Fear and the Reactive Mindset
Why would statements like “Teach our friends and family to take care of one another” and “Don’t abuse people” not be items that get put on The Box list? Fear. Fear permeates the American landscape. Media heighten our fear of danger with every alarming news story. Daily coverage of crimes, violence, potential terrorist threats, school shootings, poisonous drinking water, food insecurity, toxic toys, and stories of interpersonal violence cultivate a fear of our environment and one another. Fear generates anxiety, reactivity, and an impulse to seek quick, reductive answers. In a climate of fear, it feels better to have a safety checklist. A safety checklist seems like a guarantee. And while there might be some acknowledgement that there are no true guarantees in life, it feels better to have one just in case. When something happens to someone on the news or to someone we know, we can refer to the checklist and feel a sense of relief: Phew, what a horrible thing, but it’s not likely to happen to me because I do X or don’t do Y. This not only blames survivors, it also redirects the responsibility from perpetrators to those same survivors, and it isolates us from each other at the very times we need support and community.
The fear-based checklist also assumes violence to be a given. While it is true that we unfortunately live in a world where violence happens all too often, the checklist stops us from envisioning a world where violence is less likely to happen. It reduces self-defense to a reactive mode, which, at its core, reflects a belief that while we may be empowered to stop violence in the immediate moment, we are powerless to change the larger context of violence. Self-defense and boundary setting should include not just tools for responding to and preventing violence in the moment but also skills we can use to envision and create relationships, environments, and social constructs where safety is not a privilege but a basic right; where violence is less likely to occur; and where, if it does occur, we have the means to respond and hold each other accountable without simply “pathologizing” (i.e., regarding and treating someone as aberrant or abnormal), criminalizing, or victim blaming. There are many amazing groups and organizations exploring the intersections between individual and community self-defense, self-determination, and social transformation in a variety of creative and inspiring ways. The Box exercise provides a way to widen and contextualize concepts of self-defense in order to create a different, more flexible, and complex framework from which class participants learn specific physical skills. A few articles and organizations contextualizing the intersections between self-defense and social transformation include:
“Understanding Self-Defense in the Civil Rights Movement Through Visual Arts” by Sonia James-Wilson (www.civilrights-teaching.org/Handouts/UnderstandingSelf-Defense.pdf)
“Kicking Down The Barriers: Self-Defense and Social Change” by Martha Thompson (http://www.strategicliving.org/downloads/KiaiKickingDown.pdf)
“Who Is Oakland: Anti-Oppression Activism, the Politics of Safety, and State Co-optation” by Ludmilap (CROATOAN) (http://escalatingidentity.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/who-is-oakland-anti-oppression-politics-decolonization-and-the-state/)
“Resisting Gender Violence Without Cops or Prisons: An Interview with Victoria Law” by Angola 3 News (http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/5436:resisting-gender-violence-without-cops-or-prisons-an-interview-with-victoria-law)
Incite! (http://www.incite-national.org/)
Unpacking The Box
Most things that people included in The Box exercise were stranger focused. Stranger-oriented safety strategies do not necessarily reflect the violence people are likely to face because many assaults occur between people who know one another. Knowing the person who is causing you harm complicates self-care, boundary-setting, and self-defense strategies in ways that are important to include in any self-defense curriculums. The Box exercise is a way to begin to widen and deepen discussions about safety, violence, and self-defense. The options included in The Box were presented in a decontextualized way that perpetuated the myth that there is a right and wrong way to respond in various situations. This renders invisible the complexities that inform how people choose to defend themselves, stigmatizes certain choices, and can encourage victim blaming.
After seeing the list of safety tips in The Box exercise, we discussed as a class how the list reflects myths and perceptions about violence and offers a particular view of what violence is. For example, many items addressed interpersonal or one-on-one violence rather than social systems of violence. The strategies often assume access to doors that can be locked and that safety lies behind locked doors. Strategies such as “act crazy” are not only demeaning, they ignore the reality of institutional violence and the vulnerability of individuals identified as mentally ill. Self-defense tactics like “stay out of certain neighborhoods” have very different meanings depending on who you are in the world. For people of color in general, and black men in particular, who are often viewed as dangerous and/or criminal, being more vigilant and aware in certain environments is a very important self-defense strategy. On the other hand, saying, “Stay out of certain neighborhoods” can also reflect complex and intersecting myths about class and race that stigmatize certain neighborhoods based on stereotypes. Most of the options included in The Box exercise focus on individual safety and individual acts of violence, which can limit critical thinking about systems of violence and delimit safety strategies to individualistic approaches where violence is viewed as inevitable.
