Taking an impartial view when approaching a problem is hard. If it’s an especially destructive situation (as most forms of crisis tend to be) wanting to put off action is a common coping mechanism. We do it as individuals and we do it within the meta-organisms that form the cultural and political systems we live within.

My suspicion is that some of our current political problems are a result of denialism. Seeing things as they are is impossible for some people. Avoidance, rationalization and minimization is practically a skill set.

I’d hope in a crisis I would attempt to solve a problem with whatever meager tools and skills I had at my disposal. I’ve done my best to take action on a few slow moving problems. And yet impartiality only arises when I can accept reality. And I wouldn’t blame anyone who finding the reality completely unacceptable.

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Emotional Work

Day 1242 and Finding You

My “emotional work” tag has years of self exploration. One aspect of self understanding that remains elusive for so many of us is the belief that authenticity is the goal over mere improvement.

I’ve come to see the goal of emotional work as the work you do to to find yourself. You aren’t trying to improve yourself (though there may be areas you want to improve) but rather find the truth of who you are underneath conditioning from family or culture like fear and shame.

The ways that we don’t love ourselves are the ways in which we haven’t embraced who we are. That’s why authenticity over self improvement is such a helpful framing.

I’d recommend this podcast from AoA on the matter. Yes I’m in my Joe Hudson era. I’ve not decided if I want to apply for the summer master class though my first experience was so positive.

In some ways, I feel as if I’ve done so much of this type of work that my ambition is to stop looking for myself and simply be myself.

Being and becoming are fluid states so I have to recognize the flux of coming in and out of finding myself. I feel very much in myself at the moment and searching further instead of living in my current authenticity seems like a stretch. I’ll have a lot of “doing” next week so I’m sure I’ll find whatever kind of “being” I am as I go along.

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Culture Emotional Work Uncategorized

Day 1232 and Crab Bucket

As I age from maiden into crone (many millennials missed mother) I find myself uncovering emotions I missed during the forced march through corporate feminism & Girlbossism. The meritocracy takes its pound of flesh.

I climbed the chaos ladder & am grateful for my perch but I did not understand what I sacrificed to participate in this climb. I doubt your average person does.

American Millennials intuited that we had an opportunity to class jump through the meritocracy of institutional human capital games & were encouraged to do so if we showed capacity. Largely that meant raw intelligence & affinity for playing by unwritten social rules. If you could get out you were told to do so. Social mobility is one of America’s great strengths.

It is not without costs. I sacrificed family & place. To climb above the station of my origin & “achieve” the American dream of education & assets you leave behind a lot. To go from the lower rungs to prosperity and security we leave behind parts of ourselves.

I do not regret this. Many millennials come from dysfunctional families. Boomer can read as slur to some because future shock & greed hurt so many of that generation. The narcissism of the new age experimentation with new cultures and expectations gave us divorce & rootlessness. Those insecure circumstances bred flexible performative children who adapted to incentives.

If I had not leapt onto the ladder of meritocracy I’d be struggling like many in my cohort and I’d still be without a people. The Millennial wealth gap is tearing social fabric because the divergence between our outcomes is so clear. Atomizing is part of assimilating.

I am now in a position in which I inhabit the lower rungs of the very top of the ladder. I have access & assets & a reputation for work in the infinite game of playing for leverage. There is security here to be had. But a Damocles blade hangs over us all.

American success isn’t cheap. And you may not always understand the costs at the outset.

If you’d like to read more about the millennial wealth gap I’d encourage you to look. I am lucky to be one of the “self made” in my cohort in that I picked work that ended up being well remunerated. I started from a decent place but we were poor for portions of my childhood. Startup life isn’t a smooth ride and Silicon Valley produces very uneven outcomes.

I will not however be a millennial heir. I’ll inherit debt. The great wealth transfer will not be coming my way. I’m grateful to have helped my family but equally grateful when they manage to take care of themselves. I am so sad so many of our elders spent so much that their heirs felt the best option was a race to climb out of the crab bucket of the meritocracy. I am glad I made it. But it hurt.

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Emotional Work

Day 1225 and Better Out Than In

I may have bitten off a bit more than I could chew. In post 1215 I discussed a personal development course I’d committed myself to doing. And, to put it delicately, quite a bit of stuff has been coming up. Let’s call emotional acid reflux.

Over the last few days in particular I felt as if I was drowning in somatic bile as years of grief and anguish have surfaced. And I’ve let wash over me.

Turbulent waves of realizations come up and crashed over me. I pray the tides give me enough time to recover before anything washes back. I’d rather it be out than in but the pain has been acute.

I belief it to be appropriate to credit some of this outflow to The Art Accomplishment Connections Course. It is a highly recommended personal development experience.

It’s clear that the methods are almost intensely effective. I can’t say if it’s right for anyone else but I’ve made a commitment to emotional growth over the last several years. I found the name to be off putting (somewhere between scam & Ted Talk in terms of branding aesthetics) but many people I respect and trust recommend it to me. If you’d like to get some things out of your system perhaps it cooks well for you too.