This is a question that came up for me this week, and I will tell you how. But I also thought it was an interesting question to ask given how topical giving and receiving is for many people around the world at this time of year across various cultures.

Of course I am not talking about those horrid itchy socks Auntie sends every year. This is about examining my beliefs so I am open to receive all that is helpful to me on this journey of life.

The question came up when I went to an appointment with a chiropractor I hadn’t seen before. I thought I’d try something new to see if I could get any relief for the tension in my right shoulder that is often there.

I figure that at some point, along my inner journey back to authentic me, I will address the layers that are keeping my shoulder bound. Since there is nothing structurally wrong, it’s more likely related to an unhelpful thought pattern or belief (or multiple layers of unhelpful beliefs).

The chiropractor took one look at me and described what she was seeing: locked up at the pelvis, twisted on my left hand side, and that crosses over in a common pattern of tension up through my right shoulder and neck.

I explained some inner work I had done around my shoulder which revealed some emotional trauma as a baby (having to suck up or rein in my feelings when being weaned onto a rubber teat at two weeks old) and there is some past life memories there that I am aware of relating to being badly beaten for the knowledge I possessed.

This, I guess, made her feel comfortable talking to me on a metaphysical level. She explained her own understanding of the pattern she was seeing. What she told me was that we often receive an imprint of our mother’s nervous system from our time in the womb, and then when we are born our will is usually shaped by the role models around us, so our ideas about masculine and feminine often come from our mother and father, for example.

Metaphysically the left side of the body relates to the feminine and the right side to the masculine. So as she saw my left hip twisted inwards (in a defensive/protective type posture) it’s a physical representation of the feminine blocking the masculine.

The question to ask myself, therefore, is “what do I currently believe about receiving support from the masculine?” and “where am I blocking myself from receiving support?” Knowing, of course that I have aspects of both masculine and feminine within me, and I may be blocking myself from internal support and/or external support that would naturally come to me if I was open to receiving it.

Because I am a writer, I just starting writing out the response. It was fascinating to look at how my beliefs have been shaped through my experiences with my own parents, siblings, partners and other important males like coaches and grandparents.

As I sifted through memories of mum relating to me her opinions and experiences of men, the story of overhearing my uncle’s teenage friends talking about girls, for example, I was aware of little alerts getting flagged in my system. Perhaps I haven’t been as trusting of aspects of masculinity as I would otherwise have been.

I also took a look at the most enlightened and encompassing definition of masculine that I could find, I wanted to know what a fully embodied expression of masculine could look like. Devine masculine represents action, direction, movement, responsibility, strength, focus, fatherhood, the sun, generosity, encouragement, material abundance, clarity, intellect, transformation and growth.

I can certainly see, for example, being the eldest living child in my family, responsibility is something I do well, maybe too well. Maybe I even have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility and don’t always let others take responsibility for themselves. This is especially important for me as my kids grow and I let go.

While there is undoubtedly more support I am blocking myself from receiving, becoming aware of where I’m blocking it is the first step to unblocking it. There are a myriad of way to change the emotional signature of my beliefs by revisiting these early memories, as I talk about in Want More Energy, Clarity and Time? but it all starts of awareness.   

In diving deeper into my associations with the masculine, I also became aware of some of the wonderful support I’ve received from men over the years.

I don’t have many memories of my grandad, he died when I was fourteen, but I do remember him taking my brother and me to feed horses at a local estate. He didn’t have a lot to say, my grandad, but there was a quiet solidity about him, like a space in which I could just safely stand as who I was without judgment of any kind. And his gentle example of feeding the giant horses helped overcome fears I had inherited from my parents’ who were not animal lovers.

There were also my swim coaches, my diving coach and the lovely gentleman who worked with me in the travel centre in one of my student’s jobs. Those guys were in my corner, and my dedication and success was their reward. They were there to show me how to give others a hand up in life, to pass on what I know.