Giving Up the Checklist
Let me be clear: the action steps listed in The Box exercise are not wrong, and some of them will be the best choice for different people in different contexts. I am encouraging us to exchange the checklist and a one-size-fits-all approach to safety for self-trust and belief in our own ability to do the best we can in any given moment. Not only can we respond to, and at times prevent, violence and abuse, but we can even survive and thrive in spite of it. This can be scary. Inevitably, in self-defense classes someone will share a story that in their mind represents a boundary-gone-bad or no-boundary-at-all scenario and asks, “What should I do?” In the dynamic of “teacher as expert,” I am expected to answer the “should” as a means to offer some kind of guarantee of safety: You should do X, then Y will be avoided, and Z will not happen. The problem with answering this question within a checklist framework is that it does not consider the context in very deep or meaningful ways.
Another problem is the “What if’s?” themselves. “What if’s?” are a never-ending series of possibilities: What if you do X and then Y happens? What if you try A and it doesn’t work? What if you set a boundary and they don’t listen? What if you use (fill in a boundary-setting or self-defense skill here) and the person gets angry? What if there is more than one person bullying you? What if you lose your nerve? What if you forget how to get out of a choke hold? “What if’s” reproduce fear, anxiety, and self-doubt, in part because they are never ending and because they seek certainty where there is none. They are an understandable product of living in a culture of fear that offers a checklist-oriented approach to safety, but they are ultimately ineffective as a general approach. With the goal of encouraging people to trust their capacity to assess a situation and make informed decisions on what to do based on their own expertise rather than on a checklist, Home Alive teachers developed an exercise called “What’s Free? What’s Open?” This exercise involves taking the particulars of a given scenario and asking what is available, accessible, possible, realistic, and (hopefully) effective to meet your goals. In a self-defense situation, this may mean looking for what target points are vulnerable and available in a particular moment and what tools, weapons, and shields you have at your disposal. What’s Free? What’s Open? can also be used to look at events that have happened as a way to identify the skills people utilized but did not recognize as self-defense or boundary setting.
Negotiating boundaries and safety means having a critical understanding of context that informs when and how one might set boundaries and e
ven what safety might look like. What’s Free? What’s Open? will look very different due to different situations for different people. The goal of using What’s Free? What’s Open? is to think about what resources, skills, and capacity you have, what information you know about the other person and situation, and what your sense is about the best way to approach and obtain your goal. What’s Free? What’s Open? is not a way to create a new series of checklists; rather it is a way to reframe how we approach scary, uncomfortable, intimidating, or frightening situations by encouraging curious reflection on the complexity of context and the variability of how people can and do respond.
It can be challenging to move away from a formulaic approach, especially when fear motivates us to seek standardized strategies. People, however, are not arithmetic problems. We’re not even the wordy math question you get on the SAT. Imagine the following scenario …
Martha, starting at 8:00 a.m., felt her intuition kick in because the person talking to her at the café began to ask very personal questions in what she perceived to be a pushy and inappropriately flirty way that made her feel uncomfortable. She began to deflect these questions and set boundaries at 8:07 a.m. by saying, “You know, I’m not really comfortable sharing that information with you.” In such a case, how long is the anticipated time before the person Martha is talking to responds to her boundaries, and what is the anticipated response?
The person backs off within three seconds.
No time. The person is unaware that a boundary has been set.
No time. The person ignores Martha’s boundary, using humor and minimization: “Come on, it’s no big deal.”
After ten seconds of reflection, the person apologizes and respects Martha’s boundary.
What should Martha do? People ask this kind of question all the time and in classes, as in life, people are overflowing with advice, ideas, and opinions about exactly what Martha should do: “She should leave … She should tell the person she thinks it’s rude to ask personal questions … She should ask them personal questions back … She should start picking her nose and freak the person out … Tell the person she has to go to the bathroom and ignore them when she gets out … Pretend she sees someone she knows or just remembered she has a meeting and has to go…” The truth is that none of these things are what Martha should do. Yet any of these could be possibilities. First, we don’t have a lot of information about the context or who this person is. A stranger? A coworker? A longtime friend? Partner? Ex-partner? Date from last night? Someone she wants to go on a date with? Second, we don’t have any information about what Martha would like to have happen. All we know is that she is uncomfortable. Is she uncomfortable because she would like to be able to talk about these things with this person but isn’t sure how? Or uncomfortable because she wants to say something but hates conflict? Is she anxious because she feels threatened? Or is she anxious because she doesn’t want to share personal information? All of these things inform boundaries. There is no right way to respond and there is no response that will guarantee a specific reaction from someone.
In one class, during a “What if?” discussion, someone asked what you should do if a perpetrator gets you in a car to take you to a second location. The room was full of fear and desperation. No one said a word until I directed the discussion to an exploration of context. Then two participants finally spoke up. One was a young man who had disclosed some information about what was understood to be a long history of very violent trauma. He quietly said something to the effect of, “I would do whatever it took to not get in the car. I don’t care what happens. I won’t ever let something like that happen to me again.” The other participant, a middle-aged woman, said something very different: “I would do whatever I needed to live. I can’t imagine my baby girl growing up without me.” Two very different self-defense strategies, and in fact two different views on what self-defense would look like, and a clear example of how there is no one right way to act in any given situation.
