[1127] Moving Right Along

I felt myself getting a little heated in today's CASA group discussions about "trauma." For every 10 times you'll hear that word, "resilience" will come up maybe once. I think most of us are aware of how arm-chairy and buzzworthy trauma and therapy have become. It's one of the latest cultural trends that facilitate a fluidity to presumed-more-informed conversation, without the practice of developing finer lines of understanding and distinction.

On the basis of your invocation of "trauma" you can rush to provide "help" and "services" and begin blaming an incredible amount of "mental health issues" or "unresolved childhoods." It's literally the cliche of a freshman's behavior after enrolling in their first college psychology course on blast. They've already invoked unsubstantiated pseudo-science and pop-culture explicitly not psychology as tools to provide frameworks for understanding your families. When someone infers substance abuse from a story just because the accusation was levied or any kind of drug was referenced at any level, their conclusions or assumptions go unchecked. It's predictably baking a recipe for an unnecessary mess on top of whatever the family is going through.

You can feel the tension every time you speak in "checking" ways. This happens to me routinely. One of the presenters spoke to the biased and incomplete ways that foster parents or aggravated family members might speak to the nature of the case or anyone's character. I pointed out that case managers can leave out details and massage stories to fit their ends as well. That got ignored and we moved right along. It's a real concern, and you need to know how to protect your relationship with someone who might be specifically directed to undermine your effort to advocate with the evidence.

But it doesn't feel "pleasant" or "decent" when you "want to believe the best" about your colleagues. Is it less true? Absolutely not. I was literally forced into that position from predatory supervisors and watched dipshit coworkers skip along those disingenuous lines without hesitation. Anecdotes fawning over better-inclined and capable FCMs do nothing to erase that.

So I started thinking about "discomfort" broadly. Another concept that's been wholesale abused. We needed to be way too on guard for what or whether we said might be a "micro aggression" or would cause someone to feel "unsafe" or "uncomfortable." Again, our pop psychology and propensity to overstate the noisiest out-ragers, made it so critical thinking and doubt became sinful in and of themselves. Facts don't matter in that space. "Being heard" is afforded only if you're claiming victimhood, but then, only victimhood of a certain type. The own-goal that is reactionary politics when you forgo any genuine attempt at taking someone's, almost certainly mostly irrational but nonetheless real, concern seriously is the ongoing consequence we get to suffer.

I think the more you practice observing conversational patterns, word choices, and trends, you can start to see previously "abstract" things considerably more acutely. One thing I notice is a propensity for "moving right along." I don't care what the topic is, there's a "normal" pace and pater that is preferred. Violate that, and it's time to move on. Point out the failings of the people you're supposed to trust most or even ingratiate yourself to? Let's move right along into the next module, as we all know there's nothing much more to say about that.

Another pattern I notice is the "taken aback pause." It's not precisely a reaction to being "offended," but it's a stark enough detail or way of relaying information that who you're speaking with was not prepared to engage that intensely. If they're quick, it'll be a brink-of-condescending acknowledgement before moving-right-along, or if they're not quick, it'll be a placating obfuscating of what you said to "even things out."Again, these are imprecise norms of conversational behavior around the particulars of one culture at one point in time, but they're real and of consequence whether or not you can see them.

When we use the word "bias," we let ourselves off the hook on the myriad ways it manifests. We let "bias" obscure in the opposite way that we let "trauma" obscure. Trauma is abused to over-explain what should be considered a necessary series of responses or consequences. Bias is abused to overlook how deeply it colors your propensity to engage that over-explaining behavior. You are biased, first and foremost, to your subjective experience of reality. In my experience, almost no one is that clued into their own flow of experience. Even the ones that are, or are showing the most growth and evidence, struggle, and will struggle indefinitely. This includes myself.

That's the point, though. You need the struggle to keep your wits about you. You need appropriate stressors against the things that will help you grow and incorporate. By definition, norms put that insistence to the side so we can all find a baseline mutual understanding to move right along down. The more cliched you sound, if you don't have a reflex to pause and pull back, the more you're training yourself to believe and act on "just whatever it is you say." You're a circular and totalitarian monster by default.

Add to that, you may not have any real ability or willingness to recognize how many cliches you truly are under the spell of. This is what the unironic attempts around discussions of "privilege" do a generally miserable job of explaining. We all have privileges up and down hierarchies and competencies and dozens of other metrics we fluidly transition through all day. None are necessarily going to jar you awake or indicate there's anything worth examining on their own. Your cohort speaks your language. Your education taught you the "right" things. Your hobbies and interests conform to a person of your state and stature. "It's just how things are done."

This provokes people's insecurity as a standing state of a lack of readiness. When you poke people, you'll find they don't have "real" reasons for their behavior, beliefs, or words. It's all been handed to them. They're a series of unconscious forces they're more or less molding to because that's how our brains work. Your brain doesn't care what it forms a pattern around, just that it can do so. There's survival reasons for this, as well as a story of basic capacities to function regardless of the nature of the environment that's all-but certain to otherwise kill you if you can't figure it out.

I, routinely, provoke that insecurity. I've learned to show considerably less ambivalence about the person after they've been provoked, but it happens just as an ongoing and predictable course of my practice. This is my practice. I analyze. I pull back. I try to identify and speak to patterns, even if they're abstract, but certainly concrete enough for me to anticipate them and work with or around them. I know what kind of response I need built into what I can reliably anticipate is going to be yours. I know how to piss off and get ignored by "the internet," and I know how to illicit a thousand likes. What's important to me is that I'm speaking as closely to my real perspective or agenda as possible, and not being driven by an elusive brain chemical game subject to the mercy of algorithms or inarticulate desires to unhealthily fit in.

