I have been considering a post about difficult people but from the perspective of gratitude. When I look back at them now, I see things differently. It's the old cliche about them being the best teachers. It's true, but I think they're really the best trainers and mentors too.

I have been lucky in life to have had amazing mentors. People who helped me intentionally with a skill or with just being a better person. I love to return the favor. But the unwitting and unintentional mentor is just as valuable, and perhaps more.

Most of us were trained at different times in our lives by difficult people. They may have been or still are antagonistic and critical, mean etc. But they show us ourselves in a mirror. They show us how much we want/need/demand approval. They show us how we react. And they definitely trained us on how to handle future difficult people.

Some shun, others gas-light, attack, project and on and on. But I recently sensed that I feel galvanized by this treatment. I even wear it as a badge of honor. Even since some scenarios that took place around covid times I sense now that I experience myself as dramatically different. I am far more self-approving and assured. I was really mad at someone for the treatment that led to this. Now I'm thankful. I'm tougher. I'm more centered.

What also helps is that I took some rude awakenings and decided to reflect and act upon the information. So the context is different when you're doing the work, even to the small extent that I do. So from that place of seeking renewal and redemption, I can recontextualize the behaviors as tearing off a band-aid rather than seeing the other as a villain, regardless of their intentions.

And we are in a mental health crisis for lots of reasons. That's a whole different post. But one must realize that they will and do encounter lots of people who are projecting their traumas onto others. People who will misunderstand behaviors and intent. They will try to convince you that yours are treacherous. They will try to fit you into their narrative when you don't want to be an adversary. This can be quite unintentional and unconscious on their part. Because they, like many, have been hurt deeply.

So hurt people hurt people. And the only solution is to do the inner work. To seek assistance from within and without. To educate oneself on one's own foibles. To seek a spiritual life if so disposed, or to seek community.

But what woke me up lately is a sense that maybe everyone is sleep-walking. The hubris that puts them to sleep is the idea that they've already done the work, don't need the work. It's denial. And the antidote to said arrogance is humility.

Humility says I don't know. I'm going to use beginner's mind. I'm going to apologize, forgive and humanize the other. I'm going to awaken when I'm in someone else's control drama and quickly exit. And I'm going to be vigilant against ensnaring others in mine.

Then we can see that most of us are unwittingly re-living the past. The pain, the wishes unfulfilled. The emptiness and the losses. The inner child, so wounded, becomes the miserly ego of the adult. And all we can do is to truly see them as more than they're being. And to see our small selves in them. To mourn our losses and forgive our trespassers. Because most of them were asleep at the wheel. And so have we been.

And love is giving. And it feels so much better than resenting. We can forego starting the whole adversarial process over again with someone new, while subconsciously imprinting upon them someone from our past.

And speaking of mourning our losses, it seems such a pity that we spend so much time in this dance of re-traumatization. We must be here for so much more. Perhaps some don't want to wake up from it because the weight of the wasted time and misplaced rage and hate would seem too much to bear. Especially minus the mechanism of forgiveness.

I wish everyone only love and joy and peace. And as I inch closer to 50, I realize there is no shortcut for doing the inner work. In some ways I feel like I'm just getting started. In others I sense the accumulated insights and knowledge for which I am grateful.

Sometimes the intent to learn, grow, and change our ways is enough to start a process that overtakes a person. I sense I'm strapped into that ride, especially after recently responding to a call made years ago to a very different me.

The tools of the trade of life are indispensable: meditation, gratitude, foregiveness, crying, journaling, community, purpose, music, exercise, humility, humanizing others, perspective, stewardship of nature and others. And sometimes, it's fighting for what's right, even if it makes us unpopular.

To all the teachers and trainers, I truly am grateful.

I hope you enjoy the narrated version with expanded commentary

I think of conservatives as being dogmatic. I'm liberal. I think of myself and others as being fluid thinkers, seeing through the eyes of nuance. But that's not always the case.

I see the effects of Trumpism as being manifold and deleterious to our political system, as do most in the peanut gallery. But I see a more subtle yet profound effect on our society and the way we speak to and treat each other. Basically, we're starting to act like Trump, since he is the dominant figure in our nation and has been so for the last 10 years.