While I feel like I have only just begun my journey of uncovering the helpful and unhelpful beliefs I have around receiving support from the masculine, it also feels like an important perspective to share. In what areas are you blocking yourself from receiving?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy What Value Are You Adding to the Currencies in Your Life? How to Live in Conscious Self Awareness in the World and You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

It’s simple; I got more energy, clarity and time by doing my inner work.  While that is a nice neat statement, I can also add that I’m more relaxed, have more perspective, more focus in areas that are important to me, a much better sense of self, my health is better, my body and mind look and feel better and my relationships are better. Honestly, life is just better.

What do I mean by inner work?

Well, I mean that I always felt stressed, tired and unhappy and was always looking to fix the things I blamed – usually circumstances and other people. After years of external change to try and fix how I was feeling inside, I realised it was time to stop running from the heaviness that seemed to lurk there and, instead, shine some light on it.

What has brought this to mind is I’ve been doing some catching up with friends as the year approaches its end, swapping our tales of challenge and triumph for the year.  I had been sharing, among other things, the continuing work I’ve been doing rooting out old and unhelpful beliefs, thoughts and behaviours.

One response was “I’m not quite sure I'd want to think of all the crap stuff in the past, I am sure it would be helpful in some ways but in others, I think ... just bash on with life.  I know I need to chill out a bit and laugh and enjoy life more and will perhaps try and focus on that in 2021”.

That is how I used to feel too, I get it. My life was busy, crazy busy, and hard emotionally, I carried a lot. I felt alternatively like superwoman (I think that was the adrenaline) and anxious and irritable (which was probably the cortisol), and I also felt really weighed down (which, it turns out, was all the unhelpful thoughts and feelings that actually were weighing me down).

I’d sit there at 10pm at night, when my partner would switch off the TV, knowing I really needed to go to bed and get some sleep but simultaneously feeling like I was just being swept away on the tide. Meanwhile it felt like there were better possibilities that existed for my life, but it was as if those were happening somewhere just beyond my reach.

I’d often liken my experience of life (until recent years) to swimming through treacle, but it's getting better as I wade through all my unhelpful thought and behaviour patterns. I’ve found that "all the crap stuff of the past" is really one big generalized bucket. 

There was the first seven years of my life, of which I have little conscious memory, but that is precisely when all the internal wiring occurs, so that is where I've been focusing my attention.

It's fascinating, it turns out my life was basically just a repeat loop of experiences that reflected all these crazy beliefs I had picked up as child, a toddler, a baby, and even in utero – in fact there is also a whole lot of inter-generational and collective trauma in there for good measure. It was all just playing out through more and more exaggerated experiences. 

For example, last week I had been away for a few days with the kids while one attended an out-of-town course. When we got back I was busy and, after saying I would make salad for dinner, I then told my partner I was too exhausted and wouldn’t be making one.

His face fell, he was disappointed, but said he’d make it. His facial response had triggered me though; I was irritated and needled him. To give this context, he had also had an extremely busy week so we were both pretty tired and low on energy.

In the (not too distant past) this scenario may have played out with a lot more intensity than it did, given neither of us was in a good place emotionally. Thankfully however, having both done some inner work around conflict, it didn’t get ugly.

That said, I was still aware of an unhelpful belief that was bubbling up within me, the belief that I wasn’t seen. There was a definite voice of a martyr in my head, and what felt like a swelling or stuckness in my throat.  I worked through the emotional intensity on a scrap piece of paper “I am angry because…”, “I am disappointed because…” working my way up the emotional scale until I reached a point of clarity and even the silver linings.

This perhaps makes it obvious how I’ve gained more energy, clarity and time.

Previously I’d have gotten really stuck on something like this for a good few days, because it would have seemed so much bigger than it actually was, because of all the deeper (and heavy, negative) meaning attached to it. I’d have jumped from recognizing I was too tired to make a salad to questioning the entire basis of our relationship and a minor blip would have become major battleground.

