Earlier this year i turned 56. The photo on the left is when i was 16. The photo on the right is 40 years later is on my 56th birthday - in one of my favourite places in the world; Kauri Mountain Beach.

56 sounds old. I can remember hearing those kind of numbers as a child and being kind of horrified at that many years stacked up inside, and as it turns out, outside me. When i was 16 i couldn't comprehend what 56 year old me would be like - i was too busy trying to be good and pretty and biddable. i was Vassalisa before she went into the forest.

I know... Some people never make it here at all.  Some lovely and deserving and wonderful people won't make it here. And so the imperative to make some use of life, to tend to a sense of purpose gets sharper each turn around the sun. 

But one of the things that sticks out in my memory from those times when i listened to adults reflecting on age was the idea of letting go.

No, not the diaphanous spiritual idea of just letting it go. Or even the more hard won and solid recovery idea of letting go and letting God. Nope. This letting go was, by the tone of the voices, something shameful and an act of letting the side down. "Oh she (rarely he btw) let herself go."

What was this letting go?

Was it the kind of letting go that brought relief to my little childhood heart - "Yes I'll let you go to the shop with the neighbours?" No it wasn't an allowing .

Was it that she finally let herself go on holiday or somewhere she always wanted to be? No, didn't seem to be a destination.

Was it the letting go of the reins and letting the horse go where it wanted. Well that was closer.

But what was the shameful part of that? Was it about controlling the direction or destination and if so what was the thing they were trying to control or avoid?

It seemed that the letting go was the kind that happened to houses if they were filthy and gardens if you didn't use lots of weedkiller and petrol.

It seemed the letting go was about rack and ruin. About disintegration. About failure.

And what was this failure? it seemed it was the failure to be young. The failure to pursue youth and youthfulness. To put effort into appearing younger than you were or slimmer than you were or richer than you were. The way this thinking keeps us on a hamster wheel of buying things to stave off age is clear. The way this thinking keeps you ashamed of yourself is also pretty clear - living into your own body as a source of shame never fails to distress me.

But as i aged It seemed to me that letting yourself go meant being who you actually were.

The crime of being your age, of being your weight, of living to your means seemed to be one that special vitriol was levelled at. I know little jane tucked that in her psyche for future reference. And now, i think i am living that future.

I have let myself go. Into my own weight, into my own skin; as saggy and wrinkly as it is. Into my own changing shape and hair colour and capacity.

i have had to wrestle with my thoughts and prejudices as i did so. I have a pang each time people who haven't seen me for years don't recognise me because of the changes time has created but do i regret it?

No. I don't.

I feel like, by letting go of the battle with ageing, i am freed up to pay attention to other things; to sleep on my front as i love to do (a woman i know who did end up in her elder years with impeccable skin refused to sleep anywhere other than her back for fear of wrinkles. - the pay off just doesn't make sense and i often think of her when i am snuggled in with my face all squashed into a pillow, luxuriating in the softness.)

Do big trees regret changing into their adult form? Do wolves mind getting grizzled grey muzzles? I don't think so. 

Maybe the letting go is about letting ourselves go towards the realms that modern culture is so damn scared of; ageing and dying? Maybe that's why we are encouraged to spend so much to stay young; to convince the tribe not to leave us behind on the next migration?

I don't know. I have had too much tenderness around age and dying to discount it as something to fear. And besides I can go where i want to now that i am a grown woman with means. I get to let myself go on adventures if i want. And the adventure of age seems important.

So l let myself go. Into my Baba Yaga self. Into wildness, into freedom, into self compassion, into the relief of being able to put down my weapons in that particular war against myself and just be real.
 

One of the best things i have ever done is Randi Buckley's Healthy Boundaries for Kind People course. Stellar, Life Changing stuff. I even trained as a facilitator (and would be happy to share her wisdom with you if you like - just shoot me a message)

But sales pitch and Randi fangirling aside, part of what i learned was about inner boundaries.  The boundaries i have with myself that support me to live a life that feels better to inhabit. The boundaries that support the change i am aiming for. The boundaries that remind me "not that way anymore, this way now."

These are some of the hardest boundaries to hold because they turn me towards the coping strategies that have saved me. Ok, so some of those coping strategies come with their own shit-ton of problems but they were the best i could do at the time. They were the patterns i learned to try and keep myself safe, win connection, figure shit out in this wonky world.

