#disowning powerful experiences creates serious problems

[lavideenrose]

When children feel pervasively angry or guilty or are chronically frightened about being abandoned, they have come by such feelings honestly; that is because of experience. When children are filled with rage, it is due to rejection or harsh treatment. When children experience intense inner conflict regarding their angry feelings, this is likely because expressing them may be forbidden or even dangerous. When children must disown powerful experiences they have, this creates serious problems including ‘chronic distrust of other people, inhibition of curiosity, distrust of their own senses and the tendency to find everything unreal.’ The long term effects of brutalization and neglect in caregiving relationships are the body and brain experiencing PTSD.

From The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk

[crystallllines]

[John] Bowlby noticed that when children must disown powerful experiences they have had, this creates serious problems, including ‘chronic distrust of other people, inhibition of curiosity, distrust of their own senses, and the tendency to find everything unreal.’

The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel Van der Kolk

[whitestonetherapy]

Back to School...2 (1.10.17)

The next couple of months are going to be busier than normal for me with some large projects that I’m responsible for all happening at the same time.   This is not a complaint at all, because I prefer being busy to the alternative and a lot of my work through WhiteStone is deeply interesting and rewarding.  It does mean the weeks are flying by, and as I’d already started to outline Boarding School Syndrome (BSS) in my previous blog I wanted to complete the outline before more time passes.

Let’s get right to it and talk about some common things that are encountered in a clinical setting.  I mentioned emotional encapsulation in my previous post as a central feature of BSS.  This refers to a form of psychological splitting, where emotional vulnerability is eventually disowned by the young boarder as a defence against finding herself in a situation where this vulnerability might single her out from the pack.  This is the child’s adaptive attempt to survive in her changed environment, and can be either a gradual process or marked by a specific moment that might be recalled within therapy.  Being sent away from home is an event where many of the conditions that are associated with healthy psychological and physical development are suddenly disrupted – this includes the total and sudden loss of the family unit, familiarity (a home, a bedroom etc), pets, places, people and things – these are replaced instead by strange staff at a strange school with confusing customs and traditions, surrounded by other strangers.  This requires urgent adaptation, and the child has to abandon her biologically programmed need for attachment.

The web of relationships, into which we are born and on which we rely for healthy development, is traumatically disrupted by this experience in a number of ways.  Instead of secure attachment, which is fostered in children through attuned care-giving from parents (summarised mightily), the sudden loss of family increases the chances of the child developing an adaptive attachment style to deal with the traumatic event she has undergone.  This may involve emotional encapsulation, a dismissing style, where she learns that it is safer and much less painful to dismiss or minimize her own emotional experiences than to feel them, as she learns her needs will not be met and perhaps do not deserve to be met.  Alternatively the child may instead form an adaptive strategy that involves amplification of her need for caregivers and comfort - a kind of hyper-activation of the need to be close to others.  Instead of developing a secure attachment style marked by flexibility, a growing ability to experience herself as ‘good enough’ and a capacity to understand the emotional experience and intentionality of others, the child may instead develop strategies that shut her off from her emotions (dismissing) or lead her to become overwhelmed  by them (amplification).  In some cases she might switch between both of these adaptive strategies in what psychologists call a ‘disorganized’ way.

These adaptive patterns of being can remain with us throughout life and can run very deep.  What starts out as a survival strategy can quickly become a representational filter that limits the extent and nature of access to our own thoughts, feelings and desires.  And so adaptive patterns begin to influence and shape how we see the world, the predictions we make, how we see ourselves and others.  Much work in psychotherapy is to provide the type of reparative relationship where the flexibility I mention above is encouraged and adaptive strategies can be spotted and some of these ‘filters’ perhaps even changed. 

