Nimue Brown's Blog, page 101

Willing to be uncomfortable

One of the most powerful things we can do to support each other, is be willing to be uncomfortable. It is key to listening with an open heart so as to fully take on whatever the other person is experiencing. If there are actions we can take that would genuinely help someone else, being willing to be uncomfortable with them will help us find those actions.

It is all too easy to act in a way that seems soothing, but has the effect of shutting people down. ‘There, there, don’t cry’ is not an act of giving comfort to a person in distress, it is about reducing discomfort for the person witnessing the crying. It’s a simple and common illustration. The person doing it probably does mean to be comforting, but doesn’t think through the implications.

Another common form – again probably well meant – is to reassure the person in distress. You’re ok, you’re doing well, it’s not that bad… Such statements are a real barrier to asking for help or even getting into the details of the problem.

In its worst forms, the shut down is deliberate. I’ve had people be really explicit about what they want me to do to make them feel more comfortable because they don’t want to deal with my distress. I’ve come to draw a line between well meant things that don’t work, and this kind of reaction. I can only have fairly limited and distant relationships with people who would prefer I shut up if I’m in distress. These are not people I continue to invest in.

It is a different situation if you are also in crisis and don’t have the means to support someone. However, my experience of people in crisis is that they are often the first people to move towards me when I’m struggling. It is my ill, wounded and struggling friends who are most likely to be willing to be uncomfortable with me when I need that. It has been my more well and comfortable former friends who were quickest to shut me down and tell me off.

It isn’t easy being open to someone else’s pain, but it is a powerful choice. It does get things done. It does far more good than vague reassurances or soothing noises. Being willing to hear, to try and understand, and to affirm the person in what they’re going through is a starting point from which better things are a lot more possible.

Being diseased

I’ve made some considerable effort not to get covid – I wear masks when I can (I get panic attacks so sometimes I can’t wear them). I’m vaccinated. I stay out of crowds and I don’t do much indoor stuff with people. But here we are, and it is in me and has been in me for a few days.

At this point there are no legal requirements for me to behave in any specific way. There is only advice, like working from home if I can. Little wonder that I have it. Part of the problem here is that we have a fundamentally broken system when it comes to work. We expect people to go to work when they are ill – spreading diseases of all kinds, and slowing recovery. Working when ill is horrible. The person who can just take a few days off and rest will recover faster. But, a lot of workplaces will punish you for doing that. Most people can’t afford to be unpaid or to lose their jobs over taking care of their health.

I feel grim, but not as grim as other things have made me feel in recent years. I’m very tired, but I was very tired anyway so it’s hard to know if this is new and extra very tired, or pre-existing very tired. My concentration is rubbish, but it’s mostly been rubbish this year.

I’m looking at how body stressors add to my experiences of panic. I’m starting to think that my panic experiences aren’t just silly things happening in my head for no reason, and that panic might be what my body does when it starts to feel dangerously under-resourced. I’m usually the first person to assume I’m making a fuss and taking a thing far too seriously, but here I am with covid and it is by no means the most ill I have felt this year. 

What if the panic isn’t an over-reaction? What if the panic isn’t something I need to learn how to control, but a genuine and reasonable response to hazards? What if the problem is one of being under-resourced, not one of just making a fuss? Everything I’ve encountered on the mental health side assumes that panic is an over-reaction, and that the problem is the panicking, not whatever caused it. Last week I had panic attacks caused by being in more body pain than I could take. Maybe the fact of the panicking isn’t the problem here. Maybe I’m not just making a fuss over nothing, and maybe that’s even relevant when the things going on are more about mental health as well.

Self Esteem and Privilege

Self esteem has far more to do with privilege than it does with either your innate worth, or your sense of self worth, or anything you might do to try and feel good about yourself. The more privilege a person has, the easier it is for them to feel good about themselves. Not only are they practically lifted by their advantages, but they will be praised and socially rewarded for having those advantages in the first place. At the extreme end of this we have the example of the UK government – murderously incompetent and full of self praise. No matter how they fail, they demonstrate arrogance and supreme self confidence.

