Therapy for Social Change Podcast

--What it's like to have to change, or choose change and not know how to do it

--Change in the context of privilege

--Strategies to survive freefall

--How propaganda works

--Overwhelm as evidence of mental defeat and propaganda success

--Strategies to return to power and not feel overwhelmed

--How to discern the difference between the mind's story and the body's sensations

--Sitting with fear and uncertainty

--Listening and silence as roots of the creative process

--Joy Harjo's poetry

--The change model of New Year's Resolutions

--How change really happens

--Self improvement versus structural change

--including all aspects of mind, body, spirit in change making

--An examination of the Story of People and how it's breaking apart

--What it's like to live between two worlds, one that's collapsing and another that isn't here yet

--How to stay with uncertainty instead of believing we can predict what's coming

--The difference between ideation and execution

--Disney's Three Rooms of Creation

--Grief as a part of finishing

--Grief and Transformation in the context of COP28

How can we make complex problems approachable through writing? How can writing help people act, make change in the world? How do we better understand why people are turning away from reading because they find our current problems exhausting?

Objectification is the act of turning something living and vibrant and changeable into a thing. It’s one of the key preconditions for an ideology to work. I cannot evaluate my value in patriarchy, or in white supremacy, until I can see myself through its gaze. I have to step outside my experience to look at that selfhood as if it is a static thing. Years of practice of objectification are designed to ease the friction between the self and the systems of which we are a part.

Finally, one day someone will ask you what you want, what you truly desire, whether that’s in bed, or what you want to eat, or what you want to learn, or what you want to create in the time you have left on this earth, and you’ll blank out, right there in the strobe light of that question, because you can’t find it, that answer. It’s not that you know it and you’re hiding; it’s that it’s gone.

The rub here is that ideologies aren’t seamless. It’s not that they knock out all of our internal experience and turn us into robots. It’s that there’s a slippage, an inconsistency, a faulty wiring between us, our sense of what is real and true and what is being represented as worthy and normal by these networks of power. The more in congruence we are with the dominant culture, the less that slippage causes pain. If we aren’t measuring up, it’s harder to stay in contact with our internal experience. Because instead of being a source of wonder, of gratitude that we get to be here at all, our experience is of shame. We leave the self, only to re-enter it and castigate it, thing-ify it, improve it. But what if we can’t make it better, this objectified self? What then?

There are two usual responses to that shame, that certainty that we’re intrinsically flawed. One is conscious, the other is largely unconscious. In the first, we practice monitoring ourselves, policing our behaviors and believing the more we conform to what is expected, the safer we’ll be. In the second, we wall ourselves off from those feelings, desires, aspects of being that we know mark us as deviant, contemptible, disgusting, and undeserving of care. They become our shadow, or we project them onto others, the not me, the ones who are alien, animal, less than human, repositories of all that cannot be tolerated in the self.

But there’s a third approach, and that’s collective resistance and critique. By sharing our experiences of internalized oppression, of how we daily objectify ourselves, we can receive encouragement from others to learn from our collective pain. We can root our personal experience in the wider framework of our particular standpoint—how we are situated, in terms of our identities, our relationships to power, resources, and status, our subjection to oppression, our congruence and distance from the dominant culture. We can stay vulnerable, naming the ways we do violence to ourselves, and how we are encouraged to enact violence on others.

One thing I’m curious about is the space between stop and go. I don’t know about you, but when I actually stop something, I feel awful.

Some days it takes everything I have to refuse the old coping. Most days I notice how much of what I tell myself I should be doing, or even want to be doing, isn’t mine. It’s not real. It’s not attached to any true feeling of embodied desire, or curiosity, or wonder. It’s just me, recirculating what I’ve been told I should be doing to be valuable, or acceptable, or safe, or interesting to someone else. It’s “me” as the dominant culture represents me to myself. 

I don’t believe there’s a “me” I can find that isn’t already shot through with patriarchy and white supremacy. I don’t think I’m going to find an authentic self, a self before culture. I’m noticing I want to give you a template for how to do this, this what-comes-after-stopping. If you have one, I want to know yours. But if I give you a template I’ve destroyed it. I’ve turned unknowing into knowing. I’ve made a graphic you can pin on your mirror. I want that, too. But then I’d be back in the “go” box. I’d have my secure path forward. I’d be congratulating myself on how much more self-actualized I am, now that I’m doing the new thing.

If we’re going to stop so that something visionary and truly revolutionary shows up, something that lets us maybe survive and halt the violence and destruction, I think it might come from sitting together and trying to find some way to communicate this unknowing, collectively, in a way that preserves a tentative sniffing at something, rather than a fixing, a certainty. I want you to share your version of that with me, in whatever way feels best to you. I long for it, because I want to know you, and because you hold my survival in your hands.

Last week I listened to an interview between the arts consultant and therapist Beth Pickens, who specializes in working with artists and wrote Make Your Art No Matter What, and Austin Kleon, the author of a number of bestselling books, like Steal Like An Artist and Show Your Work. Pickens was telling Kleon about the kinds of anxieties she sees in her artist clients. She said every artist should have a death acceptance practice. This was her first slide: We will die.

Then she said: Having a death acceptance practice helps us be in the living while we are alive. You have a lot of work to make while you’re here and I want you to move around the fear that’s stopping you, and a death acceptance practice can help you do that.

Another reason to have the practice is that throughout history it’s artists who have been explaining death and the divine to us. You are our best hope for describing, for approaching, for encountering the ineffable. So the fact that we will die; the fact of our mortality, we rely on you to help us understand and interpret this. 

Our lives are finite, and I want you to make your work. You have to make your work.

One thing I love about Pickens’ recommending a death practice is that it obliterates the ego, if only for a second. It pushes me past my own preciousness, my avoidance of my disappointment that the work isn’t amazing, glorious, ground breaking. It’s just work. It’s just appreciation for being able to think, in communion with other people, in one split second.

The fact of death makes the risk of making something worth taking. 

But the fact of death can also drive making into a practice of dissociated frenzy. All my activity, keeping the image of my corpse at bay. I’ve been holding the tension between the need to take the risk, make the thing, and the need to be present, not use the work to escape the body, the feelings that are lurking and waiting for me to break my focus.

How much work is enough? Enough in terms of quantity, or quality, or fullness of expression of an idea? When is a piece of work good enough to be called finished and released? When I substitute the word “art” for “work,” the question has more gravity to it. If I say “content,” it has less. Weak art sucks; weak content just gets overridden with more content. There’s this truism that the more content a person creates, the better. Better connection with the audience; better engagement; an increasing reassurance in the relationship between the two sides, creator and receiver, each demonstrating how much the other matters to them.

Beth Pickens doesn’t say make a whole bunch of art, no matter what. She just says make art. It’s me who’s added the question of enough to it, as I watched myself canning jar after jar, filling up every crevice of my freezer and pantry. I live in a city. I can walk to a grocery store. It’s really ok. Except, somewhere in my being, it’s not. How hard do I have to work, in my own eyes, to feel like I get to rest, that I’ve shown the universe my gratitude for being here?