The Still, Not-So-Small Voice

     COVID-19 has been a desolate time in the world of mediation, at least where I live. It appears that people have either set aside their differences, albeit perhaps temporarily, in order to be at peace with staying inside and being among those with whom daily dealings are necessary in order to simply make life work, or they have resorted without intermission to legal recourses or outright scorched earth. I have conducted most of my mediations of the past year via telephone or Zoom, which has meant none have had to be for local parties, and this has been a learning experience. I have concluded that while a remote process can work for mediation, it is far less than ideal, as all non-verbal cues are truncated or even undetectable, and people tend to be less than candid when they can retreat into a virtual world, which a room uninhabited by others is when those others can only see part of you and hear you only to the degree that the volume works and there is no freezing glitch happening.

    That said, the other day I experienced a new phenomenon which I both hope and fear will become some version of normal in post-Covid days. My two clients, a couple contemplating divorce, were on our Zoom call from separate locations. I, of course, was in my own home. Things were going pretty well in their now-standard way, with the usual allowances for the remote format; that is, everyone having to take time for delays in audio, for the dreaded video freeze, and for the weirdness of not having the palpable energy of the humans with whom one is in frank and heartfelt discussion be part of the rhythm. Suddenly, one of the clients sat up straighter (versus the standing up that might have occurred in person) in her chair and announced, "I can't do this!"

    The other client stopped talking and I must confess I was at an immediate loss and had no idea what the problem was. The discussion had actually been humming along quite well and everyone had seemed amenable if not exactly amicable.

    The client, visibly upset, continued.

    "I don't even know what we are doing," she said. "I can't follow. I don't understand if we're making any progress. I just don't know what, if anything, is happening!"

    I gaped unattractively, I'm sure, for a moment, but suddenly I got her gist. I ran it by her to make sure I had perceived correctly, and when this was confirmed, I had a flash of insight and used it as a discussion point. This was a brilliance conceived not in my own mind but brought to me out of the sky by the sensitivities of my client. This was the issue in a nutshell:

    She was not objecting to anything that had been said or not said, and she was not even channelling resentment or vitriol from the way her marriage had been unraveling of late. No. She was objecting to the constraints of the mediation in this format. It seemed that without the usual cues from her partner, and from me, she had no idea where she was in time and space with regard to the issues at hand. She could see our faces and hear our voices, but without the context of other observable human behavior, she didn't know where she stood or even what she felt or thought. She used this phrase: "I don't think you're lying to me but I can't really tell."

    I thought this was a remarkable observation. She was saying, and I pointed it out, that without being able to detect the subtle energy of a human being, her spouse, the person to whom she had been closest over the period of more than a decade, she felt untethered. Her spouse was on the verge of scoffing at this but I redirected by saying that this was a kind of metaphor for all our relationships and that she had discovered something very valuable that we as human beings often take for granted without even realizing its existence.

    In human relationships, especially those centered around love and family, context is everything. Devotion, loyalty, honest, kindness - these are the waters of a relationship, but context is the faucet. Without context you don't get an inside joke or an obscure reference. You don't have the history of events or circumstances or of the wisdom gained by knowing someone over time, and without these, all the love and fidelity in the world, while admirable, stand in a vacuum and don't mean much. And while we tend to think of context as these external factors, much of it is an indescribable, ethereal thing, the one we get when we stand near a person, whether in the kitchen making dinner or in line at a cash register. It's nothing we use our senses to detect. Deeper and more essential than that, it's the thing that lets us know without seeing or hearing that someone is about to speak or is refraining from it, or that a person is kind or not. We've all experienced this, and in the days before Covid I daresay most of us experienced it daily, with people known and unknown to us. We are so used to it, it may seem like a pretense to even bring it up. But thanks to the spiritual and emotional grounding of my outspoken client, I was reminded of its importance, if I had ever given it thought.

    When two people have known each other for a long time, much of their relationship goes without saying. I mean this literally. A lot goes unsaid. The better you know someone the more accurate you can be in detecting their feelings or needs, if you care to do so. People are at varying degrees of expertise with this, but we all do it to an extent. When you know someone well, whether you realize it or not, it is context that allows you to know whether their silence in the darkness on the other side of the bed means they are angry, or sad, or just tired. What my client was pointing out to us was that she had none of this information. Her lack of proximity to her partner left her feeling as if her radar was jammed. An extraordinarily spiritually sensitive person, this particular kind of lack caused her more distress than it might have some others, who might have done just fine with merely the words and tone and facial expressions of one another, and, to some degree, me. But what she was able to articulate gave me an opening I might not have otherwise had here. 

    I  asked their forbearance while I talked for a few moments. I then explained that I understood what she meant and that this was a time to pay attention. The dissolution of a marriage, or even the potential for it, can bring up all sorts of grievances and resentments, not to mention sadnesses and wishes unfulfilled, but when everything is over, most people can still name a few things that they valued in their partner. Just now, I said, we were presented with an unusual opportunity.  We could talk about the things my client thought were missing as if they were factors in the relationship, which they were. They were context.

    I asked her to explain some of the things she was missing from this discussion. Like a ray of light, she immediately responded with a very clear answer. She said she was missing being able to see her husband's hands, because he was a fiddler, and she knew by what he was doing with them - fidgeting, picking at his nails, rubbing palms together - how he was feeling about their conversation. This was a clear explanation, I said,  but was still related to visible elements. She got my drift, and she went on to tell how for years she had understood whether or not he would want to be close to her by how he was breathing. Just saying this brought tears to her eyes. Her voice became very sad and she couldn't look at the screen but seemed to be staring at her lap. 

