Healing America's Narratives
Reggie Marra, MA, PCC
Alleviating unnecessary suffering for the willing: Cofounder, ParadoxEdge/Fully Human, Professional Certified Coach, & author of "Healing America's Narratives"
Part 1 - Gender, Race, Money, Trauma, & Shadow in the U.S.A.
Yeah, I know the subtitle may not be enticing for some folks.
This is Part 1 of 2 articles that expand on and apply the themes developed in Healing America's Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Part 1 lays out some problems and connects some dots and Part 2 will point to some directions that address these problems in various ways.
I am blessed that I get to work with some very talented, successful folks in diverse industries who are open to seeking and taking new, broader, and deeper perspectives and engaging in intentional practice. At the same time I get to write and teach an ongoing, expansive, multidisciplinary application of Healing America's Narratives and, along with Kent Frazier , teach and coach through our Fully Human curriculum.
Stated in an oversimplified but still accurate way, I get to do work that invites and facilitates willing individuals (including myself) and groups to move toward more inclusive, comprehensive, balanced, and complex ways of being in the world. Such movement, when authentic and embodied, usually leads to increased empathy and kindness as well.
As this new year unfolds, the country into which I was born as a 2nd-generation New York Italian-American Catholic in 1954 (see "cultural givens" below) faces a cascading series of crises, many of which are shared by everyone on the planet, and about which we'll say more below.
In the United States, we face a paradox in which our separate fights and occasional wins and defeats make and keep us small, as Rilke warned in "The Man Watching" (Bly translation), and most of these fights, wins, and losses concern things that matter deeply to the various "usses" within the larger, mostly invisible, integrated us. Both are true: the separate smallness and the deep mattering. Holding paradox is an essential tool in the 21st century.
The remainder of this article will focus on the United States, its history, and its current struggles. It provides brief overviews of selected interrelated events, disciplines, and entities — from the marketplace to mental health, from war to religion, from the planet to the smart phone, and more. Necessarily then, what follows presents some ice shavings from the tips of very large (and increasingly rare) icebergs. Through links and notes I've cited numerous ways for you to find out more. The first few sections lay a foundation and clarify some terms.
Cultural Givens
Every person born anywhere and at any time since humans first appeared has his, her, or their own set of givens — in every location on the planet, with or without religion, and in poverty and wealth. Makes sense, yes? Each of us has a given story — an initial set of beliefs — whether or not we are aware of it. Some of it is given in order to simplify a complex world for young children; some of it is given as literal truth by the adults who believe it; and each of us continues to be given more input through late childhood, adolescent, young adult, and adult experiences and observations. What we choose to accept, embrace, revise, or reject is up to us. Each of us is responsible for our choices, acceptances, embraces, revisions, and rejections. No one is exempt.
Here's what Thomas Merton had to say over fifty years ago about the influence of what we're given by culture:
"Reflect, sometimes, on the disquieting fact that most of your statements of opinions, tastes, deeds, desires, hopes and fears are statements about someone who is not really present. When you say ‘I think’ it is often not you who think, but ‘they’—it is the anonymous authority of the collectivity speaking through your mask. When you say ‘I want’, you are sometimes simply making an automatic gesture of accepting, and paying for, what has been forced upon you. That is to say, you reach out for what you have been made to want." (1)
Ken Wilber had this to say some forty years after Merton:
"You can be listening to someone coming from, say, the multiplistic level (orange altitude) and it is obvious that this person is not thinking of these ideas himself; almost everything he says is completely predictable…. He has no idea that he is the mouthpiece of this structure, a structure he doesn’t even know is there. It almost seems as if it is not he who is speaking, but the orange structure itself that is speaking through him—this vast intersubjective network is speaking through him." [bold in original] (2)
Your cultural givens, and the extent to which you've recognized, explored, accepted, revised, or rejected Merton's anonymous authority of the collectivity or Wilber's vast intersubjective network are impacting how you're responding to what you're reading right now. I firmly believe that all of us need to (continue to) explore what we were and are given (3).
"Finite and Infinite Games"
In 1986 the late James Carse published Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility. For Carse, a finite game is played with a limited number of players whose intentions are to win and bring the game to an end; an infinite game is played by an unlimited number of players whose intentions are to invite more players to play and to keep the game going. U. S. history (as with virtually all nation-state histories) has been dominated by finite games. This writing beckons us to acknowledge the limitations of our finite wins and losses, and to embrace an infinite game that allows and invites all of us to continue to play. Examples of the dangers inherent in limiting who can play are abundant in U. S. history and current events — a few of which we'll mention below.