You’ve probably already guessed that a dismissing style is particularly common for ex-boarders.  Joy Schaverein has outlined various clinical markers for this.  Here are some examples:  problems with intimacy and difficulties being fully open and honest about feelings even with a loving spouse or family;  difficulties identifying such emotions in the first place, which may register as anger and yet mask other emotions which are hard to accurately name; difficulty talking about these things even in the safety of therapy; a tendency to make very dependent relationships but then to ‘cut off’ emotionally (either as part of a repeating pattern within relationships or permanently); difficulty creating or sustaining intimate friendships, or sustaining situations such as employment or education etc;  a tendency to be more comfortable time-tabling family life, and perhaps holding fixed views of what ‘should’ happen; a tendency to struggle dealing with vulnerability in others, (if your own vulnerability has been dissociated, it is tougher to acknowledge it in others).  Interestingly, as Duffell points out, ex-boarders in therapy may not at first recognise these things of themselves, even though their spouse or family may see these issues very clearly and indeed have encouraged their loved one to seek help.  Often these issues manifest as a depressive episode for ex-boarders, and this is a common trigger for entering therapy and eventually seeking help.

What is the psychological process that such people have gone through to get here?  What happened to them at school?  Duffell talks of a ‘privileged abandonment’ and Schaverein talks of the moment of abandonment itself.  The moment of being taken to boarding school and parents departing is a moment for which no young child can be prepared or give consent.  Many ex-boarders can remember this moment clearly, as for example I can.  Others report a sense of amnesia, a dissociation of feelings and a sense of numb shock.  As Schaverein says, this is the moment “the child becomes lost for words”.  Remember that young children need adults to give words to their experiences – particularly emotional ones -  as this is what allows children to metabolize their powerful emotional experiences and make sense of them.   This cannot now easily happen as reliance falls on a house-master who is looking after many children, and has limited experience or training in these respects.  In later years children may develop a sibling bond and take on some of these parental tasks and ‘parent’ each other, but this will not be possible for young children arriving at a boarding school. 

It can be common from this point for children to feel homesick, which is really a proxy for feelings of bereavement.  This is often a gradual process of realisation, from initial alarm, to searching behaviour (anger and guilt), then hope of rescue, then mourning, grief and feelings of internal loss.  As well as grieving, children may experience their new school as a form of captivity.  They are taken to a place they cannot leave and where all activities are regulated and time-tabled - food, clothes, work, play, censored letters, lessons, and so on.  As Schaverein says, ‘private reverie‘ is discouraged, and unsanctioned spontaneity may be frowned on.  Whether this is just an enduring extension of the Victorian idea that boarding schools are a place to ‘unmake the child and make the man’, I cannot say, but I think it’s a fair bet.  Here is a quote from a Mr Woodard, founder of my own public school, who in 1858 said the aim of the place was to, “remove the child from the noxious influence of home and home comforts”.  Hmm.

Younger children often experience a powerful and troubling internal incongruence too.  Perhaps they have been told school will be fun, possibly (these days) a little like Harry Potter, and that they will be enjoying lots of activities, and that the whole experience will be good for them – as Duffell says “the making of them”.  So the child is placed in an internal double bind.  She ‘knows’ that this is ‘good for her’, but it does not feel good.  She may also have a sense that financial sacrifices have been made so she can go to boarding school and that she is expected to be grateful… yet it does not feel good at all.  The child’s experience inwardly is at odds with what her caregivers have told her it should be… and thus she may come to experience herself as unworthy or a failure, and to doubt her own perceptions.  She may have a sense that to share these things will be deeply upsetting and that caregivers will be angry, and so she may come to feel responsible for maintaining the emotional equilibrium of her parents at a very young age .  These are things for which small children have no words and only a limited understanding, and so cannot verbalise.  The child increasingly becomes separated from a coherent narrative of her own life. 

As an adult a further double-bind is that such an upbringing is considered a ‘privilege’ and so discussion of any of these serious things can feel like a dangerous flirtation with being considered an ingrate,  fair game for ridicule rather than compassion from a society that considers them to have been born lucky.  This is common. The same process works internally too; ex-boarders may hide from themselves (and their therapist) the traumatic nature of their boarding school experience, such is their sense of shame at admitting such a ‘lucky start’ might actually have caused some problems – there can be a feeling it would be deeply ungracious, a bout of navel-gazing and quite unmanly to ‘whine’ about such things.  So as adults, ex-boarders may trivialise the tough experiences they had as young children, especially if they came to associate closely with (and attach closely to) the school in which they spent many formative years, and where some good friendships and good times were also had.  It can be hard to consider the cost at which these things have come, even when facing troubling issues later in later life.