That takes a lot of headspace, a lot of energy and creates a much muddied view of life.

There are so many ways to tackle this kind of work, and gain insights, and start to lighten the load. I have taken advantage of many free video mini-series that teachers and authors often use to launch online courses, read many books, listened to many practitioners from many walks of life share their insights and experiences engaged with mentors and made use of other help; there is a veritable smorgasbord of tools, practices and people to engage with in whatever way suits the situation at the time.

How did I know where to begin? I just started to tune in to that innate wisdom that lies within. The truth is that there is only one person who knows what is right for me at any particular moment and that is me, I am my own unique cocktail of genes, experiences and much more. But I had to become practiced at observing my thoughts rather than totally identifying with them.

The way I did that was to stop procrastinating about meditation and start doing it. Every day I take fifteen minutes and breathe, letting my thoughts drift away like a cloud each time I notice them. Doing that has not only helped my nervous system enormously, it’s helped me to really get this sense of my inner – more objective - observer and the thoughts and feelings I’m noticing.

That has helped me to develop my innate sense of intuition, which helps me make better decisions about how to tackle things in my life. It’s helped me to connect with the various kinds of help I’ve needed along the way, most of which would have previously just been ignored.

In Judith Fertig’s novel The Taste of Lemon, the main character’s dad has been absent from her life for many years after he couldn’t cope following his time in Vietnam. Finally, after getting the help he needed with his trauma, he remarked “I feel terrible. I know that is how it’s supposed to work. You have to feel worse before you get better.”

It’s so temporary though, feeling worse, it really is fleeting. More than that, it is so much better than the feeling of dread and running away from the things I feared for years, not even thinking about them fears or as anything more than a dense mass of shadows somewhere back over my shoulder.

Psychologists are really changing the way they deal with trauma, whether it’s the more insidious common variety emotional trauma experienced by most people though the early years of attachment and attunement, or more obvious and heart wrenching trauma.

Terry Real has a three-part model for thinking about the psyche that can help clients understand the aftereffects of trauma and relate to other people from their most thoughtful, mature self. He says “Oftentimes, patients reenact past trauma in their current relationships. Not only is this heartbreaking to watch, the patterns are extremely difficult for client to change without awareness”.

In Brittany Watkins work, while centring on comfort eating and dealing with the tap roots of where that unhelpful behaviour begins, she powerfully and relatively easily addresses the emotional signature of those heavy feelings people have been carrying around.

Jimmy Davis, astounded by the far reaching effects of her methods, said Brittany had told him “If you have a computer and it’s slow… Usually, that just means there are lots of programs running in the background.  When you get rid of the programs, the computer runs how it was designed to.  Humans are the same way.  Your brain installs software (belief systems) based on traumatic events that happen when we are younger. Usually, they are not positive, so your subconscious installs these programs to protect you. Once you get rid of those programs, you run how you are supposed to.”
He added “I realized in that moment everything I had tried to fix previously was simply managing symptoms rather than the actual root cause.”

I relate to this, I've had this drive to tackle the root cause (or dissolve the treacle, so to speak) as I'm crossing the halfway point of my life and I want my body and brain decluttered. This seems necessary to take on this next part of my life that I want to live from that less encumbered and more authentic perspective.

Anne McNaughton said “There is always the point in any month when you get a chance to exhale, catch your breath and make time to hear yourself think. There is some opposition to this, with life fighting back and (whether real or imagined) a belief that time out to hear yourself think is being lazy or unproductive. However there couldn’t be a more productive use of your time.”

With the end of the year and perhaps some downtime in sight, perhaps it’s time to hear yourself think and start becoming aware of some of those unhelpful patterns in your life so that you can gain more energy, clarity and time?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy I Am Worth It – Are You? Put Money in its Place,  Autonomy – Break Free of Money Fears,  and Profit, Purpose and Personal Fulfillment Can Thrive Together - A Remarkable New Organisational Construct. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

This was a question that really struck a chord with me when I was glancing through a paragraph that mentioned income. Normally when I read about income needs and priorities it doesn’t really strike me too deeply, I have always had faith in that department that things will work out, for which I am truly grateful.