What's Been Lacking — A Taste of Part 2
We need to understand and engage healing, which, as used here, means coming to terms with things as they are in order to move toward wholeness. Whether or not we like things as they are, and especially if we're trying to change how things are, we remain deluded if we deny what is provably true. While healing may be related to curing, and the two words are often used synonymously in medicine — which is fine — healing, as used here, is an ongoing process of acknowledging what is, whether or not what is can be cured, and again, whether or not we like it.
Healing both emerges through and encourages the emergence of love, truth, and skillful means.
As used here, love refers to at least one, and ideally all, of the following: "the joyful acceptance of belonging"; "the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth"; and "the absence of fear" (4). Said differently, love involves belonging, intention, action, and letting go.
Truth in a given moment refers to evidence-based fact, upon which reasonable, disinterested people — regardless of their cultural givens —can agree. Authentic science and journalism, among other disciplines, are based in truth. When considered over a period of time, my favorite definition of truth is Parker J. Palmer's in The Courage to Teach: "Truth is an eternal conversation about things that matter conducted with passion and discipline" (5). The conversation is eternal because new evidence and knowledge emerges. It was once "true" that the earth was flat and that the sun revolved around it.
Skillful means refers to the quality that allows the surgeon to make the incision the right depth and length, at the precise location it needs to be made, and on the correct patient. It enables the mechanic to tighten the screw, bolt, or nut without stripping the threads, and allows anyone to deliver bad or sad news with both honesty and kindness. Skillful means requires parents, educators, and all of us to engage with children in chronologically and developmentally appropriate ways.
Truth, love, and skillful means, among other things too numerous to mention but still important, are essential for human beings.
Development
Development refers to our capacity for perspective taking. Said differently, our developmental worldview determines what we're aware of — how many perspectives we can take, and our inclination to actively seek new perspectives. In this article, we'll use a four-level developmental shorthand that is grounded in fifty-plus years of longitudinal research. From earlier to later development, each of these can manifest in healthy or unhealthy ways:
Unhealthy us- or group-centrism (us vs. them) is at the core of contemporary and historical atrocities at scale. Us and them or us with them carries a very different energy. Occasionally a me-centric individual incites harm, but it takes group-centrism to carry it out.
Woman, Man, Feminine, Masculine, Human (Pick One?)
Becoming more fully human includes the ongoing healthy integration of what have been culturally stereotyped as feminine or masculine traits or spirit. More to the point, concern with caring, relationship, embrace, community, compassion, mercy, and emotion has been characterized as feminine, and focus on rights, individualism, agency, wisdom, justice, and reason has been characterized as masculine. All of these can manifest in healthy and unhealthy ways (e.g. unhealthy concern with relationship can lead to codependence; unhealthy focus on reason can stifle emotional health).
The culture that so divides and stereotypes the feminine and the masculine is, as Carol Gilligan makes clear, patriarchy, and "patriarchy is an order of living based on a gender binary and hierarchy" (6). Gilligan cites her own research to point out that this patriarchy conditions girls to lose their authentic voices, leading to a sense of "I don't know," and Niobe Way's research with boys, which surfaced a parallel culturally conditioned loss of authentic voice articulated through a sense of "I don't care" (7). A culture that conditions its girls not to know and its boys not to care might not produce particularly healthy women and men.
Shadow
Shadow, in the Jungian sense, refers to that which remains in the unconscious; what an individual, an organization, or a nation denies about itself and often projects onto others (8). We're not violent; they are. I'm not angry; you are. We can also deny positive aspects of ourselves: I'm not worthy (talented, successful...); they are. "Shadow" is often used to refer to the dark, undesirable aspects of ourselves that we know of and don't like. That's fine, and it's not how the word is used in this article.
The collective national Shadow of the United States is characterized by at least these nine traits: ignorance, arrogance, fear, bigotry, violence, greed, excess, bullying and untrustworthiness. This is not a claim that the United States, all of its history, and all of its citizens are ignorant, arrogant, fearful, bigoted, violent, greedy, excessive, untrustworthy bullies (although some of us are). The U.S. has done much good. It has yet to live up to its promise. The collective Shadow of the nation carries these characteristics, and the collective Shadow of the United States has been and is dominated by an unhealthy, group-centric, masculine energy in a virtual absence of the healthy feminine. Don't take my word for it.