For the young child at boarding school there follows, in time, a choice point.  Either the boarder must adapt and find a way to navigate her new environment and begin to dissociate from her need for her (now unavailable) family and home, or continue to suffer and take the chance of being singled out as a target onto which other students can project their own fears.  Eventually the child dissociates from the pain and protects a nucleated self from experiencing further trauma.   In short, she must adapt or find herself alone and singled out.  Here is emotional encapsulation. “He wears a mask and his face grows to fit it” (Orwell).  I will link to a documentary at the end of this post, where this process is shown in some detail.

Finally, the sense of loss young boarders experience is repeated many times with return trips to school over many years, and so loss is re-experienced routinely in a way that reinforces adaptive strategies.  This further crystallizes a split between the ‘survival personality’ of the boarding school self and the ‘home self’ which is fundamentally changed too.  Those suffering with BSS often report a sense of ‘no longer being known’ at home when they returned for school holidays, and so having a sense of not belonging anywhere, they had changed in ways not recognised by their parents and so were now alone here too.  Many ex-boarders remain with a sense of exile throughout their lives, a sense of non-belonging as if they are not really participating in their own life.

Nick Duffell spends a lot of time at the moment lobbying for the abolishment of boarding schools for the under-16’s.  I am not sure I would go that far.  I can think of plenty of examples where home-life may be far more troublesome than an upbringing in a good institution.  For children in their teens it is important to also begin to individuate and this seems a more natural and much less damaging time to consider this type of education.  I also think that technology such as mobile phones, and much greater emphasis on pastoral services in schools should not be ignored – it is obviously much easier to maintain a meaningful contact with children at school in recent years with phones and email, and schools have become much more sophisticated in terms of considering the wellbeing of children in their care.  That said, I want to be careful not to diminish the suffering that many will be experiencing right now who are at boarding school – an institution is absolutely no replacement for a good family - but general trends in a better direction must also be recognised. 

I’ll be coming back to this topic, no doubt, and I hope this blog is at least a useful general overview and a start point for readers who are interested to know more. 

As promised, here is the Cutting Edge documentary “Leaving Home at 8”.  It tells the story of four boarders who we meet just a few days before their departure to boarding school.

www.whitestonetherapy.com

[biofunmy]

YouTube’s Newest Far-Right, Foul-Mouthed, Red-Pilling Star Is A 14-Year-Old Girl

What does a 14-year-old girl dressed in a chador have to say on YouTube to amass more than 800,000 followers?

How about this: “I’ve become a devout follower of the Prophet Muhammad. Suffice to say, I’ve been having a fuck ton of fun. Of course, I get raped by my 40-year-old husband every so often and I have to worship a black cube to indirectly please an ancient Canaanite god — but at least I get to go to San Fran and stone the shit out of some gays, and the cops can’t do anything about it because California is a crypto-caliphate.”

Or how about, simply, “Kill yourself, faggot.”

Yes, if you want a vision of the future YouTube is midwifing, imagine a cherubic white girl mocking Islamic dress while lecturing her hundreds of thousands of followers about Muslim “rape gangs,” social justice “homos,” and the evils wrought by George Soros — under the thin guise of edgy internet comedy, forever.

Actually, don’t imagine it. Watch it. It’s already here.

The video is called “Be Not Afraid,” and it may be the clearest manifestation yet of the culture the executives of Alphabet’s video monster are delivering to millions of kids around the world, now via children incubated in that selfsame culture. To understand just how bad things have gotten on the platform, you need to see it for yourself.

Users — and more importantly to YouTube, advertisers — have over the past year started to hold the platform accountable for enabling the exploitation of children and exposing them to disturbing content. But this video reveals an entirely different way the platform is harming kids: by letting them express extreme views in front of the entire world. This is what indoctrination looks like when it’s reflected back by the indoctrinated.

A 20-minute, unbroken, and hyperarticulate tirade ostensibly about ignoring criticism online, “Be Not Afraid” stars a high school freshman from the Bay Area who goes by the name Soph on YouTube. (She edits as well as scores the videos, which she says are comedic.) Through videos like these, she’s become a rising star — with more than 800,000 followers — in the universe of conspiracy theorists, racists, and demagogues that owes its big bang to YouTube.

