The underlying premise in Healing America’s Narratives is that the United States we know in the third decade of the 21st century is inevitable. Viewed through the lenses of history and psychology, our violence, anxiety, depression, addiction, wealth disparity, bigotry, greed, excess, and our individual and collective trauma are anything but surprising.
America remains an experiment:
“We were conceived through the fertilization of ideas that gave voice to some and subjugated others. We were born through a bloodbath that pitted Brit against Brit on land stolen from indigenous peoples and developed by kidnapped Africans. We were raised on enslavement, land and property theft, massacre, betrayal, and peasant labor. We were reborn in an attempt to maintain the experiment through an anything-but-civil bloodbath with ourselves, from which we have yet to fully recover. And we were reborn yet again as a financial and military superpower as the result of a global bloodbath.
“We regularly perpetrate and perpetuate violence against others while refusing to acknowledge and address in any effective way the everyday violence we commit against ourselves…. Not yet 250 years old, we’re lost in a national adolescence, thinking we’re invincible and immortal — despite clear evidence that we are neither. Not only have we not recovered from our bloodbaths of birth and rebirth in any whole, integrated sense, we continue to choose to bathe ourselves and others in blood, literally and metaphorically, because that is the normal we know.”¹
Killing each other with guns is part of a larger legacy.
An online search today for “mass shootings in the US” returned 34,800,000 results in 0.38 seconds. A similar search, for “shootings in the US,” took more time — 0.51 seconds — and returned 2,400,000,000 results. Let’s say those numbers out loud: thirty-four million, eight hundred thousand, and two billion, four hundred million.
We are divided in our views of guns, and we debate interpretations of the Second Amendment while we kill each other and gun sales make a lot of money for a few people. All of our children, in every school district in the country practice active shooter drills. Just in case.
I don’t pretend to have solution to this problem. But as long as there is a moat filled with lobbyists around the Capitol and the protected royalty within need to fund their reelection campaigns, we will continue to sling meaningless slogans and talking points about what the founders wanted, good guys with guns, thoughts and prayers, this has to stop, not one more, and the greatest country in the world. At what?
We know that change can be unsettling, even scary, whether it’s exterior change imposed by events such as war, weather, or pandemic, or prospective interior change of beliefs, values, or view, beckoning for our attention. As we continue our exploration of Chapter Eleven’s foundational question, “So, now what?” we’ll briefly consider here a model of how and why we resist change.
For more than two decades, Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey have researched, developed, and implemented their “immunity to change” approach to understanding and overcoming individual and organizational resistance to change. In workshops and in their 2009 book, Immunity to Change, they present a nuanced four-column process that asks us to identify in column one, our goals — what we are committed to changing.¹ [e.g. I want to spend less time looking at my phone.]
In column two, we list what we do or don’t do that obstructs the path to achieving these column one goals. [I use my phone to get news, for entertainment, for being in touch with friends and family, as an alarm clock, and to search online. I always have it within arms reach. I don’t allow myself to be away from it.]
In column three, we first name what we’re afraid might happen if we stop the column two behaviors that we do engage, or actually engage the column two behaviors that we avoid; [I’m afraid I’ll miss out on something important; I’m afraid my friends and family will think I don’t care about them; I’m afraid I won’t be up to date on the news and might appear ignorant…] and then the competing commitments that underly these fears [I’m committed to not missing out on anything; I’m committed to not letting my friends and family down; I’m committed to not appearing ignorant…]
In column four, we explore the assumptions that inform the competing commitments [I assume that if I miss something important, terrible things will happen; I assume that if I don’t respond to family and friends quickly they will think I don’t care; I assume that if I’m not up to date on the latest news, others will think I’m ignorant…].
In Kegan and Lahey’s exploration of assumptions, they ask us to determine (test) whether the assumptions are true or false, and they label any assumption that was previously unconscious or that was conscious but untested, as a Big Assumption — worthy of investigation. Unconscious or unexplored assumptions have us. We have assumptions once we are aware of and have tested them.