One of those patterns is people pleasing. I was an a grade, well trained footsoldier in the army of nice. I tried my best to ensure that everyone thought i was nice, that everything i did was nice and that the nicest thing about me was that i was nice. 

Notice a theme?

This pattern had me swallow my truth, behave very inauthentically and subsequently very unnice things happened. My anger leaked out in passive aggressive ways. I couldn't trust myself so i self sabotaged, i didn't back myself and i felt, as a direct result, lonely, confused, hurt and disgusted with myself.

I also felt ripped off. I mean, here i was trying, as if my life depended on it, to be nice and people walked all over me. i was a screen for projection (unsurprisingly because i was absent from the picture and was just a facade of niceness). I was able to be an object of scorn because i wasn't treating myself with any respect. I was failing to turn up in ways that mattered to the outside world so i wasn't considered valuable. I was sacrificing myself left and right because that's the deal right? If i sacrifice, you will like me - isn't that the deal? 

I would spend hours re-running interactions, imagining triumphant speeches, people seeing the error of their ways when they were mean. To no avail. It was familiar - i knew how to do it, it was a well worn deep groove of a pathway i didn't even have to think about. If i was doing it, at least i was doing something, and that somehow had to count as nice, even though it hurt and it was fruitless. Right??

I can see, through the Somatic Experiencing lense, that this was me trying to build connection, the very necessary-to-human-mammals part of the sense of safety. "If you like me, i belong, if i belong i am safe with you" is the best way to sum it up. It was my attempt at building that safety, that connection. 

Trouble is it wasn't working and in undoing the pattern of trying to make people like me, i had to suspend myself outside the old ways until something new was strong enough for me to rely on.

I don't remember a particular time when i realised i couldn't keep being nice, perhaps a watershed moment was when i decided to stop doing things that made me resentful. Seemed innocuous, but man, did it turn things on their arse...

I won't lie, it wasn't always pretty. I made a lot of mistakes - clumsy and not deliberately mean, i didn't always get the new way of turning up right. I had to, as i changed shape, step out of situations i could no longer fit. It was tough.

But one of the hardest patterns to break has been the midnight ruminations. The running 200 different how to fix this scenarios while in the shower. Losing 20 minutes of walking the dog to, well as my photo says, fondling the shit. Some of the shit was mine but very often the shit was the stuff i was facing was the way i had been treated.

The more i cleaned up my end of the relationship, the more vehement the projection, the snideness and judgement, the more rapid the triangulation. I spent hours running through it like a crime scene detective combing for clues about how i could do it better. 

And the truth is i was often just fondling their shit.

My hands got covered in kaka. No one but me and the people i loved could smell the stink. I ended up sitting in it and alas not in a "it all becomes compost" kind of a way. 

So my instruction, my boundary with myself is "stop fondling their shit." and you know, it's coming up roses. 

 


In typical fashion I am writing from the world view of a cis white woman. I am speaking to white folk, to look at ways we collude with white supremacy. I would like to cover some wide territory, to spark curiosity to support wonder. This is, as always, not exhaustive and full of cracks but if I wait for perfect I collude with harm so with that caveat, let’s begin.

in the natural world everything dies. A seed dies in order for the plant to grow, the plant dies in order for the soil to be nourished. Even the seemingly solid mountain is slowly eroding into a non-mountain state. In their own time all living things are somewhere on the life death life cycle. 

You could say anywhere on that cycle, that there is a will for life or a will for death. Is the tree in a process of dying or a process of living? What is it working towards? Most likely it depends on where you are placed at the time.

The will to live can be seen as the incredible raft of functions that the tree, for example, has to correct any harm being done to it. The sap rises and becomes gum to seal off an injury. The roots communicate harm to other plants to help them prepare. The tree knows to still it’s growth in the winter to preserve it from harm in the cold. This is what the will to live looks like – a self-righting impulse to continue on, to thrive.

Humans too have this force within them, this self-righting impulse to mitigate harm, to navigate threat.

The polyvagal theory is an observation of this in action. When we experience threat our systems automatically respond in ways that are designed to get us out of trouble.  We see a bull running at us and our sympathetic nervous system doesn’t give us time to think, it gives us the blast of adrenalin to run, leap over the fence and escape. The will to live. 