The video platform for years has incentivized such content through algorithms favoring sensational videos, and, as recent reporting has revealed, has deliberately ignored toxic content as a growth strategy.

Soph’s scripts, which she says she writes with a collaborator, are familiar: a mix of hatred toward Muslims, anti-black racism, Byzantine fearmongering about pedophilia, tissue-thin incel evolutionary psychology, and reflexive misanthropy that could have been copied and pasted from a thousand different 4chan posts. Of course, it’s all presented in the terminally ironic style popularized by boundary-pushing comedy groups like the influential Million Dollar Extreme and adopted of late by white supremacist mass shooters in Christchurch and San Diego.

(Soph is even more explicitly hateful on Discord, the gaming chat app, where she recently admitted to writing under the username “lutenant faggot” that she hoped for “A Hitler for Muslims” to “gas them all.”)

By now, we’re used to this stuff coming from grown men — some of whom have even used the platform as a launching pad for political aspirations. But Soph is a child. Despite the vitriol of her words and her confidence in delivering them, she’s still just a 14-year-old kid. And hearing this language lisped through braces, with the odd word mispronounced as if read but never before said, is clarifying.

Think of Jonathan Krohn, the conservative child prodigy who addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2009, at age 13. Today he’s a freelance journalist who writes about extremism for liberal magazines, and has disowned his past views. Or think of Lynx and Lamb Gaede, who became media sensations as 11-year-old white nationalist twin pop singers in the mid-aughts. Today they’ve renounced racism and taken up marijuana legalization activism. Part of being a young person, maybe especially for a rhetorically gifted one, is testing out ideas and identities — even ones we later find anathema. That’s not to excuse anything Soph says; but it is to say children often don’t understand the weight of the words they use. (Neither Soph nor her father responded to requests for comment.)

Interviews with Soph and asides in her videos reveal a young person whose identity is obviously still being formed. She didn’t start as a politics caster but, predictably, as a profane 9-year-old (9!) game streamer called LtCorbis. Influential YouTubers Pyrocynical and Keemstar promoted her early work, which ripped on YouTube culture and the indignities of being a fifth-grader instead of people of color and liberals. (A 2016 Daily Dot story about her bore the unintentionally profound headline “This sweary, savvy, 11-year-old gamer girl is the future of YouTube.”) In more recent videos, Soph discloses a health issue that kept her out of class for long stretches. She confesses to being unhappy in school. She talks about a move from New York to California. She identifies by turns as “right-wing” and “anarcho-capitalist.” She’s 14, precocious, isolated, and pissed off, a combination that has produced a lot of bad behavior over the years, but not all of it monetized through preroll ads and a Patreon, and not all of it streamed to millions.

YouTube’s kid problem is well-known. From disturbing auto-generated cartoons to parents who playact violence with their children for clicks to a network of users exploiting videos of children for sexual content, the company has consistently failed at protecting the young users who are its most valuable assets. But Soph’s popularity raises another, perhaps more difficult question, about whether YouTube has an obligation to protect such users from themselves — and one another.

Of course, that’s partially the job of parents, a fact Soph pointed out in a recent video while addressing people alarmed by her content.

“I’m wondering why they’re concerned with what I say instead of being concerned with the parents who let their kids watch me,” she said.

It’s unclear how much Soph’s own parents know about her videos. Internet sleuths have figured out details about her parents’ lives, one of whom Soph has claimed voted for Hillary Clinton. In a recent interview, Soph said that her parents have never had a serious conversation with her about the politics of her videos, though she did respond angrily when a reporter attempted to contact her dad.

But the powers of parents over children who live online are limited. And YouTube has taken no ownership over what is happening to kids who grow up inhaling its trademark stench of bigotry, conspiracy, and nihilism. Now the kids, or the smart ones anyway, seem to know it. Indeed, YouTube’s own incompetence and lack of quality is one of Soph’s recurring themes; she acknowledges owing her fame to them.

“The fact that I was 11 and could easily follow the commentary formula should have been a sign that the standards for the genre were terribly low,” she said in the same interview.

Last month, after YouTube deactivated comments on her videos — the platform disabled comments on all videos with children in response to an outcry over the aforementioned network of exploitation — Soph uploaded a 12-minute video in which she seemed to be daring the platform to suspend her, knowing full well that it wouldn’t.

