On an unseasonably warm November day, I took the dog for a walk. With COVID-19 raging, I suited up with a baseball cap, sunglasses, visible earphones, and a bright green cloth mask with white polka dots. I thought my presentation’s message was pretty clear: Not here to talk, just to walk.
Alas, while strolling along a relatively busy street listening to Brene Brown’s latest podcast episode with Dolly Parton, a man on a bicycle, who was wearing a mask better suited for Nightmare on Elm Street than COVID-19 protection, waved as he passed me on the other side of the road. I responded with a slight wave, trying to be friendly rather than antisocial in this time of so much isolation and loneliness. Apparently this was all the go-ahead he needed to turn around and ride up alongside me.
I abruptly stopped walking, and he rode past, which is what I had hoped would happen. I believe in science and the infection prevention that physical distancing provides, especially when I have no idea where people have been or what they’ve been doing. When he realized I was no longer beside him, he hit the brakes. I saw a large knife in a sheath on his hip. About 15 feet away now, he told me he wanted to talk to me. I replied, “I’m not talking to strangers during the pandemic.” I waited, feeling grateful to have the dog by my side and the presence of several people driving by that I could flag down if necessary, although I noticed I was feeling fairly frozen. After what felt like an eternity, he began to pedal again and turned around to go wherever he originally was heading. I returned the earbud to its rightful place and began to walk again, the words he was now yelling at me as he rode away garbled by Dolly’s soothing twang.
When I got home, I headed straight to the stump and axe in my backyard, set up explicitly to metabolize the anger that has been stuck in my body for years. To borrow from my daughter when she was a toddler, “I have a lot of yellings in my body.” The swinging movement of the axe helped to thaw the freeze in my torso. As the stuck energy was mobilized, my throat opened, too, and the words came—the things I wanted to say to that man, that would have been appropriate to say to that man, but that could have resulted in violence to me if I stated them directly to his face. Other words came, too. About accountability. About entitlement. About wanting to be a person who isn’t expected to caretake adults and their feelings.
During this hellish year, some amazing women have delivered poignant and welcome truths:
I have a voice.
Started out as a whisper, turned into a scream
Made a beautiful noise
Shoulder to shoulder marching in the street.
— Alicia Keys & Brandi Carlile, A Beautiful Noise
I will not stay, not ever again - in a room or conversation or relationship or institution that requires me to abandon myself.
— Glennon Doyle, Untamed
Do no harm, but take no shit.
—Elizabeth Lesser, Unlocking Us
These singers, writers, and activists are not the white women who turned out in droves to vote for Donald Trump on November 3. As a trauma therapist who wishes everyone old enough to vote was required to read Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, I think there’s a lot more going on here than we want to acknowledge, let alone address, in the cries for unity following Biden’s win.
The day before I encountered Entitled Biker Man, I happened upon Heather Plett’s poignant blog post, “On trauma, abuse, and the justification that helps us cope with cognitive dissonance,” written after her own encounter with “Mr. Big Man” and published three days after the 2020 presidential election. As she wrote,
When I found the research that identified a fourth trauma response (tend-and-befriend), I finally felt seen and could finally begin to name my reactivity as trauma-related and not just something that made me weak. (I could also learn to soothe myself, and to experience my heightened reactivity with more mindfulness and less self-judgment.) Tend-and-befriend is most often seen in women, according to the research. It’s the instinct that causes us to gather the vulnerable around us and to befriend those who will help us survive the threat. The ‘befriend’ part can be a really healthy community-support piece (i.e. gathering other family members to help us protect our children), but the dark side of it is that we also tend to befriend the perpetrator of the threat in order to mitigate the harm.
Nowadays, when I observe this tend-and-befriend adaptation not only in women but also in people with additional marginalized social identities, individuals who have partners or parents who fall on the “higher” end of the narcissism spectrum, and life histories filled with violence and negligence (and often all of these experiences reside in a single body), I interrupt minimizing language, such as “people pleasing” or “peacekeeping,” when it is used to describe this trauma response. Instead, I emphasize the unmet need for safety that drives it.
If we are in homes and relationships that promote secure relating—that is we feel seen, heard, valued, and, especially when we are kids, protected in our close relationships—we do not tend to live in constant fear of physical and/or emotional harm. In contrast, in environments where we have repeatedly felt emotionally overwhelmed and alone in that overwhelm, whether as young children or later in our lives, a wise strategy is to keep the external environment as stable and harmonious as possible, regardless of the cost to ourselves. So we learn to soothe the volatile person who has power over us. To silence our truth so as not to not upset those around us. To give up our authenticity. To freeze.
Unfortunately, in a society founded on a caste system and filled with authoritarian religious communities, the tend-and-befriend trauma response abounds among those of us in one-down positions on the ladder. Healing this response first and foremost involves carving out safe-enough external and internal landscapes in which we can learn to tend and befriend our own experience.
It is hard to contact the wounded places in us if we’re feeling imperiled by threats of violence, humiliation, criticism, and contempt. We’re mammals after all, and our animal defenses (that is, fight, flight, freeze, and tend-and-befriend) will generally win out if our nervous systems perceive or experience enough threat. Boundary setting therefore is key to establishing those safe-enough spaces to tend and befriend ourselves first. Learning how to set boundaries that are firm, clear, and kind requires a lot of practice after a lifetime of shrinking the self to evade harm. When we have been terrorized as children, we may have an even harder time allowing ourselves to be vulnerable enough to stay kind when standing our ground, or keep a soft front to use Brene Brown’s language, since our brain so quickly associates vulnerability with violence.
I’ve found that the “take no shit” part of Lesser’s teaching can easily drown out the “do no harm” message in an interaction if I have not metabolized enough of my anger beforehand and/or I am interacting with someone who is scared of my anger and so tries to control or dismiss it, which is akin to throwing gas on a fire. Another boundary I therefore am learning to honor is to walk away from most people when I start to feel the upward and forward energy of rage in my body so that I can process that energy in a way that does not harm others or myself. For the record, containing our rage long enough to get to a safe refuge is much easier to do when we’re sober, have enough food in our bellies, feel supported by a community and got adequate sleep (the HALT acronym is a great tool for assessing how resourced we are at any given moment).
After decades of doing no harm and taking a lot of shit, we are undoubtedly going to make mistakes on the path to doing no harm while taking no shit. Ironically, the more we can practice tending and befriending ourselves, the more resilience we will have in the face of the shame that arises after unskillfully standing up for ourselves. Simply put, more self-compassion creates more capacity to effectively engage in the art of repair.
Ultimately, if we want adults to grow up and be responsible for their own words, feelings, and actions, we are, as Lama Rod Owens puts it, going to need to let people “have their agency to be in the dark.” The process of transforming the tend-and-befriend trauma response to a more fulfilling life is a winding one with a lot of cognitive dissonance. Shadow work is not for the faint of heart. And I cannot think of a more liberatory experience than consciously choosing to no longer betray myself. Having attended to my own wants and needs, I now understand I am not my trauma. Nobody is.