    Her husband appeared confused.

    "Breathing?" he asked quite gently, and tears began rolling down her cheeks.

    She explained further that she knew him so well that for years, whenever she had wished for them to be close - holding hands while walking, snuggling on the sofa, or kissing in the kitchen -- she had gauged his breathing, which is about as vague a measure as you can get physically, barring exertion or excitement. I asked if it was really his breathing or if it was something else, like how he held his head or set his jaw. She replied that it was all the same to her, that it all felt like the same thing. I nodded along, trying to understand her thinking. But her husband quickly got it. He pointed out that it was similar to how he knew if it would be a good night for sex. He didn't even need to ask. He just knew, and he couldn't really say how he knew. He just knew her that well.

    I asked them if there was anything similar going on when they would fight. They looked at each other over the airwaves and neither had an answer. How about when you were deciding something? I asked. They agreed that they rarely had to ask what the other would want, they had known each other so long. I sat for a minute and let that sink in.

    In the end, there were so many points on which communication was non-verbal, and indeed, barely sensory, that it would be pointless to list them here. But my point was made with them. 

    I asked them, as homework, to each work on a list of times when they didn't need to talk or touch to know how the other was feeling. This mediation had reached its limit of usefulness for the day, and we adjourned after a few other practical matters had been addressed. 

    I can't tell you how this story will conclude, or whether this couple will decide to divorce or not. Their issues were not limited to the ones discussed here. But I thought about this lesson for several days. I wondered how often we don't listen to what our internal radar tells us about another, and how often, if we do pay attention, we get the directions right. I also wondered how many conflicts could be avoided if people would at least occasionally rely less on their five senses and more on their patience and their ability to hear unheard voices, meaning, in crude language, gut feelings or intuition. And I thought about the role of history, of wisdom, of context in deciphering the way to get through to the other side of a question. 

    One thing it is important to note is that until you know a person well, conversation pays. There is profit in clarity and in being forthright. Some people are so sensitive that they perceive non-verbal communication without difficulty in most cases. For most of us, it's a learning process, and talking is the best way to get things in stone until context is established. But never make intuition and extra-sensory perception into a small factor. Ultimately it may matter more than words, as words are mere symbols for meaning, whereas feelings are the direct expression of it. We work with what we have. But context and non-verbal cues have risen at least for now to the top portion of my toolbox. It would be a failed opportunity not to ask people about this often. And in my own life, while I am reminded that listening and patience are at least as important as talking and timeliness, I now have a renewed sense of the crucial voice that makes no sound. It's a thread that connects every person to every other, and that thread is burnished to glowing between those of us who love each other, especially when we love with intention. When love becomes a question, I'm not sure the thread weakens, but it may be that we stop giving it our attention, just when we need to be minding it all the more.

NOTE: the identities of the clients mentioned here have been disguised via alteration of identifying details, although permission to share their story was given by them before publication.

    

    

Not A Surprise

 Well, what did you think was going to happen? Did you really think that you could just look in front of you at the people and events that had properly lined up where you had placed them, in your foreground of preferred reality, and ignore the chaos bubbling all along the periphery as if it wasn't real or was a figment of someone else's thoughts? Did you think that you could neglect human beings, whose thoughts create reality just as much as yours do, consigning them to the Ignorance Pile, as if they required no attention? They have been telling you, this entire time, who they are and what they believe, what they intend, and now you are surprised that your years of swatting them away like so many pesky mosquitoes has fed their bubbling rage, which has now spilled over into the most scalding kind of chemical fire? A person may lie down at the side of the road in exhaustion after being left to march after the ones who built the road, thinking he has no choice but to follow, unsure of how to create his own path. But people? People never will. People in a group will harness their resentments and their frustrations together and make a common decision not only to take over the road, to demolish the tracks neatly laid by others who've told them they know better, but to destroy the road altogether, to obliterate it from all perception, and eventually claim there was never a road there to begin with.

Perhaps the solution does not lie in building enough roads so that everyone can have one. Maybe it is more a question of cooperating to make the existing road wide enough to accommodate everyone who wishes to travel on it. Wiser engineers than I may figure this out before I do.

    

Under the Gaslights

One of the most difficult cases I've ever taken on as a mediator was one where I not only had a technical conflict - because I knew one of the parties personally - but I had a visceral response to the plight of one of the other parties. My conflict was waived by the parties because they didn't trust anyone else in the area to help them. They were so overcome by social shame that the fact that one of the individuals counted me as an acquaintance was not even an issue. This, however, did not alleviate my distress on the behalf of one of the three clients, the adult child of the other two, her parents. The adult child who, as an adult, was having a revelation: she had been abused as a child. Moreover, she felt she was still being abused by them. As the mediation progressed into two and three sessions, I came to the conclusion that she was absolutely correct. To my amazement, my presence among them did not deter the ongoing abuse. The parents were so oblivious to the nature and effects of their treatment of their daughter that the abuse occurred repeatedly right in front of me.