For Christ's Sake
Tens of millions of U.S. citizens believe that their country has been, is, or should be, a Christian nation. Many of those who so believe also imply the word "white" before "Christian." For Christ's sake, then, the United States of America began with three foundational subjugations — of Women, Indigenous Peoples, and Africans/African-Americans — none of whom were originally included in the language of those who were "created equal." For brief histories of these three subjugations in the context of healing, collective national Shadow, and development, see chapters 3-5 in Healing America's Narratives, pp. 35-144.
Notice that these three foundational subjugations manifested through the cultural givens of the subjugators, who practiced an unhealthy, us vs. them, group-centrism, demonstrated a lack of love toward those who were not in their in-group, and seemed oblivious to healing.
How would the Jesus who allegedly told us to love our neighbors and our enemies feel about the behaviors of and the subjugations manifested by his self-proclaimed followers from the fifteenth century forward, and about those who currently claim that their worldview is "the Bible" as they attempt to limit access to the ballot, cherry-pick applications of the Bill of Rights, and "make America great again"? (9).
Mike Johnson, his congressional loyalists and the at-large folks whose candidate lost the 2020 presidential election by more than seven million votes are not an aberration, and while diverse motivations influence their current ranks, they share some historical roots . At a rally of more than fifteen thousand conservative pastors, leaders, and supporters in Dallas, Texas on August 21, 1980, Paul Weyrich, a cofounder of the Heritage Foundation, the Republican Study Committee (RSC), the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and the Council for National Policy (CNP), and who coined the moniker, “The Moral Majority,” said the following:
“I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down.” (10)
Among those present were Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye, Mike Huckabee, and Republican presidential candidate and eventual president, Ronald Reagan. If any of them opposed Weyrich’s preference for limiting which citizens of the United States could vote in order to effect their desired election outcome, they kept their opposition to themselves.
Which of the Shadow traits was behind this desire to limit voters? Ignorance, arrogance, fear, bigotry, greed? Some combination? Which are still at work today?
Dominoes, Democracy, & Lessons Not Learned
The three foundational subjugations have undergone varied levels of diminishment and disguise since the nation's conception, but their foundation continues. In April 1953, President Eisenhower delivered his “The Chance for Peace” speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Widely known as the “Cross of Iron” speech, it celebrates the end of World War II, warns of the Soviet Union’s post-war/Cold War behaviors, and argues both against the costs of war and for hope, freedom, and democracy. Far less frequently quoted than the famous "Every gun that is made....humanity hanging from a cross of iron" excerpt is his statement that "the [post-World War II] way chosen by the United States was plainly marked by a few clear precepts, which govern its conduct in world affairs." Here are those precepts:
"First: No people on earth can be held, as a people, to be enemy, for all humanity shares the common hunger for peace and fellowship and justice.??? Second: No nation’s security and well-being can be lastingly achieved in isolation but only in effective cooperation with fellow-nations. Third: Any nation’s right to form of government and an economic system of its own choosing is inalienable. Fourth: Any nation’s attempt to dictate to other nations their form of government is indefensible. And fifth: A nation’s hope of lasting peace cannot be firmly based upon any race in armaments but rather upon just relations and honest understanding with all other nations." (11)
Beginning almost immediately, and continuing for the next twenty-plus years in Vietnam and in various places around the globe to the present day, the United States would violate Eisenhower’s first, third, fourth, and fifth precepts, and engage an ongoing national debate about the second. The Soviets and Chinese would behave similarly, but they didn’t claim to adhere to these same precepts, equal rights, or democracy.
Beginning with the Truman administration's and/or the CIA's choosing to ignore Ho Chi Minh's post-World War II plea for help, which the U.S.S.R., China, and the United Nations also initially ignored (some two million Vietnamese had died of starvation under Japanese wartime occupation); continuing through the Truman and Eisenhower administrations' funding France's attempt to recolonize Vietnam after Japan's surrender; and through Kennedy's military advisors, Johnson's committing to combat, and Nixon's extending bombings into Cambodia, Republican and Democrat administrations and Congresses together sacrificed 58,000-plus U.S. soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen while some three-million-plus Vietnamese civilians and combatants on both sides died.
