Feeling Another Way Forward
Staying conscious and connected in a world at war
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
-William Butler YeatsWe’ve been here before. The details are different, but we’ve been here before.
As I’ve floundered in my grief over these last weeks and felt waves of hopelessness pass over me, I’ve found grounding in the words of writers who lived long before our time, enduring conflicts as horrific as anything we could yet imagine.
We do not have to reinvent the wheel. We do not have to fight like dogs thrown into a ring together, seeking to tear the other to shreds while crowds look on.
“Since men do not know that the conflict occurs inside themselves, they go mad, and one lays the blame on the other.”
―Carl Jung, The Red Book
I've been immersed lately in readings for a course I’m teaching called “Toward Wholeness,” which is all about the union of the opposites, from a Jungian perspective. Explicitly, the seminar is about the integration of the masculine and feminine within each of us and the damage that patriarchy has done to our ability to relate deeply. In class together, we inquire into what life beyond the script of division might look like. We read, discuss, and share stories of another way forward that might not require us to define ourselves by what we aren’t while seeking to possess or destroy the “other” outside.
Sports provide a place for us to peacefully project and battle the dualism of our nature, but life, like war, is not a team sport. The victory of one side over another only assumes a future conflict and reinforces a distinct sense of being caught in a time loop. We’ve been here before.
Perhaps, as this Pema Chödrön quote reminds us, there is an element of all of this that is core to the reality of existence:
“Things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together and fall apart again. It’s just like that.”
We’ve talked about this a lot in our class too, that coming together and the falling apart. This is the core of what we think of as healthy attachment: the ability to be held in connection and then part without fear; to be connected, and then separate again. It is also the way we build muscle: small tears and repairs, over and over. But we know too that large tears lead to injury, not strength, and that painful or violent separations make coming back together again harder and harder.
Pema Chödrön offers the solution too:
“The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”
In what can seem like endless war and violence both at home and abroad, I can feel myself pleading silently that we might finally make room. That we might learn to discern the actual roots of our division and find a way forward beyond revenge and violence and even, perhaps, beyond proclamations and protest.
There is little time, anymore, to find space in one’s emotions. Little time to wrestle with grief and doubt when faced with shattering, unimaginable pain. Little time to address what we least want to address in our own lives, our own relationships, and our own communities when roused by external events. There is no time available to tolerate the grief, confusion, and ambiguity, to let there be room for all of it before we react.
I’ve been entirely off of social media for the last few weeks. I learned the hard way that being there right now feels akin to being in a small room in a pandemic with people, everywhere, coughing. It has felt viral, as if staying, surrounded by all that noise and all those opinions, almost guarantees infection. With all the posting and re-posting and raging and shaming, I found myself quickly pulled in, dysregulated and confused, while not processing anything in depth.
It’s more pronounced on social media, but when the world faces a new threat, our bodies and beings become dysregulated. We lose balance while the machines of shame demand positions, without nuance or the profound discomfort of doubt and self-reflection. They demand we know who is right and who is wrong, no matter our prior familiarity with what has unfolded or our prior ability to process traumas and wounds.
In his essay, The Undiscovered Self, from 1957, Jung penned his final warning to all of us for what he saw as humans’ great fallibility: the desire to be a part of the crowd and the “good people.”
“All mass movements, as one might expect, slip with the greatest ease down an inclined plane made up of large numbers. Where the many are, there is security; what the many believe must of course be true.”
Jung had lived through WWI and WWII and feared the beginning of another world war. He was adamant that humans are the greatest danger to the planet, and that the seeds of our danger are in the fissures within our own psyches. We are mostly unconscious yet certain of our rightness; we are always ready to lay the blame at someone else’s feet.
"It would be an insufferable thought that we had to take personal responsibility for so much guiltiness. We, therefore, prefer to localize evil in individual criminals or groups of criminals, while washing our hands in innocence and ignoring the general proclivity to evil. This sanctimoniousness cannot be kept up in the long run, because the evil, as experience shows, lies in man."