However this question had a twist that called to me, it stemmed from a statement that money is simply a means to an end, and it was more about:

• Looking at my needs and priorities behind money
• What I believe I deserve across all the currencies in my life i.e. how much I value myself

Now that really grabbed my attention, what are the different currencies in my life I wondered?
I set about doing a little research.

Tim Ferris suggests time (in the sense of being time rich), money and mobility (being able to come and go as we please) are the three currencies of life.

Lisa Grace Byrne talks about our five life currencies as inner natural resources: time, thoughts, words, feelings and talents/natural gifts.

Willie Patterson cites four currencies to building a more fulfilled life, and includes a helpful chart of what poor versus wealthy means in each of the areas: money, time, knowledge and relationships.

Dr CH Vikranth espouses the concept of five currencies to lead a well balanced life: physical (body/health), mental (knowledge/skills), social (the people in our life), money/material possessions and spiritual.

And Mary Morrisey puts forward four forms of abundance we need before money flows into our life: ideas, gratitude, space and worthiness.

When I define the term currency, as things I have of value that I can exchange for value, it is Lisa Grace Byne’s definitions that resonated with me the most. To her list I’d add money, ideas and knowledge/skills.

This makes my list of currencies:

• Time
• Thoughts
• Words
• Ideas
• Knowledge/Skills
• Feelings and talents/natural gifts
• Money

I then essentially went through each of my currencies and wrote down my goals preceded by “I deserve”.

For example:

• I deserve time for self care, time for myself to explore ideas, time for relaxation, time with each of my children, time with my partner and time with family and friends
• I deserve thoughts that give clarity, thoughts that are kind, thoughts that will help me go with the flow and thoughts that will help me manifest the life I want.
• I deserve to use words that inspire. I love Jean Houston’s phrase “You speak like angels and use words like wands.”
• I deserve ideas that flow to me easily.
• I deserve knowledge and skills that continue to grow to the benefit of this life and beyond.
• I deserve feelings that I fully connect with, teaching me to navigate the journey to my essential self. And I deserve feelings that vibrate on a high level, attracting my best life.
• I deserve a life where I get to express my natural gifts and talents fully and regularly. And I deserve to use my natural gifts and talents to the service of all in ways that I can see and appreciate.

Once I had defined those it then highlighted to me where I have added value in recent years and where there is still some work to do (okay, perhaps a lot of work to do in some places), but it was gratifying to see how far I’d come in many of the areas in recent years.

However with 2020 almost in the rear view mirror it felt like a great exercise to get clarity on what I’m reaching for as I am moving forwards.

I really liked a statement Anne McNaughton made this week “2020 was the year that the cake came out of the oven and we could see what had been cooking for years, while in 2021 we get to wipe down the bench, get out the recipe book and start cooking something brand new.”

This exercise felt a lot like that process of looking at the cake, wiping down the bench, and starting to get ideas for new recipes.

So what are the currencies of value to you? Has 2020 changed your perspective across some of these? And how will you add value moving forwards? 

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy I Am Worth It – Are You? Put Money in its Place,  Autonomy – Break Free of Money Fears,  and Profit, Purpose and Personal Fulfillment Can Thrive Together - A Remarkable New Organisational Construct. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

She held up a pair of shoes and asked us to imagine that those shoes belonged to our mother or father. Then she asked us to imagine them on their feet as they are walking towards us. “How do you feel right now? What do you notice in your body?” she asked.

This was a talk on intergenerational trauma by Dr Diane Poole Heller. As I imagined this scenario I found myself getting anxious. I found it such a simple and interesting exercise I later asked my partner the same questions. His response was a feeling of fear, of walking on eggshells.