In 1995 former secretary of defense Robert McNamara, who had served under both Kennedy and, for a time, Johnson, published In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, in which he explored eleven lessons learned — lessons that specifically addressed the mistakes of Vietnam. Here's an excerpt from # 4: "Our misjudgments of friend and foe alike reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities of their leaders…." He would later elucidate another set of lessons in his conversations with director Errol Morris in the 2003 film, The Fog of War — lessons of a more general nature. Here's #1: "Empathize with your enemy." (12)
The architects of America’s domino-theory-based policies and war in Vietnam ignored Eisenhower’s precepts. Only one of them, McNamara, acknowledged their mistakes. Not to be outdone, the post-9/11 architects of America’s policies and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would go on to ignore Eisenhower’s precepts and both sets of McNamara’s lessons learned. The office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) would eventually publish What We Need to Learn: Lessons from Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction in August 2021. Lesson # 6 begins with these words: "The U.S. government did not understand the Afghan context and therefore failed to tailor its efforts accordingly" (13). Compare that with the two lessons learned from McNamara noted above. Appendix I in Healing America's Narratives compares these three sets of precepts and lessons not learned.
The Sound of Money Sliding Down the Chute
From Doug Anderson 's poem, "Same Old":
".... Always a war somewhere and underneath / the crack of rifles, the sound of money / sliding down the chute, and a / whimpering of mothers, over here, over there." (14)
War is good for the economy, as is violence in general, especially in a for-profit insurance-pharmaceutical-medical-government-finance-lobbying industry, which we call heath care in the U.S. (more about this later). Methods of calculation, and therefore, opinions on how much taxpayer money was spent on the Vietnam War, cover a range of about 120 to 200 billion dollars. When adjusted to 2024 dollars, that's over one trillion.
As of February 2020, according to the Military Times, the war in Iraq had cost U. S. taxpayers some one trillion, nine hundred and twenty-two billion dollars, a number that looks like this: $1,922,000,000,000.00. That amount does not include costs for the war in Afghanistan or other shorter-term post-9/11 antiterrorist actions. It does include the costs of combat, private contractors, promoting democracy, reconstruction, veterans’ care, and interest on the debt incurred to fund the war. (15). For some perspective on what a trillion means, consider that one million seconds account for 11.6 days; one billion seconds account for 31.7 years; one trillion seconds account for 31,710 years.
According to the Center for International Policy & Watson Institute, International & Public Affairs at Brown University, from October 2001 through August 2021, the U. S. Department of Defense spent more than $14 trillion (measured in 2021 dollars) for all purposes, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. More than a third of this went to private contractors, and of that, more than a quarter went to just five companies— Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon and Northrup Grumman, which, together contracted for $286 billion in 2019 and 2020 alone.
In October 2001, Boeing vice president Harry Stonecipher announced that “the purse is now open . . . any member of Congress who doesn’t vote for the funds we need to defend this country will be looking for a new job after next November.” Lockheed Martin’s 2020 Pentagon contracts totaled $75 billion; the U. S. State Department’s budget that year was $44 billion. “In addition, weapons makers have spent $2.5 billion on lobbying over the past two decades, employing, on average, over 700 lobbyists per year over the past five years, more than one for every member of Congress” (16).
In October 2011, the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan “concluded that between $31 billion and $60 billion of taxpayers’ funds have been lost to contract waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan" (17).
领英推荐
In 2021 the entry level (E-1) gross salary for a service member with at least 4 months of service was $1,750 per month, $21,000 annually. War is lucrative for defense contractor executives, their lobbyists, and those who accept their money, but not for the people who put their lives on the line.
Anxious, Depressed, Suicidal, Violent, & Civilized
It is no longer possible, at least for me, to recall all the locations in which a mass shooting has occurred in the United States. While very few of the 100+ daily deaths by firearm occur in mass shootings, tens of thousands of U.S. citizens die each year from gunshot wounds — that's our normal . Tens of thousands more are shot, wounded, and survive. These gun deaths and woundings arise from violent crime, suicide attempts, police activity, and accidents. Firearms account for the vast majority of murders in the U.S. In 2022 14,789 of 17,830 U.S, murders (83%) were committed using firearms.
Violence is at once a foundational element of our national Shadow and a primary manifestation of it. We are immersed in it. It is and has been our status quo. As a nation, the United States of America remains an experiment. We were conceived through the fertilization of ideas that gave voice to some and subjugated others. We were born through a bloodbath that pitted Brit against Brit (and some others) on land stolen from Indigenous Peoples and developed by kidnapped Africans. We were raised on enslavement, land and property theft, massacre, betrayal, and peasant and indentured labor. We were reborn in an attempt to maintain the experiment through an anything-but-civil bloodbath with ourselves, from which we have yet to fully recover. And we were reborn yet again as a financial and military superpower as the result of a global bloodbath.