So it's from that vantage point that I see some of my liberal friends being dogmatic, unyielding and viewing issues as black and white when they are not. I see people vilifying certain groups via over-generalization.

I see my friends dehumanizing those with whom they disagree. And it's easier to dehumanize a billionaire because it's punching up. But it's still punching and it's still not clear thinking to lump all billionaires together.

And to be fair, I'm sure that there are and have been, historically, non-dogmatic republicans, conservatives. Senator McCain might have been a good example. Teddy Roosevelt another. But I am not over-generalizing with the intent to lump all conservatives together, but to speak of tendencies. And on the level of tendency, I do think conservatives do this more. But especially when those behaviors are being constantly modeled and affirmed in the form of politicians who are more like shock jocks than public servants.

So it's only natural: monkey see, monkey do. And all us monkeys have been watching the big orange orangutan behave badly and think poorly for a decade. We are bound to be acting like him in overt and covert ways. Especially when we get attention for it.

So some amount of liberals are bound to unwittingly start to think in distorted terms. And perhaps, at its extremes, liberalism can be dogmatic as well. I certainly don't want to have a communist dogma ruling over me.

But politics isn't static. Perhaps, with the rightward trend of our politics since 1968, liberals have really meant centrists, pragmatists. Maybe from a different vantage point, I'm only a consensus builder with the heart of a liberal. Maybe I see the New Deal legislation as respite from mergers, and the Dobbs Decision and Citizens United.

But enough of that tangent. When I see my liberal friends espouse dogmatic views on sports, billionaires, real estate, and politics, I'm disappointed. I want them to see nuance, context and subtle gradations. I want them to see how they're falling into the traps that have ensnared so many conservatives, with horrible consequences for them and the rest of us.

I want them to see how this dehumanization is a reaction to being dehumanized themselves. And how 2 wrongs don't make a right. I want them to see their distortions and course-correct. I want them to stop the wheel of alienation from steamrolling another generation.

I want them to adopt a sense of a beginner's mind and to doubt all their suppositions, if only to recalibrate their thinking apparatuses.

Humility is the grounding we all need in order to do the delicate work of creating a society that works for more and more of us.

And it's so easy to pick on the rich. To pick on those who have more when we struggle. And I'm struggling financially so I get it. It's also easy when we are in a second gilded age where power and money are once again in the hands of the few. In that setting, one can easily operate from outrage and view all rich people as thieves and all billionaires as hoarders.

But that's essentialism. That's the idea at the heart of racism, sexism, homophobia and on and on. It's dehumanization parading as a philosophical stance. It is the rationale behind ethnic cleansing and Jim Crow and gas chambers. It is the same thing.

I want my friends to see this before they become the enemy.

As I watch the news of the day unfold I'm anxious as I see all these protests on college campuses.  I want there to be a Jewish State and for Israel to get rid of Hamas.  I also want Palestinians to be safe and have food and have a homeland of their own with autonomy.

And so I understand why lots of protesters want to demand their schools and our government divest from Israel.  It's because they are not honoring human rights while prosecuting a war against an entrenched terrorist group in urban areas.  This is tricky business of course.  But Israel can precision-strike a building in Syria that kills the Generals they know are there.  They are capable of precision.  So I see why people are speaking up.  I obviously don't condone any antisemitism or violence during protests.

But what concerns me more is that this looks and feels like 1968 all over again for American politics.  The nation was on a knife’s edge. Race riots, burning buildings, division, Viet Nam and free love. We were divided on lines of age and race. The streets were a powder-keg and key national figures were killed.

While there haven’t been such assassinations so far in 2024, the tension is, perhaps, equally high. And so are the stakes. In 1968, with our nation at war in Viet Nam and our President having just passed historic Civil Rights legislation in the last few years, there was much unrest. Race riots following Dr King’s assassination made the case for Nixon. He would go on to win because Bobby Kennedy was killed and the disorder frightened white voters.  The conservative, law and order candidate appears to be the answer in such times.  Nixon wasn't what this country needed in that sense, but he's what we got.  He was the beginning of the backlash to Civil Rights and began the drug war.   As an aside, he was a good President in lots of ways, even if he was our first proto-fascist President and a foreshadowing of Reagan and finally Trump.