I want to fit in, but with an ever-winnowing type of person. I want to be less-wrong in the information I share, but not at the expense of someone's capacity to hear it or learn from it if I can't be bothered to temper how I say it. I want to grow in my capacity to accept people, but not at the expense of their obligation to better account for and relay their own experience. I've been told my whole life that I'm not allowed to expect the same things from other people as I might of myself. I think this is fundamentally wrong and condescending. I think I should maintain the expectation while doing everything in my power to reduce the barriers to any one person getting to whatever heights you think I've managed or been born with.

Here again, we stay lost. How do you remove barriers you can't see or might even be dispositionally against even acknowledging can exist altogether? How many "boot straps" types can even be bothered to acknowledge the impact of the villages they're living in? How many "deeply empathic" people would entertain pairing their sensibilities to the word "toxic" under any circumstance? It's pretty easy, now, for me to see when my forthright manner acts as too blunt an instrument. Can you see where your baseline disposition and sympathies cloud your judgment and capacity to act more accountably?

I feel like "accountable" itself is poorly understood. Just count! Count the disquieting contradictory thought. Count the intensity, frequency, and severity of the feelings. Count the attempts to mitigate or times you recognized forgoing to do so. Accountability doesn't mean wildly wielding an axe to bring down dramatic consequences upon everything and everyone that wasn't noticed until now. It's just asking yourself, over and over again, what can I control about this situation? What can I act on that speaks to my values and perception?

Let's take the real world example of me and Byron. I can't control his perception of what he thought he was doing in service to the kid. I can't control his awareness of any creeping mental health issues that might have arisen. I can't control whether or not he responds affirmatively to my new boundaries. I could control telling him what those boundaries were altogether, so I did. I can affirm that I'm only going to communicate along the lines that hopefully help the boundary conditions get met before I'm willing to get more colloquial or back to friendly. I can respect that he told me our friendship is "invaluable." I can't truthfully say I think we'd be using that word in a mutually understood way until I see practical, tangible effects upon my life that counteract where I feel I am as a direct result of my expression of friendship getting grossly taken advantage of.

Until then, I'll treat him like I would any client. Show me. I'll patiently-enough nod along, provide whatever perspective or reframe that I can, and remain open to demonstrated behavior changes. I don't have to throw myself back into his fire. If I'm going to claim a desire to protect and maintain genuine friendships or care for those in my life, I'm not going to treat myself with the ambivalence I see others suffer from themselves every day.

I choose that level of discomfort. I only mildly complain today, as it's gotten dramatically better, about doing things alone and never having anyone to hang out with. Byron was my go-to spot for killing time or hanging out. Not once in my free time have I said, "You know, fuck my boundary, let's hang out there!" How could I look myself in the mirror? How could I advocate for you establishing better boundaries with people in your life? How could I ignore what I would characterize as gleeful and willful defiance of doing "better" than playing out battered-wife excuse making? I will not play-act friendship with someone who can't be bothered to work as hard on themselves or in service to me as I've been for them. That's not the kind of friend I am, so it's not the one I'll let back in lightly.

What's normal, though? No matter how bad someone fucks you, forgive and pretend to forget, right? They're "family." Life's too short. It is what it is. They didn't mean to or weren't aware. That's not who they were in the past. Holding grudges is unhealthy. Your insecurities around being isolated or alone betray you. Your obligation to play along and appease your mutual network takes over. Whether any real healing or mutual understanding comes into the equation is perfectly mute because we need to just move right along and "love each other."

I watch that dance justify literally every conceivable level of atrocity. It is the exact same self-servicing motivatedly ignorant pattern. From your god's behavior right on down through your secret satisfaction and smirk at punishing your pet a little too aggressively just that one time. What you don't account for counts on you to carry out its consequences. And you are, every day, in big and small ways, and it's predictable and fixable, but only with stuff like this. You have to own it. You have to "yes, and" like it's an improv class. You have to perpetually entertain the thought that you are a misguided monster, but that fact doesn't have to dictate your behavior going forward nor need to illicit some special amount of stress or talking in circles.

Then you might have a prayer of genuinely helping anything, because you see how you're otherwise fucking it up within yourself. You can resist the insistence to move past meaningful details. You can point to specific repeatable demonstrations of your values. You can see other people responding to your confidence of relatable recognizable capacity, and not the shadow game of peacocking virtue signaling and mantra echoing.

I will spend thousands of dollars, use all my tools, and spend every waking hour I have trying to help. I think most people I've met would say the same thing. Who is actually doing so? And in service to whom? Do you trust what drives them? Do you see equitable put in get out dynamics? Or is it codepedence? Or insecurity? Or some noble story of infinite sacrifice and unconditional love?

I'm willing to set the conditions because I expect better than what's normal of and for myself. Were circumstances reversed, I wouldn't treat you as I've been treated, and most importantly, have the demonstrated behavior from myself to trust. I've spent the time and money. I've opened the conversations. I've challenged the mismanaged powers and privileges. I've risen to the challenge of creating circumstances that inch me closer to what I actually want or think is better versus what's expected of me. It never ends. Every second you pretend otherwise, you disappear, and I have to fit your abstract abdication into my specific constructs.