Here is a query:
Are you a corrective experience or are you secondary trauma?
There is a meme that has gone around more than once since I’ve been on Facebook. I’d seen it before, and I always thought it was a good touchstone for how I wanted to walk in the world. It’s this:
“Be the person you needed when you were a child.”
I absolutely love this.
There’s an acknowledgement there that none of us, not one, got everything that we needed as we were coming up, coupled with an even deeper acknowledgement that some of us got very little of what we needed, and because of that, we all too often act out of our deficits.
A person who has not begun the process of examination and excavation of their interior life often becomes a reservoir of pain, both for themselves and for others.
Let’s talk about the bucket illustration, where we talked about the buckets of pain and maladaptation that we each do have, and that weighs us down, and can cause danger and damage to others.
This bucket is full of accumulated pain and wounds from the past that become activated, and rather than being examined and carefully held for minimum slosh, is handled recklessly with the residue spilling over unto others in the form of defenses like displacement, like projection, like denial, like minimization.
It’s that messy bucket that gives us permission to act with unbridled self-expression with no regard as to the consequences for others, it’s what allows us to shut down and/or run because we haven’t developed the tools to stay and appropriately engage.
It’s the weight of the bucket that encourages us to insist that others hold our bucket for us. In short, it’s that bucket that keeps us from fully growing up, and from fully leaning in.
Owning and managing our buckets is our life’s work.
Owning and managing our bucket is going to mean finding the places of pain in ourselves and doing the deep work required to learn how to hold on to our own buckets, so that we not only refrain from sloshing our residue, but also to actively committing to becoming a person who can model holding the hard things with Grace.
The saying helps us with part 1 of this task.
Becoming the person you needed will stabilize that bucket. It will also help some of the weight of the bucket to dissipate so that you can hold it more lightly, so that the bucket does not drive your perceptions and your actions and behaviors, so that you can learn how to discern when your bucket feels unstable and/or volatile, so you can minimize the slosh.
This is part of growing up. Particularly for our purposes here, it is a part of growing up into racial justice convictions.
In Lace on Race, there was a conversation that talked about this very thing, and there was some confusion about responsibility and accountability.
I want to be very clear about the distinction.
The things that happened to us as children that have filled our buckets as adults were not our faults. What we do with them, whether or not we unpack, interrogate, and confront them–it is there that our responsibility lies.
Whether the traumas were large, or seemingly small, they have cumulatively filled our buckets, and we are not to beat up on either ourselves or others for the contents of each other’s childhood buckets.
The residue from childhood has been poured into our adult buckets, but added on to by the residue created by our often ineffective ways of dealing with our childhood residue, and it informs our present; how we walk in the world, how we speak to ourselves in our thought lives, and how we do or do not effectively relate to others.
I hold that it’s that volatile childhood residue that makes our adult buckets so unstable, so hard to hold, so quick to slosh.
The tools we have been slowly introduced to and are slowly learning have been meant as tools to stabilize and to minimize and mitigate the contents of our collective buckets.
We’ve slowly been learning emotional regulation: how to hold on to ourselves, how to deal with activations and triggers (what we here call the ‘woosh’), how to differentiate between discomfort and harm, how to stay in the car.
All these skills and more have been part of a collective reparenting process of sorts, where we learn to acquire the skills we either incompletely learned as children, or never learned it all– or only learned to apply selectively, intermittently, and unreliably.
I want to be sure, at this point, to say something very plainly. I have great compassion for each of our buckets. Every person’s bucket is entirely too large, and is too filled to the brim with residue.
I even have compassion for the adult errors, some unforced, but also often unconscious and unrealized, that we have sometimes brought to bear in our own buckets that have made carrying them harder than it has to be.
I have found that rarely is there mostly malevolence in these buckets, but rather deep deep pain and trauma that has acted out loudly rather than have been dealt with. I have faith that we can learn to confront our buckets individually and collectively, and our individual and collective work will be the better for it.
Terry Real and his work and theories deal with dyadic relationship, usually between intimate partners. We adopt and adapt his work for our purposes here at Lace on Race.
We are going to examine his 5 losing strategies that cause so much harm and are detriments and barriers to full communion with our ourselves and with others, and then we will pivot to the five winning strategies that will help us, that will shore up our muscles, that will give us stamina and endurance for the work ahead of us.
Going back to the phrase above, it is indeed important that we learn to be the people that we needed 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago. It’s important to learn to self-soothe in appropriate ways, to practice authentic self care, to learn to walk with all deliberate speed as we carry our individual buckets well.
But that’s only level 1.
Level 2 is when we learn not only to be the people that we ourselves needed, but then to gain the capacity, volition, and agency to pivot and look outward and become the people that the person in front of us, that the communities that we choose to walk with and serve, need for us to be.
That’s level-up work.
To be able to hold on to ourselves and to be able to use our fictive imagination and curiosity to be able to be of true service and in true alignment with those who we walk with in this journey of racial justice, and the people we will either succor or harm– it’s work that few people even think about attempting. We are going to be realistically audacious as we do this work here in this space; this work of lessening and mitigating the harm suffered and endured by Black and brown people at the hands–and words–of white people.
Each of us has within ourselves the power and the capacity to become a corrective experience for those we encounter and with whom we engage, both on an individual, dyadic, and communal level.
Each of us has the power and the capacity to dissipate just a few molecules of another person’s bucket, to make their bucket that much less lighter to hold.
But this also comes with a real caution: We also have the capacity to be walking and talking triggers and activations and reservoirs of pain and compounded trauma for others.
Our self-soothing must never be at the expense of other people. Our self care should not be on the backs of others, ever.
As we learn to become living and breathing corrective experiences for the world , let us hold all of this in mind.
Looking forward to exploring this new path with all of you. Looking forward to growing up together so that we can grow out with the effectiveness that is required for this walk, with resilient reliability, and with deep love, faithfulness, and steadfastness at our core.
**This is a rewrite of a previous post which can be found here:
https://laceonrace.com/index.php/2019/10/02/relational-ethics-series-introduction-to-terry-real/
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