The family - or, this portion of it; there were other offspring - had actually come to me for help overcoming an impasse regarding the disposition of a deceased relative's remains. This issue had several legal and emotional technicalities that I won't discuss; they are immaterial here. In fact, the shame they were enduring because of related events was of little consequence compared to the reality that unraveled across the mediation table from me. Over the course of four separate meetings I watched two otherwise intelligent, socially adept, presumably non-ignorant people insult, denigrate, belittle, and dismiss their daughter, who, at the time, was thirty-seven. She was a tall, strong, accomplished woman, but in the presence of her parents she repeatedly became small and quiet over the course of each hour. Although voices were never raised, profanity never used, and hands never made into fists, the pain inflicted was just as severe as if they had been. What was most alarming and unbelievable was how, when, as the presumed neutral party, I brought the discussion around to what I was seeing, the parents seemed confused and befuddled. I came to understand that in their view - which seemed to be born of some agreement between the two of them that this behavior was acceptable - words could not be abuse. They were entitled to their opinions and to voicing them. And if their opinion was that their daughter was a disappointment, or her attitude or behavior inadequate, there was no reason not to say so. They viewed it as their job to tell her each time she failed them, which she seemed to do, no matter what she did, every five minutes.

She was out of line if she had an opinion that they did not share. It was okay if Mom and Dad didn't agree on everything - they would work it out - but it was a violation if she disagreed with either of them. It was an impossible standard to meet. So inevitably she was "making things up" or "being difficult" (which she wasn't; she was as respectful and patient as can be) when she made a point not made by one of her parents. In their view, it appeared, she was not entitled to a differing idea from theirs.

The aspect of their treatment of her that I found most peculiar was their repeated attempts to dismiss her ideas and thoughts completely, as if anything she might have to say was simply irrelevant and unworthy of consideration. If she said something that they didn't like, they would deny its importance right down to the ground. If she recalled something they might have to answer for, the reply was "don't invent things" or "that never happened" or "I never said that." This is called gaslighting - to tell someone over and over that what they see and remember are not real. Instead of saying,"hmm, I don't remember it that way" or even just "are you sure?" - which invites an explanation, they just dismissed her assertions out of hand. It was incredibly distressing to watch the repeated attacks on her intelligence and honesty, as if she was either stupid or making things up. I imagined how hard it would be as an adult to maintain her sense of solidity, of sanity, of worth, if this had been done to her her entire life. How she grew up not just assuming that she was always wrong and they were always right was a miracle to me. But, although she wasn't as assertive or critical of their tactics as I would have liked, she never relented. She let their preposterous insisting stand without much argument, but she never stopped recalling things or mentioning past discussions, which, after all, were relevant to the mediation issue. I took note of this refusal to completely fold in the face of their assaults. I concluded she was made of sterner stuff than I had first thought. She was letting them try to convince her of her wrongness, but she never fell for it.

She called them out periodically by saying "that hurts my feelings" or "that was hurtful." She was infallibly met with "you're too sensitive." When she protested that perhaps they were being insensitive (something I found myself agreeing with), they were deeply offended and defiant, telling her that this was clear evidence of her self-centeredness. Evidently they really did think that she was entitled to no thoughts they didn't share, and if she had them anyway, she was self-centered. How dare she have her own thoughts! Even worse, standing up for herself was the direst of sins; it was confirmation of their repeated point that she thought too highly of herself. One of the lines often used was "your (sibling) would never be so (fill in the blank)." The siblings were routinely held up as the standard to which she was held and failed to meet. The repeated unfavorable comparison of one human being to another is textbook abuse. A person cannot be another person. If I am a failure because I am not my sister, I am destined to fail because I can never be my sister. If you will only love and approve of me because I am my sister, then you will never love or approve of me. To tell me that I have failed as a person repeatedly, because I cannot be who you would prefer me to be, is 100% abuse. If you've done that to me as I am forming my identity, you are ensuring that I will always feel unloved and unwanted. This is cruel, and it is abuse.

We threaded our way through the presented issue by way of negotiating a discussion that was rarely civil and never cordial. I admit I was repeatedly shocked and disgusted, not to mention dismayed, by the way these parents repeatedly ganged up on their daughter. Their own child. A human being they had brought into the world without her leave, and who, presumably, had been the subject of this treatment her entire life. By now it was such a habit - of thought, feeling, and behavior - of the parents that they gave it not a thought. The daughter's reactions were also a habit - she protested occasionally and weakly, taking a stance of protectiveness both physically and in tone and word the majority of the time. She never lost her temper, something I began to wish that she would do. Instead of sequentially accepting their treatment of her, I began to dearly wish she would finally stand up and tell them off. But so long-standing was her habit of taking it, and, I imagine, of hoping against hope that they would finally someday see her value, that she never lost it. She never returned their ugliness. She was clearly the better person. Instead of bitterness and resentment, she had the strength of character to not be cruel right back to them. In response, in an astonishing show of despicable character, when she failed to give them the hateful retort they seemed to be attempting to evoke, they would up the ante. Their cruelty would increase. The outrageous nature of their words and tone would increase. It was quite a spectacle to watch. Each time they appeared in my office I found myself emotionally drained and exhausted by the time they left. Their actual mediation issue was not the problem. We dispensed with that in a relatively typical, practical way. The problem was the fact that I could not escape the idea, indeed eventually the conviction, that these parents were truly bad people. The very person of whom they should have been the most protective, a lovely human being they should rightly have loved and treasured and nurtured, they instead resented and bullied and attempted to knock down. As bullies do, they needed to make their own daughter small in order to feel strong and relevant and big. The reasons for this were unknown to me; I did not know them well enough to guess. But it really doesn't matter why parents abuse their children. What matters is that they do. There is never a reason good enough to make cruelty toward one's child okay. I ruminated on this each time I saw them to the extent that I began searching for a therapist to whom I could refer the daughter.

