Therapy for Social Change Podcast

What’s the difference between creativity and imagination?

There’s an underlying assumption that creativity seeks an output, that it wants to generate a material artifact, either as a goal in itself (think “art as creative expression”), or to make an impact on someone else, or to generate money for the creator.

Imagination seems less attached to an output. I think of imagination as an force, buoyant and inexhaustible, surging and sparking. It doesn’t need us, or want anything from us. We can choose to connect to it, but there’s no guarantee of safety—it might be a great experience; it might take us to our edge. Imagination is other-worldly, by which I mean it’s not necessarily bound by or linked to what is. 

I’ve been thinking about creativity and imagination as ways to characterize the difference between reformist and revolutionary strategies for social change. Reformist strategies seek to improve and overhaul our current systems, organizations, and structures. They often start with an end goal in mind. Revolutionary strategies try to imagine an entirely new way of solving a problem, without necessarily being attached to things as they stand.

One thing I’ve been wondering about is this: what would “therapy” look like if its work was less that of creativity/reform and more that of imagination/revolution? What would it seek to heal? What strategies would we us, to do it? What would change if the field’s focus on trauma shifted from addressing the impact of interpersonal violence on individuals and communities to instead healing trauma’s ultimate source, the violence of inequality, systemic violence and oppression? 

It’s often said that people who live in cultures that are steeped in individualism struggle to wrap their minds around systems. Individualist cultures see both the source and the solution to problems in the actions of individual people who are said to be rational, who know and understand their thinking and their desires, and who have the power and self determination to make changes, if they choose. Systems thinking is frequently derided as “too big” and “too emotionally overwhelming” because when there’s a problem there isn’t an individual to blame or supplicate or lock up.  

Those who argue that it is overwhelming to think in systems usually speak about the “system” as a totality, a “thing” that we must be able to see in its entire complexity and range, if we are to transform it. We have to know in advance exactly how to tackle its every element. 

In actuality, systems thinking is a highly nimble, optimistic, iterative method of problem solving, because it’s not the totality of the system, but rather the fact that systems are networks that is the key to thinking about change. Thinking of problems like population extinction, or white supremacy, or sexual violence as systems inaugurates a space of immense possibility, because a change made to one part of a networked system will inevitably impact the rest. 

The beauty of systems thinking is that it shows us that any change to one part of the system will impact other nodes. But how that impact will occur, when it will occur, cannot be predicted. So the call to know how to change or “fix” an entire system is not only cognitively and emotionally overwhelming, it's actually impossible. 

We cannot master the system, or dominate it back, the way it dominates us. But we can learn a nodal point, we can isolate a 30%, and in impacting that 30% we can be a catalyst for systemic change.

This is not to say that those ripple effects will be uniformly positive. We cannot know or anticipate the result of that 30% intervention. But we can track the energy flows in the feedback loop, and we can notice the ways what we think we know will come back to us, changed, by its interaction with the system itself. We can work together, in coalitions, in organizations, in spontaneous conversations in coffee shops, to overcome our fear of enormous challenges; we can accept our grief and our longing for change by locating ourselves within our own networks and systems, and by reminding ourselves that we don’t have to know the entire solution to make a tremendous impact: we just have to start with a small but significant change.

I’ve been thinking about those almost imperceptible actions we take to remind ourselves of who we are.

There’s a privacy in the smallness of the act: people who know you well still might not know you do that thing, say that phrase to yourself, make that small move with your shoulders when you catch your face in the mirror. I wonder when the last time was that you had a chance to be the person you are when no one’s looking. I hope you can find that version of you and hold it for a quick second, before you close your front door behind you.

My “Christmases” taught me there was no one Truth, and that just because you weren’t religious, that didn’t mean you weren’t impacted by culture and tradition and faith. They got me thinking about cultural collision and being of two nations, two worlds, two religions, no religion. They gave me an experience of utter alienation and isolation and un-belonging. But they also gave me the ability to empathize with and occupy multiple viewpoints at the same time. 

One reason I am invested in ideology critique, and in sharing what ideology critique “is” and how it works, is that ideologies such as patriarchy and white supremacy live in our bodies as much as our thoughts, and learning to see and combat their power is a deep form of personal and collective liberation.

When I read Hough’s piece, I hear her describing how ideology is registered in the body and forms the engine of our self conception. Ideologies are braided together with the specifics of our lived experience. They are not merely concepts; they are not merely expressions of culture; they are the screens through which our embodied experiences and our feelings are made sense of and expressed in words. They shape our belonging and alienation, our shame and exile, our pride and resistance. 