“Susan, I’ve known your address since last summer,” Soph said, directly addressing YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki. “I’ve got a Luger and a mitochondrial disease. I don’t care if I live. Why should I care if you live or your children? I just called an Uber. You’ve got about seven minutes to draft up a will. … I’m coming for you, and it ain’t gonna be pretty.”

A far-right child comedian threatening to murder the executive of the video site that has made her famous, for trying to protect her from pedophiles: the state of YouTube in 2019. (YouTube did not offer a comment for this story.)

Indeed, one of Soph’s messages seems to be that in a world where the adults who have grown rich through technology took the implications of that technology seriously, she wouldn’t exist. She’s a problem, she seems to be saying, of YouTube’s own making.

“You could beg me kicking and screaming to stop disseminating the ideas I believe in, and it wouldn’t make a fucking difference,” Soph says at the end of “Be Not Afraid,” in a passage in which she seems to drop her shtick, if only for a moment. “Not only am I inoculated to that bullshit, most of Gen Z is too. Millennials grew up with MTV and nowadays watch Colbert. We, on the other hand, grew up with the internet, so we have no centralized source of information that controls what we think. We filter out the truth for ourselves; we’re not lazy. No one is brainwashing kids. Kids are simply learning from having free access to information, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

The ultimate target of “Be Not Afraid” is, finally, adults: people who just don’t get why social justice discourse is meaningless and co-optable, why school can’t compare to YouTube, why mass murder can be funny. People who have enough experience to know better. She’s sure that adults are selfish and stupid, that the people with the most power over her life are making it up as they go along, just like she is. When you look at the adults who have gotten rich off the platform that created Soph, she isn’t completely wrong. She’s been publishing on YouTube for years with no consequence other than becoming famous.

Sahred From Source link Technology

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[ellenlucasonlinedatingblog]

A Sex Positive and Transformative Justice Approach to #MeToo

Raechel Anne Jolie

Ready to take #MeToo to the next level?

This essay includes descriptions of sexual violence.

I thought this was going to be an essay about my first and most traumatic #MeToo story. The story of the time when I was 12, and held down on a bed by my mom’s then-boyfriend who told me he’d love to go down on me. It was going to be an essay about my fear and panic and how I didn’t even know what that phrase meant. It was going to be an essay about how heavy his body was on top of mine, how he felt like a plank of concrete, and how I could barely breathe through my weeping and begging for him to leave. It was going to be an essay about how he smelled like Listerine and gasoline and how the scent of each of them, to this day, fills my stomach with knots and bile.

But I realized that I don’t want to tell you more about that, nor the countless experiences I would have after of men touching me without permission, standing too close as a means of intimidation, commenting on my clothes or my body, fucking me even after I said no, (and so on).

I don’t want to talk about those things, because I hope by now you know that if you see a woman, you are, more often than not, also seeing a living history of those kinds of stories of abuse, assault, and terror. Too many people (women, trans and non-binary folks disproportionately) have borne the brunt of so much sexual and sexualized violence, that it has become part of our skin. It is why, I surmise, that when, in the yoga classes I teach, I press into the hips of women in half-pigeon pose, they tremble beneath my palms. We carry trauma in little pockets tucked awkwardly and persistently between our muscle and bones. We are all sewn up with these memories, clinging and wrestling below our surfaces. We know they are there. And now, finally, most others who have not experienced this personally (largely men) seem to be acknowledging this too.

So that’s not what this essay is going to be about. This is, instead, a story of the other times. The times when sex went right, when consent was enthusiastic, and also the times when it was somewhere in the middle. And I want to talk about these good times and these confusing times because I am a sex-positive prison abolitionist, and believe that putting transformative justice theory into action most commonly emerges in the most challenging, triggering, and seemingly egregious situations. And although it seems like perhaps there is an exhilarating shift in the tide — as men are finally being called out and women are finally being believed — I am not sure that this will ultimately eradicate rape culture either. But I do think putting these two frameworks — sex-positivity and transformative justice — in conversation with these abuses may provide us new and effective avenues for change.