With these steps laid out across a four-column worksheet, an “immunity to change map” depicts an immune system that is designed to keep us safe:
“…the set of big assumptions collectively makes the third-column commitments inevitable…it is clear how they sustain the immune system: The third-column commitments clearly follow from the big assumptions and generate the behaviors in column 2; these behaviors clearly under-mine the goal in column 1.”²
As with re-visioning narratives and owning and integrating Shadow, Kegan and Lahey’s immunity to change process helps us uncover what is hidden — competing commitments and big assumptions — so we might move forward in a more integrated way.
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Robert Kegan, and Lisa Laskow Lahey, Immunity to Change, (Harvard Business Press, 2009). The process is “nuanced,” detailed, and specific and unfolds most accurately and effectively through numerous conversations and drafts (i.e. rushing through it is not a skillful approach). Their chapter 9, “Diagnosing Your Own Immunity to Change” is available here: https://mindsatwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Chapter9.pdf
In the previous essay, we introduced M. Scott Peck’s stages of community-making: pseudocommunity, chaos, emptiness, and community.
Here, as we continue our turn toward the collective, we’ll look briefly at Theory U, a book and methodology by MIT professor and founder of the Presencing Institute, Otto Scharmer, who invites leaders — that’s all of us at some level — to explore their “blind spot” — the “inner place” and “quality of intention and attention” from which they operate.
Scharmer engages a developmental approach that navigates individual, group, institutional, and global dynamics and structures, with a focus on the collective. “Presencing, the blending of sensing and presence, means to connect with the Source of the highest future possibility and to bring it into the now.”¹
The process invites leaders to connect “to the deepest source, from which the field of the future begins to arise — viewing from source,” by first recognizing habits and patterns (compare with Peck’s pseudocommunity and chaos) and then seeing with fresh eyes, letting go of preconceptions, connecting with the stillness of source, and “letting come” what is yet to emerge (compare with Peck’s emptiness).²
Theory U engages open minds, hearts, and wills, deeply explores self and work, and embraces the collective energies of co-initiating, co-sensing, co-presencing, co-creating, and co-evolving. Scharmer is playing an infinite game³ at organizational, institutional, and global levels: “The real battle in the world today is…among the different evolutionary futures that are possible for us…right now. What is at stake is…the choice of who we are, who we want to be, and where we want to take the world… The real question, then, is “What are we here for?”⁴
In Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds,Thomas Hübl, after several decades of engaging large groups in collective trauma integration and healing, works through what is now known as the Collective Trauma Integration Process (CTIP).
The process includes three stages: Cohering the Group, Inducing the Collective Wave, and Meta-Reflection. The second stage unfolds through four waves:processing group denial, group eruption, discerning the collective voice, and group clearing and integration.⁵ Hübl’s work also includes Trauma Integration Processes for individual trauma (ITIP) and Ancestral/inter-generational trauma (ATIP).
These two synopses, along with Peck’s in the previous essay, just scratch the surface of Peck’s, Scharmer’s, and Hübl’s respective offerings, which differ in content, context, scope, scale, and intent. Amid these differences, however, they share a trajectory that moves generally from old or current ways of being, making believe, and denial, through chaos, resistance, and disruption, then through emptiness, presence, stillness, and openness, and into true community, co-evolution, integration, and healing — these last four being ongoing processes, not static end points.
Peck, Scharmer, and Hübl all emphasize the importance of the collective; the need for each member therein to do individual work as well; and the need for those who lead or facilitate community, presencing, or healing to embody the energetic, spiritual, psychological, and mental competence and clarity to guide others.
Our American polarizations have us stuck in denial, disruption, chaos, and resistance to growth. Until enough of us engage the will and the available means to move collectively into emptiness, stillness, and deep listening, we’ll neither own and integrate our national Shadow nor heal our individual, ancestral, and collective traumas. Such owning, integrating, and healing won’t be legislated, trickled down, or magically cast upon us. Peck, Scharmer, and Hübl present opportunities for intentional engagement, practice, love, and discipline.
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Otto Scharmer, Theory U: The Social Technology of Presencing, (Berrett-Koehler, 2009), 163.
Ibid., 38–39.
James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility (Free Press-MacMillan, 1986), 3. According to Carse, a finite game is played with a limited number of players whose intentions are to win and bring the game to an end (i.e. conventional American history); an infinite game is played by an unlimited number of players whose intentions are to invite more players to play and to keep the game going (i.e. what we need to do if we are to survive).