At the other end of the scale, those who are struggling are socially punished for struggling. To be poor, or ill, is to be blamed for being poor and ill. If you belong to a minority, mainstream culture will punish you for existing – as trans, queer, Black, neurodivergent, disabled… To have been unlucky, got into debt, struggled with addiction or become homeless, been a victim of abuse or other crimes is to meet with blame, shame and stigma. How can a person have good self esteem when their society punishes them for their lack of privilege?

If you have a lot of privilege, no one demands much of you. If you have little privilege, then society measures your worth in productivity and encourages you to feel bad about inactivity. If you don’t currently have a job, or are too ill to work, or too ill to work full time, or you need to rest, you won’t be encouraged to feel comfortable about that. Government ministers will call you lazy and workshy, and begrudge you enough support to afford food. If your work isn’t well paid, you will be treated as though you don’t deserve to be able to afford food and shelter.

All the self esteem advice is about not pinning your sense of worth to external things. I’ve never seen anyone talking about how much of a privilege issue this is. Without privilege, you aren’t allowed to do that thing. Feeling like you have intrinsic worth is difficult when your society treats you like that isn’t true. For anyone who faces disadvantages, self esteem isn’t something you can just magically grow and without external validation feeling good about anything can be really difficult.

At the River

A birthday trip to The Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust meant that I got to spend a little time beside the River Severn. It was low tide, with a great curve of sand exposed – no doubt many wading birds were feeding, but only a few were visible. Thanks to the efforts of my fabulous offspring, I was able to see curlews, and I heard them, which was wonderful. It’s been years since that last happened.

There were wild cranes with chicks, kingfishers, avocets and oystercatchers. I think I’ve added shellduck and oystercachers to the small list of birds I can identify by all alone. There were a lot of fluffy baby geese, and a great many orchids.

I grew up on the Cotswold edge, above the Severn plain. The river was always part of my landscape and always part of my sense of sacredness.  

Do we choose how we react?

It’s one of those toxic positivity ideas – that we can always choose how we react. It blatantly isn’t true – torture and brainwashing alike exist because we know perfectly well that in the right conditions people are robbed of their ability to choose how they react. We know that trauma often leaves people unable to control their reactions to certain situations. If we’ve been taught to respond in a particular way, it can take a lot of work to change our reactions.

Making it all about how a person chooses to react provides effective cover for bullies. It’s not them bullying you, it’s you choosing to feel this way about the situation! I’ve seen this in action and it is unpleasant indeed. It can protect people from looking at their own behaviour and actions, making the person who has been hurt wholly responsible for the situation. 

If your reactions are actually pretty reasonable and the situation itself isn’t, then a focus on how you react isn’t going to help. It can be a distraction from holding boundaries, seeking help or demanding better. If, for example, you are depressed because you are exhausted, choosing to react differently means getting to still be exhausted while gaslighting yourself over the depression. This only makes things worse. Sometimes the key to improving a situation is not changing your attitude to it, but getting the shit sorted out, which may involve getting others to take more responsibility.

People don’t tend to wave this sort of content about in response to joy. The odds are the only time you will have a conversation about how you choose your responses, is when you’re expressing ‘negative’ emotions. This can be a shut-down. All emotions are valid. Grief, sorrow, anger, resentment, bitterness and regret are all valid human emotions and you may need to work them through in order to either get somewhere better or figure out how to carry them. There’s nothing wrong with this – it’s actually the healthier choice.

Supportive people will help you work through whatever you are feeling. They will validate you, comfort you and help you find ways through. They may help you explore different possible responses to situations or suggest other ways of thinking about things, but they won’t invalidate your feelings. Toxic people will tell you that you get to choose how you feel – implying that you should have chosen a different response, and may even act like this information is a fabulous and benevolent gift.

I over-explain

I over-explain because I think I’m the problem and if I tried harder to make sense, things would work out better.

I do it from long-term knowledge based on the experience of other people, that you may find me weird or incomprehensible, and that it is not enough for me to say ‘I need’ or ‘I feel.’ I expect to have to justify what I’m doing or asking for, and to be able to demonstrate what makes it normal, reasonable or proportionate. 