But back to the present.  Joe Biden didn't need any more headwinds.  With inflation, his age, the giant disinformation campaign and a fascist demagogue on the other side of the race, he needs this Israel thing to go away.  But he has to tiptoe because he wants the Jewish vote, which normally goes to the liberal candidate.  Embargoing Israel right now will obviously cause consternation among a large swath of the population.  But helping Israel kill and starve its neighbors could cause progressives to stay home on election day.

I know this sounds cold and calculated but the Israel/Hamas situation will not get better with a Trump Presidency.  It would get far worse.  I want to prevent more needless loss of life and to stop the churning toward world war that seems to be inevitable.   But more than that, I want to stop another Trump Presidency because I don't know if we could recover from such a seismic event.

This election is the most important election in our history.  I argue that it could be the most important event in American History because if it goes the wrong way, it could be our last election and our last gasp as a free people.

I'm glad that the protests have gotten the Biden Administration's attention.  He should be warning Bibi that our assistance only goes so far.  Biden is bringing in food to Gaza.  He could and should do more.   But he also realizes that nothing is more important than this election.  And that is the saddest calculus I've ever had to speak for.  When innocent civilians are dying and it's not the first priority, you know it's a sad state of affairs for the human race.

Here’s my newest video about my most recent writings

Enjoy and please feel free to share feedback on the video or my ideas.

Obviously many of us thought the Nation’s highest court was beyond corruption.  With recent revelations about Thomas' and Kavanaugh's character deficits and choices, that idea has begun to erode for many of us.  But let's take this to its logical end.  I think we at least thought these people were smarter than us, more savvy than us, that these men and women were the best of us.  At least 3 of them clearly are not the best of us.

Two of these justices, Thomas and Kavanaugh were voted into a lifetime appointment for the highest court of the land amid credible accusations of sexual assault and/or sexual harrassment.  They weren't proven innocent in a court of law.  They were voted in any way.  Thomas hid behind his cheap 'high tech lynching' defense.  His accuser was treated as if she was on trial.  Kavanaugh lied to Congress sneeringly and was rewarded with a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land.  As an aside, I was driving and turned the Kavanaugh hearing on midstream.  I heard this snotty man talking and assumed it was one of Kavanaugh's friends from the time in question.  When it registered that it was Brett Kavanaugh, I was beside myself.  Rewatch that schmuck's blatantly dishonest testimony.  It's astonishing in its brazen snottiness and overt dishonesty.

Then we get to Alito's decision: the loony logic, the laughable common law 'precedent' he cites.  This is the stuff of a comedy sketch, not the actual Supreme Court of the United States.  But it's real and will affect real humans across the country.

Let's go back to Thomas and his nutball wife.  Thomas won't recuse himself when cases come before him that involve his own wife!  No problem, right?  Of course the items that come before him involving his wife are solidly partisan, but no bother.  And of course, we have the texts between Ginny Thomas and the former President's chief of staff, urging them to find ways to OVERTURN THE F*****G ELECTION.

These people are a national embarrassment, not fit for office, to say the least.  But there will be no consequences.

Gorsuch and Barrett, brought to you by the people who fomented an attack on our Capitol, were installed amid political maneuvering that stole the appointments from Obama and Biden, respectively.  Barrett espoused odd religious beliefs, a disrespect for Starre Decisis and was a judge for only 3 years before becoming a lifetime member of the highest court in the land.

To his credit, Gorsuch seems like a capable judge as does Chief Justice Roberts.  These 2 seem to be able to think for themselves and don't always fall on party lines.  But lying is lying.  The 3 Trump appointees just plain lied about Roe Vs Wade when asked directly about it.  Doesn't that matter? Shouldn't we be able to hold them accountable?  How is it that we seem to have no means by which to redress grievance here?

Minority rule is maddening, especially when coupled with patriarchal jurisprudence and attacks on our election system/a blatant violent coup attempt.  Most of the country disagrees with the upcoming decision, having watched the Handmaid's Tale.  Half of the country is affected by the decision.  The half that is not affected won't walk in the shoes of those who will bear this burden.

