Nimue Brown's Blog, page 88

Problematic coping mechanisms

CW addiction, self harm, suicide, eating disorders

Often, the things people do to survive dire situations are of themselves problematic. When you have to weather hideous things, keep going entirely on willpower, survive things that you find unbearable and you don’t have the resources to do that well, the tactics themselves can be messy.

By these means, a person can end up with an eating disorder, addictions, unhealthy relationship strategies, self harming issues and other things that from the outside look like the problem. The choices we make in order to keep going don’t always make sense to anyone else.

Trying to fix a coping mechanism doesn’t actually solve much. It may put pressure on a person who is in a lot of trouble to put down one of the few tools that helps them cope. Self harming looks nasty, but a lot of people do it because it helps them not kill themselves. The self harming is not the problem to solve, here.

It’s important, if you’re trying to help/ heal another person, to understand what’s going on with them first. Make an alcoholic stop drinking and you might kill them. Some addictions need a careful weaning strategy. If a person isn’t eating because food is the one thing they feel they can control, then their relationship with food is not the thing that urgently needs fixing. 

Trying to help someone when you don’t understand what you’re seeing can do more harm than good. It is important not to centre how you feel about someone else’s problematic coping mechanism. If you feel unhappy because you’re seeing something nasty, please don’t assume that making yourself more comfortable actually solves the problem. You may be seeing the things that are keeping that other person alive and able to function, and however messy that is, demanding that they give up their survival tools is not a good place to start.

If you can’t imagine the kind of horror that a person might be experiencing such that hurting themselves is actually helping them cope with it, then honestly you aren’t well placed to tell them what they should be doing. It’s really important to listen, and to establish what would most help to keep them safe. It might not be what you think it is. 

It’s not good asking a person to give up their survival strategies when they’re still dealing with the things that make those necessary. Sort out the underlying issues first. When people know they are safe, it’s much more realistic to then ask what might be done about the less than ideal coping mechanisms that got them to a place where they had more options.

When nature isn’t lovely

I’ve seen plenty of Pagan and Druid writing that celebrates nature in really straightforward ways. Nature, we tell each other, is beautiful and lovely and inspiring. Go out into nature, it will lift your spirits.

Sometimes nature is harsh. Sometimes nature looks a lot like a baby bird fallen from the nest and dead on the ground. Sometimes it’s the rainstorm that tears the flowers apart, or the remains of a fox cub on the side of the path. It’s watching a gull take a babe coot, or a buzzard take a rabbit. It’s the desperate, dying shriek of the mammal who has been found by the stoat. 

While I don’t like the way nature documentaries often focus excessively on violence, sometimes nature is violent. Sometimes it is arbitrary, cruel and makes no sense. The rising tide takes the nest of things too young and small to escape from it. The naturally occurring forest fire slaughters those who cannot flee fast enough.

Nature is the basis of all things, it is part of us and we are part of it. Life continues, often at the expense of other lives. Forces move through the world with no care for the lives they impact on. I think it’s important in nature based spirituality to acknowledge that nature itself is not moral. It’s not lovely, or benevolent, it simply exists. The universe can indeed be bountiful, but bounty for the fox is not benevolence to the rabbit. What creates bounty for humans at the moment is wiping out the majority of other creatures. When we see the bounty and not the cost, we don’t see nature as a whole.

Druidry cannot ignore the parts of nature that are neither pretty nor comforting. We need to square up to those as well. We don’t have to like all of what’s out there, but we do have to respect it. We don’t have to be happy in face of the harsher parts – it is important to have room in ourselves for the feelings that aren’t lovely. Sometimes you need to cry over the dead baby bird. Authenticity is bigger and messier than the idea that nature is lovely.

Superstition, colonialism and prehistory

My experience as a white person living in Europe, is of prehistoric peoples being depicted as ignorant and superstitious. It’s there in pop culture, and it intersects with a similar treatment of the global majority. It’s a kind of infantilising, treating adult people from other cultures as though they have the same relationship with reality as a typical white toddler.

One of the things this misrepresentation does, is to enforce the idea that white colonial cultures are superior. I think it actually starts from the assumption of that superiority and then interprets what everyone else is doing in light of the idea that those cultures are inferior. There’s nothing evidence-based here. I’m going to talk about prehistory because it’s less loaded and, being pallid myself, I feel it’s more appropriate for me to speak about. I do think that how we imagine prehistory is profoundly related to modern colonialism and racism.

Pop culture representations of prehistoric people tend to focus on their being ignorant and superstitious. An obvious example is the way people in Clan of the Cave Bear don’t know where babies come from. There’s a tendency to imagine ancient people attributing everything around them to gods and spirits while having no idea of how anything works.