In their edited collection, Yes Means Yes! Visions of Female Sexual Power & A World Without Rape, Jessica Valenti and Jaclyn Friedman argue that “no means no” as an anti-rape framework leaves little room for a culture to value sexual pleasure. They write that they want to explore “how creating a culture that values genuine female sexual pleasure can help stop rape, and how the cultures and systems that support rape in the United States rob us of our right to sexual power.”1 This book was an early lesson in my development as a sex-positive feminist, and I think the concept of “yes means yes” is worth revisiting, especially in this current moment.

I am not trying to argue that we shouldn’t tell these stories of harm, or that we shouldn’t hold men accountable. The recent call-outs and testimonies as one very important tool in addressing toxic masculinity.

But what would it look like if we also combatted the behavior of sexually abusive perpetrators with stories of men (and other genders) who do it right?

As one of my sex-positive, transformative justice heroes, adrienne maree brown, recently wrote: “It is humbling to realize that the majority of us are trying to reach pleasure through the complex trauma of transgression. In the onslaught of unveiling, I thought it would be useful to take a step back and address something crucial: the pleasure of consent.”

So what if, instead of sharing the story of when I was 12, I told you the story of how when I was 16, the 20-year-old barista who made out with me after punk shows told me he wanted to be respectful of my boundaries and when we started to have intercourse one night, he paused and asked if it was okay, and when I said I wasn’t sure, he stopped without protest? What if, instead, I told you about how when I did eventually start having sex with a different boyfriend that it was tender and protected and discussed at length in advance? What if I told you about how the first time I explored dominant/submissive dynamics, that my partner went slow and checked in all the time, and would back off in response to my body’s signals, even when I verbally (and unconvincingly) said it was okay to keep going?

Or what if we talked about the incredible heat of consensual foreplay; of hands on hard dicks, and fingers in wet cunts, and tongues desperate for mouths? What if we talked about explosive orgasms, and the silly and joyful pleasure of sexting? (What if we asked why these kinds of sentences are more often censored than sentences about sexual harm?)

And what if we also talked about the times that were neither entirely consensual but also not entirely abusive? Like the time, with a person I met at a party, when I was drunk and so was he and that although he fucked me and I barely remember it, it didn’t feel traumatic and I don’t consider it rape. (Which is not to say others wouldn’t be traumatized by it, or consider it rape, which would also be true, and which is why this is all very complicated.) Or like the time I was in a toxic relationship and my queer partner and I, at different times, pressured each other for sex, and how often we’d feel upset or confused after, and how we talked through those moments and cried and went to therapy and did the hard work of rebuilding trust in our intimacy. What if we talked about how I didn’t want to publicly shame and call-out any of the people from these in-between scenarios, but instead wanted to think through mutual complicity, and solutions on how to heal to do better moving forward?

This is where transformative justice comes in. According to the organization Generation FIVE, transformative justice “responds to the lack of — and the critical need for — a liberatory approach to violence. A liberatory approach seeks safety and accountability without relying on alienation, punishment, or State or systemic violence, including incarceration and policing.”

In the most simple terms, transformative justice acknowledges that “hurt people hurt people,” and that the causes of harm are largely structural rather than individual. Further, given that the State is the cause of so much of the cultural conditioning of harmful behavior, we should not rely on it to solve problems. Which is to say: throwing our rapists in prison does not stop rape, but it does further entrench a reliance on the prison industrial complex and the State more generally. Given that one of the biggest root causes of sexual violence is toxic masculinity, we ought to address the culture that breeds it, instead of excommunicating and disowning individuals who are products of it. And that we especially ought not try to address toxic masculinity through an industrial punishment system that is seeping with it.

That said: transformative justice does not shirk individuals of responsibility and accountability. And although there will be instances when transformation may be near impossible, it doesn’t mean we should dismiss accountability and healing work as a desperately needed tool in our fight to end rape culture.