As we were approaching the end of our concluding session, a remarkable thing happened. Upon later reflection, I hoped that it was a signal of impending enlightenment and, I further hoped, freedom. The parents - first the wife, then, following suit in solidarity, the husband - stood up to imply that our time was up. The daughter stayed seated. She looked at me and did not look once at her parents. For a brief moment, she shut them out, acting as if they were no longer there. I remained in my seat as well, unsure of what was happening.

I am paraphrasing here, because my memory is not perfectly exact, but here is what she said:

"Ms. Robbins," she said, "I would like to apologize for the appalling behavior of my parents these last few days."
The parents were suddenly standing stock-still in shocked silence. I could only nod.
"They have always treated me this way. As a child, I thought it was my fault. If your parents don't love you, you must be pretty bad, you know?"
The husband 's face had turned red and he began to protest angrily. Unprofessionally or not, I held up a hand to silence him. He was so surprised, he obeyed.
"The good thing is," she continued,"I'm not like them. My children know every day when they wake up that there is someone who loves them more than anything in the world, and that that person is me. They know I would never hurt them and that I would never want to. They have never had a doubt that the thing I want most is for them to be happy. And so they are."
I was stunned enough that all I could do was nod again and murmur some affirmation or other.
She smiled. I will never forget that beautiful, authentic, ironic smile.
"Please forgive them," she said. "They are very sad people. They are very sad that in spite of their attempts to make me sad, I am not. They keep trying. But I am not. I wish I had parents who love me, but I don't. The best I can do is love them anyway."

And she stood up, walked past them, and left.

I don't remember the moments after that. I have rarely been so stunned at the end of a mediation. I know I got paid somehow so someone had the presence of mind to perform mundane tasks. I do recall that there was no more discussion of the matter, and eventually the parents had left my office. Later that night, I actually shed a tear.

The significance of this episode to me was that, as a mediator, I was tested on my ability to conduct an effective mediation when the most pressing issue was not the one being mediated but the side issue that made conducting it so fraught. It was also the sudden confrontation of a truth I had never spent a lot of time considering in such an extreme sense. Abuse, physical or not, is a family dynamic that does not necessarily end due to age or maturity or even realization of its reality. It is a habit, a cause, and a consequence. It is the subjugation of one inherently valuable and love-worthy human being to the fears, insecurities, and inhibitions of another. It is the ultimate cruelty in bullying. Abuse is the attempt to control another person by destroying them. When the victim is a child and the perpetrator a parent, the cruelty is unimaginable to those of us who know what love is.

The other truth that confirmed itself is that, contrary to the sticks-and-stones rhyme, words absolutely can hurt as much as fists.

The daughter in this scenario was an uncommonly strong, graceful person who did not debase herself by returning the abuse of her parents. In a way, she did them no favors by pulling punches. On the other hand, she remained triumphant by remaining good. I have no idea what happened once they all left my office. I only can hope that she went on to deprive them, in their remaining days, of her shining light, leaving them in their self-imposed darkness.

Hope For the Holidays

In the United States in 2018 many of us have grown up with ideas about holidays that we don't even question. Yes, you do make plans for certain days that require reservations or drive time or rental cars or pick-ups from the airport or innumerable grocery store visits. Certain food is eaten, or at least put on the table, with a certain amount of fancy china or a big table at a Chinese restaurant (it's amazing how many families I know who do the Chinese food thing). You will see certain people and put up with them a certain amount. A certain budget is set and a certain percentage of it is abided by. A certain range of calories will be consumed (and a certain amount of alcohol) and a predictable amount of sleep will be lost. Receipts will be saved. Items will be regifted. Festivities will be looked forward to in some definable amount and at some point, a regular activity and feeding schedule will again be longed for.  There are some things that are inevitable around the holidays. People will make too much food and somehow will still run out of things. There will be discussions of who will be the Christmas Elf or where is that one Hanukkah gift; I'm sure I put it on this shelf after I wrapped it..? The things that drive us crazy in the moment they are occurring are somehow the things about which we reminisce most fondly in July when we are telling someone about our usual holidays. How you have to have two kinds of cranberry sauce. How having a vegetarian now throws Mom, who's cooked the same turkey for 60 years, into a spin. How Santa is no longer a thing (this I find repugnant and hard to understand). How we do/don't go to church/temple/feast/soup kitchen. How we do/don't watch the parade/football/dog show. And we remember, anticipate, and describe our usual holiday experiences with a certain amount of laughter, exasperation, or derision. In fact, while you are reading this I wonder if you are picturing in your mind some of these things from your own life. And no matter how you feel about them, I ask you to imagine for a moment that you've lost them. That somehow these holiday traditions and images no longer exist. That you lived a life with none of the usuals. That you had nothing in particular to expect in terms of the holiday season because you had never had a consistent holiday experience.

Okay, now hold that thought. Put it aside for a moment.

Among all the ideas and pictures we each hold internally about the holidays is another one with which almost everyone is familiar: stress. It might be a tight budget or far-flung family. It might be a packed calendar. It might be a change in circumstances like a divorce or death. It might be the holidays-only proximity of those difficult family members who can't seem to conform their behavior to the standards of peacekeeping the rest of the family accepts. It might be loneliness. In the end we all have felt some measure of stress about and around the holidays and we can probably readily identify the source of it. More than any one of these, mediators most often see holiday-related issues that have to do with families and how they get along in terms of expectations, planning, and participating in holiday activities. The holidays seem to exacerbate whatever family issues exist the rest of the year. Often we are in the presence of people from whom we are usually at a comfortable distance, and we have to negotiate not only our relationships with them but our relationships in the context of dearly-held (or secretly dreaded) traditions and norms. 