Scharmer, Theory U, 20.
Thomas Hübl, Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds, (Sounds True, 2020), 119-42.
As we continue to explore America’s narratives and collective Shadow, it’s essential to remember and pay attention to the interrelationships among individuals, groups, and systems — with systems, as used here, including all of our natural and human-made environments — from the planet itself to big cities, to belief systems, to the technology you’re using right now to read or listen to this essay.
From among those abundant possibilities, we’ll focus here on individual human beings as they come together in search of, or because of, community. One deceptively simple and wonderfully useful approach to community emerged through M. Scott Peck’s work after the publication of his groundbreaking book, The Road Less Traveled, in 1978. He and some colleagues set out to explore what they called community-making, and after some years of experience-based practice — convening groups of individuals to make community — he published The Different Drum: Community-Making and Peace in 1987.
Briefly, in pseudocommunity, individuals are nice, friendly, and polite — as they try to fake community.
When the facade falls apart, chaos emerges, characterized by attempts to control and fix each other; chaos feels frustrating, exhausting, and further from community.
Eventually, a facilitator suggests the possibility of emptiness, which Peck describes as the hardest, “most crucial stage” — “the bridge between chaos and com-munity” — that requires participants to “empty themselves of barriers to communication,” many of which they have just experienced in chaos. The barriers include expectations, preconceptions, ideology, and attempts to fix, solve, or control.² It is common for individuals to ignore the initial invitation to emptiness, unwilling to let go of what they know and to surrender to the process.
Emptiness requires both the “little deaths” and rebirths of each individual and the larger death of the initial group. “When its death has been completed, open and empty, the group enters community. In this final stage a soft quietness descends. It is a kind of peace. The room is bathed in peace.”³ Peck is clear that true community is not magically permanent; it must be maintained.
Consider your own current relationships and “communities” — in the more common meaning of the word. What stage — pseudocommunity, chaos, emptiness, or true community — characterizes your experience of each? To what extent do the stages emerge and disappear and reemerge during the days, weeks, months, and years of your life?
In light of your, my, and our discrete experiences, how, then, in the name of all that is good (and possible), might we scale such an approach to affect a nation — or even effect a new version of a nation? No easy task, that amid our current chaos.
As we’ll explore in coming essays, large groups of people around the world are already convening and building community, albeit using different language and with very specific focuses. Readers familiar with the work of Otto Scharmer and Thomas Hübl might already see the parallels with Peck’s four stages.
We’ll explore all of this further in coming essays. For now, your homework is to notice the comings and goings of pseudocommunity, chaos, emptiness, and true community in your own life.
Be kind to yourself and others.
M. Scott Peck, The Different Drum: Community-Making and Peace, (Touchstone-Simon & Schuster, 1987), 86–135.
Ibid., 95–98. For more on barriers to communication, see also, Marra, Enough with the Talking Points, (2020).
In The Myth of Normal, Dr. Gabor Maté writes that “[t]he meaning of the word ‘trauma,’ in its Greek origin, is ‘wound.’ Whether we realize it or not, it is our woundedness, or how we cope with it, that dictates much of our behavior, shapes our social habits, and informs our ways of thinking about the world.”¹
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, in The Body Keeps the Score, is clear that “trauma is NOT the story of what happened a long time ago; trauma is residue that’s living inside of you now…in horrible sensations, panic reactions, uptightness, explosions, and impulses.”² He reminds us that trauma is not limited to combat veterans, refugees, or victims of violent crimes or natural disasters. “Trauma happens to us, our friends, our families, and our neighbors,” and it “affects not only those who are directly exposed to it, but also those around them.”³
Individual trauma can result from a one-time event or from exposure to repeated events like ongoing childhood abuse or neglect (known as complex trauma). Collective trauma impacts groups of people (war, slavery, genocide, natural disasters, etc.). Intergenerational (aka historical or transgenerational) trauma is carried forward through generations, biologically, experientially, and psychologically. Secondary trauma arises when one is exposed to the firsthand traumatic experiences of another. These are not mutually exclusive categories.
In varied iterations, trauma informs our national Shadow and is a core aspect of our history.
