I don’t want to keep arguing with people who find my death an acceptable collateral damage for anything. I don’t want to keep trying to plan the future with them. So, for me, so much of it is like how do I create something that’s more compelling than that? And the invitation is always available, the door is always open, any time you want to exit the death cult. We’re going to have vibrant options for life available over here.
—adrienne maree brown, On Being
On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade decision. As Heather Cox Richardson wrote, “For the first time in our history, rather than conveying rights, the court has explicitly taken a constitutional right away from the American people.”
One thing I have been contemplating is how grateful I am for the morning-after pill and my access to Planned Parenthood when I was 22 years old. At that time, I had just graduated from college and was dating a cisgender man with whom I was learning about sexual pleasure for pleasure’s sake (hallelujah!). I also was not ready to raise a child or give up my plan to become a Peace Corps volunteer. When a condom broke one summer night, I went to Planned Parenthood as soon as its doors opened the next morning and proceeded to Senegal a couple of months later.
Then there’s my own reckoning with sexual violence that I experienced at 17 years old. Only recently was I able to process the shame and trauma of that event in therapy and begin to call it by its true name: sexual assault. I did not have to contend with unwanted pregnancy as a result of that violence. The three million people in this country who experience rape and rape-related pregnancy during their lifetime are not so lucky.
Clearly I’m craving some transparency and honesty about the countless ways women and additionally marginalized people in this country have fought for basic human rights and have had to continue fighting to safeguard those rights. If only a minority of people in this country would grow the fuck up and be accountable for their ongoing abuse of power and the Earth, including its inhabitants! Alas, I’m not holding my breath. After all, this small group of people lives on dirty pain, which reeks of denial, blame, and avoidance. Many of these folks also adhere to a cult of innocence in addition to a death cult. I don’t know about you, but I’m not trying to be a cult deprogrammer with my one wild and precious life.
Instead, I am turning to Grace Lee Boggs’ wisdom: “Transform yourself to transform the world.” So I’m going to talk about how those of us who have been inducted into various systems that feed on an abuse-dependency cycle can free ourselves from the dependency side of the equation that is literally killing us. In short, I want to encourage us to detach in healthy ways from toxic people and energy and to discern such detachment from the kind of separation that leads to disdain, apathy, and passivity. Thankfully, many very intelligent teachers have given us road maps to follow that are supportive of our struggles for justice, equity, and belonging.
First up, is Terri Cole. Last year, when Boundary Boss was published, I learned that I suffer from high-functioning codependency:
High-functioning codependency is behavior that includes disordered boundaries, where you are overly invested in the feeling states, the decisions, the outcomes, and the circumstances of the people in your life to the detriment of your internal peace and wellbeing.
A high-functioning codependent is often smart, successful, reliable, and accomplished. They don’t identify with being dependent, because they are likely doing everything for everyone else. In a way, you make it look easy and like you have it all together.
You might have an amazing career, run a household, care for children or aging parents, juggle all the extracurriculars, doctor’s appointments, plus you’re basically life coaching your friends through all their problems.
You can do it all and the people in your life look to you to do so. But what is the cost to YOU? Overfunctioning can leave you burnt out and exhausted from trying to maintain an impossible workload and keep all the balls in the air.
Around the same time, I learned about the human giver syndrome, which explicitly names how patriarchal, gender-binary societies have woven into every thread the belief that women are supposed to give everything to others, no matter the cost to themselves, so that men can be self-determining human beings who realize their dreams and aspirations. As the full-time working mother of a then five-year-old daughter and small business owner, both of these constructs were a gut punch.
I’ve been a feminist since I got away from my conservative childhood enclave and found out about feminism, soon after the sexual assault named above. But I had no idea how deep and strong the pressure to abandon myself would be upon becoming a mother. In some ways, I am grateful I didn’t know about the intensity of this mother as martyr memo or I might not have very deliberately conceived my daughter at the age of 39.
And, just to amplify our new reality, many people with a uterus no longer have the option of not becoming a parent when they do not want and/or are not ready to assume this monumental responsibility for another life.
A year ago, when I began my divorce process, I began digging into healing the human giver syndrome and divorcing myself from the high-functioning codependency, too, since I knew I would fall apart if I didn’t. I have since discovered just how much a sense of over-responsibility for others’ feelings and well-being had colonized my brain. I automatically would take on any number of time- and energy-depleting tasks and interactions without first asking, is this actually my responsibility? That I, like so many others, learned the please and appease trauma response at a young age to stay safe safe with unsafe adults further cemented my tendency to get too close to others’ distress in an attempt to understand and deescalate it. As if these adults didn’t have the primary responsibility to understand their triggers, regulate their nervous systems, and contain their words and behavior.
I loved and related to how Jen Hatmaker described being a “spotlight and cleanup crew” for others:
Thanks Sandy!
