Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims None Questions None Output None
Highlights
Location 95
imagine how this unbreakable feeling of belonging can provide those who experience it the security to stand up against harm when they are bystanders to it, or targets of it, knowing that their community has a way to grapple with it well. Imagine how it would feel to have no fear of social repercussions when standing up to violence, because a structure is in place that means their fundamental humanity and worth will be legitimated and taken seriously. What would it be like to live in a culture where we all could be socially embraced in this way, where we could speak up about harm, could say no to it, without fear, because we know without question that no one in our community will dehumanize another? What would it be like to know without a doubt that the culture in which we live will require the one who causes harm to empathize with those harmed, grow, and become able to do appropriate repair, while humanizing that person too? What would it feel like to trust the fabric of our human community so fully that we could take the risk to belong in this way, belong as our whole selves?
Location 130
When we begin with this awareness of our already-existing interconnectedness, we can look at harm in an entirely inverted way, in which we are connected from the start. Harm, whether in the form of violation or neglect, is then understood as a harm to the integrity of those bonds, or as a failure to meet relational responsibilities, not only as a violation of a presumed disconnectedness.
Location 155
This change is not about being “good people” in an individualistic sense. It is about strengthening our understanding of our position within these massive systems of power and oppression that structure social existence, so that we can better recognize systemic harm occurring, even though it is typically masked. We need to work to become better able to recognize it and then become able to say no to it.
Location 161
“Where we are born into privilege, we are charged with dismantling any myth of supremacy. Where we were born into struggle, we are charged with claiming our dignity, joy, and liberation.”
Location 222
consequences and boundaries whose purpose is to create safety for those harmed are not inherently punishments. A student at Windsor House who has caused harm may, for example, lose access to a given space in the school where those they have harmed spend time, until they can prove that they can be in that area without harming others. On a related note, as Mariame Kaba observes, “a person in a position of power losing their position of power is not a punishment, it is a consequence of bad action / behavior. If I were to ensure that you could never again make a living to support yourself and your family, that would be punishment. If I were to take your liberty, that’s punishment. If I were to kill you, that’s punishment. A powerful person losing [their] powerful position because [they] abused that power is not a punishment.”
Location 596
The more we use neuronal pathways the stronger they become, while pathways that are not used get pruned. The inability to know one’s own emotions is in some way physiological; it can be understood in part as a function of physical neurological matter.
Location 611
at a very young age, I was turning to people for love and receiving absence or harm instead. So, in response, I decided, “No thank you, I’ll just stand, I don’t need that.” But it was not apparent to me on the surface that this was disconnected. The interesting thing was how this attachment style can apply selectively to certain kinds of need. Whenever I would start to feel one of those feelings, I was hardwired to shut down that feeling completely to the point where I would never actually experience it.
✏️ Could be very likely what happens with people here with their dads.. If not harm then at least absence. This turns into a core of shame several layers below cognitive reality. And when you see this need from others, you shame them in turn. This combines with systemic entitlement as mentioned in next highlight 🔗 Location 611
Location 622
This practice combines with the entitlement in systemic oppression, the power that those conditioned into entitlement claim to define what is real socially and culturally, what they take to be universally the case,
Location 639
What you are seeing as shameful in others—vulnerability, need, nurturance, connection—can be just the noise of your own inner disavowed shame. And yet when that inner experience becomes formed through systemic power it can become a very dangerous kind of psychological control. But it was never actually anything shameful, and it can take unlearning this inner shame in order to recognize where you have been putting this shaming onto others.
✏️ Rewording the previous highlights 🔗 Location 639
Location 648
If those who hold power have killed off parts of their own self, they will attempt to discipline and control those whom they oppress. When that is normalized, as it is in Western culture, widespread systemic gaslighting pressures people facing systemic harm to view strengths and beauty through a distorted lens, as weakness or abjection. Pressure is applied under which people’s whole selves become compressed or contorted to survive inside oppressive systems. And then those targeted in this way also experience grief, when the understanding comes that these most beautiful and whole parts of the self have been lost. Grief comes of recognizing that no part of oppressed people’s wholeness was ever shameful. On the contrary, these lost parts of the self are beautiful, are needed, and belong in the world. Systems of oppression repress that kind of thinking, dignity, or wholeness, because people who are systemically oppressed, speaking and acting from their whole selves, knowing their own worth and dignity, have the power to topple those systems.