Obviously, I argue that some of these justices are not the best among us.  But the ideas presented are not grounded in logic, concern for the health and well-being of women and liberty.  The very foundations of our democracy crack and shudder while we watch horse races.  We are in trouble.  And by we, I mean women.  And by trouble I mean that they will cease to be full citizens when and where states ban abortion and travel for abortion.

What are we going to do about this?

And 2 years later, the answer is resounding.  The silence is deafening.

My new recording about critical voice

As I delve into topics such as psychological visibility and interpersonal relationships, I've rediscovered a concept from therapy and self-help literature.  The concept is so incisive.  Critical voice is a term many use to describe a stance that is fault-finding.  We can operate from a critical voice most of the time and not know it.  I sure do sometimes.

We can look at others from this place: distancing, blaming, critiquing and judging their choices.  This behavior is repellent to lovers and friends and family.  But we can also turn this critical eye towards ourselves, and we often do.

We may have learned it from a parent who criticized us.  We may have learned gossip and downloaded that behavior into our social routine.  Gossip, I suppose, would be the use of critical voice on someone not present or spoken for.

As an aside, I've recently been reminded of the destructive nature of gossip.  I don't like it and yet it seems to seduce us.  Perhaps the ego enjoys the downward comparison or not being the one that is criticized for the moment.

And that critical voice can be our semi-permanent state and stance.  In talks with a friend recently, we discovered the critical nature of his self-talk and that it came from a close family member.  So it's easy to, upon discovering that we've downloaded one of our parents to...you guessed it, criticize ourselves.  But we really need to love ourselves.  We must forgive ourselves for being human.  It's natural to unconsciously model behaviors as children.  It's how we survive both physically and psychologically.

Maybe if we can love and forgive ourselves for the error, we can eventually forgive the person who taught us this destructive behavior.

I also notice that when people have been manipulated, they tend to project that critical person onto others.  They apologize to us as if we were mad at them when they make a small mistake.  They may even assume we are mad at them when we are not.

So we can play the hero and soothe them and say everything is ok.  And we should.  But what's equally important is that we don't allow them or our critical inner voice to start making the blame-game the new modus operandi.  We must redouble our efforts to notice when we are in critical voice towards ourselves or others.

We can break this spell within ourselves and our relationships.  We do so via the awareness that we have a critical voice/stance.  Also by recognizing when we are in it and then by choosing to leave this place and enter one of love and openness.

If and when we can't or won't, perhaps we are holding onto some fear, some complaint, some hurt or some misunderstanding.  These can feel like blocks to love and peace and flow and connection.  The simplest ways to clear these are to communicate.  Maybe we journal to ourselves.  Maybe we tell them how we feel.  Then we let them clarify or apologize or leave or ponder.

Maybe we attempt to relate to them and imagine how it must be to embody their lives and struggles.  This is humanizing.  And once the air is cleared, it just feels different.

As a sensitive person, I experience a sense of feeling blocked or disconnected very profoundly.  When the air is cleared I feel it in my guts too.  More and more lately I experience a felt sense of connection or disconnection with a person I haven't seen or spoken to in days/weeks/months if there is/was intimacy or the potential for it.  I've only noticed this recently.

I guess I couldn't previously separate this felt bodily sense from the cacophony of other thoughts, feelings and sensations in my body.  For me it's between the solar plexus and heart: the knot of vishnu in yogic terms. 

How do you feel those felt senses of connection and their absence?

And can you recognize when you’re in critical voice?

I like to write about life and shared experience.  I seem to prefer an 'as above so below' micro/macro narrative where I see how the larger cultural contexts affect us on a personal level and vice versa.  I see this leading to a book. I write and think about a host of issues, but I've noticed the bottom line questions I'm working on are:

"How and why do we misunderstand?"

"How do we shut down emotionally, spiritually, psychologically?

"How do we fall prey to macro-manipulations like propaganda?"

"How do we fall prey to micro-manipulations like gas-lighting?"

"What are the mechanics of deception?"

