Monthly Archives: November 2024

Holding Fear

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I submitted my ballot today, November 3, 2024.  The US Presidential Election is two days away.

So many people fear not only the outcome, but the process.  Confidence in election integrity flags severely in recent years, for myriad reasons.  People of any political persuasion suspect their fellow humans of nefarious motivations and acts, both in general and individually.  Trust flickers and wanes like a candle in a hailstorm.

We cannot be reasoned out of our fears.  The more someone tries to convince us that our fears are unfounded, the more our fears escalate, and we get frustrated and often angry on top of that, further inflaming the encounter, risking damage to relationship. 

Emotions are, by nature and definition, irrational.  This does not mean they are unjustified, unhelpful, or unimportant.  Emotions are signals that something important to us is at stake—often relating to our survival, at least as far as our limbic brains are concerned.  Fear is a primal instinct and emotion, conserved over millennia of evolution to keep us alive.  As I described yesterday, fear often sublimates itself into anger, without help from outside forces.  This inner rage can then manifest in ugly words or actions, harming others, our relationships, and ultimately ourselves.

When we see someone on ‘the other side’ acting out like this, of course we feel fear and anger.  Of course we rail at them as horrible people and want justice for their abhorrent actions.  And of course, we see them as representative of everybody we grossly identify as their tribe (see image below from the @startswithus Instagram account).  That is the lens that fear places before our eyes, so we may be alert to threats—to our safety, security, and identity, among other things.  We separate from and divide people into groups deemed ‘safe’ and ‘unsafe’.  But this is an oversimplification that can lead to destructive patterns of perception and interaction. 

Fear is a vitally important emotion, necessary for safety and survival.  And we must manage it, for our own well-being and that of our social integrity.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or DBT, teaches simple and accessible (though not necessarily easy) skills to help us do just this.  The goal is not to discredit or eliminate our fear.  Rather, DBT skills help us gain and maintain perspective, so we may hold our fear more stably, then think more clearly and make decisions with balanced emotional and rational input, in accordance with our values, goals, and integrity.  The four pillars of DBT are Mindfulness, Emotional Regulation, Distress Tolerance, and Interpersonal Effectiveness (communication).  The method is founded on the concept of the Wise Mind: the effective integration and balance of the emotional and the rational.  I won’t describe the individual skills here, but I have studied them at length and recommend them to patients every week.  In essence they teach us to monitor our emotions, identify them, accept and validate them, and query their consequences.  We are challenged to be honest about what’s objectively true versus a story we make up.  In the case of fear, DBT skills help us make and maintain the distinction between real potential risk (even if high) and imagined foregone catastrophic inevitability.  The latter belief makes us act impulsively; holding the former reality helps us slow down, set strategy, and execute with intention.  Unbridled fear separates us; appropriately restrained fear helps us form coalitions and act more effectively. 

Fear well managed allows agency to emerge and effect positive change.

People fear on all sides of politics right now.  It’s not going away—I think ever.  And it’s natural.  We just don’t have to let it drive all our thoughts, words, and interactions.

In the coming days, I Hold Fear for Us this way: 

May we see one another as whole human beings, each and all with both unique and shared experiences, hopes, loves, and fears. 
May we recognize that all our fears are valid simply because all emotions are valid, regardless of their origin.  We feel how we feel and ignoring, dismissing, denying, or comparing one another’s fears gets us nowhere. 
May we sit and be with each other’s fears in empathy and compassion, and solidarity if we can muster it even (especially) if we do not share the same fears or even understand them.
May we vote according to not just our fears but our values, our goals, and our hopes.
May we meet one another with our fears leashed, and our love in front.
May we speak and act in ways that give nobody reason to fear us.

Deep breaths, friends.  We’ got this. Hang in there. I’m right there with you.

https://www.instagram.com/startswithus/?hl=en

Holding Regret

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What are your best and worst regrets? What is the difference?

If we pay attention, regret is inevitable. Living life with ‘no regrets’ is unrealistic at best, oblivious at worst. I’ve thought and written about this a lot, as evidenced by my birthday post in 2022 and the 12 (now 13) times I have tagged it subsequently.
How does regret feel? In my body it feels tight at the neck, shallow in breath. My head hangs, my lips purse. I avoid eye contact–don’t want to be seen–that’s shame, right?

“I would rather regret being too kind than not kind enough.”

I have said this for some years and now, in this moment of writing, I know why. As I realized and wrote in 2022, my worst regrets are relational–times when I have caused a rupture, especially when repair was incomplete or impossible. I could easily substitute honest, empathetic, compassionate, generous, humble, and forthright for ‘kind’. These memories still sting, and I will carry them forever. Thankfully, I pack them better now. They occupy a smaller, more condensed compartment of my life baggage, less damaging when they leak.

Holding regret well, I have learned, requires both accountability and self-compassion. Accountability makes me reflect, learn, and commit to doing better in the future. Self-compassion helps me step out of shame (I’m such a bad mom/friend/doctor/person), and stand instead in guilt (I did a bad thing). The difference: Shame seizes; guilt activates.

Brené Brown wrote yesterday on Instagram:

My research and my life have taught me that regret is one of our most powerful emotional reminders that reflection, change, and growth are necessary. In our research, regret emerged as a function of empathy. And, when used constructively, it’s a call to courage and a path toward wisdom.