Our bodies seem nothing short of a miracle of cosmic proportions to me, the more I learn, the more I marvel at this vehicle for my earthy ride that I once referred to as a meat suit. Now I see that it is something beyond sophisticated, a kind of intelligence I can’t even explain.

My body can tell me things my mind can’t compute. That one little exercise about how my body reacts to the sensation of feeling like I have a parent walking towards me tells me a lot about why I have always feared conflict.

I’m often taken back to the standard parting comment from my parents in childhood “be good”. Being good was what was important in society in that era. It is something I’m so conscious of, that I’ve deliberately made my parting shot to my own kids “love you, have fun”.

And while this is a personal reflection, I think it does connect into what’s happening right now in the world around me. Out of interest in what was happening in the US election I watched a short clip of Joe Biden saying that after the election was called it was time to “put the rhetoric of the election behind us and (I’ll paraphrase) reconnect with each other”.

Too little too late given that the crumbling seat of power in Western civilisation appears to be descending into polarised anarchy, exactly the kind of conflict we do want to avoid. This seems yet another example of the kind of rot that sets in as discussed in You See What Happens When Leaders Are Not Grown Up on the Inside.

To call the political trash talk rhetoric is to severely downplay the role it has played in political polarisation, realising too late the violence that has been incited and the extreme importance of leading by example.  

Though, as I said four years ago in The Role of Clinton or Trump in an Evolved World?  political game playing is not for those who want authenticity, it’s not for those who want to understand the world through the eyes of another and it’s not for those who want to truly be part of a world more evolved than this one today.

My view then was, whether it was Clinton or Trump was irrelevant, neither represented an evolved world, both represented a step in nature’s death dance of an era. And so four years on, this death dance is still playing out, but certainly further along the track, hopefully the crescendo.

This is the kind of violent conflict that arises, I believe, because we are taught that disagreement and difference is a bad thing, there is a right and a wrong, instead of their being many personal truths. And so, I think, instead of us being able to confront and explore our personal differences one to one, we become this angry, seething, polarized mass unable to engage in meaningful conversation.

Before I dive into this fear of conflict a bit more on a personal level, I want to really query whether conflict is something I should be afraid of? While the aforementioned escalations make it something more than just undesirable, taking it back to conflict between two people, the words of Abraham Hicks are ringing in my ears about contrast:

“Contrast is anything you don’t like, doesn’t feel good, or causes you to be in a negative mood. Identifying contrast is a useful tool to get clarity on what you don’t want.”

Now while there is always the possibility for conflict that is truly life and death, most conflict I face in my life really is not – and yet my body reacts to it as though it is. For example:

• A friend says something that triggers a negative response within in me,
• My partner does something (or doesn’t do something) that triggers a negative response within me,
• Our kids’ school says something (or omits to say something) that triggers a response within me, it’s an everyday occurrence.

This stuff is all too real, part of my everyday reality, part of yours too I imagine. Like the friend who unintentionally stepped on an emotional landmine in conversation about my daughter’s camp, that I talked about in How to Stop Being Triggered by What Other People Think.

Like the parenting conflict with my partner I mentioned in What I Love About Being With Narcissistic People. And like the lack of explanation at our contactless, drive through pick up system at the kids’ school when all the traffic is backed up and there seems no obvious reason as to why we have been sitting waiting going nowhere for ages.

None of these things were a threat to my survival, but they felt like that from the way my body reacted. I recently had a conversation with some friends about getting triggered, posing the question about whether it was a bad thing or not? I’m of the opinion that it is actually great, because it points me to an opportunity to grow out of old patterns and heal old wounds.

In the moment, though, it does not feel good, far from it. When I’m triggered, the chemicals in my brain want conflict; the pull within me is strong. Just as strong as the opposite feeling of being confronted by someone who is triggered when I’m not, and then I want to get away from conflict; unless I’m also triggered and then the lure is back.