The subjugation of women still plays out in many ways, just one of which is the unprecedented rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide among our teenage daughters.⁴
The betrayal and slaughter of Native Americans still plays out in disproportionate unemployment, disease, and low life expectancy, especially on reservations.
The kidnapping, enslavement, and lynchings of Africans and African Americans still plays out in disproportionate susceptibility to specific diseases, mass incarceration, and less access to quality health care.
The effects of every war we’ve engaged in still plays out in the primary trauma of our combat veterans, the secondary trauma of their families, the collective trauma they share, and the intergenerational trauma that has been passed down for centuries.
We are all impacted, at varying levels, by our daily rituals of violent crime, our lack of equitable access to affordable health care, increasingly intense and more frequent natural disasters, “active shooter drills” and actual shooters for our school children, employees, shoppers, and others, and the global residuals of the COVID-19 pandemic. The list continues and it is long.
We are not suggesting here that the intergenerational trauma that is passed down to someone whose life seems otherwise okay carries with it the same immediate experience as the primary trauma of a combat veteran, a victim of violent crime or natural disaster, or those who have been abandoned or neglected. We are suggesting that Americans live in a country that remains an experiment, and that the experiment involves ongoing trauma.
We were conceived through the fertilization of ideas that gave voice to some and subjugated others.
We were born through a bloodbath that pitted Brit against Brit on land stolen from indigenous peoples and developed by kidnapped Africans.
We were raised on enslavement, land and property theft, massacre, betrayal, and peasant labor.
We were reborn in an attempt to maintain the experiment through an anything-but-civil bloodbath with ourselves, from which we have yet to fully recover.
And we were reborn yet again as a financial and military superpower as the result of a global bloodbath.
Without honest recognition of and intentional steps toward healing the individual, collective, and intergenerational traumas of America’s conception, birth, and rebirths, our efforts to re-vision⁵ our narratives and integrate our Shadow will be partial at best, and completely ineffective at worst.
Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture, (Avery, 2022), 16.
“Re-vision” simply means to “see again” with fresh eyes something we think we’re familiar with. This is consistent with, and deepens the more conventional use of “revision” to mean change.
Most of us who are more or less healthy have no problem extending compassion to — recognizing and engaging with the suffering of — others. Many of us, however, when it comes to our own suffering, struggle to offer compassion to ourselves.
Kristin Neff, in her book, Self-Compassion, writes that compassion “involves the recognition and clear seeing of suffering….feelings of kindness for people who are suffering….[and] recognizing our shared human condition.”¹ Self-compassion, then, asks us to be mindful — so we can recognize and clearly see our own suffering. It asks us to extend kindness towards ourselves so we might help ourselves alleviate our suffering. And it asks us to recognize and remember our shared human condition — our common humanity — which includes, but need not be defined by, pain and suffering.²
Consider for a moment the importance of Scott Peck’s idea of balancing — of disciplining our discipline — so that we might avoid an overly rigid, narrow, and impossible-to-maintain set of standards, and learn to relax into the prospect of not having to be perfect, accepting our full humanity, and accepting ourselves in all our beauty and blemish. This balancing is a manifestation of self-compassion, which means self-compassion can be an essential part of our self-discipline.
So, the next time you find yourself facing pain, suffering, or both, practice self-compassion.³ Any one of these three, in any order, can help. Each of them invites the others:
Slow down and express care and kindness for yourself.
Remember that pain and suffering are part of our common humanity. You’re not in it alone, even if it feels that way sometimes.
Hold whatever comes up — sensations, thoughts, and emotions — in mindful awareness.⁴
The language of pain and suffering can get a bit slippery. For the sake of this post, pain arises from difficult events and circumstances — we break a bone; we lose a loved one; we have a difficult argument, etc. Suffering arises from how we respond to the pain we experience. If we respond to the pain with anger, denial, or blame, we tend to suffer more (similar to the idea of dirty pain. If we respond to our pain with acceptance and understanding, we tend to suffer less (similar to clean pain).