✏️ Exploring systemic oppression 🔗 Location 648
Location 660
shame unaddressed, in a culture that conditions those with privilege into an entitlement to define reality not only for themselves but for others, will come out as implicit attempts to shame those who hold less social power. That shame can get enacted as an unquestioned belief in one’s entitlement to control how those around you perceive or recognize reality, if you have not done the work to recognize the location of the sense of shame. js: Exactly. And as men we are able to get by with so little self-examination for so long!
✏️ The oppression in practice for men means we can manipulate the realities of those “below” us (women and children) and dissuades us from ever doing any emotional work that may lead us astray from the dominant culture 🔗 Location 660
Location 683
On the one hand, I identify as genderfluid, on the other I identify as a woman, but not always. When I was younger I would have seen “male” and “masculinity” as a place to venture out from. For example, I was very flamboyant as a child and I cross-dressed, but I didn’t really question my masculinity. For a time in my early twenties I identified as genderqueer, and these days I see “woman” as the home I venture out from and back to from different areas of gender. ns: Wow. It sounds like you are articulating gender as a kind of security in the body, something you can leave and come back to. It makes sense when considering that people who are optimally nurtured develop security in themselves; this could be another dimension of that kind of security.
✏️ A perspective on gender fluidity 🔗 Location 683
Location 695
my gender expression was facilitated in part by being able to see people’s performance of gender out in the world. If we are thinking in terms of attachment theory, other people’s gender expression gave me room to know mine. It offered a kind of mirroring, something like what the nurturance culture essay describes.
✏️ Goes back to the whole mirroring or accepting thing from other article. If it gets mirrored or accepted, it can be looked at and approached and accepted. Otherwise it becomes internalized as shameful. Other people’s gender expression made room for hers 🔗 Location 695
Location 724
transness should be built right into the argument from its conception, especially since everybody has the potential to be trans. Everyone has a complex relationship with their gender identity. Cis people perform their gender just as much as trans folks do.
✏️ Notes on how to address audience and to be careful about Cis people can feel shame about their gender identity as well.. Like women feeling shame about their body aspects that run counter to culture (eg too masculine) 🔗 Location 724
Location 751
we all have the potential to be similar to each other. And we still have different levels of power that are imbued by society and the expectations of gender, and we all have to be accountable for our actions, because we also all have the potential to experience harm and we all have the potential to cause it.
✏️ As noted before, audience needs to be inclusive since all are affected 🔗 Location 751
Location 808
when someone undermines your trust in your own perceptions and you feel crazy because your instincts and intuition and sometimes even plain old perceptions are telling you one thing, and words from someone you trust are telling you something different.”
✏️ Quick reminder definition of gaslighting 🔗 Location 808
Location 826
People undermine the perceptions of those who have less social power for a variety of understandable reasons: • They feel ashamed about something they are feeling, wanting, or doing, so they dissemble and act emotionally dishonest about it, or blame the other person, instead of taking ownership over their own feelings, wants, and actions. • They are not self-aware and have not done their own emotional work, so when asked a direct question about something confusing in their behavior (such as incoherent emotional distancing, irritability, conditioned entitlement, or attachment issues), they cannot give an honest answer, and give a plausible but emotionally dishonest one instead. • They are attached to a certain image of themselves (as nurturing, as a feminist, as very responsible and dutiful) and are not ready to perceive shadow sides or less emotionally developed sides that contradict this self-image or public image. • They were raised in a conflict-averse household where skills were not taught for how to meet your own and other people’s needs simultaneously, so they unquestioningly believe a zero-sum game is the only option, and they want what they want. • They have a physiological level of arousal or alarm that feels overwhelming when talking about uncomfortable topics, so they smooth them over with excuses or logistical dissembling. • They are anxious about healthy amounts of normal intimacy and on guard against it, so keeping things vague protects their feeling of control over emotional intimacy. • They do not have lived experience of emotional safety and healthy nurturing responsiveness, but do not realize this about themselves, so they experience people they are intimate with as having unreasonable or excessive needs. • They have grown up watching a male parent speak to women or children in the family in a paternalistic, condescending, or manipulative way and have not taken the time to recognize and change this pattern. • They have “narcissistic qualities.” This is actually not uncommon (7.7 percent of the masculine-identified population, apparently). “Narcissism” describes a human experience: an abandoned, rejected original self, buried under layers and layers of shame, with a seemingly highly self-confident personality developed on top. For those who struggle in this way, the original or vulnerable parts of the self are tucked away under a firewall and are emotionally undeveloped, and so this inner guide to empathy, trust, and connection that emotional adults have to guide them is to varying degrees offline. These folks are unusually susceptible to gaslighting others without even realizing they are doing it. Unfortunately, they are also the least likely to take ownership of or recognize their actions and are more likely to try to cover their ears, deflect, prevaricate, change the subject, attack, or flee when someone they do this to attempts to ask them for help or clarification. The level of self-awareness of people with narcissistic…