We regularly perpetrate and perpetuate violence against others while refusing to acknowledge and address in any effective way the everyday violence we commit against ourselves. Not yet 250 years old, we’re lost in a national adolescence, thinking we’re invincible and immortal — despite clear evidence that we are neither. Not only have we not recovered from our bloodbaths of birth and rebirth in any whole, integrated sense, we continue to choose to bathe ourselves and others in blood, literally and metaphorically, because, again, that is the normal we know.
Consider what kind of society needs the following organizations (the list is not exhaustive): https://www.sandyhookpromise.org/, https://www.everytown.org/, https://momsdemandaction.org/, https://www.bradyunited.org/, https://giffords.org/, https://marchforourlives.com/, https://gunresponsibility.org/, https://vpc.org/, https://actionnetwork.org/groups/csgv, https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/.
Here's an example of our making believe, denying, and projecting from the U.S. Congress on September 14, 2001:
"I rise today in support of this resolution [to authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States]. Civilized society has long sought to end the use of violence, but the perpetrators of terrorism and states that harbor them are the enemies of civilized society. They only understand the use of force, and the time has come to speak to them on their terms" (18)
The United States is civilized, and the problem is out there somewhere. In those other people. Or, if we stay within our borders, in that other party. Or that other sexual orientation or identity. Or that other religion or lack thereof. Or that darker skin pigmentation. Or that desire for equal rights, access and protection of the laws (which is socialism!...see below). Or that other gender. Unhealthy. Group-centric. Us vs. them. Pick one or more reasons: ignorance, arrogance, fear, bigotry, violence, greed, excess, bullying, untrustworthiness.
When I was a kid, we did duck-and-cover drills in school: we practiced sitting in a certain way, sometimes under our desks and sometimes in the corridor against a cinderblock wall so we'd have a better chance of surviving a nuclear attack. Every Saturday, local air raid sirens would be tested, wailing away for a few minutes. Once we were old or curious enough to view footage of the explosions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki and photos of the devastation, and to read John Hersey's Hiroshima, we realized how ridiculous the drills were (19).
Today our children practice active-shooter drills. They are taught to run, hide, fight. They learn that people get shot in schools, at the movies, in stores, at places of worship, at clubs and at concerts. The odds that they will actually have to run, hide, fight are low; more shootings will occur; it could happen to them. All three are true. This alone is enough to explain increasing levels of anxiety, depression, and suicide among our children and adolescents.
Add to it species extinction, planetary warming, catastrophic "weather events," and a general historical ambivalence about the planet — especially by those who have made, continue to make, and want to make internal profits by extracting resources from the planet faster than they can be replenished, and depositing waste from their profit-making externally on the planet, polluting, killing off species, and causing human sickness. And add to that many adults in power who deny that any of the above is true. What's a civilized society to do?
Much is being written and spoken about the mental health of our children nowadays (actually for some decades) — especially our daughters — and the conversations usually include the impacts of social media and the Covid pandemic, among other factors. In a March 21, 2023 broadcast, WBUR's (NPR) On Point host, Meghna Chakrabarti (in my experience one of the best listeners and interviewers in the media), explored with her guests "Why mental health is declining for teenage girls in the U.S." I recommend listening in or reading the transcript.
Mental health is declining for teenage girls (and boys, albeit at a slower rate) at the intersection of multiple factors. Covid and social media/smart phones are part of, but not the whole, story. Interviews like On Point, social psychologist Jean Twenge's generational research, Greg Lukianoff's & Jonathan Haidt's collaboration, The Coddling of the American Mind, and their respective individual work, along with many other researchers, provide some powerful insights into why our children suffer as they do, especially amid the speed, technology, and parental stressors, inevitably passed on to our children, in the 21st century.
Carol Gilligan points to something older, larger, and more foundational that is also at play — the resistance that both young boys and adolescent girls display as they are initiated into their respective I don't care and I don't know roles in our patriarchy. Gilligan's exploration and elucidation of the timing of the struggles (boys typically around ages 4-7 and girls as they move into adolescence) are beyond the scope of this article. We'll say "simply" that when we ask boys and girls to leave parts of themselves behind in order to fit into the anonymous authority of the collectivity, they resist being so split. As they should. (20).