What ideology critique gives us is a method to fight oppression and refuse shame. It gives us a way of noticing and talking about how ideologies work to craft and shape what counts as normal, and who is worthy enough to stay alive and unmolested, in both senses of the term. 

It takes us out of individual questions of how we feel, and what happened to us, and what we think is our fault, and shifts our focus to the larger systems and structures that shape the acts of violence that are landing on the people we love. It shines a light on the systems, so we can see them, challenge them, break them, and usher in something new.

My client is a person with an abiding interest in the magnificence of life. He was not prompted to bring up prayer because of the shooting at Club Q. Nor was he inspired because this is Thanksgiving week in the United States. Our discussion was instead a continuation of our longstanding conversations about meaning and purpose, embodiment and contemplation.

There is something about the insistence that one express gratitude on a particular day that rubs me the wrong way. Though I appreciate the idea of gathering and expressing reverence for all that one has, I think that forcing a person to express gratitude when he feels otherwise can engender in him the belief that everyone else has so much to be thankful for, and he must muzzle himself or risk exclusion from his community.

The person who believes he’s been robbed of the gifts he thinks are the patriarchal right of men; the person who is forced to say he is thankful for his riches when instead he feels inhuman and reviled, or who believes he cannot measure up to the strict definitions of white patriarchal masculinity; this is a person who may fantasize he can force others to feel as he does, drag them into his misery and loneliness. These are the psychological characteristics of men who engage in mass shooting events.

Richard Fierro is not a person who needs to be reminded of the preciousness of life, or to be told he should be grateful for what he has. He willingly threw himself into the face of death, again, and survived. Watching him, knowing veterans like him, I know he would do it again tomorrow.

Here are three men—my client, the shooter, and Richard Fierro—each of whom is expressing a different form of masculinity, of power, of identity and meaning, all in negotiation with the dominant culture’s ideal of what white patriarchal masculinity means, what it looks like, and what its power confers.

What I find hopeful in this moment is that so many men are in negotiation with the limitations of a singular ideal of masculinity. So many men are taking the risk of talking about the ways they have been barred from their full range of feeling, and from expressing vulnerability and intimacy. Even in their loneliness and fear that they are unique, or odd, or misfits, for wanting to be able to express themselves, they are speaking up. Even in the face of a uniform, white patriarchal ideal of masculinity, men from different identities, ethnicities, and subcultures, are describing and valuing different ways of being men.

One of the gifts of queer culture is that it has an entire vocabulary, a storied history, a theoretical apparatus, and practices of celebration, all of which are designed to help people grapple with the violence of patriarchy and the limitations of binary conceptualizations of gender. This is in part why queer culture, and queer people, are so often attacked and destroyed.

Despite our knowing how complex it is to even persuade ourselves to change, let alone our clients, if we work in mental health, it’s often still the first impulse to provide information, or a helpful explanation of why X will be so much better if only Y happens.  Facing the contradictions and complexity of embodied existence, we often cling to the simplicity of a logical explanation. We can thank psychoanalysis, then, for teaching us how squirrely the mind can be when it’s confronted with information or arguments about how it should change, when it doesn’t want to.

These concepts help us understand how even the most moral argument, or the most earnest appeal, or the most thoroughly fact-checked research cannot make it through the thicket of our defenses.

What’s less discussed in mental health is the complex interaction between our individual defenses and the ways the larger structures that shape and consolidate the dominant culture work together to make change appear much more difficult than it actually is.

Structures, and the ideologies that animate them, shape what counts as normal, usual, or valued by the dominant culture. One way these structures work is to make us believe that there are certain areas of the social order, certain aspects of being, that are fully outside our control as individuals, or so entrenched in the culture—so much the “accepted consensus”—that the idea of speaking about them as if they can change can elicit shame or disbelief, even in those who desperately want the change to occur. 

Ideology works by recirculating the idea that the social consensus is infallible and that to be granted the safety of participation in the dominant culture there are certain ideas, certain changes that cannot be said aloud, or that will be treated as absurd, or idealistic, or simply dismissed without comment. 

I was struck, recently, by a study in Nature whose authors shared that “We find a form of pluralistic ignorance that we describe as a false social reality: a near universal perception of public opinion that is the opposite of true public sentiment. Specifically, 80–90% of Americans underestimate the prevalence of support for major climate change mitigation policies and climate concern. While 66–80% Americans support these policies, Americans estimate the prevalence to only be between 37–43% on average.” (italics in the original).

How many other issues are suffering from this same false social reality? How many changes that we now celebrate as evidence of our culture’s ethics, or generosity, or willingness to confront our history, were once regarded as threatening and absurd?