Fear and anxiety drive us to offer advice and suggestions to others about what to do. This reflects an attempt to fix the situation rather than cultivate a wider awareness of what is going on both internally and externally. Advice is often a vehicle through which people project their perspectives, morals, and beliefs onto a situation in a generalizing way. Anytime someone says, “You should …” they are projecting a belief about the right way to handle a situation, which may or may not be the best (or even possible) way for someone else. When advice is informed by a sense of intuition, it can be challenging to comprehend that one person’s intuition can be very different from someone else’s. But it can be and often times is. When we mistake our intuition for “the objective truth” we often miss important information. We don’t necessarily have to explain or defend or justify our intuition, but we should be able to identify what it’s based on.
What we observe, how we think about safety, the kinds of boundaries we want, how we build our support systems, which action items from The Box exercise we find to be useful, are all informed by our environment and who we are in the world. Fear can narrow our perspective, which at times is a good thing. We don’t need to spend time reflecting on context when we are about to get hit by a bus. Other times, it can be helpful to widen our view of things, be curious and reflective. Moving toward a more reflective and responsive way of setting and negotiating boundaries can be challenging in the face of strong emotions like fear, anger, and anxiety. In the next chapter, we will look at some tools to help navigate the complicated conditions in which boundaries are set or negotiated, and how to do so with a framework that allows for the full range of human emotions and experiences.
Eight
Setting Boundaries with Intention
Boundaries can be messy. Not only do they involve boundary setting itself, but boundaries are also set in emotional, interpersonal, psychological, and physical contexts that impact us. There are times when we cross people’s boundaries without knowing, set boundaries in ways that are hurtful to people we don’t want to hurt, are hurt by other people’s boundaries, set a boundary we later regret, or don’t set a boundary we wish we had. The collateral effects of setting and negotiating a boundary are often enormous and complicated.
This chapter considers how the concepts of compassion, forgiveness, accountability, community outreach, and solidarity can help us grapple with the messy and complicated world of boundary setting. Some of these concepts are drawn from current psychology, some from spiritual traditions, and some from contemporary political organizing (including the transformative justice movement). Some may be familiar to you and some may be new. All are offered here as means of understanding boundary work in a larger setting. Setting boundaries with intention is another way of understanding how the personal can be political and how individual work can contribute to positive shifts in society. For more information on transformative justice, go to www.transformativejustice.eu/en/.
Forgiveness and Compassion
Forgiveness is an important skill and not something to rush into or engage in before we are ready and willing. Forgiveness, as I define it in this book, is not meant to be automatic or unearned. It is a process, often to be taken slowly and with intention. Reflecting on forgiveness frequently means stepping back and investigating events with curiosity and as much compassion as we can muster, in order to understand what happened in a nonjudgmental way. The goal and end result of reflecting on and seeking understanding may not necessarily always be to forgive. In addition, while the goal of initial exploration is to try to understand without rushing to judge, making judgments themselves is not to be avoided completely. There will be events, interactions, and behaviors that warrant judgment (both good and bad). The intention of this practice is to not rush to judgment while being mindful and accountable when we do judge.
Contemplating what conditions make forgiveness possible can be valuable. Primarily because when we mess up, make mistakes, hurt people, get hurt, set boundaries out of guilt, anger,
or resentment, lose sight of our intentions and values, react defensively, and are in many other ways exquisitely human, it benefits us to be able to be compassionate in our reflection. Forgiveness, at its core, is an act of compassion, both self-directed and outward or other-directed. The aim is not to always be compassionate and forgive everyone, but to be able to choose to reflect on events with a compassionate lens that extends the possibility of forgiveness if conditions allow. It also invites people to investigate what conditions are necessary for forgiveness, which can help create avenues for accountability. Again, this is not to suggest that the purpose of accountability is forgiveness. There may be times when we do not want to or are unable to extend compassion and forgiveness. This is understandable in some situations. A survivor of domestic violence may find that not extending compassion toward her or his abuser is a healing position to take. Someone who was cruelly bullied may not want to forgive his or her attackers. I have many clients who have made very thoughtful and grounded decisions to not forgive certain people. The important aspect is developing the capacity to have an intentional compassionate lens, so that any decision made to not extend compassion or forgiveness is an active, intentional choice.
Developing Compassionate Curiosity
Clients and class participants have shared that talking about compassion and forgiveness makes them feel as if they are being asked to not be angry or hurt. While this is an understandable reaction, I believe the contrary—that compassion enables people to feel more, not less. Having compassion increases one’s capacity to be present to the full range of human emotions and experiences, which include feelings that are not typically associated with compassion, such as rage, anger, or bitterness. As a first step, rather than tell ourselves we must forgive or be compassionate, we might find that learning to develop some curiosity about our situation can help with understanding it. The ability to reflect on events to seek clarity and understanding without preemptively judging offers us more information than when we make reactive snap judgments or find ourselves reenacting old scenarios in habitual ways.
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