"What are the tools of misunderstanding?"

"How do we transcend our limitations?"

"What are the tools of healing and perceptual correction?"

This sounds so heady and philosophical but I've been feeling a lot lately.  A sense of loss, of guilt and befuddlement at the recognition that I've been manipulated from within and without.  And I'm no different from anyone else in that regard.

I see years and decades of shut-down towards a person or people due to trauma, resentment, misunderstandings and habit.  Trying to figure out where my behaviors end and the other's begin is a trying process.  But more importantly I seek the insight, the catch, the essence of what took place.  What did I miss?  How do I prevent this again?

I see my political and social views manipulated by seen and unseen individuals and businesses and media and government.  Some of this is just Plato's Cave analogy.

I see my work, social, family and romantic life affected by the same forces, within and without, that affect everyone else.  We spend so much time getting it wrong.  We work the wrong career or marry for the wrong reasons.  We often don't see it until it's too late.

I was musing recently with a friend about some of the artifacts of misunderstanding:

psycho-emotional trauma and

fallacies, biases and other intellectual devices of misperception

the many faces of dehumanization

some of the ones that stuck out to me are:

over-generalization

jumping to conclusions

bandwagon fallacy

being judgmental which to me is coming from critical voice or stance

scapegoating

These can all be tools we use, wittingly or otherwise, to dehumanize others or even ourselves.  But at the very least, they distort what could be our objectivity.

It's an overwhelming undertaking to create a frame of reference on a subject so broad and emerging.  I haven't even mentioned addiction and aversion.  But those are 2 strong examples of ways in which our neurology gets rewired as a result of traumas and outside influences.  But so are fallacies and biases.  Social media and phones and computer screens have a hand in changing us, often for the worse.

But yet we go on and heal and learn and create and rest.  We seek love even when we've lost.  We forgive and apologize and try again and again.  We are nothing if not resilient.

I guess I'm wishing/hoping for a scholastic approach toward helping individuals learn about the ways that we perceive and how to untangle the many influences on our capacity to make sense.

This issue has become especially important in our current political climate where, for the last 10 years (and obviously more) we've been under an all-out onslaught on our capacity to make sense of the information we are given.  The stakes couldn't be higher and the situation could not be more dire.

And yet such moments in history have created tremendous opportunities for positive change on a grand scale.  And make no mistake, those changes are needed if we are to have a habitable planet and a society and culture that balances the needs of the individual and the collective.

A battle for the soul of the nation coincides with a battle for the habitability of the planet. 

Can we defeat greed, fear, hatred, deception and grasps for unchecked power?  These are the questions of every civilization.

Can we eschew dehumanization of any and all people?  Can we rise above dehumanizing those who use dehumanization as a tool?  Can we humanize those with less than us and those with more than us?

Can we both fight the deeds of those who would oppress while still not demonizing them?  For if we can't, we become them.  We become the enemy.  We must shake off the desire and urge to see any other human as less than us, as evil.  This is the trick.  We can fight fascism with all our might.  We can try to create an economy that creates less billionaires, while still honoring the person behind the money.  We can remember to not overgeneralize about them, for starters.  See Taylor Swift as just one exception to the perception about greedy rich people.

We must do this dance or we have already lost.  The battle is not merely for our planet or our nation, but for our souls.  If you let your enemy take away your soul, your humanity and your kindness, then any victory you make will be pyrrhic.  Because the victory we seek is not to merely save our democracy or our planet, but to maintain our humanity while doing so.

I come back to speaking on psychological visibility more and more.  I keep experiencing how important it is in our relationships and on the world stage.  I often talk about how we need to see and be seen.  We go out, we make friends, we have dates, we join civic organizations.  Sometimes we just people-watch or just go about our night, dressed to kill. Most of us do so for various reasons.  People want to be seen, to be liked, to be understood.  Some need to feel that they’re not the only one that has certain political views or environmental concerns.  Most want to feel a sense of community.  And with friends and lovers we need to feel a sense of affinity, like our people get us, to see past the surface, maybe even past the flaws, to reveal our essence.  And we want the benefit of the doubt, to be taken at our word.  Otherwise, what’s the point?