As a mediator, I recognize the particular flavor of family conflict that simmers like a stew during the holidays. It has its own tang of disappointment, a tangible texture of projection, and a pungent odor of blame. We want the holidays to be happy, relaxed, and full of warmth. Not many of us don't have a Norman Rockwell- or Rankin Bass-like fantasy of what a holiday celebration should be, and most of us have at least some skepticism that it will ever come true. People give up their fantasies reluctantly, no matter how many times they've been proven unlikely. There is a certain number of us who, at New Years every year, wonder why we succumbed to the dream again. We swear we will never wish that holiday wish ever again. But by Halloween we are making plans all over again, with either optimistic enthusiasm or jaded dread, which we might cynically call realism.

Why do we do this to ourselves? What is this fantasy of joyful family gatherings based on? Are we all just Hallmark marketing victims? Have we really just swallowed a sour soup of materialism, Christmas specials, and pseudo-religious tag lines that has brainwashed us into thinking that the holidays are somehow different than the rest of the year for families? That the people who hurt our feelings or eat all the pie or have no idea how to buy gifts from January through October will magically become considerate, generous, or astute from Thanksgiving to New Years? What is this amalgam of insanity? Why can't the people we want the most to be tolerable just behave how we think they should? Why can't they meet our expectations? Come on, it's the holidays!

Remember that thought you were holding from earlier? OK, back to that. Imagine, for instance, an upcoming Thanksgiving about which you have either no expectations or wide-open ones. 

It's hard to do, right? That would mean a turkey day with no definably expected menu, no definite attenders, no specific location for the meal. It's a little devastating, isn't it? A formless Thanksgiving. No ideas about it at all. A blank slate. It's pretty impossible for me. The instant I add one detail, several more flood in. Just a picture of a pumpkin pie means the person who usually bakes it. Which means the partner of the person. Which means strong perfume. Which means my aunt's allergies. Which means my aunt's misery, which means my uncle's complaints. Which means my cousin's exasperation. Which means my sister's annoyance and impatience. Which means my frustration. Which means burned rolls, which means derision all around. 

You see how this goes. We know our families and their antics and habits as well as we know our own names. And unless we have reached the absolute end of our hopes and expectations and decided to take ourselves on a solo trip to a tropical resort instead of trying to Give Thanks for nothing, we really do want to have Thanksgiving (or Christmas or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa) with the people we love (whether or not we like them). Therefore, we can't help wanting peace and harmony (unless you thrive on conflict and love to cause it, in which case you are probably not a great candidate for mediation anyway). 

The truth is, you can't force so-and-so's girlfriend not to wear perfume to dinner. You can't anticipate every medical event that may or may not occur at dinner. You can't ask your uncle to keep his complaints to himself if you really do want his naturally-complaining self to be present. You can't dictate your cousin's reactions to his parents' traits. You can't tell your sister to lighten up and not judge everyone. I mean, you could do these things, but good luck with that. You CAN, however, decide not to be frustrated. You can decide your love for your family matters more, especially on one night, than pie or rolls or your own perception of everything running smoothly. You can decide that no holiday runs like a computer program, but you can enjoy it anyway. You can decide to laugh rather than get annoyed. You can decide that you are the only person over whom you have control. 

Many of us don't give much thought to what we can do to make family gatherings happier events. We give an awful lot of thought to what others can do. And when you get a whole house full of people who each thinks everyone else bears the responsibility for the happiness of the group, you have a whole house of miserable individuals. What if you had a whole house full of people who bore their own responsibility for their own feelings? Holiday or not, Tuesday or Friday, this always works out better. The best way for everyone to get along is to each be a person who gets along. Your family does not exist to make you happy. That is up to you. An entire family (we can excuse toddlers) of individuals who each monitor their own behaviors and attitudes and don't expect anyone else to do it for them will always do better at the holidays, which are stressful and non-ordinary enough without considering other people's proclivities. If we each consider our own, it may not be perfect (we are not robots), but it will be better.

Family mediation can be fun, casual, and joyful. Issues can be aired with a minimum of vulnerability and angst. A few pre-holiday season sessions can remind family members what it is they like about each other and why our families are the people we most love. Shared memories unite us if we let them. The minute we can't imagine a holiday that works with a minimum of glitches is the minute we need to stop and think about what our part in the glitches is. 

So build that picture of Thanksgiving anew in your mind. Imagine the pumpkin pie baker's girlfriend and her perfume. Imagine your reaction. Imagine your reaction to your aunt's allergies. And imagine asking your uncle what you can do to help him not worry so much about her. And imagine your peaceful, calm reaction to whatever he says. Imagine commenting to your sister how much your uncle loves your aunt. Imagine your reaction to her reply. That's all you can do. Your reaction. That's it.

And, you can bring your baker, his girlfriend, your aunt, uncle, and cousin, and your sister to mediation and have a holiday hash. Yep, get it said before the holidays. And make sure you say it's because you love them. Because you really do.

The holidays have just a good a chance of exceeding your expectations as they do of meeting or failing them. But a little preparation never hurts. And if you can't round everyone up ahead of time, come in for a strategy caucus. In the end, all you can do is you.

Grief As A Door

So, I've lost my friend. She has left. Left the building, left the parking lot, left the earth. To me, she feels lost, gone, nowhere I can see or hear. She took a year to take her leave of us, simply because she refused to go, even when there were spirits pulling and pushing her through the door. The fact is, she didn't want to go. In the end, the spirits won. We still feel, left here without her, that we lost.
I feel there is a must behind my writing today, because that's what some of us do when we've got shit to deal with. We write it down, look at it, hold it close and ruminate over it or put it where others can read it and go, oh, yeah, I get that.

