Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture

by Nora Samaran

Did you ever have the feeling when you finally did access the feeling of shame and the emotions underneath it, that it had been there all along, but was so much part of the landscape that you couldn’t notice it, because it just seemed like baseline reality?

If those who hold power have killed off parts of their own self, they will attempt to discipline and control those whom they oppress. When that is normalized, as it is in Western culture, widespread systemic gaslighting pressures people facing systemic harm to view strengths and beauty through a distorted lens, as weakness or abjection. Pressure is applied under which people’s whole selves become compressed or contorted to survive inside oppressive systems.

js: Following that line of thought, I was similarly impacted by the essay “On Gaslighting.” That piece helped me realize that if I do not understand the coping mechanisms I’m using, and if I have not faced the rationalizations I have built around those coping strategies, I’m going to have a pretty distorted view of myself and my motivations. And that means I’m going to be offering the people around me not just a limited view of myself, but a distorted view of reality.

A lot of writing I have seen reduces violence to a cis male–cis female dynamic, where it is presented as though there is nothing beyond and nothing between. Any arguments directed toward a trans audience are tacked on, even though trans folks, and trans women in particular, face disproportionate and severe levels of violence. It is as though trans readers are a secondary audience, when instead transness should be built right into the argument from its conception, especially since everybody has the potential to be trans. Everyone has a complex relationship with their gender identity. Cis people perform their gender just as much as trans folks do. Putting transness at the center of our understanding of gender makes apparent that cisness has also always been complicated.

sb: Yes. You can’t make a secondary argument about trans folks because these violences affect everybody. It’s not that we are all the same. Instead, we all have the potential to be similar to each other. And we still have different levels of power that are imbued by society and the expectations of gender, and we all have to be accountable for our actions, because we also all have the potential to experience harm and we all have the potential to cause it.

Does an abuser’s refusal to fully admit to the harm reduce the impact of having an entire circle of ostensibly radical and feminist people abandon and gaslight the survivor? Do we really need the person causing the harm to see the harm before we will name that it is there? Isn’t that an awful lot of power to give those who gaslight, that they get to decide whether or not the person they have harmed can be heard?

And we were all going out one night and people said, “Oh I really want some snacks.” So, we stopped by the corner store and a few people went and got snacks and then the group comes back and people open up the chips and start passing them around without even asking for them back. And I wanted to say, “Wait, those are your chips, you bought that, it’s going to get all eaten.” ns: Western individualist mind. rsd: Right, just a basic level of care there, that this is just everybody’s now, that was a shock for me at first. It’s just embedded culturally.

If your focus is more on the fact that harm got named than it is on the harm itself, does this strike you as peculiar? Depending on the severity and longevity of the harm, and the body’s silencing effects when trauma occurs, do you make it the responsibility of those you have harmed to tell you “in a nice way”?

Is it possible they have tried to tell you in a nice way and you have clapped your hands over your ears or made it hard for them, and eventually they lost the capacity to be nice while they were being harmed? If you think back—really think back—how long were they trusting you and quietly asking you for help and empathy and support and compassion and honesty before they lost their buffer of capacity to speak kindly while drowning?

Coming up from underwater to speak up isn’t always pretty or easy. What if one of the effects of trauma is that after speaking calmly without being heard for so long, or after having the words get trapped in the still waters of their body, the survivor can no longer speak and can only scream?

Just as Indigenous students and students of color in my literature classes are somehow expected to be quietly, constantly unsafe and deeply out of their comfort zones just to make sure the white students do not experience a moment’s discomfort, and the white students think everyone is having the same experience they are, if you make it hard for people around you to let you know you have caused harm, you’re going to invoke survival strategies in your friends and colleagues when you think you’re just having a regular hang-out with your friend.30

Guilt is not empathy. Neither is shame. In fact, when people feel overwhelmed by their own inner feelings of guilt, they are more likely to attack the people around them rather than act empathetically. Feeling guilty does not make you a good person. Empathy and responsiveness make you a good person. Guilt blocks empathy.

Imagine replacing guilt with curiosity. Imagine saying, “Wow, it is so cool to recognize what I did. I’m excited I can hear you and grow. I did this, I did that, here is why it is fucked up. I’m so excited to learn how to come back into integrity with you. I’m so happy I can do this, that it is OK to fuck up and say sorry and learn together. This owning warms my heart.”