My psyche says “I’m not the powerless little child any more, here I am in the ring, bring it on!” which really is more like an angry teenager than what I’d expect from my adult self.

So what is going on? It’s basically my sympathetic nervous system recognising an old threat pattern and triggering my flight-or-fight response. In childhood, like every child, I was dependent upon my parents for survival. I couldn’t get away from the perceived threat, so my body developed defence patterns.

The most well known patterns are flight, fight and freeze, but psychologists are now recognising more complex variations beyond these. All of which are differing ways we learned to adapt to the stresses and threats in our environments.

By threats, I’m taking more here to the emotional threats of withdrawal of love, of facing shame or guilt for not doing as I was told, or breaking a rule, or being bad in some way. When someone triggers me, my nervous system reacts the way it did when I was a child (and the same can be said for anyone who hasn’t done personal work into unpacking all this, including most of these so called leaders).

So while I know people are generally doing the best they can in any given situation, I’ll admit I - at least momentarily - forget that when I get triggered. There is a narrative in my head about what “they are doing to me” and how it is unfair and I won’t tolerate it.

Of course, I now know this is an old voice that I’m hearing, the powerless child version of myself. Whereas, as an adult, I do have different choices:

“We have to start to re-own pain and befriend it, to consciously practice moving towards it instead of away from it. There was a time we felt we could not eradicate an actual threat so we moved our sights to the secondary threat...pain itself. By association we started to see the pain itself as the threat to our life. In reality, pain is not a threat to us at all, it is a feedback mechanism.” Teal Swan

So essentially, although the scenario has changed, my body still reacts to the same old pain, my wiring fires based on the old well worn patterns.

This year has been an interesting journey in particular, as my partner and I have come into conscious awareness of our mutually unhealthy patterns as recounted in How to Break Free of Addictive Relationship Patterns.

Now in the moment when one of us is triggered, none of this is fun, but this awareness is helping us to break the chain of pain. Instead of being pulled in, it’s more likely now that one of us will walk away, ready to revisit when the other is not so triggered.

Instead of feeling like our relationship has a fatal flaw because we get into conflict, we now see conflict is not the problem; it’s all our old associations with conflict that are the problem. And this is really the point at which we are able to choose to fully grow into our adult potential.

We can stay locked in our childhood patterns forever, as essentially the human race has done for generations, but it’s a game that has no winners. Instead we have each chosen to embark on a journey of unravelling and being deliberate about making different choices, building new pathways in our brain and nervous system.

What makes me afraid of conflict is really seeing what not doing this work does on a large scale. When we embrace the personal conflicts between us as important indicators about who we each are, we can do the personal work needed to mature into conscious awareness and fulfil our true potential. Now that is the world I want to live in, what about you?
If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy How Relaxed About Your Own Differences Are You?, Want Better Health? Be Shrewd About Stress, Let Anger Be Your Teacher While Learning to Become Its Master, What Can Your Anger Teach You About Your Gifts? and What Do the People in Your Life Have to Teach (Good and Bad)? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

This is the question before me this week. As someone who desires to aid in our evolution, it has been thought provoking and uncomfortable for me to confront some of the ways in which I have unconsciously been complicit in the oppression of others.

If asked, I would have sworn I am not intolerant towards any particular group, so it’s been eye opening and refreshing to look at myself from a different angle. Certainly throughout my life I’ve observed the many ways in which people who are deemed different are treated differently and I’ve been thankful not to have faced their particular challenges.

The sorts of things that can divide us are unlimited, but the common ones are gender, race, sexual orientation, existential beliefs, political beliefs, religious beliefs, social class, economic status, physical abilities, mental abilities and so on.

The earliest examples that come to mind from my schooldays are the way people (whose brains don’t seem wired for typical classroom education) got dubbed as unintelligent, disruptive and/or naughty, sensitive people got picked on and those with a disability of any nature were hidden away.