What psychoanalysis and structural analysis give us, in these concepts about how change happens or is prevented from happening, are ways to talk about power. We can “know,” in our bodies, or in our minds, that we need to change. But whether we believe we can act, and what we think will happen to us if we do, is inseparable not only from our lived experience, but also our conceptualizations of power.

* What is the psychic toll of being in a state of perpetual anticipation of a threat?

* How does it feel in the body when we behave as if we aren’t in hyper arousal, when we play at rationality and calm, even as we’re consuming information designed to evoke a strong emotional response?

* How might sustaining this level of contradiction keep us off balance, out of contact with our own known truths, make us vulnerable to others’ stories?

* How can we access our creativity, which is rooted in our intuition and embodied sensations, if we are being told to concentrate on overcoming an imminent threat?

The problem with speculation is that it is a falsity, masquerading as a truth. And when that speculation is attached to an authority—a newspaper, a TV broadcast—it’s even more difficult to slow down and untangle what is anticipated from what is known.

What would happen if we could stop asking a world view that got us here to show us how to escape? Instead of being seduced by speculation, I wonder what it would be like to sit with what is actually known: that there have always been other sources of knowledge, other practices of attuning, and that there is urgent communication from the entire ecosystem that we must hear. Just inhabiting our not-knowing, and making room for the feelings that show up, is work that could help us slow down.

Part of what is so challenging about this moment is its two-ness: how we are daily told to shore up the systems that organize the current power structures, even as it is clear that increasing numbers of people want to engage in a process of emergent and fundamentally transformative change. Almost everyone I know who has chosen to engage in this kind of change work is doing it on double time—for free, around the edges of paid work, exhausting themselves, trying to stay uplifted, trying to find more time, more energy, more sustenance, because they have one foot in the future and one foot in the now.

I won’t hand my imagination to those who say we can’t make it across the threshold. I want to sit in the vastness of what is emerging. I want you sitting beside me, breathing, dropping into the wellspring of your power. I want my body to love uncertainty and eschew fixity. I want this to be a new kind of safety. I want to practice this, together.

Rebecca

The CPT protocol uses as its measure of effectiveness an assessment tool which the client fills out each week before session. The assessment lists all the symptoms outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’s diagnostic category for PTSD. From week to week, the assessment tracks the level of symptom severity the client is experiencing, and their level of daily function.

Each week, the symptoms are noted, and the level of function is assessed. If the client’s symptom score goes down by a certain percentage by the protocol’s close, the treatment is considered a success.

How much of what counts as “probable” in CBT is rooted in a false generalizing of a certain kind of situated experience? And what forms of stigma, and pathologizing diagnoses, can greet those who come from a different situated context? What is the unacknowledged ground upon which the definition of what “mental health” looks like stands? Whose experiences, class positions, and racialized world views are embedded in these definitions, which are then put forth in evidence-based practices like CPT as universal traits?

*Please note that the client I describe in this post is a composite of many veterans with whom I have worked throughout my time as a trauma therapist.

It makes sense to me that trying to imagine the death of the dominant culture, and of ways of being that have been practiced for centuries, would engender rage and terror. It makes sense that the un-knowing of where we will be, on the other side, is enough to make people freeze up, not want to speak. And at the same time, there’s the simple, common, goodwill: the hope that the little things, like a slice of pumpkin bread, can bring neighbors together, can remind us that we aren’t alone, that the desire for community is deep and strong.

So how do we love each other, and bring bread, and yet also have hard conversations, fight the violence, name the ways it tears at our hearts and breaks us?

When I get ready to speak publicly about what I think and how I feel about patriarchy and sexual violence, about economic inequality, about whiteness and ecosystem destruction and rampant growth, I assume I will be met with derision, with people turning away, wanting me to stop talking. But lately, I’ve been encountering people whose shoulders relax when I say these things; who exhale with relief when I make the opening in conversation.

I’m still shocked when they step toward me and share back. They’re telling me about the steps they’re taking to save the land that abuts their farm, to save it from development. They’re telling me about the people they’re gathering with, to push things forward. I have been assuming that community happens when the hard things are silenced and the violence is buried. But lately, I am seeing that is me who is making assumptions that are wrong, and that the community I crave is already here, that it is ready, that it is digging in the darkness, spades and shovels and hand trowels, turning the ground.

How do we become a “feminized” society—one that lauds and respects caring and empathy and that is full of people who are unafraid of facing death, of acknowledging our frailty, our uncertainty, our physical and emotional pain? If we better shared the work of caregiving, would this shift in our priorities diminish the power of patriarchy and white supremacy to shape our world?