Interestingly we don’t make the same assumptions about animals, historical or contemporary. Whether their behaviour is attributed to instinct, experience, training or conditioning, we treat animal behaviour in the wild as being fairly logical and as making sense as a response to the environment. But overall we like to imagine our wild human ancestors as not being rational in the way that all other mammals are. We portray them as children, for the greater part. It also does a disservice to our own children, who, given half a chance will do their best to figure out how the world around them works and how best to interact with it. Children tend to be quiet scientific in their figuring out and will engage rationally with their experiences unless adults actively teach them not to.

To survive in the wilds as a human, you need a lot of skills. You need to be able to source things, make things, gather things and maybe hunt for food as well. You have to understand the weather, the seasons, the resources and threats around you. This calls for people who are highly skilled and knowledgeable and who interact with what’s around them in informed and logical ways.

The irrationality and childishness are in fact projections from the minds of contemporary adults. We believe some pretty irrational things these days – not just the gods we’ve invented, but market forces, countries, trickle down economics, the divine right of kings, capitalism… none of these things make a lot of sense when you consider the evidence for how they function. We accept childish tyrants who do little of value but who have inherited wealth and power and a belief they should lead us. We’re not a culture that invests much in evidence or reason most of the time.

Our ancestors must have known how to communicate and cooperate with each other far more effectively than we do. Useful skills would have been essential. Knowing how to suck up to power isn’t worth much when you live marginally. I think a lot of the time what we project onto prehistory says a lot more about us as people than it does about the past. 

Finding courage

Back in the summer I started asking questions about the nature of courage. I’ve struggled with fear, anxiety, terror and paralysis for years. I used to be a much bolder person, more willing to take risks and to trust my instincts, and I’d lost that part of myself.

Recent months have taught me some things about courage that it might be useful if I share.

It’s far easier to be brave when other people support you with their belief. When other people invest you with their trust, faith, confidence and things of that ilk, it’s easier to hold some sense of being worth that. It’s also easier to be brave for other people than as some kind of solitary project. Humans are communal creatures, and community can bring out the best in us. Being heroic for someone is considerably easier than just trying to generally speaking ‘be heroic’.

The other community aspect is that being brave on your own is exhausting. Being brave as part of a community means taking shifts, propping each other up, hauling each other through things and not having to be brave about bloody everything all of the time. Courage as a community project is way more sustainable because the courage can continue far beyond what any one person can manage or carry. If someone is able to be brave, there’s scope for everyone to keep moving, often. We can take it in turns to be bold for each other.

Courage is not of itself all about fear or challenge. You don’t have to be afraid first to be bold in meaningful ways. Courage is a state of readiness to act, to risk, to jump, and to be informed by your sense of honour. It takes courage to live with honour. Without courage to enable you to manifest what you believe through your actions, honour is just a nice set of ideas. Courage is more than a principled way of living, it’s part of what gives a person the willingness to be active in the world.

It is much easier to be courageous when you can see yourself moving towards something. Without vision, without a sense of direction, what is there to be courageous for? Granted, you can fight to keep going and fight to survive, but when that looks like more of the same, pointlessly for as long as you can bear to live, it is hard to keep courage alive in your heart. We can’t always be fighting against things, that leads to exhaustion and despair. For courage to thrive in your heart you have to have things you are fighting for. It is not enough simply to resist.

I’ve been re-building my courage in recent months. I’ve had help. There are things, people, possibilities and opportunities I want to move towards, and that’s meant changing how I act and how I relate to the world. There are people who definitely do need me to be stronger and more courageous for them, and that’s been a huge source of inspiration. There are people who will hold me when I don’t have it in me to be bold, and who help me get back on my feet when I lose my confidence. 

The more I look at these issues the more convinced I am that community is a key part of everything that I want to do differently. I’m my best self through my relationships with other people and I have most to offer when I don’t feel like I have to somehow be and do everything.

A new coping mechanism

I struggle with large events because I become overwhelmed by noise and movement. I struggle to tune things out. This year it dawned on me that ‘meltdown’ might be a very good description of what happens to me in those circumstances. I’ve not sought formal diagnosis, but I am exploring on the basis that my brain might need looking after in some specific ways.

In the photo I’m wearing a bonnet made out of my son’s old cricket hat. It was a beaten up object with no scope for re-use or recycling and I’ve kept it out of landfill. The lace is a mix of upcycling and stuff I had stashed, the creatures were made for something else and needed a new home. 

I tested it for the first time at Shrewsbury – an event with a lot of footfall. I found that it does indeed reduce my peripheral vision, and that as I had thought, reducing peripheral vision reduces stress. There’s less information to process so I don’t get so overloaded. On the downside, it covers my ears so doesn’t work for singing, which I only realised after we’d started singing.