The will to live is not just about surviving, it’s about making the conditions for thriving and our incredible self-righting organism of our bodies support that too. We are not designed to just move around escaping threat, but we are also encoded with the self-righting mechanism to come, like many other herd animals,  to bring us to rest. Interestingly enough rest is not just about to being safe from the bull but also being with others with whom we are safe.  So, no physical threat and connected = safety.

With this embedded equation the will to live and thrive, how do we explain people who are not coming to rest, like people who are experiencing anxiety. We can say that in anxiety our sympathetic drive doesn’t turn off. We feel like they are living in “AAAARRR BULL COMING” mode all the time. We can’t come to rest. 

As a result a lot of things suffer; sleep, concentration, digestion, relationships, self-image etc. etc. When we don’t rest, we don’t thrive. 



Is this a mal-adaption? Is this just a personal issue? Should we just get over it and be sensible and see there’s no bull and get on with it?

Well. No. 

What about the dark cousin of anxiety, depression. Where is the will to live in that? Is that the will to die switched on? Is it the natural systemic response to overwhelming threat?

I would say inside depression is the will to live being confused or contorted somehow. I would say that the system gets overwhelmed by intractable challenge and, under resourced, goes into a shutdown state, aka depression. Depression, like all human experiences can be on a continuum and sometimes the darkness is so overwhelming it becomes the will to die. i think it’s a natural response to overwhelming threat to freeze – emotionally, socially, physically – it can turn up in many ways. 

Would it be great if these people who are living in a state of exhaustion and distress could just switch it off? Well hell yes.  But I think unless we look at the will to live, at the natural process that we come encoded with, we will continue to blame the individual, treat with cruel, disrespectful linear treatments and set them up for more distress.

I think we need to look at anxiety and it’s cousin depression, as natural responses to overwhelming threat.

What if we are able to look at anxiety and depression which is turning up in epidemic proportions in teenagers, and see what this pattern might be expressing or attempting to mitigate. 

What if instead of using mouse’s view - what is wrong with this person, what chemical imbalance are they exhibiting, what thought are they being captured by etc etc, we took the hawks view of the systemic issues our teens are facing and began to see what effect they might be having.

It’s  a modern western cultural norm to blame the individual for pathology and to seek perfection. Those are two  of the features of white supremacy. Ok let’s name them all to get them on the table.

Firstly I want to name this article to thank the author for their rich insights and to name the lineage of this part of my thinking From Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture by Tema Okun, dRworks.(1)


• Perfectionism, 
• sense of urgency, 
• defensiveness, 
• quantity over quality, 
• worship of the written word, 
• only one right way, 
• paternalism, 
• either or thinking,  
• power hoarding, 
• fear of open conflict, 
• individualism, 
• progress is bigger, more,  
• objectivity, 
• right to comfort

if we see ourselves, our children, as being embedded in a culture with these paradigms and oppressions as part of the air we breathe, is it unreasonable to think these are threats that the will to live and the drive to thrive are impeded by? 

If we are constantly required to engage in a world that would have us be perfect, for example what does that do?  Let’s look at a young woman. She is supposed to be pleasing and beautiful. She is supposed to be successful, but not too successful, thin, accomplished, academic and sporty, smiley and engaging. I can feel the way these impossibly narrow criteria for approval set young women to walk on a knife edge.

Each week I meet with young women who are sliced by this knife edge, profoundly harmed by this cage of acceptability .They blame themselves for their failing to meet this inhumane ideal. They see their “failure’ as evidence of their unworthiness. Each week I try gently to say “fuck that shit” “this is not your fault” “you are not wrong to be buckling under this pressure”

But often they just think I am trying to be kind to them. I think they sometime see me as naïve or simple because as far as they can see I am just a whisper against the roar all around them.

They understand the world telling them that they are wrong and not that the world is wrong.

What if they are not wrong? What if their response to this world is healthy and adaptative? What if their system perceiving the threats all around them is working just as it should?  What if it’s a will to live screaming at them “get out, GET out, GET OUT!!!”?

What IF all the anxiety that is flooding the nervous systems of so many people is in part a response to the inhumane threat posed by white supremacy?. 