We're not going into any detail concerning "more conventional" illnesses and sources of suffering like cancer, cardiovascular disease, obesity, kidney disease, multiple sclerosis, arthritis, HIV-AIDS and other autoimmune diseases, and many others. Their brief mention here turns our attention to the for-profit insurance-pharmaceutical-medical-government-finance-lobbying industry (IPMGFL), pseudonymized as health care in the United States. While we're not quite done with our Anxious, Depressed, Suicidal, Violent, & Civilized subtitle, a new one will clarify this next piece.
Fear of Words
One effective historical and current strategy employed by folks who work to promote only finite games that limit the players to people like them (see just about every example provided above, but especially the For Christ's Sake section), is that they label more inclusive policy that would serve more U.S. citizens well as socialist or socialism — two words that frighten them. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s was demonized as socialist or even communist. Any attempt to provide affordable health care to all U.S. citizens is also so demonized. Yet, the U.S. military is socialized; public education is socialized locally; local fire departments and law enforcement are socialized; Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are all socialized programs. We drive on socialized roads. I have yet to find anyone who refuses to utilize and appreciate these services. Nah, I have a couple of buckets. Why bother the fire department? Yet, the "s words" are un-American, anti-capitalist, and just, well, inherently BAD.
Unless, of course, the social programs benefit and support specific, important people and groups. Critics seem less vocal when the government provides trillions to the already wealthy and fortunate in moments of difficulty. Here are a few recipients of government handouts and bailouts (our taxpayer dollars at play): General Motors, Chrysler, Ford, Harley Davidson, Apple, Goldman Sachs, the entire airline industry, Citigroup, Bank of America, Bear Stearns, Lockheed, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, PNC, American Express, Capital One, and many, many more needy corporations who could not make it without taxpayer assistance (21). The argument is that some of these companies and industries are too big to fail—helping them helps the people who work for them and the national economy. That may be true(ish) and it’s partial. The other side of that argument seems to be that some people are too small to help. The unhealthy masculine, group-centric manifestations of excess and greed trump the healthy feminine traits of compassion and care.?
Let's connect some dots here. War is good for the economy, and in the absence of war, funding and having the latest weapons of all kinds of destruction in order to prevent war is good for the economy. Mental and physical illnesses are good for the economy in the for-profit IPMGFL we call health care, but at the same time bad for the economy because of their impacts on workers and their families. This dot connection is more complex than we have space for here, but the selective fear of the s-words impacts U.S. citizens who go to work and do their best to love their kids. Yes, those same kids who are increasingly anxious and depressed.
Which leads us to this ubiquitous quote, attributed to Jiddu Krishnamurti:
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
We can argue semantics all we want, but in the context of its conception, its birth, its several rebirths, and its current state of affairs — politically, culturally, financially, spiritually, and any other "ally" you want — using any or all of what's written in this article, which just scratches the surface, the United States of America is not well. Sure some folks are doing all right but many are not (and they tend to get less air and print time). Anxiety, sadness, anger, and situational depression are valid responses to the state of the union. And the state of the union can only be understood at the intersections of history, psychology, politics, economics, environment, culture, spirituality, and everything I've left out.
The ignorance, arrogance, fear, bigotry, violence, greed, excess, bullying, and untrustworthiness that inform the collective national Shadow of the United States of America manifest an overarching theme that values the few over the many; money, things, and beliefs over people and other beings; and violence as a way to make a point and get things done.
Canceled and Woke, Anyone?
Historically, and in its healthy manifestation nowadays, being and/or staying ‘woke’ refers to becoming aware of social justice (or any) issues that need to be addressed, and ideally, taking action that addresses them. More generally, being woke involves being increasingly able to see ‘what is’ beyond the limitations of one’s personal, familial, and cultural biases. No one that I’ve met, read, listened to, heard of, or been does this 100% successfully. In its unhealthy manifestation, being woke refers to an attitude of superiority — being more woke, seeing more than some other individual or group: I’m (or we’re) better than you are. So there.