He almost pleads for us to wake up.
“Even today people are largely unconscious of the fact that every individual is a cell in the structure of various international organisms and is therefore causally implicated in their conflicts.
…It is in the nature of political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything he does not know and does not want to know about himself by foisting it off on somebody else.”
I found myself up against a similar feeling of confusion as I’ve felt lately around the time of 9/11 and the start of the Iraq war, twenty years ago. I was in college and organizing protests like mad. I was still grieving the sick bravado and violence that had killed thousands of people in my own country while trying to prevent the sick bravado of my country from expanding the violence in response. But after endless hours of organizing, speeches, and crying, I was left with the sinking feeling that there had to be another way. It all felt so circular. The role I was playing was of the protesting college student rather than the grieving parent or the soldier heading off to war, but I felt sure that it had all happened before and would continue to happen. It felt mythic. And I felt it necessary to pause and think of the larger picture. What were we all doing, and why?
I couldn’t help but feel then what I feel now: What if, in our pleading for this war to end and for all war to end, we also looked for the deeper roots of how we are divided and, even in our protesting, perpetuating division?
What if, rather than blame this group or that group, we blame the division itself, or the patriarchy: the tendency towards violence as a solution, the desire to keep us wildly separated and disconnected from ourselves first and foremost and from each other too?
The solution may be in tolerating the tension and the uncertainty; “letting there be room,” as Pema Chödrön says, “for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”
I had to begin by separating myself from all of the opinions to just find my way back to grief. Grief that this is the world in which we live, where murder, rape, and kidnapping can happen with glee, where violent retribution still occurs, where bombs and invasions are still seen as solutions, and where weapons of war still rip through bowling alleys in a small American town without a single attempt for things to be otherwise. It’s all so stupid. So unnecessary. And also so effective at keeping us dissociated and separate from ourselves, blaming others, dysregulated, and ultimately unable to imagine a different world.
One of the readings that I selected for our seminar comes from Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider’s book entitled, “Why Does Patriarchy Persist?” The lessons that they draw are so profound in their clarity and simplicity, and so applicable here. We don’t tend to think of war, for some reason, as the most pronounced violence of patriarchy. We focus on the ethnic divisions rather than what is even more directly at its core: the desire to keep us in a hierarchy against each other, the desire for “winning” over connection. War is the most thundering, disgusting, widespread flag of patriarchy’s dominance.
Gilligan and Snider offer a solution, a subversive way forward:
"Our ability to communicate our own feelings, and to pick up the feelings of others and thus to heal fractures in connection, threatens the structures of hierarchy. Feelings of empathy and tender compassion for another's suffering or humanity make it difficult to maintain or justify inequality. …
Patriarchy persists in part by forcing a loss of relationship and then rendering the loss irreparable.
Without the possibility for repair, love, a force of nature that has the power to uproot patriarchy, becomes sacrificed to protect us from the pain of loss.
This sacrifice of love then serves the establishment of hierarchy and opens the way to its preservation."
I knew, finally, that I had to come back to the core of my feelings and tolerate them before I could find a way through. In order to re-ground my sanity, I needed to feel the vulnerability of love again in order to exit the space of unbearable hopelessness. Love for all who are hurt. Love with discernment, yes, but love. I need this to be able to imagine a world beyond cycles of violence that will just continue and continue in a loop that cannot be escaped.
Gilligan and Snider remind us of the radical importance of regaining connection to our feelings and love as the solution. Love over hierarchy as a principle because: “Patriarchy persists in part by forcing a loss of relationship and then rendering the loss irreparable.”
Without the ability to grieve loss and pursue connection, the status quo of division will win again and again.
Finally, Jung echoes this truth in his plea to humanity: “Where love stops, power begins, and violence, and terror.”
We’ve been here before. There may yet be a way out of this loop of violence, blame, and hierarchy. But we first have to believe, imagine, and feel another way forward.