NOTE: When this episode was recorded, Electra still had an active license to practice acupuncture. As of July 2024, all her licenses are in INACTIVE or LAPSED status. See website for more details.

In this episode, we're discussing Collaboration!

This is part 4 of 5. The next episode is wrapping up the conversation about Collaboration with my co-host. I'm not sure yet what the next topic will be because I've got several lined up.

Sections

• 0:00:00 Intro
• 0:01:22 Introduction Chat
• 0:06:03 Content Warnings
  • Content warnings for Parts 1 2 and 3 of the Collaboration episodes: To explain what it feels like to be in a non-collaborative relationship, I and my co-host describe distressing psychological experiences such as hypervigilant anxiety, ruminative and psychogenic insomnia, "barrage of rhetorical convincing," intrusive thoughts that involve interpersonal violence, homicidal ideation, suicidal ideation, destruction of institutions; losing supportive relationships and becoming isolated
  • Content warnings for Part 2: imagined/fictional interpersonal violence due to intrusive thoughts including torture; serial sexual assault perpetrated by a celebrity; political corruption by a past politician; mob violence (stochastic terrorism) and fictional description of homicide; workplace harassment; and descriptions of things that might trigger body dysmorphia.
• 0:07:37 Grounding Prayer
• 0:08:45 Kiki's quick intro reprise
• 0:09:14 A quick digression about how the behavior you develop in a non-collaborative relationship feels jarring and confuses others in a collaborative relationship
• 0:09:56 Intrusive Thoughts come from Learned Helplessness
• 0:11:45 How Learned Helplessness creates escalation of What It Would Take To Influence This Situation and that creates Intrusive Thoughts
• 0:13:16 Another way towards Intrusive Thoughts is, What Would It Take To Get You To Empathize? How Do I Recreate My Lived Experience In Your Body? uuuuuuh, I guess, uuuh, enhanced interrogation? because nothing else seems to work.
• 0:15:30 Sidebar: How people having intrusive thoughts and being disturbed by them provides cover for people who talk openly about their inclinations to create a sense of normalcy for when they actually act on those harmful actions.
• 0:19:15 Stochastic Terrorism as portrayed by mob violence from being Under The Umbra / an Emotional Regime of Othering, and how an Umbra of a non-collaborative relationship creates a direction for the violence for Stochastic Terrorism to occur
• 0:25:13 But non-collaborative Umbras creating emotional regimes which include an oppressed group or a scapegoat 'target of blame' also create the same micro environment as Stochastic Terrorism does on the national level and the Umbra creates the same obfuscation of Plausible Deniability
• 0:26:13 When you are in a non-collaborative relationship and the invisibility shield plus learned helplessness means you feel powerless to influence THAT relationship, you then run the risk of heaviliy overburdening the relationships in your life that ARE collaborative... until they cut you off for self-preservation, because you have become non-collaborative from being underresourced
• 0:31:13 Non-collaborative relationships happen all the time, phasically and because of neurodivergence; in every demo and SEC and can be co-morbid with other conditions; and being perpetually non-collaborative creates an Umbra where the people Under the Umbra feel the effects I've described in these episodes
• 0:32:32 First step: look in your metaphorical rear view mirror and blind spots, or open the closet door to peer at the jumbled storage, to see where you are in relationship with a non-collaborative person, to pierce the invisibility shield and start to make plans about how to change that relationship, cultivate self-compassion and self-forgiveness and relationship repair, and find resources
• 0:33:43 When you pull down the invisibility shield, suddenly a person who appeared normal before suddenly appears to be an Alien or a Monster... but hopefullly this is a phase in your repair, not the final form; Stopping with that as the Final Form = Cut Out Toxic People culture
• 0:37:04 Outro, Credits, and Disclaimer

The Co-Host is Kiki and you can find her work here: Instagram: @heretic.homestead TikTok @heretichomestead and now YouTube @heretichomestead9896

References mentioned in the show can be found in the show notes!

This is Under the Umbra: Using Empathy and Collaboration to Navigate a World of Shadows. In each episode, Electra and the co-hosts explore ways to think about and plan for difficult relationships with people and systems in a way that stays grounded in values and centers community. I invite you to try out focusing on Empathy and Collaboration as a realistic and compassionate model for interpersonal interactions. If you find yourself Under the Umbra, let's find our way back to the light.

Find the show's home at Under The Umbra . Info

Support the show at Patreon.com/UnderTheUmbraPodcast

This podcast was created, recorded, edited and produced by me, Electra, and brought to you by Bridge to Becoming LLC. Music is by SoulProdMusic on Pixabay and used with permission. Show art is by Lo Carter, 2023. Subtitle crafted by Vera!