A casual review of history demonstrates 1) that the general concept of being or staying woke has been around since at least the mid-1800s in the United States — as in the “Wide Awakes” abolitionist supporters of Abraham Lincoln; 2) the specific use of the word woke (as opposed to “awake”) has been around since at least the 1930s — as in Lead Belly’s commentary at the end of his song, “Scottsboro Boys”; (and elsewhere at least since Siddhartha Gautama famously woke c. 500 BCE); 3) many folks whose behavior embodies healthy wokeness don’t talk about it or posture as being superior; they simply live as exemplars for the rest of us — the late Congressman John Lewis and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg come to mind, among others; and 4) as above, some folks who talk about their alleged wokeness wield it as a weapon to point to the shortcomings of others. They (we) can be found everywhere — in media, government, and in our neighborhoods; at our kitchen tables and even peering back from our bathroom mirrors.
The allegedly woke folks (not the embodied woke folks) who wield their wokeness as a weapon of superiority, whom we’ll call unskillful, publicly judge and attempt to ostracize or ‘cancel’ the allegedly inferior sleepyheads — pointing out their inferiority, silencing them, and symbolically or literally canceling their membership in whatever they had previously belonged to. Critics of the woke cancelers work at canceling them, essentially practicing what they’re supposedly opposed to. If a government agent or agency does this, it’s a First Amendment issue; if anyone else does it, it’s inherently contradictory: if I’m truly woke in a healthy way, I don’t need to judge, shame, silence or cancel you. In fact, I’ll probably model my wokeness by engaging you in a conversation that does more good than harm, beyond the talking points, so we can both be woke. The aforementioned Buddha and John Lewis, among others, engaged in such modeling and conversation. The late Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Antonin Scalia regularly engaged each other in this way — amid their significantly different Constitutional perspectives.
For a deeper (than you might want to go) dive into how canceling and wokeness have been conflated with Critical Race Theory (CRT) — which virtually no Americans had even heard of prior to mid-2020 — and (of course) weaponized, see Healing America's Narratives, 133-44 and 243-60.
Canceling others and wielding wokeness as a weapon are poster children for the ignorance, arrogance, fear, and bigotry that nurture an unhealthy, group-centric, us vs. them worldview, which can be and have been dressed up in the costumes of both the political right and the political left — historically and currently.
A Gift and a Threat
On September 14, 2016 I wrote a blog post entitled "Donald Trump, Collective American Shadow and “The Better Angels of Our?Nature”; I revisited that writing on October 28, 2018. Updated versions of these posts are available in an October 10, 2022 article and in Chapter 10 of Healing America's Narratives (261-90). Each of the above makes the argument that Donald Trump embodies all nine traits of the collective national Shadow of the United States: ignorance, arrogance, fear, bigotry, violence, greed, excess, bullying, and untrustworthiness. His public persona throughout his life (not just since 2015) is a gift that allows U.S. citizens to see the worst of ourselves in one person. It is a threat as well, since tens of millions of Americans seem to embrace that persona — for diverse reasons beyond the scope of this article.
Donald Trump didn't create the collective Shadow of the U.S. He inadvertently helped expose it. He is a symptom and a product, not the cause, of a society that created him. Traumatized as a child, not getting the help he needed, he now traumatizes others.
Can You Spell T-r-a-u-m-a, Girls and Boys?
From Dr. Bessel van der Kolk:
"trauma is actually NOT the story of what happened a long time ago; trauma is residue that’s living inside of you now… in horrible sensations, panic reactions, uptightness, explosions, and impulses." (22)
From Dr. Gabor Maté:
"'trauma' is an inner injury....primarily what happens within someone as a result of the difficult or hurtful events that befall them; it is not the events themselves." (23)
From Dr. Judith Herman:
"The psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people simultaneously call attention to the existence of a an unspeakable secret and deflect attention from it." (24)
From Dr. Peter Levine:
"Trauma is a fact of life. It does not, however, have to be a life sentence." (25)
From Thomas Hübl:
“Trauma breaks relation. Within a person, trauma fractures relation to the self and sabotages connection to the other. At the scale of the collective, traumatic disrelation is cultural and generational; it is a feedback loop.” (26)
Trauma informs our national Shadow and our national Shadow keeps us from wholeness. Without honest recognition of and intentional steps toward healing the individual, collective, and intergenerational traumas of America’s conception, birth, and rebirths, our efforts to "re-vision" our narratives and integrate our Shadow will be partial at best, and completely ineffective at worst.