Of course, if you are in a Black body or a brown body, you have a disability, are not cis, or adhering to the gender binary, or you are old, these things are a real physical threat.  As a white person we are automatically privileged by this system. Imagine being this harmed and being privileged at the same time.

Make no mistake this system is one of deep harm making where very, very few are advantaged and it has us stepping over each other to get out of harm’s way. The criterion for thriving in this system are in being able to be the top of the pile and to get there we climb over the “imperfect”, the slow and gentle, the collective, the powerless…

What if this rise in anxiety and the smashing down of depression are our system saying fuck this shit. What if this will to flourish is saying we are at peak toxicity and we are not going to survive, let alone thrive?

My grandad was a coalminer so I lean into his legacy when I ask, what if all these heartbroken young people are the canaries singing “enough” while they can? What if with each cut they make they bleed out a little of the harm they are holding? What if with each negative thought they are hearing the whispers of the system we all participate in?

What if the treatments that tell them to work harder, think themselves lucky, be mindful are just corralling them closer to that which is hurting them?

Now of course, not all treatments and not all therapists and not all paradigms…. But  until we can be assured that we can help each other see how our oppression guarantees us harm we will be suffering from our own collusion and I don’t think we can afford to do that anymore.

IF you are willing to leap you might want to wonder about this with me too. What if, seeing we humans are, in our true state and origin, a part of the natural world. We have become so “superior” in western culture that the idea of humans as natural seems risible. But if you are willing to leap with me – what if we are seeing the rise in anxiety and depression because we are part of the natural world? What if the suffering of the natural world (at the hand of humans and mostly white humans) is calling us into a deeper sense of alarm?

What if this is again, a healthy response to a planet that is suffering and that we are irreducibly linked to? What if these young people’s systems are reading the distress of the planet and are able to take on their responsibility where many of the older generations have failed? What if they are living expressions of “we can’t do this anymore”?

I believe that if we see these young people, well, all of us with anxiety and depression, as purely pathological we collude with the paradigm of perfectionism, with either or thinking, with reluctance to confront what is really there. 

What if we can see our collective responsibility, we can honour the will to life being expressed by people with anxiety and depression? 

What if we could use this as a chance to listen to the grief, to stay with the discomfort and learn what’s really there?

What if we could listen, to each other and to our collective and we could disconnect both as individuals and as communities, from this toxic paradigm and start to reclaim our humanity? 

What if our systems could finally read each other as safe, because we are no longer treating ourselves like production machines?

What do you think?

What if we could honour our will to live outside of what this toxic system tells us is the only right way?

What if we could become safe with each other again?


https://www.showingupforracialjustice.org/white-supremacy-culture-characteristics.html

 
Caveat before we begin. This is not exhaustive and doesn’t look at every facet of how Modern Western Culture causes harm. It’s not my intention to gather all those threads. This is just the lens I am looking through today because i am a fallible woman who is learning to use her voice and not the oracle at delphi.
 
Modern Western Culture (MWC) is a collection of forces that unconsciously shape our social landscape. MWC has a central theme that tough and hard is good. We see that in the honouring of the warrior archetype, the ruthless businessman, the go get ‘em entrepreneur.
 
The be the best, winner takes all, no prizes for second, go hard or go home mentality is the air we breathe.
 
If we try to navigate life  in MWC without a critical eye, we can think the world is a pretty hard place. We learn quickly that neediness and vulnerability are considered weak and undesirable, that rest and disability and failing are not. an. option. We should just Do It ®. In relationships, news media, social media and current popular political movements we are encouraged to go hard regardless of suffering, regardless of the impact on others (aka the weak) and the planet.
 
To be human is to fail, it’s always going to mean stumbling and falling. It’s always going to be messy, painful, embarrassing, but this MWC thinking has us repelled by our own softness. It teaches us to be disgusted with our wobbliness as we learn, our own hurt and emotional response to the inevitable tender and difficult aspects of life.  .
 
We are always going to need things aka be needy and if we are growing and learning we will always make mistakes. When we believe that these very human responses to life are things to hide and be ashamed of we begin to make maladaptations.  In these mal-adaptations we attempt to shut down our neediness and instead try for invulnerability. We shut down to our failures and stop trying. We learn, for fuck’s sake, to think we have done well if we don’t cry at a funeral.
 