I’m now considering how expensive events are for me in terms of overload, and there are some I don’t intend to return to because even with a bonnet they’d mess me up. I’m working on the idea that pushing through is not always the best choice. I’m lucky in that I have a lot of control over when and how and where I work. I note that even so it’s not easy to hold boundaries and avoid doing things that make me ill. 

There are far too many people with far too few options around how their work spaces impact on them. Some work spaces are so toxic that they’d make anyone ill. Mental and emotional wellbeing in workplaces are just as much health and safety issues as physical threats to wellbeing. We really should be taking that seriously.

Justice on the Druid path

It is important to think about what we do in the name of justice and not to assume that the desire for justice of itself guarentees anything about our actions or the impact they have.

There’s nothing like righteous indignation for making a person feel powerful and important as they lash out. That can be alluring and addictive. It’s important to be sure at the very least that you’re lashing out at the right person – someone who has the scope to fix a problem. All too often the person who gets lashed out at is the one who happens to be nearest and easiest to hit. Shouting at a low paid employee over decisions other people have made regarding the company they work for, is not a just action.

The internet gives us a steady supply of opportunities to lash out at other people in the name of justice. Online it’s easy to hit people who are vulnerable. It’s also easy to pick on people who are actually doing good work and care about getting things right but do not meet your standards in every imaginable way. By this means we can end up knocking down the people who were genuinely trying to fix and improve things while ignoring the people who are causing the actual problems.

If you’re in a fight and enjoying it, there’s a lot to be said for pausing to look at that. Are you really helping anything or anyone, or are you just enjoying your own feelings of power? Might you be playing at being a white knight? Are you making yourself feel good and important at someone else’s expense? Who are you talking over? Is there anything important you might have overlooked? What’s the real power balance between you and the person you’re fighting? 

People are seldom persuaded by aggression. There are times when a show of force gets things done and there are times when that may well be the right choice, but it shouldn’t be our first port of call. People are depressingly averse to reasoned arguments and evidence when that goes against beliefs they have invested in. Getting angry with them doesn’t turn them into better people, usually. 

If you can’t fix a problem, or challenge someone who can then often the best choice is example, not engagement. Put your truth into the world. Show your values through your actions. Do something restorative, because that’s often the best form justice can take anyway. If you can’t fix a problem, draw attention to it, try to offset it in some way. Anger is not a direct path to justice. We have to take our anger and turn it into something useful that helps people, otherwise we’re just being self indulgent.

Brains, illness and resilience

Mental illness is in no small part a loss of control over your own thought processes. However, the degree to which simply regaining control of your thoughts it the ‘cure’ for this is one I think could stand questioning. So much of what we do at the moment to help with ‘mental health’ starts from the assumption that the thoughts are irrational and are the problem to be fixed.

Like a lot of ill people, my struggles with mental illness have everything to do with my experiences. I didn’t get here on my own. I am afraid of finding myself in situations akin to situations I have already been in. Some of my coping mechanisms are a bit dysfunctional.

I know there’s a school of thought that goes in for the idea that the answer to distress is to teach people how to be more resilient. The right mental attitude will get you though! The trouble with this is that as an approach it denies that other people have agency too. The only person who has to change here is the one being hurt, while everyone else can blithely get on with whatever they were doing.

Getting control of your distressed thoughts can indeed make it more possible to cope. It can also be a process of learning to be responsible for what’s being done to you, rather than demanding change. When the focus is on controlling your own mind, there’s little encouragement to look at what might be changed so you don’t have to be in this mess in the first place.

Sometimes what’s most helpful is to have the time and space to sit with the distress. Get to know it, find out what it’s made of and why it’s happening. It’s better not to have to train yourself out of your own innate responses. Sometimes, it is possible to simply ask for help and have that help manifest. I know from experience that changes in the world to solve the problems causing the distress get a lot more done than me trying to be more resilient.

There’s a lot we can do to help each other with all of this even if we don’t know exactly what someone else is up against. Tell people that you care about them and value them. Tell them that they matter, that what they do is good and valued. Tell people that you need them, appreciate them and respect them. Encourage, uplift, and praise the people around you every chance you get. There’s a different kind of resilience that comes from all of this, one that doesn’t depend on having to push constantly against our own distress. It’s easier to have resilience when you are supported, rather than trying to make resilience in face of desperation.

She saw the water-lilly bloom

(A little bit of fiction that might be part of a larger project)

You are pretty sure the man who said the answer to everything is make good art had no idea what he was talking about. You make the tapestry anyway because it’s all you have, and it’s that or throw yourself out of the window. It is not enough to make the tapestry. Not enough to watch the world through a mirror and always be separate from it. But you make good art in the hopes that you’re going to figure out an answer here. As though this mess is a puzzle to be solved.