My Ellie was an angel, in many ways, on the earth. She was a truly good person who only wanted others to be good. She saw the good first and anything else as a rip in someone's fabric, a hurt they weren't good at healing rather than a failing. At the same time, she had a very tiny stinger, the size of a grain of sand, but, boy, was it sharp when she needed it to be. She didn't use it to cause harm, though. She uncovered it when she could see you needed help doing the right thing. Was it a little passive aggressive? Maybe. Would she have said so, if it was? Yep, she'd be the first.

Ellie kicked breast cancer to the ground twice, but only the first time did it stay down. The second time, she called me days after her re-diagnosis. As her friend who is also a cancer survivor, I was one of her closest repositories of all woes cancerful. She knew I wouldn't tell her how to feel about it. I was there to feel her feelings about it with her. So when we had our first lunch after her first few days of tests, she told me this story, an Ellie-in-action if ever there was one:

Her doctor sent her to the lab for blood work. When she got there, the receptionist was rude and dismissive, treating her unkindly. Worse, the phlebotomist was the same way. She jabbed Ellie's arm, and, assuming she could read between the lines as to what the tests were for, and assuming anyone with a heart would be kind to anyone being tested for cancer, or any disease, she couldn't seem to care less about Ellie's feelings and seemed resentful that she had a patient of any sort. Ellie left, her feelings hurt and already suffering mightily under the imminent terror of a cancer diagnosis.

Later in the day, when those results had been read, the doc sent her back for more lab work. This time, Ellie wisely took John, her husband, with her. Again, the receptionist and the phlebotomist acted as if she were a thorn in their sides for even showing up. Never mind that she was in there twice in one day, which anyone would know was probably not good. Didn't matter, they were rude and unkind as ever. On their way out the door, Ellie asked John, "so...did I imagine that..? Or were they...?" And he said "No. They were awful. You didn't imagine it."

Ellie turned this over in her mind the rest of the day, as she waited for the final cruel diagnosis that would dictate the quality of the remainder of her days. It kept her up that night as much as did the anticipation of the dire news. In the morning, she felt a need to address it, as a way to put it away, because, heavens, she had bigger things to deal with, but she couldn't let go of the feeling that those two lab employees had been so truly inappropriate that it suggested some kind of demon they were fighting. So, what did Ellie do?

A little middle finger, a lot of love. Can you guess? She sent them flowers. On a day when she was receiving the worst news of her life, she couldn't dismiss the pain of others. So she sent them flowers with a note that said she was so sorry for the pain they must have in their lives that would lead them to treat someone at their mercy with such a lack of it. She hoped that they would have a little more light in their lives and happier days from now on.

THAT was my Ellie. She figured anyone who behaved badly was in pain. She was a doctor, a healer (who, by the way, could have reported these women to their superiors with some authority), and she felt that need to heal so deeply that not a day went by when she didn't exercise it. She hated that these women were in so much pain that they would treat a sick person badly. But she had that little stinger too. Clearly, these people just needed a reminder.

She was usually right about these things.

I feel her nearby as I write this story. And that is what we will all do for a while, until she gets fully settled up there, and can start spending her time floating among us and injecting our hearts with her love. We will write about her and talk about her, and keep her here with us until we can stand not being able to see her face or hear her voice because we know for sure that she is always with us and not really gone. We will do this because we miss her so much. We've missed her for the last year, while she was busy kicking cancer's butt, hacking at it with all her swords, until she had no swords left. Cancer took her from us while we imagined that Ellie was a physical body. But all who knew and loved her love her still and know that she wasn't her body. She was love and light and everything that was good. So, when we are ready, she will make her presence known. And because she was SO darn stubborn ("I can do my own laundry two hours after chemo, I don't need any help"), she will make sure we know it's her in case we still happen to think that she's gone.

I miss you, my beautiful Ellie. You will live, truly, in my heart, forever.

Don't Lie. Live.

So. Much. Lying.   Lying has become normal conversation for some in our government (not so surprising) and (perhaps more alarming) in society at large. Honesty and integrity are hardly recognizable anymore. Self-service and fooling the masses into believing the things that keep you in power have become the basis for politics. Self-service is the cultural norm that trickles down from that. If it’s white or East-Coast or well-heeled people who call for fairness, equality, justice, and love, they are called elitist, overprivileged, out of touch, and selfish. If brown or poor people do the same thing, they are called race-baiters, criminals, pathetic, and ignorant. My conclusion is that by shooting any messenger, we reject the message. We don’t want love and kindness. We prefer anger, division, tribalism, and cultural war. Why? Maybe so we can sow and cement separation and division. Why? Because as long as we‘re separate, as long as we can say ‘they’ don’t belong to us, we each can maintain that we are superior to someone else. And that’s all that matters, isn’t it? 

The above is a slightly edited compilation of several tweets I posted the other day when I was screaming inside with frustration after watching way too much news and commentary.  It has become an addictive trap these days into which I fall far too easily. I've lost many hours listening to commentators analyzing and expounding about the events we are watching march by us like acrobats in a fascinating but terrifying parade. How can this - this unrest, this world, this chaos and grief - be happening? I think many of us can agree something has been lost or is at least on the verge of becoming lost. What the something is is its own question. It's somewhere on the continuum of integrity to truth to trust to joy. If that continuum is a road, it might seem like that road is slowly being demolished by some deus ex jackhammer. It sometimes feels as if we are crawling along the side of that ravaged road, through the weeds, unsure if we are headed in the right direction. The main conundrum in this situation is that we have nothing to which to orient ourselves. There is no true north by which to set our compasses. There are a thousand norths clamoring for our attention, trying to be the strongest signal so that we will head that way, whatever it is. And maybe one of them is the true one. But we have stopped believing any of them, not totally, anyway. I'm afraid that soon we will stop believing that there even is a true one, anywhere.