To truly pay attention in this way, some level of healthy self-discipline is required — not the discipline of the angry parent wielding a belt, but the discipline that helps us move forward when things are difficult. In The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck defined discipline as “the basic set of tools we require to solve life’s problems,” and he characterized “these tools [as] techniques of suffering, means by which we experience the pain of problems in such a way as to work through them…learning and growing in the process.”¹ Peck’s toolbox contains four essential tools: delaying gratification, acceptance of responsibility, dedication to truth/reality, and balancing (learning to discipline discipline).² These tools may seem obvious conceptually, but they must be embraced and embodied if we are to benefit from them in this third decade of twenty-first-century America.
Briefly, delaying gratification requires that we engage what is painful before we, and often in order to, experience what’s pleasurable. Do the hard thing first; get it out of the way. Dr. David Schnarch and Dr. Steven Hayer³ use the term clean pain to refer to our ability to delay gratification and move into the pain of difficult circumstances when we know something must be done, even if we’re not sure what it is. Dirty pain is what we encounter when we try to avoid what is necessary, uncomfortable, and uncertain. The clean pain of delaying gratification often leads to learning, growth and healing narratives; the dirty pain of avoidance or denial tends to lead to increased suffering, a lack of resolution, and illness narratives.
Accepting responsibility requires that we honestly own what’s ours — that we accept and engage those problems that are ours to solve. It is at the heart of healing our narratives and owning and integrating Shadow. It requires that we do the difficult work of wisely and compassionately discerning what belongs to us and what belongs to others. It challenges us to be present to and move beyond the harmful belief that either everything, or nothing, is our responsibility.
Individual dedication to truth or reality (used synonymously here) requires that we know what we mean by these words; collective dedication to truth requires that we agree on these meanings or at least honor each other’s meanings. Our working definition for these essays is Parker Palmer’s view that “truth is an eternal conversation about things that matter, conducted with passion and discipline.”⁴ So, truth is an unfolding part of the infinite game; it is a conversation to which all are invited⁵ — not the domain of one individual or group — and it is important and welcomes and requires both deep feeling and healthy rigor.
Finally, balancing invites the disciplining of discipline and avoids obsession, rigidity, and inflexibility. It allows us to take a day off, to rest and recover, to eat the icing (or even dessert) first, to recognize that sometimes good enough — even if that phrase gets caught in the throat or knots the stomach — is more appropriate than best, great, or good.
Another model of discipline that can be useful comes from retired college basketball coach, Bob Knight. Knight also described discipline as having four components: Do what has to be done. Do it when it has to be done. Do it the best you possibly can. Do it that way all the time. I won’t do a point-by-point comparison with Peck’s model. My experience is that each of these models has value in the practice of self-discipline.
Love is also required if we are to truly pay attention, and we’ll explore it in a future post. In the absence of love, there’s a good chance discipline will either be ignored or manifested in unhealthy, punitive, subjugating ways — whether self- or other-directed.
M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth, (Touchstone-Simon & Schuster, 1978), 17–18.
Peck develops each of these in detail on pages 16–78.
Dr. David Schnarch and Dr. Steven Hayer, in Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, (Central Recovery Press, 2017), 19–20.
Parker J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life, (Jossey-Bass, 1998), 104.
The idea that “all” are invited is important, and it needs to be qualified. A more accurate characterization might be “all who are authentically dedicated to truth.” An example: Trump strategist, Steve Bannon, argued that it was the media and not the Democratic party that was the “real opposition” and that “the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit” — which Trump, Bannon, and others did quite well. Michael Lewis, “Has Anyone Seen the President?” in Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, (Brookings Institution, 2021), 163.
Our exploration of this question in forthcoming essays will necessarily revisit some concepts and practices that we’ve already acknowledged (cultural givens, skillful means, healthy development, intentional practice, silence, openness, truth, and love) as well as some that we have not explicitly addressed, such as resistance, trauma, self-discipline, self-compassion, empathy, and community.
In preparation for what’s to come, as you read this now, consider the previous paragraph and get a sense of — perhaps write down — one or two (or more) of the concepts and practices listed that you feel you would like to work or play with and develop further, and one or two that you feel you are in a good place with — that don’t need your immediate attention. Feel free to add your own if there’s something in your awareness that’s not listed above. And you can always change your mind and revise your list.
Another way to do this, which I find more challenging, is to prioritize the list: #1 would be what you feel you’d most like to work or play with and the final item you list would be what you feel is in pretty good shape right now. Again, none of this is etched in stone; just playing with the list might bring an insight. Stay open and curious.
