Becoming Sensitive To Insensitivities

Brenè Brown tells a story about moving to a new school and only getting invited to the black kids birthday parties. Why? Because her given name did not sound "white" enough. Weird, right? Here are ways that we struggle and cope with unfairness:

1. We develop the inability to feel compassion because we. just. can't. do. it. anymore.

2. We minimize or excuse the suffering.

3. We feel helpless and responsible and stressed out but do not DO.

4. We stay in a bad situation because we feel like we are Jesus and it is required of us and no one else should have to endure this torment.

Notice that these are not helpful and they increase our stress and the stress of others. We need to learn to DO something different. To be continued...

In the meantime, where have you been insensitive? When have others been insensitive toward you?

DO Something!

I learned helplessness with regards to gender discrimination in a big way in college. I did not deal with it. It fueled and fed my eating disorder. The worst part of the problem was that when I shared my experiences, other females who had not experienced my issue often gave me poor advice. They suggested I survived, or that it was 'boys being boys' or other nonsense, which is called gaslighting - by the way.

The truth is, we learn helplessness from actually being helpless. And there are so many opportunities to learn. Here are a few examples: when a family is devastated by a death by suicide, when someone loves a person with a substance use disorder, gender inequality, racial inequality, learning disabilities, physical disabilities, abuse, neglect, economic deprivation, and more more more.

I began to unlearn some of my helplessness when I read an article written by a woman who was a classmate at UVA with me. Her experiences mirrored my own. I had begun to believe the "others," those who did not understand this particular brand of helplessness, and had doubted my own memories. (An indicator that perhaps I have ignored other experiences that were traumatic or dehumanizing.)

The answer? DO something. Here is what I am doing. I am launching a new program that helps participants re-remember. The details are unimportant, but the DOING is the thing. I am DOING my part to help all humans find their virtue and fight for its reality. I cannot change the world. But I can get to know people and give them information that might support their own recovery. I'm pumped. And a lot happier than I was last year this time.

What do you need to DO? It can be anything that gets you moving. It is the first step to getting out of that cage you are stuck in.

UnLearn Helplessness!

I felt immediately better once I realized that, as a female pastor, the game is rigged. It just is. But this was not the first rigged game I played. My list is long and boring, I don't need to rehash it - but it is true. What I really need to focus on, and maybe you do as well, is teaching my body that the game may be rigged but I am not helpless.

How do we do this? We DO something.

Remember those animals they taught to be helpless? They untaught them. They forced them to escape by dragging them to safety. Eventually the dogs (in this experiment) eventually learned to escape without human coercion. We can learn the same!

When we feel trapped, freeing ourselves from ANYTHING can teach our body that we are not helpless.

I have a friend who is struggling with past disappointments and abandonment. These past issues are done. She feels helpless over the effects they have had on her relationship with men. What can she DO? Well, she cannot undo her childhood trauma.

But what she did do was join a gym and get fit as a fiddle. She found a therapist who gets her. She is DOING. This helps reduce the stress that helplessness causes.

Today I was feeling helpless over those dang grant applications. I cannot change the outcome. But I did phone a friend and check in with them every hour all day. I did not call them to lament my grant status. I called them to see how they were doing - friendly connection. The goal in unlearning helplessness is to stabilize ourselves.

You can DO something. What are you doing to get out of the trap you feel helpless in?

Pay Attention!

This past summer a team of hardworking folks helped write grant proposals for Northstar Community. None panned out. When I hear the word "grant proposal" I start twitching. Grant proposals are a lot of work and the more challenging the proposal, the more invested the applicant becomes in the outcome. If we as a team are not careful, we will conclude that there is nothing that we can do to create funding streams to grow a community that loves to serve those who often have no financial resources to meet their desperate need for recovery. This, in psychological terms, is called learned helplessness.

There are hundreds of studies about experiments that teach animals to be helpless, even when a way of escape is made available. Heartbreaking, right?

Here is what we all need to remember: the game is rigged. The enemy is not the conditions of the experiment, the enemy is the mad scientist who thinks up these games and studies the participants with cool detachment. Researchers say that the kinds of pervasive problems that lead rats to feel helpless create "chronic, mild stress." I can only assume that every time someone mentions the word "grant proposal," my body has a stress response. I also assume that those who did the heavy lifting with the grant proposals (not me) might actually twitch when those words are spoken in their presence.

To manage our stress, we need to recognize that we exist in an environment where there is often "chronic, low-level stress." Women understand this when they work in corporate America. People who study these things say that women are granted only 30% of the air time that men are given in meetings. Boys speak up more than eight times than girls as early as elementary school. People who do not fit the social norms of "skinny" are judged and treated with blatant disrespect. This is. IN SPITE of the fact that evidence teaches us that for the older set, people above the healthy BMI range live longer than those who are at the lower BMI range. Don't even get me started on the difference in racial equality.

What's my point? Pay attention. There is one other issue that needs acknowledgment. People who do NOT share the same experience have a very difficult time accepting that differences are real and they are stressful. This is even true for people who are experiencing the inequality. For many, acknowledging these differences is more painful than addressing them. This is a double whammy for the folks who notice.

Second point: Do NOT fall into the trap of learned helplessness. The game is rigged. Account for the stress, but unlearn the helpless myth. Tomorrow, we'll unpack that!

Reclaim Your Joy

My grandchildren saved my life; it is a lot of pressure to put on newborns, but this is the truth of what happened. Their births awakened within me a profound joy. I remembered. I remembered that life was not all work and no play. I remembered that babies grow like weeds and I would only have them for a few short years before I either descend into senility or they get a hankering for their own kind - their peers.

I realized that I was slogging through my one wild and precious life as if someone had attached heavy weights to all my positive emotions, hopes and dreams. I felt stale and stiff and used up. I looked around and recognized that some of the patterns from my childhood were being replayed in my current day reality. This was not good. I was disgusted with these patterns. I was lonely and hopeless. I was sinking fast. I dreaded trying to go to sleep and dreaded waking up to the chaos, confusion, and conflict that infused not only our world, but my community. I read somewhere that dread is anxiety on steroids. That sounds about right. But what could I do? I did not know and so I did nothing.

I believe that I am responsible for every moment of my life. There is no one to blame or pawn my work off on. My life. My work. I needed to get some help but part of being depressed is that we feel helpless. I knew I had a problem - the loss of joy. That did not turn out to be the problem but it was my starting place and although I did not know what to do next, I did know that I wanted to reclaim my joy. Or maybe find it for the first time.

As you pay attention to yourself, notice if you are receiving any clues that something needs to change in order for you to grow and thrive.