Privilege comes in many forms. Those with privilege must provide a leg up to those without.
I recently had a conversation with some professional colleagues that didn’t go well. I’ve been disturbed by it since and thought it might be useful for all of us to use the experience as a teachable moment.
I was asked to talk about my work, and I ended up focusing on the difficulties I’ve had experiencing repeated rejection from mainstream colleagues.
I didn’t start out intending to express my frustration, but it is a common theme in my experience that obviously I haven’t been able to really move beyond yet. The pain is still too raw. The experience is still occurring on many fronts. I don’t think it’s appropriate and it doesn’t undermine my confidence in my vision, but it does make me pause between interactions, sometimes for weeks, because it’s just so hurtful, relationally.
We often talk about the courage to speak up. I’ve been speaking up about ACEs for 5 years. But I’ve also been subjected to innumerable toxic responses. For example, I’ve been discredited for not having legitimate enough qualifications. I’ve been accused of being in this only for the money by people with 6 figure incomes and pensions. (I’ve earned not one cent from all my work promoting ACEs which is also not right). I’ve been excluded from collaborative initiatives. I’ve been blocked from contributing my wisdom through mainstream avenues. I’ve been accused of putting people at risk by talking about ACEs and trauma.
I’ve had so many rejections I’ve lost count. And yet I pick myself up, dust myself off, and reach out again, in my attempts to build connections and a recognition and acknowledgement of the significance of ACEs Science.
I get that I make people uncomfortable speaking about my lived experience. But as many of us have said in more diplomatic ways, try living it and then come whining to us about your discomfort.
Repeatedly, the people who have been harmed and who struggle to get on with their lives are also the ones required to do the extra heavy lifting of being careful about other people’s feelings and interpretations of our value.
I wish I could just focus on what’s going right with my work. However, what’s going wrong is still so dominant, that those aspects spill out as well when describing what I do. Then people correct me, silence me, ignore me, dismiss me without a word of response.
I get that they are surprised by my full transparency, and offput by my “negativity”. In white culture, we’re not supposed to air our dirty laundry in public. It’s not civil. It’s not mature. It’s not professional.
But it is a call for help.
Here’s the lesson. If you hear someone whining, complaining, expressing frustration, or even that dreaded attitude of victimization, lean in. Be curious. Rather than dismissing the person as inappropriate or unworthy of your further attention, consider what’s underlying that pain that’s being expressed, and consider how you may be able to assist.
As Dr. Karen Treisman says, “Relational trauma requires relational repair.” If we don’t have people who are willing to provide that relational repair, we will never get out of this cycle we are in of perpetual re-traumatization.
In a recent “A Better Normal” episode with Rebecca Lewis-Pankratz, she described a practice within her poverty work where people from the middle class support people working to get out of poverty as friends – not mentors - rather actual friends who care and give a leg up, advocacy, corroboration of their perspective, and even acting as witnesses where the power differential is present.
In the Black Lives Matter movement, white people are being called to step up and speak up and implement change in their institutions to end racist policy and practice that impede Black, Brown and Indigenous people from advancing in society in equal measure to white people.
There’s an energy shift in the wind. Many of us who have been oppressed in different ways in our lives are recognizing the opportunity to harness that momentum and propel our relationships to a new standard.
Privilege comes in many forms. I’m white, cis gender, and Canadian. In those areas, I have power that I can use to improve access to goodies I have for all.
If you have a job, secure income, a sanctioned professional designation, extensive connections, specific skills, or even low to no ACEs, you have privilege you could leverage to also help others.
In our Trauma-Informed and ACEs movements, we keep hearing “It’s all about relationships”.
Yet those with privilege continue to a large extent to respond paternalistically to those of us without those same advantages. The old “we know better than you how you should be behaving” message comes across loud and clear.
The fact of the matter is the status quo we’re expected to fit into isn’t a worthy system to perpetuate.
When people show up with a different perspective, it is to all of our advantage to listen, to learn, to be curious, to reflect. We are more similar than we are different. We will find our shared humanity if we’re willing to risk getting to know each other at our deepest heart levels.
There are multiple groups of humans around the world during this transitional time of quiet brought on by Covid 19 who are envisioning and working towards resetting humanity. ACEs Connection hosts A Better Normal conversations weekly. Presencing Institute recently facilitated a 14 week global community experience called the GAIA Journey. Fritjof Capra offers his 12 week Capra Course The Systems View of Life twice annually where he helps us understand how systems thinking is patterns of relationship.
I keep stepping into the arena as Brene Brown calls it because I know what I have to contribute is valuable. I learned what I know through ingesting the darkness, albeit not by choice. My life’s work is to transmute the lessons I learned through experiencing that darkness into a better future for those who come after me.
Dr. Gabor Mate gives the advice: Keep doing what you’re doing, in the face of all that works against you, and don’t take it personally. Don’t take it all on as a job that you’re going to have to finish, because you’re not going to finish it. But without your contribution, it’s going to be much worse. That’s the best I can tell you.
Vaclav Havel sees hope as a dimension of the soul and not as an assessment of the situation in the world. He explains: Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.
We each have a contribution to make to the advancement of humanity. We all have different ideas of how to do that, but at the heart, the answers are in our true nature, which is surely compassionate, collaborative and mutually sustaining. Humans have been successful as a species because of cooperation, not competition.
That’s what I’m working on, no matter what impression anyone has of me because I articulate my pain. I have come to the conclusion over many attempts to find the path to healthy relationships that actually acknowledging how bad things are is our final opportunity for transformation.
This is our moment. We can and I believe must seize this chance to actually be the admirable species we profess to be. It starts with our immediate relationships and practice of actually assisting to elevate each other, of leveraging our privilege to lift others, rather than just giving lip service to our ideology or just looking out for number 1.
When someone keeps playing the pain track, see what you can do to provide a relationship that begins to counterbalance the victim experience. Then everyone wins, and isn’t that what we all say we want?
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