In a world where it’s not so much who we are, rather what we make that matters, we begin to jettison our innate humanness.  We value how we appear and what we produce over our truth and experience. We become the ones who say what we do rather than who we are. We are repelled by the very things that encourage us to belong; things like story-telling, vulnerability, connectedness and nurturance.
 
 
Nurturance.
 
The world nurture has its root in the word meaning to suckle or to nourish. A nurturing relationship then, is one in which we are nourished and where we are safe to bring our innocence and child-like tenderness.
 
In the view of the polyvagal theory regulating our system and coming into a sense of safety requires two things;
1. we need to make sure we are not under threat – there’s no sabre toothed tiger in the room and
2. We are able to connect and cooperate with trustworthy others.  This connection is predicated on the need for nurturance, we have to be safe to be vulnerable and to receive nourishment.
 
Despite it being the central quality for a sense of safety which is the bedrock of development and coping for all humans MWC would have us dispise nurturance.
 
In a dog eat dog world there is little place for nurturance.  
 
One of the biggest signals of value in MWC is where the money is. When you look at roles that are by nature engaged with nurturance you see the truth; parenting, childcare, teaching, nursing, death-work, all of these nurturing roles are low paid work. They don’t have value in MWC.
 
The impact of devaluing nurturance
How does this lack of value of nurturance impact us. Does it show up in our undervaluing of self-knowledge, the so called navel gazing of self-reflection? Does it show up in how self-care is considered a mani-pedi and a haircut or buying a bigger car? Does it show up in our vicious inner critic who has no limits on how cruel it can be if we stumble or fail? Does it show up in our rigidity, lack of rest and addiction to busyness? Are we lead to believe we are like a machine and drive ourselves into suffering while neglecting the signs along the way?
 
How does it show up in our relationship? Does it show up in our desire to give someone who is crying a tissue and a platitude, to hurry them into happy? The shiny impenetrable glaze of “think positive” and “look on the bright-side” that’s offered to people who are suffering? Does the nervous system, get what it needs? Is that need over-ridden so many times that we begin to feel we are intrinsically wrong? What does that do to a nervous system? To our wellbeing? To our ability to connect with others?
 
What does the social devaluing of nurturance do to the family system. Does it teach us to value pushing ahead and the striving into the outer world rather than the resting with and tending of nurturance. Does it have us stay busy in our outer lives rather than taking time to be with each other. Does it have us turn away from the vulnerabilities of ageing? Does it make people who are just mothers or just fathers or just guardians shrink or become invisible? Does it mean that the broken relationship to nurturance in a family system becomes a burden? Are children taking on the thinking that despite the neurobiological imperative, the fact they are missing nurturance means they are bad/faulty/not enough or too much? Does that mean we go into life trying to disguise our neediness and faultiness and doing so by not listening to ourselves and perpetuating the cycle?
 
What if on a global scale neediness is discouraged and shamed? Does it misshape neediness and the call to interconnectedness into entitlement?  Does the denial of our own natural neediness twist into greed. Does it turn up in the behaviour of the “weak” being exploited by the “strong”? In the powerful taking what they want and damn the consequences?
 
 
 
What if we repatriate neediness?
 
Chris Zydel an expressive arts therapist in San Francisco and general glorious human encourages her students to be

“needy greedy and proud of it.”
 
This invitation opens the door to self-acknowledgment. As that long-shut door creaks open, often what rushes in is hunger, grief and confusion. How long have we been waiting for someone to tell us it’s ok to want and to need? How do we learn to understand that which we have taken such pains to deny?
 
This invitation is the beginning of a quiet revolution. It’s in this nurturance that we start to uncouple from important parts of the harm-making of modern western culture.
 
It’s in the living into the acknowledgment of this woundedness that we begin to come into clarity; clarity about what we long for, clarity about what works and doesn’t work for us, clarity about what is true.
 
It’s in this state of clarity that we can begin to resource ourselves and fill our cups with what works, without having to grab everything, we learn what is enough.
 
It’s in this well nurtured, replete state that we begin to understand ourselves, that we begin to humanise. We learn to listen to our bodies, we learn to rest, we learn when to leap and when to wait. We learn about who is with us and who is harmful to us, who to trust and who to turn away from. We build healthier connections and respectfully see ourselves as part of the ecosystems of our lives. We learn to connect to meaning and our sense of purpose and live into that in a respectful way.
 