Essentially the central definition of codependency is that you just do not allow another person to sit in the consequences of his or her choices…You don’t want them to feel the discomfort of it. You don’t want other people to observe what’s true…You don’t want to live with a ticking time bomb. So you shape shift around somebody’s volatile personality just to steady the waters right? So that you’re just not constantly having explosions all around you. You’re basically taking on the effects of somebody else’s choices and you are crafting an environment around someone else so they don’t have to feel their own pain, their own discomfort, their own trauma, their own consequences, or even their own responsibilities…I did not know I was codependent. I thought I was just being a good person, right? I thought I was just being helpful. I thought I was just being in service to another person. I did not realize how much I stunted our own growth…And I took that to my counselor and she was like, this is your work…You made these choices one by one because you preferred a steady stable environment over whatever was true…And so, that’s been a lot of my personal work for the last year and a half is figuring out how to let other human people just be human people. All the way. Good, bad, hard, making good choices, making terrible choices. Because they’re a person and that’s their life. And it’s not my life.
After listening to Hatmaker so vulnerably describe her own struggles, I was finally ready to read the classic Codependent No More. Damn did Melody Beattie’s unflinching honesty hit hard. Her depiction of healthy detachment is what struck the deepest chord with me. As she wrote, “It (detachment) is not detaching from the person whom we care about, but from the agony of involvement.” Could she more perfectly sequence three words? I don’t think so. Agony of involvement captures so poignantly the felt experience of pursuing a relationship with a person, job, or cause in which only one party is assuming responsibility for their choices and the impact of those choices. We can scream from the rooftops, work ourselves to death, and come up with the calmest, smartest argument in the world. However, if the other party refuses to tune in and turn toward what is actually happening—ideally in a regulated and emotionally aware way—anticipate feeling very stuck and having oodles of blame and shame hurled at you.
And since those who dodge responsibility do not want us to make the distinction between blaming and assessing accountability, here is a little David Richo magic:
In blame, there is censure with an intent to shame and humiliate. The intent is to show that someone is wrong. In assessing accountability the intent is to right a wrong and restore a balance. In mindful, adult living, no one is to blame and everyone is accountable.
When we see clearly that we are not sitting across the table from fellow adults who are willing to be accountable, I want us to detach rather than work harder, give more, or explain what’s what until we’re blue in the face. I’ve been thinking about healthy detachment as backing up from the scene as far as we need to before we start getting curious about what’s happening. In the case of the Supreme Court, when I am detached enough, I’m no longer shocked or befuddled. I see that the system is working exactly as it was designed.
Image Credit: Jess Watkins
Now is my chance to recognize I have other options than to get seduced into shame’s inadequacy story (and it is a bullshit story) or a chronic state of powerlessness, both of which can take us deep into isolation, dissociation, and self-hatred. Enter another tough lesson from Beattie: those of us who are accustomed to assuming responsibility for other people’s messes tend to jump on the Karpman drama triangle in this order: rescuer—>persecutor—>victim. Yikes. brown unabashedly rejects the over-responsible, caretaker role when she says,
We can’t keep getting swept back into conversations that are nonsensical to be in. The idea that I would ever argue with a man about what I do with my body, like it’s such a waste of my miraculous life and time that…it’s just illogical.
Amen. So what are some concrete options for honoring our miraculous life and time? Here are a few:
We can adopt the wise practice of transformative justice and support people in holding themselves accountable. Not hold them accountable, mind you. Sometimes I joke with my clients, “Are you a district attorney?” Certain individuals in specific roles have the responsibility and authority to hold people accountable. I do not and you probably do not either. But I enjoy thinking creatively about supporting people in holding themselves accountable. I might ask them, “Have you reflected on how your behavior is impacting them?” “Have you inquired into the belief driving that action?” “Huh, that reaction surprised me. Can you tell me where it comes from?” “How are you going to make this right?” I might even give a mere one word, “Ouch,” and see if the person is willing to go inward and consider how what they just said or did was hurtful. In none of the above examples did I exert energy I don’t want to spend on educating, mind reading, or walking on eggshells.
“We need other people to see our own faces,” writes Cole Arthur Riley, and challenge the “intoxicating lie of individualism.” The transformation of ourselves does not happen in isolation. If we are considering leaving a family or partner or community that is harming us, we need to find additional people who will embrace and care for us. Reaching out is vulnerable and requires a willingness to put ourselves out there.
We can choose to forge close relationships with adults who, as my therapist beautifully said, know how to hold themselves (or are intentionally learning how to do so—thank goodness secure attachment can be earned!). If our early relational map was marred by abuse, neglect, and additional kinds of trauma, we may need help knowing how and where to find such people. I promise they exist. An adult who holds oneself first and foremost has learned how to love themselves and hold themselves in high regard (e.g., brown’s words above). With their deep well of self-worth, they do not struggle to take responsibility for their thoughts, emotions, behavior, and happiness. And they contain and process their dirty pain rather than regularly unleash it on others. Since we’re all imperfectly perfect and inevitably hurt others in long-term relationships, these adults know how to repair relational ruptures.
We can seek out, learn from, and support networks and movements, oftentimes founded and run by queer people of color, who have been challenging oppression and domination for generations. In this moment the National Network of Abortion Funds is one such organization.
If and when we can, rest. “Rest is the only reliable gateway to wonder,” Riley lyrically reminds us.