The idea that regret is a fair but tough teacher can really piss people off. “No regrets” has become synonymous with daring and adventure, but I disagree. The idea of “no regrets” doesn’t mean living with courage, it means living without reflection. To live without regret is to believe we have nothing to learn, no amends to make, and no opportunity to be braver with our lives.

In our work, we find that what we regret most are our failures of courage, whether it’s the courage to be kinder, to show up, to say how we feel, to set boundaries, to be good to ourselves, to say yes to something scary. Regret has taught me that living outside my values is not tenable for me.

Regrets about not taking chances have made me braver. Regrets about shaming or blaming people I care about have made me more thoughtful.

Sometimes the most uncomfortable learning is the most powerful.

Discomfort: What actions do we take to avoid it? When does this lead to regret down the road, and which of these discomforts would we choose, if we had it to do over? Vulnerability is extremely uncomfortable–a risk of variable magnitude, depending on context. The reward, however, can be transformative. I regret causing others discomfort with my vulnerability; I’m better at attuning to that risk as I age. I regret when my vulnerability is met with dismissal, invalidation, or minimization. Still, deep human connection cannot occur without real vulnerability, risks and all. Since I live for connection, I have a very high tolerance for the discomfort of vulnerability. Expressed alongside kindness, honesty, and humility, likelihood of connection rises and regret declines. How lovely.

What regrets would you rather carry forever?

I Hold Regret for Us that shows us our core values, that keeps us honest and accountable. I also hold love, compassion, and deep connection that lightens regret’s perpetual load on us all. We walk on, my friends, all on the path, all doing our best.

Holding Wholeness

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When was the last time you judged a whole person, dismissed them, or put them on a high pedestal, knowing only one thing about them? They’re a Chinese-American doctor. They’re a black man in jail. They’re a white male CEO. Their body shape is at least as thick as it is wide. They think exactly the way you do about something really important to you. They think the opposite, and loudly.

“Mamala and the Senator”

Most of us probably know Kamala Harris more as the senator, the attorney general, and the district attorney than the maternal figure to her stepchildren, the avid home chef, and the joyful, laughing woman among friends. How do we reconcile these divergent aspects of her humanity? What does this bring up for each of us? What biases does her wholeness as a person trigger?

Some of us want to see women mainly as maternal, domestic figures. We value the feminine as nurturer and caregiver, the personal glue that holds individual family units together. Others of us also cheered when we watched Senator Harris in action, interrogating hearing witnesses with firey eye contact and direct language, not letting them deflect, obfuscate, or gaslight. Some of us cannot reconcile these divergent sides of a woman, cannot imagine their synergistic integration embodied and applied in leadership, especially at the highest level. That’s too bad, because any leader–man, woman, or otherwise–must own all parts of themselves to lead to their full potential. The strong and the soft, the masculine and the feminine, the committed and the flexible, the differentiated and the attuned–these polar and balancing aspects of our nature make us whole humans. People who live in their wholeness lead by example, by inspiration, by resonance with the wholeness of those they lead. They are leaders because we are moved to follow them; we feel their integrity and want it, aspire to it for ourselves.

Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent. Name a professsion. Name a state, a generation, an eye color, and all of its associations in your mind. It’s okay to think of stereotypes. The brain operates on pattern recognition and shortcut heuristics; we could not live effectively without these automatic systems in place. We just need to guard against leaning on them so heavily that we oversimplify and overgeneralize our fellow humans.

What a narrow, uninteresting, and unfulfilling life when we only see people as categories. Red, Blue, old, young, rich, poor, male, female. What happens to our heuristics when we encounter contradictions? Maybe gay people should not be conservative? Asians should not be loud and demanding? How do we react to the unexpected, the new, the unknown? Too often we fear it. It’s perceived as a threat–to our own expectations, identities, and emotional security. Fear can then sublimate to denial, anger, blame, exclusion, and violence.

What happens when we hold space for one another’s incongruous, confounding, enigmatic, vibrant, and distinctive wholeness, ourselves included? Maybe then we can say, “I don’t fully understand us, and I choose to see us–all of us–anyway, and be with the parts I don’t yet get, because the longer I’m with us, either it will get clearer or I’ll just accept what I cannot know and figure out how to live in civility, if not harmony, with the whole of us.”

None of us is defined by only one aspect of our identity. And yet we so easily identify others this way. What a disservice to one another’s full humanity. Even when it’s positive–“You’re a doctor, wow, you must be the smartest person!”–it’s still reductive. And when it’s negative–“All Trump supporters hate women and people of color”–it is destructive, no question, even when we think we protect and defend the good.

Holding wholeness means getting and staying curious. It means being honest with ourselves and holding ourselves accountable to our biases and how they manifest in thought, perception, words, action, and relationship. It means practicing self-compassion for all of this, and extending empathy and compassion to others struggling with their own self-honesty and -delusion.

May we endeavor to see one another’s full humanity in every encounter. May we withhold judgment, even for a moment, a breath. May we move through the world with an attitude of ‘together’, all of me with all of you, inextricable, interdependent, ad infinitum.

I Hold Wholeness for Us.