In the perfectly integrated, comprehensive, inclusive, and balanced universe in which most of us do not (think we) live, we can hear the mystical cheerleaders’ rhythmic, enthusiastic, and obvious response echoing around the arena: EV-ree-one! Where most of us do think we live, it can be helpful to have a sense of who our people are — not in the unhealthy us-against-the-others sense that governs most finite games, but in the sense of realistically assessing how and with whom I might do the most good in the world as it is, with what I have to offer, without harming others, to the benefit of the whole shebang. Taking care of my, or our, little niche is often the best way to serve the greater good.
Often, the answer to this question lies not in some definitive choice we make but in our authentic attention to the intersections of who we think we are, the stories we choose, the impacts we both have and receive, and what we are able to uncover and own that we previously had not seen. While “my people” may be superficially identified, or at least narrowed down, through blood, geography, and chronology, they are inevitably found and known through experience, belief, and worldview. They include those I learn from and learn with and those who learn from me — whether the learning emerges in the classroom, on the street, at the checkout counter, in the healthcare office, at work, or at the kitchen table. Consider the words of Ta-Nehisi Coates, as his writing led him into “contact with more human beings”:
“I had editors — more teachers — and these were the first white people I’d ever really known on any personal level. They defied my presumptions — they were afraid neither for me nor of me. Instead they saw in my unruly curiosity and softness something that was to be treasured and harnessed.”¹
The friends we choose and who choose us in childhood and adolescence, the groups we align with when we choose a craft, profession, or area of study (or one chooses us), and the individuals in our chosen craft, profession, or discipline towards whom we gravitate may provide insight and evidence about, but don’t necessarily define, “our people.” Many folks will come, stay for a while and go; others will come and stay. We begin to recognize some who stay, and even some who go, as our people.
As tempting as it can be to espouse an all-of-us perspective and claim everyone as our people (as those mystical cheerleaders did above), if we’re operating primarily from a Body-Mind identity, it is difficult to embody and live up to that claim — despite its value and attractiveness. Better to live in a healthy embodiment of who our people truly are right now, than to delude ourselves with an espoused, but not yet embodied and lived, self-aggrandizing claim.
Still, part of our intentional practice might be to “act as if” all humans are our people and to see how such practice impacts our sense of self, our beliefs about others, and our behavior.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, (One World- Random House, 2015), 62.
Some of the story sources that inform Healing America’s Narratives
Everything Is a Story
Note your immediate response to this premise. Is it, ‘What do you mean — please explain?’ or, ‘Bullshit…?’ or ‘Du-uh, tell me something I don’t already know?’ Perhaps it’s ‘Thank you for confirming what I was beginning to see?’ Is it something else entirely? Whatever it is fine — it’s your story about the suggestion that everything is a story. Consider that if your response was in the general area of Bullshit.
The cultural givens handed down by our parents and earliest communities and experiences are stories. As (or if) we grow up, wake up, clean up, and show up, some stories hold up and some don’t. Sometimes the givens that don’t hold up were false when we received them and sometimes they were true — as far as anyone knew at the time — but the larger, always evolving community of truth learned more and disproved them when new evidence was found.¹ Doctors no longer recommend smoking cigarettes as a way to relax. Planet Earth is no longer considered the center of the universe.
The stories we choose to believe and tell, as well as the stories that choose us, are powerful. Being in the position to choose our stories and not be chosen by them carries power. Mary Catherine Bateson encourages us to exercise this power:
“…think about the creative responsibility involved in the fact that there are different ways to tell your stories. It’s not that one is true and another is not true. It’s a matter of emphasis and context…. The choice you make affects what you can do next.”²
So, let’s be thoughtful about the stories we choose to tell about who we (think we — and they) are. The choices we make and the stories we tell matter.
Consider the specific stories that inform(ed) yourcultural givens. What holds up? What’s the most recent revision you’ve made, or that was made for you, where revision actually means re-vision — to see again? Look at the sweeping revisions, many ongoing, in the earlier essays in this series, and the specific, personal revisions shared therein, such as Robert McNamara’s ‘re-visioned’ view that owned the extent to which he and the other architects of the Vietnam war misjudged, underestimated, failed, and did not recognize a long list of people and ideas.