It’s within the gentle holding of nurturance that we learn to respect. When we see ourselves as worthy of respect, through the nurturing eyes of another, we come into a new relationship with enoughness. When we respect ourselves we learn to behave in honourable ways;  we learn to respect ourselves, our limits, of others, of the system around us.  We come into an interconnected and respectful relationship that acknowledges if we cause harm to ourselves, we cause harm to the interconnected system we are a part of.
 
It’s in this right relationship with nurturance and respect that we undo the imperatives of dominance and control that MWC is predicated on. It’s in this right relationship that we can begin to find solutions to the challenges of this broken paradigm. It’s in the arms of nurturance and respect that we become free to be human.

So fuck harden up. let's go soft. let's nourish and nurture. let's create a rebellion of tenderness. 

Are you in?

I want to talk about human Threat response and covid19.
The other day, I listened in dismay to a supermarket worker talk about the hideous behaviour of some people in the shop. The day before, I was waiting in a patient and well distanced line at the pharmacy, when a white man came into the queue and pushed in and started swearing and generally being belligerent.
I felt scared. I felt sorrow for the workers and others who are doing the best they can in really difficult and scary conditions and did not deserve that treatment. And I felt aghast for my fellow pharmacy queuers who felt intimidated and upset.
And now I am feeling for the angry people. That's not some spiritual bypassy nonsense. That's after a lot of reflection on my distress and leaning into the principles of Somatic Experiencing and the Polyvagal theory.
I will attempt my simple understanding of the way it works... here goes...
Our nervous systems have developed to respond to a threat in several ways. These all happen unconsciously.
Firstly, we try to think/negotiate/create our way out of it (this is the ventral/front or "newest" part of our brain).
If that doesn't work, or we have not had good experience using this, we go to the next level (the sympathetic nervous system or more ancient part of our brain.) This part of us is ready to respond to the sabre-toothed tiger. It's the fight and flight part of the brain. If you think you can take the threat on, you will fight and if you think you can outrun it, you will flight (or run).
If that doesn't work, or again, you have lived through experiences that have taught you that you don't have a lot of skill with threat, or, in the moment you are overwhelmed, you use the most ancient part of your brain the dorsal/hind-brain at the back of your skull. This is where you freeze or go into shut down.
I hope you are still with me.
Back to the shouty man in the queue. People are scared. This virus thing is out of our lived experience. (I could go off on a tangent about the lost art of story and how if we had kept alive the stories of the Spanish flu we might have navigated this differently but, I digress.)
We have been raised to think we can be the masters of the planet. We have learned to take what we want, when we want it, in the way that suits us. We don't have experience of our own puny place in the real scheme of things except for bushfires and tsunami and earthquake and something in our psyche convinces us that was a one off and we move on with the relentless entitlement that seems endemic in our culture.
At the moment, we are faced with this unfamiliar threat. It’s a threat that we can't see, it's minute and yet powerful, that is taking people out despite their status, power or wealth; aka all the things we have been taught to believe, matter.
We are all having to do things we don't want to do, live a way we don't want to live. We are having to curtail, cut off, submit. We don't like it. It's a threat. And that threat makes us respond. Remember this is not conscious.
Some of us are to the threat responding from our ventral system. We are connecting, being creative and community minded, building new ways to stay safe and strong. This doesn't mean we are not scared or feel the loss. We just respond by learning, connecting and being thoughtful and creative. To respond like this we have had to have lived pretty safe, well supported lives, be well resourced, have done some inner work to resolve trauma etc.
Some of us are responding from the “sympathetic” part of our systems. We are wanting to run and we can't. In Aotearoa NZ right now, because lockdown for a month, this means just that, no hanging with whanau, sauntering and jaunts to the beach or the bach or the fishing trip.
We are reacting from the fight part of the sympathetic response. In many cases this is a well-worn path honed by finding relief in intimidation and aggression; if you roar loud enough most things will run away.
Sometimes the fight response is heightened as a result of our own trauma and learned behaviour. And, right now, many people who otherwise wouldn’t, are acting from this fight response through stress and complete overwhelm.
We reach this place of being driven anger in an attempt to get the threat out of our faces.
These are the people who are angry in the supermarket and in the pharmacy queue. They are also the usually mild mannered person who snapped at us, the mother with her kids on lockdown losing her cool, the father crying in the car before he comes inside.
Does it excuse anger and intimidation? No.
But knowing there are people out there who are likely to be on a short fuse is important.
How do we manage this? We are wise to pay acute attention to our own feelings, not deny or avoid. We can try to be self aware, self reflective. We can try to build safe connection that will allow us to talk things out. This will often help us move into the frontal part of our brain, bring it back on line.
We can run or do exercise to release some of the pent-up fight/flight response we are all feeling. We can shout into a pillow. We can rip up paper (not toilet paper coz that's gold apparently - an attempt at humour). We can dig the garden. Movement will help us mitigate that flight/fight response. All things we can feasibly do in lockdown.
We have a responsibility for taking care of ourselves. That means navigating things with care. Trying to pay attention to how we are feeling. Asking for help. Taking breaks. Talking to people. Being kind to ourselves. Noticing something that is growing, like a pot-plant, or changing, like clouds.
None of which is encouraged by modern western culture (as you will know if you have been following my work for any time at all!) #smashthepatriarchy.
There will be many people who are unable to do this moderating or mitigating. Who are angry and lashing out. If you are one of those people or stuck in quarantine with one of those people, please contact agencies listed below for support. You deserve to be safe.
As for the third response from the dorsal part of our brain? That's shut-down. That's when we can't think, or feel. When we curl up. And sweet human, we need you with your heart light on to make a way in the darkness. If you find yourself in shutdown, please rest. Please ask for help. Please be gentle and please return. Many people use alcohol and substances to maintain this state and it's going to be harder to isolate and continue with this, again if you can please get help.
Not everyone has the resources to cope during this time. Not everyone can just get through. Not everyone has the capacity.
So, dear one. When we tend to ourselves kindly and with understanding and generosity we are more likely to be able to navigate our way back to the ventral part of our brain, think cogently, understand, learn, be creative and connect with others.
When we drive ourselves beyond our capacity we are less able to hold that place of thought and conscious decision making. We respond to threat in ways we are not proud of. And some of us are doing the best we can and it's not enough for us to cope.
So, what am I trying to encourage you to do? If you have the resources; be kind to yourself. If you don't please ask for help.