✏️ Long but thorough list of gaslighting personalities 🔗 Location 826
Location 899
second-guessing someone about their own feelings can itself be a form of gaslighting. It’s a strong value of mine to believe people when they say how they feel, because when you come down to it, we are all experts on our own inner realities. But having had my perceptions undermined all of my life, I have to learn to temper that information I’m being given with the evidence of my senses and hold the two together. When I can hold these two sets of information at the same time, I can be more willing to trust him on what he is experiencing when he needs me to be, while not automatically discarding all the really quite reliable information my body is telling me. I don’t have to tell him he’s being dishonest in order to trust myself. I can just learn that my perceptions are really accurate most of the time, and allow myself to hold as a gentle additional option the possibility that he may not be being entirely up-front: that people are not perfectly self-aware, that humans are complicated.
✏️ When being gaslit, there is potential for more gaslighting 🔗 Location 899
Location 935
When people we trust tell us, in a nearly continuous daily onslaught, that real things are not real, we experience a pernicious fragmentation and undermining of our most powerful, most beautiful, and most effective source of guidance: our perceptions, intuition, and instincts.
✏️ There is a simple allegory to work with here in a fiction story, but it can be blunt, offensive if done badly 🔗 Location 935
Location 947
If a man harms you this badly because he just doesn’t realize he’s doing it, or because he feels too ashamed to admit something that probably isn’t shameful at all, or because he has grown up in a world where he can get away with it and not think too much about it, or because he just feels entitled, aren’t the effects the same?
✏️ This is such a hard thing for men. “I didn’t mean to” is the core response, but it also is irrelevant. Just as with white people who don’t mean to act in racist ways and feel like they’re not.. The point is that they’re all perpetuating and making use of the system and the privilege they have to put down the other. Not intending to do it doesn’t save you.. The harm is being done either way, so what matters is what is done with that awareness. 🔗 Location 947
Location 982
Patriarchal culture teaches us to empathize with those who have power, and in particular to empathize with men who harm, and to “skip” or “forget” to feel what it is like to survive this type of abuse when it is ongoing, systemic, long term. We need to turn this around, centering our empathy and attention on the deeply damaging ways gaslighting affects female-identified people. This culture can heal when we hold these things together: when we consciously direct empathy toward the women who have been harmed and keep it there, so we can respond in a caring way, without centering abusers, while offering a path for repair and learning when masculine-identified people and others who hold systemic power recognize they have engaged in this kind of psychological undermining of someone else’s mind.
Location 1186
When there is safety to delve into that conditioning without being judged for it, people do change. Sometimes inch by inch, and with slipping back and then stretching again into new ways of thinking and being.
Location 1193
One of the processes for dismantling white supremacy is, oddly, building up white people’s sense of fundamental worth and belonging. Not entitlement or superiority, but a deeper feeling that they do belong among other humans and will not be discarded as they learn. The last thing I want to do right now in my stage of racial identity development is hold space for white people; I actually want to get really far away from them. But you can’t shame someone out of a shame aversion, and so working with white people has become very important for me.
Location 1203
This fragility response may be caused both by internalized shame, and also by the conditioning into supremacy that creates an inherent expectation of entitlement. Countering both at the same time seems to help: “We like you, we are not going to shun you or turn away from you, you belong and have inherent worth as a human being, and also this action, this ingrained entitlement and harmful behavior is not OK and needs to stop. We will turn toward you, connect with you, and tell you no.”
Location 1212
healthy identity of what it is to be themselves, and thus have greater resilience to understand that acknowledging the harmful impact of their actions does not negate their worth as humans.23 Their worth is no longer tied up in the label of white, but rather in an authentic sense of self, which gives resilience to take in the feedback about the impact of their action being bad or causing harm, while knowing that they still have inherent worth and value.
