Things Fall Apart
“We say what’s truest for us, often what makes us feel small, afraid, and as though we’ve relinquished the control we thought was holding everything together.
We see that conflict is not to be feared. We can fall apart and come back together all the time if, at our core, we believe in our development, that we grow, deepen and mature.
There is always something that we are most afraid of saying, the truth we protect at all costs.
Vulnerability can teach us but it’s necessary to have a culture that rewards and encourages tenderness more than it shames us.
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Things fall apart to show us who we were in the first place. Conflict is a teacher. Sometimes we would do better to allow crises to destabilize us, or at the very least not to resist them so fervently.
How we move through conflicts together shows people how possible it is to have conflicts in their own lives, perhaps their own families, and to stay in relationship. That the two can exist together.
Most of us struggle to admit when we’re scared, and a good number of us are scared most of the time.
In conflicts, our survival instincts get activated.
We can learn how to feel and listen to our bodies’ reactions without acting them out or becoming them.
The cover, the hardening, that we call strength is not just evidence of our survival. It also disguises a terror that comes from knowing that many people have not survived and that there is an unresolved cruelty growing just below the crust of our society.
Fear is the reminder that our lives are precious and precarious.
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What makes one conflict generative, moving us toward understanding, and another caustic? How could we engage in conflict while minimizing harm?
What do we need to know and do to get to the other side?
Nonstop consumption of conflict (in movies, sports, news, social media) is a by-product of the collective anxiety we feel as we face uncertain and high-stakes futures. Conflict entertainment is a distraction from deep, sustained engagement with our shared issues.
Why protect outcomes when instead I could see what was possible this time?
Conflict has a way of undoing us, of stretching us beyond our contained bodies, the shape that we usually identify with and feel safe in. When we create safety for ourselves just by listening, our bodies will offer up the truth.
We can let the emotion inhabit us, inflame us, and ask. What are you protecting? What are you most afraid of? What do you need me to know?
We change in the processes of:
making amends
incorporating another’s reality into our own
knowing ourselves, our motivations
being in practice that interrupts our unconscious and violent flailing
What changes us is vulnerability, acknowledgement, and responsibility.
Living our values decides the next shape we take.”
Explore incorporating another’s reality into our own
In our somatic inquiry this week, we build on our exploration last week Expanding Our We:
Embodied Empathy is the capacity to understand and feel what another person is experiencing. It has the power to create a sense of safety for people in their own emotions or experience.
I could have enough curiosity to consider what it meant to them, not just how I might react to it.
Empathy is listening with an open chest that allows us to understand.
Settle in your body and breath, cultivating an open heart and regulated nervous system for the inquiry.
Bring to mind a person you know, or a public figure you know of, whose life is very different from your own. It could be someone with a trauma history unlike your own, a person of a different race or gender identity, or a person whose ideas about how the world “should be” are challenging for you to understand or accept.
What is life like for them? Think of a specific incident of conflict that has happened or that you might imagine. Let yourself visualize the encounter in some detail.
Keep it real. You’re not a bad person because your nervous system is activated when there is conflict. Stay in touch with sensations in your body, with your breath, and with how you (your nervous system) are responding to threat. Are you in fight/ flight/ freeze/ fawn? How does that affect your interaction with them?
Work with visual images - put an image of the person into a frame on the wall on the other side of the room and notice the response in your body. Can you keep a soft chest? If the image is activating, move your eyes around the empty space on the outside of the frame a few times in each direction then look again.
How do you interpret their words and actions? What is your experience with people “like them”? What are your beliefs about them?
What does the image of that person reflect back to you about you? Conflict can activate core deficiency beliefs or traumatic memories of other times you felt remorse or the sting of someone’s contempt or anger. Use your breath and grounding tools to come back into regulation before continuing.
Now imagine that you are in the same situation with the same words except that you are now experiencing the event from their perspective. What is happening in their nervous system? What is their response to you? How do they interpret your words and actions? What is their experience with people “like you”? What are their beliefs about you?
Complete the inquiry by taking note of what arose in you and what you might be curious about exploring further. Offer yourself kindness and some softening in your body and breath. If it feels genuine, offer the same to the other person.
We are working with What It Takes To Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change The World, by Prentis Hemphill. The above are a series of quotes and reflections from the book.