I desperately want to be understood. I want to make sense. I crave understanding. Sometimes I end up writing very long emails, because I need an ‘ok, that makes sense now. I get it.’ I don’t expect to make sense up front, but I’d really like to try and be more coherent and comprensible.

I over-explain because I hope that you care enough to want to listen. I crave acceptance. I aim to be tolerable and I always feel that if I made more sense I would be easier to tolerate. Also most of the time I have a pretty good idea about why the weird things about me are the way they are. 

I invest a lot of effort in trying to understand other people because I really do want to make the best sense I can of whatever’s going on for other people. I’ll happily take your word for it, if there are things you can’t do, or can’t bear or you need me to be patient with. But give me the chance to understand and I’ll try my best. I like it when people explain. I forget sometimes that not everyone even likes explanations.

I have (mostly) learned my lesson, that explanations are not always good, and that long emails seem threatening or invasive to some people. I have learned that asking to be heard and understood can be asking too much. I don’t try to explain as much as I used to. I try to gather evidence that you might be open to that, but it isn’t always easy to tell.

Sometimes I explain and what I get reflected back is a sense of what a broken, ruined thing I am, how hard to deal with. So damaged. I hate the way that explaining sometimes means that all a person then sees is where I am broken, or vulnerable, or limited. I don’t want the explanations to be the sum and total of how I am. But if you decide I’m a pathetic wreck you might not listen when I talk about what I can do, what I am doing.

Sometimes I don’t even try to explain to the person in question, because I am sure I will never make sense, or it just doesn’t matter to them. Too many times along the way I’ve explained my need for a place to belong and offered whatever good I could bring in exchange for a place at the table and that doesn’t reliably play out well. I try to bring my own table, make my own spaces. Sometimes I just blog about it, when I’m especially haunted by memories of trying to explain and not having that go well.

If nothing else, it gives me a chance to check that I do at least make some kind of sense to myself.

Druidry and Asking Questions

For many people, Druidry is as much a philosophical path as a spiritual one. I’m all for asking questions, and for pondering things, but I think it’s also important to ask questions about the questions.

How much time should we spend on questions that we know cannot be answered? How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? There are questions you can kick round forever and never answer. You might argue bitterly with people who disagree, thus adding to the total sum of misery in the world. 

Philosophy doesn’t have to be abstract. There’s no need for it to be irrelevant. One of the best and most powerful questions we can ask is the one favoured by small children – why? Why are things the way they are? Why did this happen? Sometimes it helps to carry on and wonder what it means, but not always. The quest for an abstract or spiritual meaning can be a distraction sometimes. The important question might not be ‘why did I see a thrush today, what does it mean?’ but ‘why do I not see thrushes every day?’

It’s always good to ask if things are inevitable or not. We get so used to our own human structures that we collectively take them for truths and realities. Countries are just ideas, as are currencies. The five day working week, nine to five is just an idea, it’s not our natural destiny as people. Who we include and who we exclude, what we allow and what we deny, what and who we treat as important, what and who we throw away… there are so many questions to ask.

Whatever improvements you want to make in the world, part of the process involves convincing people – yourself included – that change is possible. People can only imagine change is possible when they aren’t persuaded that the current state of things is inevitable and natural.

False Friends

Anyone can claim to be an ally, but some of the people making those claims are out there acting in ways that are harmful to the groups they claim to support. 

I’ve seen this most recently in the form of loud martyrdom. People who have a lot to say about how much they do for the cause. They’ve been hurt for it, bullied for it, silenced, cancelled… Everything they have to say is about what it’s costing them to do what they do. It puts them centre stage and almost entirely erases the actual needs and issues of the causes they claim to take interest in.

Being an ally is a choice. It’s about being willing to put your comfort aside for the sake of trying to help and support people who are uncomfortable. The person who centres themselves in that is either doing it for the attention, or has a skewed agenda. Often this goes with treating abusively the people you are supposedly an ally to but who disagree with you. Talking over and trying to silence people who – at least in theory – you are supposed to be standing up for, is a red flag. Whatever the cause, it’s something to be wary of. Telling people that you – the ally – know more about what’s ‘really’ going on than a person living that experience, is another red flag. 