I digress from my main point, though. The real reason, I'm thinking, that we don't believe anyone, or believe in anyone, anymore, is that we somehow sense that we have become a nation - or an Earth - of opportunists. There seem to be very few people doing good things just because it's right to do good things. If there are, they are the trees getting lost in the forest. We are so beset by liars, cheaters, game-players, and other factions who appear only interested in their own gain, however they've defined it, that we can't even see do-gooders and when we do, what do we do? We call them names. We say "do-gooder" like it's an insult. We call a thoughtful person who considers all sides of an issue a "fence-sitter" or a "flip-flopper" as if it's disgraceful to try to appreciate many viewpoints. We call those who value kindness and compassion in language "politically correct" because we somehow think that our right to say whatever we damn well please is more important than someone else's right to be treated respectfully. We sneer at the politician who says that a rising tide lifts all boats. Pfft. The only boat that matters is mine. 

And woe to the person who doesn't self-aggrandize or self-promote. Snowflakes that disappear.

Why? Why??? Because, as I said in my tweet, there is one thing humans are good at, and that is finding someone else to be better than. We find it more expedient to put someone down if we want to elevate ourselves. Never, ever raise someone up. Then they might be higher than us. Use words like "attack" and "condemn" rather than the more neutral and thoughtful "criticize" or "disagree." When you disagree with someone, by all means, call them a name. That will take care of them. And make you look like someone who knows everything, too. Have a temper tantrum or a smug expression. You are right, so you've earned it. And because you've conflated opinion with fact, you don't have to know anything to prove it. And you can lie as long as you can find someone to agree with you. Now you're an expert.

What are we so afraid of? Are we terrified that those upon whom we've always been able to look down - the poor, the brown, the uneducated, the queer, the conservative, the liberal - might be, after all, just as good as we are? Or better? Are we worried that all the facades we've worked so hard to build to present shiny faces to the world will be discovered as frauds? Are we afraid our walls will fall down? (A wall is good not only for keeping undesirables out but for showing them how undesirable they are). Are we watching our old ways and assumptions be replaced by new ones that work better in a changing world? Does that mean we will be replaced? Replaced by what? New things we don't understand? If we have to learn new languages or skills or cultural norms, does that mean our old ones were wrong? That we were wrong? That learning something new means good, that old means bad, and if we are old we must be bad?

It might. So we find ways to hold on to those old ways - those skills, those thoughts, those behaviors - as long as we can, because when they were relevant, we were on top. Once we change, we might be on the bottom.

I ask you, were you ever on the top? What IS the top?

Who are you better than? 

And please understand, by "you" I mean me.

I hope that soon we will discover that learning something new does not mean we were wrong when we lived the old way. That way was new once too. Once we stop being so afraid of being topped by someone else, we will stop living in fear, which breeds contempt, which breeds hate. We will stop believing in the people who tell us our fear is justified and who promise to keep us on top. (It's not, and they won't.) And we will learn again what trust is - and that it's not worship. Part of that will be listening to our love rather than our fear, and realizing that we are all happier when we are ALL happier. That's not sentimental or goody-goody. It's just a fact.

Be easy. We do - all - matter.

The Cousin of Fear

Anger is a useful tool. It motivates us to change something that's not serving its intended purpose. Sometimes this is a good thing. If someone threatens a child, we rely on our anger to move us to rescue that child. If policies affect us badly, we summon anger en masse to protest and communicate our opinion and our intentions. These are fine and healthy responses to anger. Anger that leads to violence, though, in word or action, is not useful. It just isn't helpful. It causes more anger. And more violence. And it becomes a cycle that only breaks when all sides have reached a breaking point - a point that never had to be reached if human beings had remembered one thing: we are all the same. And we all hurt when one of us does.

Anger is the cousin of fear. It is the flip side of flight: fight. It's an understandable and explainable reaction to events out of control. Events might be physical: flood, famine, war, or any of their smaller-scale relatives. But the real events are always internal. It is our reaction to physical events - including inflammatory speech - that require the real attention.

A man who carries a gun into a hotel and uses it to mow down hundreds of people he doesn't even know, for no discernible reason (not that there could ever be a reason), makes us angry because it offends our sense of goodness and justice. It disturbs our perception of safety and violates our right to be secure in body and mind. It disrupts our peace.

A woman who barges in front of you in traffic or in line at the grocery, who gives you a smug look, who gives you the finger, and laughs because she's gotten the better of you - she has "won" - boils our blood (unless we are fairly enlightened and can say "well, if that's what makes her day" - some days I am better at this than others). Why? Because we also believe she got the better of us. How dare she. And here I thought I was in control of what happens to me. Here I thought everyone would stream around me like rocks in a creek.