In a discussion with transformative justice activists Miriame Kaba and Shira Hassan, Kaba states:

We have to complicate this conversation around sexual violence and see all the different ways that it is used as a form of social control across-the-board, with many different people from all different genders and all different races and all different social locations. If we understand the problem in that way, we have a better shot at actually uprooting all of the conditions that lead to this, and addressing all of the ways in which sexual violence reinforces other forms of violence. Our work over a couple of decades now has been devoted to complicating these narratives that are too easy, these really simple narratives around a perfect victim who is assaulted by an evil monster and that is the end of the story. The “Kill all rapists” conversation, which just kind of flattens what sexual violence really is, that doesn’t take into consideration the spectrum of sexual violence, therefore minimizing certain people’s experiences and making others more valid.

I echo Kaba and Hassan in this call for nuance, and am wondering what it might look like for the feminist movement to embrace complexity when thinking about sexual violence. And this is especially important for feminists who claim to be invested in fighting the carceral State—in other words, the way the prison system operates as a tool of governing. Can we actually be anti-prison activists who believe in the redemption of the abstract masses behind bars, and simultaneously call for the public disownment of perpetrators in our activist communities and families? This is the hardest work of all, especially when perpetrators are rich and powerful. But it might be necessary work, if we are truly committed to an end to sexual violence, to consider that people like Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, and Louis C.K. are actually human beings who are not only capable of doing better, but might even deserve some compassion. (I know, I know... it’s not easy; but being compassionate toward perpetrators as victims of patriarchy does not diminish compassion for victims. Compassion is not a finite resource.)

And showing compassion to abusers does not mean protecting them from consequences, or from confronting the harm they have caused. In fact, in affirming the humanity of perpetrators, we recognize, as Maggie Block recently wrote, that:

Rapists can be our children, our siblings, and our parents, rapists can be our good friends, or our partners, or a member of our church community. Because we live in rape culture, there are lots of people who think their actions are totally normal and acceptable, even when they commit sexual assault and rape. And we as their community members need to not only teach them better, but we need to hold them accountable. If someone we love, someone who shows us their best self, someone who we know to be a very good person is accused of rape, we must believe the accuser. Just because we love someone does not make them incapable of rape, and if we spend all our time fighting for them, all our passion worrying about how hard it is for the perpetrator- we make it harder for survivors, we further engrain rape culture, and we do nothing to help the perpetrators we love to be better people.

Transformative justice makes space for holding these multiple truths. That perpetrators can be good people who do bad things. That we should believe victims no matter what, and also that we shouldn’t silence abusers, so that we can begin to engage with what they did and didn’t understand about their behavior. That while traumatizing an abuser through public shaming is not aiding in healing the cause of harm, it is also not a victim’s job to do the healing. These sometimes conflicting truths and gray areas are not easy to grapple with, but to address a complex issue, we must respond with complex solutions.

So, I want us to think beyond public shaming and expulsion. I want us to think beyond the tools provided to us by the carceral State, and I want us to refuse to be content to only hear about women in relationship to sex when they are victims of harmful iterations of it.

Justice for women and other genders who are victims of sexual abuse should include a centering of their right to pleasure. I want a form of justice that not only teaches men (and other genders) how to not rape, but also teaches men how to make women (and other genders) feel safe and turned on and feel good. Justice means accountability and transformation, but also visions for a better world. And my better world is grounded in excitement about sex, not a fear of it.

A sex-positive transformative justice approach to fighting rape culture also includes centering the disproportionate impact of sexual violence on marginalized people, and how more harm towards trans and cis women of color means less pleasure for them as well. And how it’s a problem not just because of violence, but also because of a lack of good sex. For example, what impact might it have if more people who had sex with trans people talked about how good it is? (Hi! It’s really good!) What if we heard those stories, instead of only stories about trans people as victims of violence because their perpetrator could not bear their attractions?

In her book of essays, former sex worker feminist and economic justice activist Amber Hollibaugh writes:

We should be attempting to create a viable sexual future and a movement powerful enough to defend us simultaneously against sexual abuse. We must demand that our pleasure and need for sexual exploration not be pitted against our need for safety. Feminism is a liberation movement: it needs to fight with that recognition at its center. We cannot build a movement that silences women or attempts to fight sexual abuse isolated from every other aspect of our oppression...Feminism must be an angry, uncompromising movement that is just as insistent about our right to fuck, our right to the beauty of our individual...desires, as it is concerned with the images and structures that distort it.2

Indeed. In the end, our fight against rape culture is a fight for freedom. Freedom from fear, freedom from violence, freedom from coercion. But also freedom to flirt and be flirted with, fuck and be fucked, come and be part of others' coming, safely, consensually, and pleasurably.