The only way to know if the curse is real is to test it. There’s a fighting chance that you are trapped here under a misconception and that all you have to do is resist and the nightmare will end. If the curse is real, that choice is death, simply.

Every day your life hangs between the window and the loom. The world you cannot be part of and the pale reflection of life you make with your own hands. It is never enough. Every day so far you’ve chosen the loom, because it is a bit like being alive, and maybe that’s as good as anything can ever be. Perhaps the answer is to learn to live within these limitations and make the best of it. You try to be grateful for what you have, for the colours and textures of threads and for the reflected view of the world. It is something. You are alive and outside your window the seasons turn and you can smell the world even if you can’t touch it.

Today is the other sort of day. The need for sun on skin, and to sink your fingers into the long, damp grasses and down into the soil itself, is so strong it hurts. The need to feel the wind touching your face. To put bare feet into the cool expanse of the river and feel the water moving against your skin. Not to be separate from the world, but to be part of it. 

Today the bigger curse is this chilly, lifeless, lonely room. Today the living death of making sad, pale imitations of dreams is too much to bear. You finally choose to leave, because this half-life that avoids the danger is no life at all and you can no longer bear it.

Is it the curse taking effect? Or is your body so weak from its long imprisoning that your legs can barely hold you up? You find a boat, and you write your name upon it in case someone finds you and wonders. The river takes you, and holds you and carries you. Above, the sky is more beautiful than you remembered, and birds fly across your line of vision, each one of them miraculous in your hungry gaze. The taste of the river is in your mouth and the sensual warmth of the wooden boat is under your fingers. Willows at the river margins, workers voices from the fields. Life embraces you. If this is the end of the story, you regret nothing.

(Based very slightly on Tennyson’s Lady Of Shalott. I was curious as to what might happen without it being about Lancelot)

Mystery

I have gazed into wild eyes, made unexpected bonds with owls and foxes at twilight.

Once a sparrowhawk, tree perching beside the path, stared at me with great intent and a purpose I could not fathom. Seared by scrutiny, exposed to that raptor glare and yet none the wiser for being pierced to the core.

Deer in the long meadow grass, intent and watchful, alert to threats. I have felt those stares so many times, finding them through the focus of their attention. Looking back, but not too long for fear of causing alarm. I am no predator come to harm you. Trust my gentle gaze.

I see the unknown in those other eyes. Spirit and intent, awareness beyond my understanding. Lives connecting in a brief moment, a spark shared, while the difference and distance remain unbridged. 

You will always be mystery. I can only gaze with wonder.

Not being in control

There are all sorts of Pagan and otherwise spiritual activities that focus on being in control of something. There are strong associations in many traditions between being spiritual and being disciplined. Often what religious practices are for, is taking us away from our basic animal urges towards something more elevated.

How does this work with Paganism? Does it make any kind of sense to try and discipline ourselves away from our animal selves? We are animals, mammals – is it even possible for a human to do something that isn’t a reflection of our animal nature?

Perhaps part of this stems from the mistaken ideas we’ve had about what animals are and how they exist. We have a considerable history of reducing animals to meat machines that do everything unthinkingly, by instinct or by conditioning. This clearly isn’t true. There is so much evidence out there to demonstrate that mammals are thinking, feeling creatures and that we all have a lot in common on that score. 

Most mammals spend a lot of time resting. Humans often describe that in ways that assume laziness, or sensual indulgence. What we project onto animals has so much to do with wanting to feel superior to them. What we imagine when we see them not actively doing something, is that they are doing nothing. We don’t assume that a cat gazing into space is contemplating philosophy, or deeply involved in some spiritual practice. Just because we have to write books and read books and talk to each other a lot and try very hard to develop prayer and meditation practices doesn’t make it special. Maybe we aren’t superior for having figured this out, maybe we’re inferior because cats just crack on and do it anyway without needing the paperwork.

Being in control is itself often an illusion. We only think we are in control because we don’t understand the influences affecting us. We don’t realise what we’ve unconsciously absorbed, and which stories we are playing out, all too often. We like to feel busy and as though we are being productive and making progress. The more in control we appear to be, the more progress we feel like we’ve made.

I see this come up a lot with how people approach dreaming in a spiritual context. The value placed on controlling dreams bothers me a lot. It feels to me like a process of cutting down a vibrant ecosystem and replacing it with things we’ve planted in straight lines. That’s not progress. It is control and it takes away far more than it gives.

I think of dreaming as being a wild landscape. There is more to gain from entering that wild landscape without wanting to control it, I think. There’s a lot to be said for looking at anything humans have come up with and asking whether it is designed to try and take us away from our human, animal selves. Existence is not something to overcome, it’s something to embrace.

I have a dreaming book that isn’t about controlling things, more over here – https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/moon-books/our-books/pagan-dreaming