A man stands on a box and waves his hands around and yells things that appeal to the simmering anger of crowds of people who feel they've been wronged - that the things they deserve have been taken from them or are about to be - although the things he is yelling (you have been injured, you deserve better, you are victims, you are better than "those others") are merely PR, not necessarily truly-held beliefs. This man spews hatred, vitriol, and ugly battle cries. And people who have been holding back their hatred and vitriol hew to the cries. They are finally "allowed" to express their feelings - of hate and vitriol. Which exist because they feel hard done by. Their "rights" have been trodden upon. Things have been "taken" from them. They would not be nearly so satisfied by a candidate who said "reality bites. You have lost your jobs because technology has overtaken manufacturing and because coal is dirty and unsafe and is being replaced by solar and wind, which is better for everyone, but you have not been swept up in the tides of progress. You are having to share power and place and status and rights with those you have historically used to make yourselves feel superior - those of different color, of different religion, of different culture or lifestyle than you. I want you to have retraining in new fields so you can be part of the new economy. And I want you to accept people into your lives who are different from you, because that will make your lives richer and our country and our economy more vibrant."
No.
Our man on the box instead opened his arms to their anger. He fed it, seemed to share in it, reflected it, and told them they were right. And that he would save them. Which he never intended to do, but it didn't matter. He nurtured and harvested their anger, the least common denominator of experience, the basest, most easily-accessed instinct which overtakes compassion, tolerance, and desire for peace. As an aspect of fight-or-flight, it is the first stepping stone on the path to problem-solving when people are at the end of their rope. A rope that wouldn't even exist if they had not been "stripped" of what they felt were their god-given rights: to be superior to someone, and to be secure in a familiar economy. The man on the box tapped into the thing that they had actually lost, as opposed to the things they imagined they had: the right to always be right. They had never been taught that there are not some people who are more valuable than others. Critical thinking having not been an essential requirement for their education, they had lost the opportunity to learn that might does not make right, or that ideas are worth more than money, or that opinions are not knowledge. They had never been given a reason to look outside their small circle of experience to see that other ways are not fearful. Instead, they were taught that what they had always known and always done was forever the only right way.

Those of us who don't live in that circle? The ones the man on the box has now largely dismissed as irrelevant because we do not follow or believe his rantings, because we don't view him as savior? What has happened to us?

We are angry.

We are angry that these people, his followers, have been left behind and minimized historically, yes. But we are angry that the conditions that allowed that minimization ever occurred. We are, perhaps justifiably, angry at ourselves for not having noticed earlier, before the product of their simmering ire became so painfully apparent. We are angry that we didn't see this coming, because, well, we were mostly fine, and they were not our people, so we didn't know.

All that can amount to an excuse of a sort. But what makes us even angrier is that their man on his box continues to stoke their anger. He continues to feed off it, as if their anger is a drug and he is addicted to it. He infuses himself with it. And he grows angrier. Why? Because even his followers are getting tired. Anger is exhausting. We aren't built for it. It isn't our natural state. Most of us want the same thing: a peaceful world where people generally get along. Even his followers who have spent a couple of years riding that wave and envisioning the glory of destruction and the satisfaction of vengeance are becoming tired. It takes a lot of energy to keep up that level of hate. And it isn't really working. Partly because the man never intended to keep any of those promises of destruction and revenge. But partly because destruction and revenge are like violence: they only breed more of the same. No problems get solved. We just keep seeing red. And eventually we remember all the lovely colors we haven't seen in a while.

So we over here are left with our anger, because we still have a higher standard than simply "not hurting each other." We actually believe that citizens and government have a duty to build. To protect. To support. To show compassion. We haven't even reached "live and let live" at this point. So still we fume.

Why? Because we are afraid it won't end. We are afraid that the seed that was planted by the man on the box is still being watered and fertilized. And we are afraid that those of us who want nothing to do with the hate and the divisions and the blaming and the vitriol will not be stronger than the divisions and the vitriol.

And because our anger is as much if not more concerned with the fortunes of others than ourselves, we are not tired yet.

Anger that is born out of desperation and anxiety for oneself dies sooner than anger that spurs demands for justice for everyone. Funny how that works. It's as if the former has less shelf-life. Maybe because it has no rationale. Because it's not true that someone with a different skin color is worth less than you. It's false that someone else's religion, if it's not yours, is wrong. It's not true that lifestyles and preferences and norms that you never knew about are scary. It's not true that people have taken your coal jobs because they hate you. And it's not true that you are bad. So you don't need to make others small so that you can be big. You can stand up and say "I have lost my way of living and I need help to find a new way." But it's not okay to say "I lost my way of living so I have a right to tear down the people I have decided to blame." Your elected representatives have a duty to respond to the former. But there is no rational response to the latter - the box the man is standing on. And so the anger based on the latter begins to fizzle. All that's left are the die-hards. The ones who refuse to see another way. Which leaves us with white supremacy and cruel immigration policies and walls that "keep those people out." It leaves us with people who solve their internal issues with guns. It leaves us with politicians who don't think their fat bank accounts are enough. They want more. So they rationalize taking from the people who don't have anything to take. You know, the people who supported that man.

There's nothing wrong with a little anger.  It gets stuff done. But when it starts to eat you up and it becomes the theme for your life (looking at you, box-man), that's when it becomes dangerous. By this time, there is no counterbalance. And it's still all within. Anger only survives if you allow it. But it will take you down.

What is there to be done? Anger today is a curse on the countryside, a pox running rampant in the cities. We are so used to its bubbling presence inside us that we don't even notice it anymore; it is just background noise.  If we don't soon turn away from it and find another common theme we are done for. We may not literally be dead but we might as well be. Anger is meant to be a tool, not a way of life. This virus must be stopped before it becomes a plague. After a certain point, we cannot survive it.

There is a solution, but you're not going to like it. Brace yourself for the next installment.