This essay originally appeared on Raechel Anne Jolie’s blog, and has been adapted and reprinted with permission.

*** [1] In Yes Means Yes! Visions of Female Sexual Power & A World Without Rape, p. 3. (Return) [2] From My Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home, p. 103. (Return)

Raechel Anne Jolie is an educator, writer, podcaster, and activist. She holds a PhD In Communication/Media Studies with a minor in Feminist & Critical Sexuality Studies from the University of Minnesota. You can find more of her writing on her website and hear her on her podcast, Feminist Killjoys, PhD. You can also follow her on Twitter and Instagram. She currently resides in Massachusetts with her partner, perfect witch-cat, and adorable dachshund.

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WHAT IS SHADOW WORK?

Shadow work is the process of exploring your inner darkness, hell, or “Shadow Self.” Your Shadow Self – a concept created by renowned psychologist Carl Jung – forms a part of your unconscious mind and is built up of everything you feel ashamed of thinking and feeling, as well as every impulse, repressed idea, desire, fear and perversion that for one reason or another, you have “locked away” consciously or unconsciously. Often this is done as a way of keeping yourself tame, likeable and “civilized” in the eyes of others.

Shadow work, therefore, is basically the attempt to uncover everything that we have hidden and every part of us that has been disowned and rejected. Why? Because without revealing to ourselves what we have hidden, we remain burdened with problems such as anger, guilt, shame, disgust and grief. This article describes the types of repressed feelings and thoughts that compose our Shadow Selves more in depth.

HOW TO LET YOUR DEMONS GUIDE YOU

The prospect is formidable: descending into the depths of the smoky haze that is your own personal hell and looking at the demon within you squarely in the face. However scary this is, the truth is that your demon inside, your disowned darkness, is incredibly alone. No wonder it makes so much mischief and chaos trying to get your attention!

Sometimes when we awaken to the presence of our Shadows we feel a deep sense of remorse, even revulsion for the finely-tuned, squeaky clean facades we’ve been showing off to the world for so long . . . and so we rebel. We jump to the other end of the spectrum, and almost worship or “idolize” the darkness within us. But this is merely another form of craziness and distraction from the main goal: healing and wholeness. Be careful of this.

But how do you let your demons “guide” you?

To effectively follow the trail of your demon and to conscientiously begin your journey of Shadow Work, you first need to cultivate self-awareness. Without being conscious of what you’re doing, thinking, feeling and saying, you won’t progress very far.

If, however, you are fairly certain that you’re self-aware (or enough to start the process), you will then need to adopt an open mindset. You will need to have the courage and willingness to observe EVERYTHING uncomfortable you place importance in, and ask “why?”.

What do I mean by the phrase “placing importance in”? By this I mean that, whatever riles, shocks, infuriates, disturbs and terrifies you, you must pay attention to. Closely.

Likely, you will discover patterns constantly emerging in your life. For example, you might be outraged or embarrassed every time sex appears in a TV show or movie you like (possibly revealing sexual repression, or mistaken beliefs about sex that you’ve adopted throughout life). Or you might be terrified of seeing death or dead people (possibly revealing your resistance to the nature of life, or a childhood trauma). Or you might be disgusted by alternative political, sexual and spiritual lifestyles (possibly revealing your hidden desire to do the same).

There are so many possibilities out there, and I encourage you to go slowly, take your time, and one by one pick through what you place importance in.

“But I don’t place importance in gross, bad or disturbing things in life, how could I? I don’t care for them,” you might be asking.

Well, think for a moment. If you didn’t place so much importance in what makes you angry, disgusted or upset . . . why would you be reacting to it so much? The moment you emotionally react to something is the moment you have given that thing power over you. Only that which doesn’t stir up emotions in us is not important to us.

See what you respond to and listen to what your Shadow is trying to teach you.

***

If you are looking for some serious, authentic and long-lived healing in your life, the Shadow Work practice of letting your demons guide you is the perfect way to experience profound inner transformation

credit to https://lonerwolf.com/shadow-work-demons/#