✏️ Only when they replace their self worth away from a fragile one tied to the external factor of whiteness, and towards a stronger internal self worth and belonging… Then they can be accountable and accept and hear feedback about harm they cause. Same for masculinity and gendered violence 🔗 Location 1212
Location 1233
if you can fundamentally trust in the humans around you to recognize it and name it openly with you, so you can agree that it is happening, then the harm does not become so destructive. There is a kind of deep, visceral betrayal of human trust that can magnify harm significantly, when those around you do not even perceive it occurring. And yet that is precisely how normalized systemic violence works: it renders the harm normal, and all resistance to harm “disruptive.”
Location 1259
When you sit down in private with a person who has caused or perpetuated harm and work very hard to create conditions of acceptance, that is when you can see what is operating to keep that system of power in place. Depending on where they are in their own development, either the person can hear the harm, recognize it as part of a larger system not just intellectually but empathically, express their own inner need to make things right and be grateful that they can be held in that change, or they cannot handle knowing that they have hurt another person. Shame-evasion behavior can become apparent very quickly in that case, and can be intense: deflection, distraction, gaslighting, word salad, turning things around, attacking, or fleeing if they cannot regain control any other way. This can be shocking the first few times people encounter it, especially with organizers who have committed much of their lives to building movements against oppression. But it is not uncommon. For this reason, we need very clear structures in our communities for handling harm, which can be put into practice in our movement spaces. This requires setting up conditions of kindness and unconditional acceptance while also clearly establishing how actions that perpetuate systemic harm are not acceptable and need to stop.
Location 1392
If you harm someone and then when they tell you about it you are more focused on the fact that your feelings are hurt than on the fact that you have caused harm, can you stop and ask yourself if that is an adult response? Do you have your own inner desire to understand when you harm others?
✏️ Another of those questions to ask people at the start, or as an introductory way of broaching the theme and thesis and subject matter 🔗 Location 1392
Location 1398
If you are the kind of person who likes to know when you have caused harm, then there are some valuable questions about how to make that real: How do you invite this information? How do you welcome it? How do you thank those who help you grow this way if they have to tell you because you have not figured it out for yourself? Do you realize just how scary it can be to tell you before they know how you will react? Do you confuse their fear of you for anger? Is their fear in any way justified? How can you make sure it is not? If your focus is more on the fact that harm got named than it is on the harm itself, does this strike you as peculiar? Depending on the severity and longevity of the harm, and the body’s silencing effects when trauma occurs, do you make it the responsibility of those you have harmed to tell you “in a nice way”? Is it possible they have tried to tell you in a nice way and you have clapped your hands over your ears or made it hard for them, and eventually they lost the capacity to be nice while they were being harmed? If you think back—really think back—how long were they trusting you and quietly asking you for help and empathy and support and compassion and honesty before they lost their buffer of capacity to speak kindly while drowning? How long did you hear those requests and not really hear them? Imagine how it feels to speak and find it is as if you hadn’t spoken. Not that people don’t believe you, but that they actually cannot hear you, as though you are speaking gibberish or not speaking at all. As though in a nightmare where you ask for help and everyone answers as though you have said something else: where you say, “Help, I’m drowning!” and those around you reply, “Oh yes, I see. I like oranges also. Have a nice day!” Put yourself in those shoes. How long, how many days and weeks and months, would you retain your sanity while speaking kindly and asking for harm to stop and having it seem as though you had not spoken at all? Coming up from underwater to speak up isn’t always pretty or easy. What if one of the effects of trauma is that after speaking calmly without being heard for so long, or after having the words get trapped in the still waters of their body, the survivor can no longer speak and can only scream? Just as Indigenous students and students of color in my literature classes are somehow expected to be quietly, constantly unsafe and deeply out of their comfort zones just to make sure the white students do not experience a moment’s discomfort, and the white students think everyone is having the same experience they are, if you make it hard for people around you to let you know you have caused harm, you’re going to invoke survival strategies in your friends and colleagues when you think you’re just having a regular hang-out with your friend.30 This is the block to accountability that leads many of us to quietly placate men in ways they take for granted and think are normal. With certain men who have not realized…
✏️ Things to say to a person who harms but wants to grow 🔗 Location 1398
Location 1445
Guilt is not empathy. Neither is shame. In fact, when people feel overwhelmed by their own inner feelings of guilt, they are more likely to attack the people around them rather than act empathetically. Feeling guilty does not make you a good person. Empathy and responsiveness make you a good person. Guilt blocks empathy.