I am the kind of person who has a face that looks like I am sour or mean or hard or displeased when I seldom am.
I am a person who often gets misinterpreted.
I am the kind of person who walks around noticing shapes and colours and thinking about the ways they might work in a painting.
I am a person who gets inspiration in inconvenient places and sometimes has to stop and tend to that. 
I am a person who regrets the many creative acts she didn’t do for fear of failure.
I am the kind of person who spends energy just staying in a noisy space. A lot of energy.
I am a person who spends time translating what I am thinking into my approximation of non weirdness. 
I am a person who can be nutting out a problem in my writing or my course creating, as I do groceries and be oblivious to other people walking by.
I am a person who may be seen as unfriendly because of that.
I’m a person who seldom follows threads of friendship , not because I don’t want them but because I am engaged in loving what’s right in front of me and needing refill, so that I am seldom available for anything else, as lovely as that might be.
I am also a person who believes that people don't really want to spend time with me and that shrinking away is safer and kinder.
I am a person others turn away from. 
I am a person who loves big and likes people but has a tank for interacting that needs constant refills. (See translation comment above). 
I am a person who is learning about themselves, has been oblivious to harm making and is learning another way, trying to undo and mend.
I am a person who is grieving.
I am a person who who knows what I experience is not what everyone else does and who gets confused about what to leave in and what to leave out sometimes. 
I am a person who can cry at a colour or a bird song or kindness and a person who gets enraged at meanness. Particularly my own.
I am a person who values being understood.

,i was listening to this podcast about the world's smartest animals

it was funny and thought provoking.

One of the contestants, and eventual winners, was the sperm whale.  

Sperm whale won on the basis of being thought to have a "we consciousness," which meant that they thought and felt as a unit. If one sperm whale was suffering they felt that suffering and responded collectively.

I started to think what it might be like to live in a community where we truly felt as a we.

How difficult it would be to experience your fellow human's distress and humiliation, as if it were your own?