Such seeing again is never easy and always valuable when it moves the seer toward a more comprehensive, inclusive view. Malcolm X’s life stands as an exemplar of re-visioning. Two of his major re-visions — becoming a Muslim and joining the Nation of Islam while in prison and then leaving the Nation of Islam while remaining a Muslim after his 1964 Hajj — follow the developmental trajectory from a focus on me to a focus on us to a focus on all of us. In each case he changed his name and publicly recognized and owned his seeing again.³
How we tell our stories is as important as which stories we tell. Focus only on what’s wrong and get an “illness” story. Open up to the possibilities of moving through and beyond what’s wrong and tell or write a “healing” story. Adults model both of these for children: if the child who falls down the stairs and breaks an arm is confronted with parental overwhelm, blame, anger, and fear, an illness story emerges in which stairs are dangerous and the child is careless or clumsy; if the child is met with parental support, concern, acceptance, understanding, and love, a healing story emerges in which accidents can happen, stairs are useful and fine and best engaged with care, and the child is curious and open to experience.
Illness stories limit us, narrowly focus on a sense of wrongness, keep us stuck, and can reinforce trauma; healing stories open up the context in which we understand what happened (wrongness may be relevant, but not primary), they can expand and free us, and they can contribute to trauma recovery. Because they focus on what’s wrong, illness stories are often tidy, brief, stagnant, partial, and consistent. Because they emerge through and invite increasingly larger contexts, healing stories are often messy, ongoing, progressive, comprehensive, and paradoxical. Explore your stories. Be kind to yourself.
Writing can be engaged as a powerful process⁴ that helps open us up to increasingly larger contexts that allow us to see and feel as others see and feel — to go beneath all the individual differences, see another soul just like ourselves, and at the same time deeply understand and embody those differences. Going one step further, learning to embody and tell or write someone else’s story, both helps us understand the other and often provides clarity into our own narrative.⁵
Finally, if I’m truly playing an infinite game,⁶ some questions may arise at the intersection of “who am I, really?” and “everything is a story.” Try these questions on for size: Without the stories I hold and that hold me, who am I, and what’s true in this moment? Who am I and what does this moment offer without my story/ies? Ram Dass’s channels four and five point toward a prospective answer. John Tarrant, in Bring Me the Rhinoceros, put it this way:
“Everyone knows that some events are just bad and make you sad or angry, and some are good and make you glad. Yet what everyone knows might not be true. For example there might be a certain coercion to the attitude that weddings must be happy, funerals have to be sad. It could prevent you from meeting the moment you are in. What if events don’t have to be anything other than what they are?”⁷
We owe it to ourselves and each other to create and tell our stories with care.
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1. See Jonathan Rauch’s The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (Brookings Institution, 2021) for an expansive and passionate exploration of his book’s title and the “community of truth.”
2. Mary Catherine Bateson, “Composing a Life,” Sacred Stories: A Celebration of the Power of Stories to Transform and Heal. Eds. Charles & Anne Simpkinson, (HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 42–43.
4. James Pennebaker has led the way in decades of research that back this up. See his Expressive Writing: Words that Heal, co-authored with John Evans, (2014); and Opening Up: The Healing Power of Emotions (1990), among others. See also John Fox’s Poetic Medicine: The Healing Art of Poem-Making, (1997). There are many more resources available.
5. See Marra, Enough with the Talking Points, (2020),79–82 for more on truly embodying another’s story. For a deeper dive into telling another’s story as if it were our own, see the work of Narrative 4, which uses “story exchange” to help young (and old) people develop empathy. (Some meeting “icebreaker” exercises skim the surface of this experience: two strangers briefly share who they are and then introduce each other to a group — speaking in first-person, as if they are the person they’re introducing. Narrative 4 goes deeper): https://narrative4.com/.
6. Inspired by James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility (Free Press-MacMillan, 1986). An infinite game is one in which the goals are to invite everyone to play and to keep the game going. A finite game is one in which the goal is to limit the players, win, and end the game.
7. John Tarrant, Bring Me the Rhinoceros, (Shambhala, 2008/2004), 113.
Reggie Marra, MA, PCC 