The biggest intolerance I was aware of in my early West of Scotland upbringing was religious. The first question when I met someone new most often being “are you a fenian or a proddy?” (meaning of the Catholic or Protestant faith). There were kids on our street not allowed to play among those of different faiths and there were separate state schools for those of the Catholic faith.

I first noticed my own discomfort when around those with sensory disabilities. Working at the checkout of a drugstore, or on the information desk at the travel centre, I suddenly found myself wondering how to best serve those who had hearing or visual disabilities.

It wasn’t that I harboured any known prejudice towards people who faced these challenges, it was more that I had no experience or education on the best way to assist them, and it seemed rude to ask, especially since the whole transaction was quite time pressured with queues to serve.

I also remember my extreme discomfort when sitting next to people on the public bus who had mental disorders, on the long journey to university each day. I’d often see people getting on the bus and feel my stomach clench and start breaking out in a cold sweat thinking “please do not next to me, please do not sit next to me”, having never integrated with anyone facing those challenges during my school years, again, I was ill equipped.

In fact, last year when our family visited Hawaii, I was again confronted by those old fears when taking the public bus around Waikiki. For those who are unaware, there are a large number of homeless people there, who seem to be a mix of people with mental disorders, people with drug addictions and other people who have fallen on hard times but who are otherwise of sound mind.

Suddenly I wasn’t just navigating life in my own individual experience, I was doing it in the role of a parent, well aware of my desire and the weight of responsibility to be a decent human being and show my kids how to traverse the social fabric of life in a kind and safe way.

If there is one word this comes down to it is fear. I am scared to say or do the wrong thing.

Why? Because that didn’t go well as a child. As I mentioned in How to Stop Being Triggered by What Other People Think being a child of an approval/disapproval, right/wrong and punishment/reward style upbringing, in order to avoid disapproval, rejection and/or punishment, I became a people pleaser and a perfectionist.

There are probably a number of other self limiting behavioural and thought patterns that would play into the root cause of why I might be unconsciously complicit in the oppression of others, but it can definitely be summed up as fear, and mainly through a lack of understanding on my part. 

“Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.” Martin Luther King Jr

“The lesson”, says Layla F. Saad, “is that if you believe you are the exception, you will not do the work, you will continue o do harm even thought that is not your intention.”

Do I want to be involved in any scenario in which I directly or indirectly subject a fellow human – or any creature for that matter – to hardship or abuse? Of course I don’t, but I can think of far too many ways in which it happens, especially now that I’ve started to look through the lens of others.

Perhaps this, more than any other motivation I might have for addressing my own fears and limitations, is the most compelling. If I do harm to myself, that is one thing, but to affect another in such a way is not acceptable to me. I can see that we are all interconnected, that “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction” as Newton put it. If I allow one part of the whole to be treated as less than, I diminish the whole.

That is exactly how wars, genocides and other atrocities happen. People allow themselves to dehumanise others in the name of a difference and everyone suffers. People allow themselves to think they are better than for any number of reasons, but I am going to say it all comes down to fear, fear of differences. 

I’ve been reading an excerpt from a paper written by Peggy McIntosh back in 1988, in which she lists fifty ways she benefits from white privilege in her daily life. She tried to choose conditions that, in her case, attach somewhat more to skin colour than to class, religion, ethnic status or geographic location (though notes that all those factors are intricately intertwined).

Some examples are:

• I can go to a book shop and count on finding the writing of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods that fit with my cultural traditions,, into a hairdresser’s shop and find someone who can deal with my hair
• If a traffic cop pulls me over or the tax office audits my tax return I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race
• I did not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection.

I have also found Layla F. Saad’s book Me and White Supremacy an excellent read so far. It presents a step by step reflection process as a 28-day challenge to become aware of where I might be consciously or unconsciously supporting systemic racism.