Would it be so easy to hurt each other?  To incarcerate children on the border? Leave them to suffer indignity and humiliation? 

And what about the planet? Imagine if we could feel we-ness with the earth. With the air's pollution, the river's choking, the fire's burning, 

If we felt the we-ness of this place, I imagine things would be very different.

I wonder if part of us remembers being inextricably linked with each other, with our surroundings. I wonder if that is either our default setting; something that we knew in the days when we began to hunt and had ritual to engage with gratitude for the spirit of the deer that we were about to kill. 

I wonder if that part of us knew just how to treat the land and the water we depended on because we were in relation with it. We had a "We consciousness".

I wonder if that part of us was selected out as we became more aggressive with each other, more territorial?  If we began to lose the we consciousness as a defense against feeling too much when we got greedy or murderous with our neighbours?

I wonder if we are living in a we-consciousness deficit?

If our systems are struggling to cope with the lack of connection and belonging we are experiencing?

If the world around us is showing the result of this lack of we?

Is that why so many of us are living in a state of constant fight or flight? Why anxiety is rampant?

I wonder if that is why children are coming into this world in neurodiverse ways?  Is the presence of young ones so averse to the noise and busyness, the harshness of chemicals and pollutants a readjustment to our we-ness?

Are we so biologically far from what it looks like to live in connection with our life support system - the planet and each other - that our systems are sounding the alarm?

I wonder if we are beginning to experience the end of the I-ness?

It's been a while.

Instead, I find myself furiously posting on Facebook in an effort to call out the Emperor's new clothes.  It feels like trying to shout into a hurricane.

But it's one of the ways shout anyway.

And part of my shouting out is in doing my own inner work.

In turning towards my own contribution to the harmmaking in the world and doing what i can, being responsible for my part, I  become the change agent in my own life and in this way changing what i contribute to the world. 

A big part of that is my commitment to shadow work.

I have been doing shadow work for about six years now.

Facing the Minotaur is the biggest body of work i have completed and something i am immensely proud of.

My immersion in shadow work leads me to see the world through the lense of shadow, which is particularly helpful at this time where so much unbelievable destruction and dissension is becoming common place.

In a world where we are now so desensitised by a barrage of bizzare and harmful things that we watch in stunned horror at the Amazonian rainforest and its people being destroyed, the Sonoran desert being irrevocably harmed for a wall that will do nothing, the English economy tank, the American economy be 'ordered" to invent new markets... and that's just this week.

So i look at shadow.

In shadow work we understand that we have a persona or a face we present to the world. This usually, in a effort for us to succeed in the world, to find love and belonging, persona is a mixture of "good" qualities like friendliness, hard working, family oriented, kind, ambitious and a few "bad" qualities  greed, selfishness, meanness.  

Usually the "good" outweigh the "bad". Usually we think we are pretty good people. 

This persona is brittle. It's often easily cracked in defensiveness or stress and through these cracks, the other contents of our being come through.  Often these contents are likely to be "bad"; rage, viciousness, destructiveness etc and they come pouring out through the cracks and cause havoc.

Often we blame the "other" for the presence of these "ugly" things - we find ways to quickly disown them, find some scapegoat or some one "less" than us to be the owner of these disgusting traits.

But the truth is we are like the ocean.  The surface of the ocean is vast and we can think we see the ocean; we watch it change from glassy smooth to storm whipped waves and we can think we know it.  But underneath is a huge and complex ecosystem that contains huge life force. We can't afford to dismiss this in knowing the ocean of self.  The leviathans and predators that live there will "get us" if we ignore them and are unwilling to take them into account when we are out swimming around.

We have to understand the hidden and alive aspects of the self and we have to do it in a hurry.

Otherwise we run the risk of not taking responsibility for the things that we can change.  We will get drawn into the seductive power of following someone who let's us off the hook by blaming "the other" for our woes.  We will be righteous in defense of our own blamelessness and perfection and this, in its most vicious form, gives us permission to destroy.

We have to learn to abandon our defense of persona in favour of understanding our own hidden and harmful characteristics. 

We can reclaim our own drive to destruction in order to stop it being expressed outside ourselves.

But we have to do it now.

Stop believing it's all "their" fault. 

Start seeing our full selves; the sharklike self and the glorious dolphin - we need to SEA ourselves into responsible action.