And One More Thing — A Larger Context
Stepping beyond this U.S.-centric piece of writing for a moment, it's essential to recognize those cascading crises within which our uniquely "American" historical and current crises emerge. Daniel Schmachtenberger (27) refers to them collectively as the metacrisis, which few leaders recognize and no one knows how to resolve. That's not hyperbole. The details are both relevant to and beyond the scope of this article (I know, I've written that frequently). Here's an incomplete sampling of metacrisis headlines. These are my renderings of an early understanding of Daniel's work. While bulleted, they are interrelated:
In Part 2, we'll consider some ways forward, which, while they won't resolve the metacrisis, will provide some individual and collective moves we can make toward healing our narratives and owning and integrating our Shadow.
Thank You
Just in case anyone actually reads this far, thanks — especially if you've read the whole piece.
Please share if you're so inclined, and I'd love to hear what you think, so comment away.
Finally, and more specifically, I'd like to acknowledge some folks I'm blessed to know and/or work with, or be related to. My intention had been to say a bit about each of them, but I want to complete this before 2025, so I'll name names from across a wide array of life and work, including coaches, educators, writers, military officers (retired), corporate directors, engineers, attorneys, exactly one bomb tech, artists, Buddhist priests, entrepreneurs, psychologists, combat veterans, arts administrators, massage therapists, accountants, bookstore owners, poets, a mayor, nurses, conflict transformers, a chef, martial artists, tech wizards, :
Kent Frazier , Brandon Peele , Trebbe Johnson , Christopher King , Frank de Falco , Adrienne Stumpf , Tracy Burke , Michael Sallustio , John C. , John Verin , Lois MacNaughton , Jim MacNaughton , Tom Rubens , Jim Young , Shari Specland , Maureen Walker, PhD , Sean Harvey, MSOD, MSEd , David Green , Joel Kreisberg, DC , Kevin Snorf , Kevin Houston , Jane Baniewicz , Abigail Boudreaux Coaching , Nuno Matos, PhD, Mental Performance Coach , Morley Wilkinson , Robert Gambardella, CPA , Joan Hurley , Andy Cahill , Olga Ozerna , Ray DiCapua , Leslie Williams, Integral Master Coach , Kenny Sajous-Georges , Tyler Tanaka , Amy Hall , Paul Thallner , Rajneesh S. , Jennifer Smith , Christopher Luna , Beth Easton, MA, ACC, Leadership Coach , Barbara Bethea , Mar Walker , Lynnea Brinkerhoff, MSOD, PCC , Jeff Maimon , Paul Luna , Anthony Miserandino , Ed Frauenheim , Dr. Carly Hudson, D.C. , Vince Tango, Ed.D. , Steve Ostiguy , Ruth Marlin MD , Dina Saalisi , Andrew Leonard , Jess Chan , Debra J. McGinley , Eshan Govil , Damian Fearns , Keijo Halinen , David Zeitler , Philip End , Victor R. Guzman, ESQ , Lisa Worth Huber, Ph.D. , Robert W Francess , Gary Huffaker , Rudy Garcia , michael delotto , Brian Stack , Christel Autuori , Alex Douds , Sarah Bracey White , John Stoddart , Marie Pace , Lisa Frost , Bridgit Dengel Gaspard, LCSW , Dr Deb Thompson , Yasminka Kresic , Christopher Rogers , Kirsty Spence, Ph.D., P.C.C. , Joanna Burgess , Ross Stocks, PE, LEED AP BDC , Bob Killackey , Bob Devlin , Cindy Wigglesworth , Lauren Chambliss , Jamie Reaser , Margot Andresen , Bruce Tepikian , Brett Thomas , Paul Tepikian , Sam Roberts , Anne Wright , Patti Rieser , Lisa Diane McCall, M.H.S, C.L.C. , Rose Drew , Claire Molinard , MJ Malleck /Writer , Kathleen Noone Deignan, CND , Victoria Christgau , Karen Kawaguchi , Janet Luongo , Annecy Baez, PhD , Henry J. Humphreys , Faith E. Vicinanza , Diane Musho Hamilton , Paul LaMantia , Christopher Eaves , Pete Holliday , Michael Brant DeMaria , Marilana R. , Fred Krawchuk
Good work, Reggie!
Systems Advisor | Organizational Attributes, Design, Purpose, and Performance
1 年Can't think of anything more important than Healing America's Narratives. It's time to embody more conscious ways of being. Thanks, Reggie, for your thoughtful work!
Dina Saalisi Healing Arts
1 年Thanks for all of your well-supported wisdom Reggie!
Executive Coaching | Integral Coaching? | Leadership Development | Leading With Grit & Grace
1 年A tour de force!!!