But each step of the way, as she addresses issues like fragility, tone policing and staying silent, I can see the parallels into every other area of human difference and where I may be unwittingly contributing to oppression of those within society.

The obvious area where I have personally felt oppressed within my own life would be related to being female. But I am sure that everybody has experiences of being different on some level and can, if only in a minor way, begin to relate to some of the challenges fellow humans face when subjected to both overt and covert prejudice.

When I read one of Layla’s prompts on “staying silent (or making excuses/changing the subject/leaving the room) when your family members or friends make racist jokes or comments” listed under how white silence shows up, I reluctantly admitted to myself that I have done this on many an occasion.

I wondered why I do that, and find it is because I am not wanting to make waves. This is likely tied into my own anxieties about what people think (as I mentioned earlier), and the associated trauma and patterns there, but there is definitely a patriarchal element too.

I actually don’t trust myself at this stage to get into a confrontation without getting angry. This is one of the key aims of me doing my personal inner work, because I do want to be able to converse on important issues, making people think about their views rather than entrenching them further in beliefs that create oppression.

But I do know how it feels to listen to jokes stereotyping people with blond hair, or Scottish people, for instance, and how those that tell them don’t bat an eyelid to their insensitivity when I’m sitting there. Little do they know the magnitude of how angry it makes me.

Then there’s the objectification of women and the pornographic ‘joke’ videos that get freely sent around on social media. I only have to think of those, and think of my daughters and then I have instantly invoked the wrath of generations of oppressed females in the collective consciousness into my psyche.

I read Thomas Hübl’s story this week and how he found his life’s work in healing collective and intergenerational trauma, I’m looking forward to reading his book on this topic in the coming months. I suspect though the answer begins within each of us and doing our personal work.

A good friend of mine’s daughter does a lot of research and advocacy around the Maori world view, and just this week I saw she has co-authored a new book Indigenous Research Ethics: Claiming Research Sovereignty Beyond Deficit and the Colonial Legacy. The thing I admire most about her, is her ability to challenge people through questions without getting riled. It’s actually a thing of great beauty to watch, and I hold that as my example.

But I also resonate with the chapter in Layla F. Saad’s book about tone policing. I can well imagine how it would feel to hear a racist joke, anything where there is intergenerational trauma and oppression invokes a much greater sense of anger than just a personal affront. She makes the point that telling someone you can’t hear what they are saying because they are saying it in an angry way, is another way to silence those being oppressed.

At first I was conflicted, because it’s true that it is hard to hear someone’s anger. Anger elicits my old self defeating thought patterns and behaviours, meaning that instead of an open-minded adult, some old inner hurt part of me is at the helm. I notice this is often the same when I speak in anger to others, they reciprocate with a hurt part of themselves.

Yet I hear Layla’s words when she says “To be human is to feel. To talk about pain without expressing pain is expecting a human to recall information like a robot. When you insist that a black, indigenous or person of colour talk about their painful experiences with racism without experiencing any pain, rage or grief, you are asking them to dehumanize themselves.”

So I have come to the conclusion that if I would like to make progress it falls upon me at this point to both be able to hear another’s anger in these matters and to learn to express my own anger in a more palatable way.

In the words of Layla F Saad “You do this work because you believe every human deserves dignity, freedom and equality. You do this because you desire wholeness for yourself and for the world, because you want to become a good ancestor.”

It’s important to continue to challenge myself in all the ways I might be unintentionally complicit in the oppression of others, because it seems fundamental to our evolution. If we can accept and embrace our own and others’ differences, this will create strength and compassion within the whole of humankind. This creates a shift from competition to cooperation, fear to love, prejudices to preferences, and can only be to the benefit of all life.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy How to Live in Conscious Self Awareness in the World, The Internal Shift You Need to Help Solve the Social Dilemma, You See What Happens When Leaders Are Not Grown Up on the Inside and Change the World One Day at a Time. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.