Some people seem to be able to see facets of us at times.  It can be a great feeling.  But other times they may typecast us.  They may lump us in with others in our age group, gender, political affiliation, sexual orientation or religion. They may misinterpret our words and our meaning because our words or deeds may trigger old traumas, seen or unseen.  However this happens, it’s not always easy to sense when we are not being seen, but usually the mood feels different to me.

I feel uneasy in my gut.  I often feel anger, like my words are not being taken as I intend them.  If in a debate or disagreement, the person may not argue in good faith.  This can spiral into a fight or a breakup.  The misunderstanding can be mutual or one-sided.  We can talk past each other.  We can then reject or seek the approval of the other.  

The stance I’ve taken lately is to better honor myself.  I have decided to not associate with people who don’t see me or won’t see me or can’t see me.  Sometimes they just can’t see us.  They are too busy, too angry, hurt, self-involved or just not interested in seeing past their blinders or our presentation.  When they won’t see us, they may need to blame us in order to avoid seeing something unpleasant about themselves.  When they can only see us as a member of one of those categories, they won’t humanize us.  

This, to me, is the core problem: the universal human flaw of dehumanizing others.  I posit that we dehumanize others in order to protect our traumas.  And ironically, our traumas are most often the result of being dehumanized by others.  Not seen, not valued, not honored, not protected.  Used, violated, beaten, manipulated.  And as a result, we protect ourselves with pattern recognition.  If a dog bites us, we develop a phobia.  This is natural.  The body and the neurology are just trying to protect us any way they can.  It’s a blunt instrument.  And perhaps there was a time when this worked for us as a species.

Now, sadly, I see this working against all of us.  Not the vigilance or the boundaries, but the subtle dehumanizing of those who remind our reptilian brain of those who caused us such anguish, such terror.  All humans are suffering from PTSD on some level.  This is the human condition.  And I have my own traumas, blind spots and triggers.  But some have faced situations I can only imagine.  So it’s not with judgment or cynicism that I speak of my dissatisfaction with not being seen.

I even realize that I can and do and feed the narrative of myself as a caricature of maleness, of whiteness, of boorishness, condescension and so on.  Sometimes, in my ignorance and lack of awareness, I exhibit these behaviors in the moment.  But this is not my essence.  Other times I buy into a generalized narrative about myself.  I don’t see my essence myself.  Or I buy into the categorical assumptions and generalizations about men, white people, Americans, realtors, business owners, people of my age group or heterosexuals or any combination thereof.

And so we can’t always blame others for falling into the traps of dehumanizing us when our own behaviors may cue them unwittingly.  Furthermore, overgeneralizing can be a shortcut, a way to check out of a situation and/or a way to maintain denial. This feels maddening to me. The person levies a judgment, an opinion that doesn’t seem to be based on deep inquiry and presence, but a surface appraisal of the situation. It’s this kind of common sense blah blah blah that makes me feel unseen, unheard and misunderstood. I feel typecast, like I’m seen as a mere collection of my apparent categories, not a human.

Whatever it is, I’m finding myself saying No to these situations.  I don’t have to generalize in response, even if I see some general cultural trends that may be at work on the individuals I encounter.  There is no value in reflecting the essentialism that can be at the core of not-seeing.  Essentialism is false and a tool for dehumanization.

But I can move forward acting as if some percentage of certain groups may act certain ways because of being pandered to.  I can be especially vigilant against this trend.  And I can reject the behavior instead of the human embodying them..  I can move to a safer and more comfortable distance instead of blaming or rejecting those who can’t/won’t/don’t see me.

Because at its essence, many of us are often under what amounts to a spell.  People can’t find perspective in a situation, often because of the aforementioned traumas, preconceptions and cultural messages. The constant propaganda being beamed at us from those that stand to gain from division are plentiful and alluring.  Perennial outgroups that are suddenly ingroups being flattered and humored and pandered to can be unsure how to wield newfound power and yet still be deeply affected by the righteous indignation of intense experiential traumas.

It’s a perplexing dilemma, to be sure and we can see it on the world stage too, but that is for another post.