The single most useful thing a would-be ally can do is simply to amplify. It’s so easy to do this on social media without centering yourself.

Visions and Fever Dreams

Brains do funny things during fevers. I had a memorably strange experience some years ago involving the ‘revelation’ that reality is just tiny boxes inside other boxes. This week while being very ill, I had the ‘vision’ that the universe is just a Twitter thread about Our Flag Means Death.

Mess up your brain chemistry, and strangeness will ensure. I tend to hallucinate when I’m sleep deprived. Anything that pushes your body into some kind of altered state has the potential to bring weird and random insights. However, I am inclined to mistrust any vision that wasn’t actively sought.

I’m lucky because the kinds of things my brain offers up as mystic truths when I’m simply ill, are so clearly ridiculous. I can have a good laugh about them when I surface, and they make for good stories. I’ve never mistaken one of these for a serious insight into the nature of the universe. I can’t help but wonder how many other people’s religious experiences – especially in times when fevers were more common – were really fever experiences. In the absence of Our Flag Means Death fan art, you might well go for the powerful images available to you – angels and demons and so forth.

A hunger for meaning can be a misleading thing. The desire to be important can lead a person to take themselves far too seriously. If you are more interested in being spiritual than in being important, there’s a lot to be said for not taking yourself too seriously.

The language of mental illness

I notice that I feel more comfortable writing ‘mental health problems’ than ‘mental illness’ because the second option seems so much more loaded. The words we use to talk about mental illness are problematic, too. Anxiety and depression are words that really don’t convey the life destroying nature of being overwhelmed by those things.

Years ago, a doctor gave me a questionnaire that talked about being anxious and fearful. I wasn’t those things – I was overwhelmed by terror on a daily basis and unable to function as a consequence and I could not express the severity of my situation in the terms the survey offered. I was then given a CBT handbook to help me manage those small fears that will go away if only you push back against them. Only I was terrified, all the time, thanks to the genuinely threatening things that were going on in my life.

Depression, as a term does not convey the state of being so weighted down that you no longer know how to move. It does not express the experience of being so numb that you no longer seem like a proper person on the inside. Depression does not convey the utter despair and hopelessness that sometimes kills people. Talking about the fatigue that comes with depression does not express what it’s like to be so overwhelmed that even the idea of trying to do something is unbearably exhausting. 

‘Triggering’ is a word that has been sorely abused by people deliberately minimising how trauma impacts on people. Triggering as a word is not adequate to express the horror and loss of control of finding that your mind has been thrown back into reliving traumatic experiences from your history. The word ‘trauma’ alone does not do enough to convey to untraumatised people what that kind of experience this means. And I don’t want to expand on that because not triggering the traumatised folk is a consideration alongside wanting to educate those who don’t really get it.

‘Personality disorder’ is an awful term that has stigma hard wired into it. It’s also a really problematic area of diagnosis – it’s just a label, it doesn’t represent anything that can be measured. How do you tell between these ‘disorders’ and perfectly reasonable trauma responses? How do you tell between trauma in undiagnosed neurodivergent adults, and ‘personality disorders’? This is an area where the problematic language represents a lot of problematic thinking. If this isn’t familiar territory, have a look at the ‘symptoms’ for schizophrenia https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/conditions/schizophrenia/symptoms/ and consider how many of those might be caused by trauma and by real threats that are assumed not to exist. What happens to an abused teen whose parents frame their behaviour as delusional? 

Often, the official language to describe conditions comes from an unaffected observer, not the people having the experience. This isn’t a neutral process, and the stigma against mental illness and neurodivergence is massive and longstanding. And please, if we’re going to label murderers as being mentally ill, could we at least have a specific label for that illness rather than making it seem like mentally ill people are dangerous to those around them. We’re not. Most of us are far more likely to harm ourselves than anyone else.