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Who do we need to survive? It’s a question that has been rolling around in my mind and body and soul for years. The answer for me changes as I change. And a truth is the question behind the question has changed too.
Attachment theory looks at the relationships between children and their primary caregivers. All the studies that were done around attachment theory are based on the idea of the nuclear family, that a child is primarily raised by only one or two people and then merely tangentially raised by other adults who, in theory, have much less interaction with the child than the primary caregiver(s). The research is focused on the idea that these other “secondary” or “tangential” caregivers are not significant in the forming of the child’s neuropathways or attachment style. It also assumes that the primary caregiver(s) have ultimate authority over the child and any decisions centered around the child’s well-being.
In this scenario the child has no choice but to develop an attachment to the primary caregivers and can see that their (the child’s) resources for care, nourishment and survival are limited to these one or two people. This creates an atmosphere of scarcity where the child recognizes very early that their survival is solely dependent upon one or two people, which in turn has the child, from a survival standpoint, finding the necessity for they themselves to do what they can to insure the caregivers survival as well as their own. This leads to what we now call parentrification of the child, forcing them to take on emotional, psychological, and sometimes physical responsibilities long before they are emotionally, psychologically, or physically developed enough to do so.
When we look at the issues of child abuse and neglect, ultimately what we see are primary caregivers with limited resources of support who are overwhelmed and existing well past their own emotional, psychological, and or physical capacity. We see caregivers who are living under and within oppressive systems of harm that are not interested in the actual wellbeing of the people that keep them running. We see caregivers who are marginalized, not given outside support and are expected to keep it all together and raise another generation to be fed into the system. The caregivers are generally survivors of child abuse and neglect as well, who have not learned other approaches to parenting and have limited to no support to help them break cycles and do different.
This is where the question began originally- who are the literal people we need to survive and how has that shaped who we are today?
Starting here then, how do we change this paradigm? The obvious (to me) answer is to break out of the societal “norm” of the nuclear family and to build communities of support where both children and adults have multiple places to receive love and care, grow resources with, and find a stronger sense of safeness both internally and externally. It is to go back to how our ancestors lived prior to colonization and imperialism with a clear understanding that we all need each other and none of us are meant to, nor can we, do this all (life) on our own.
An obvious answer that is easy to write out but much more challenging to actually create and maintain within the structures that discourage and overtly and subversively prevent such kinds of connection and conscious, intentional interdependence. Having personally tried over and over within my own life and communities to create this kind of network of extended chosen family for my own kids (and myself), I can attest to the heart-breaking seemingly impossibility of it. It is frustrating and grief-inducing to try and try again to build these kinds of symbiotic networks, just to have them wither away or fall apart completely due to a variety of real and honestly reasonable current human realities and reasons.
A truth is we need to be constantly and consistently unearthing, examining, unlearning, our personal and collective internalized indoctrination around relationship, family, and social structures. It is a constant interaction with our own shadows and personal, intergenerational, and ancestral traumas, as well as our past and present complicity and compliance within these systems. This is exhausting work that has infinite layers and facets and needs to be done in the face of constant pressure and narratives we are trying to dislodge.
There was a reel in insta the other day comparing US to Spanish (Spain) culture. In it Friend A was calling Friend B saying we haven’t seen each other in so long, let’s get together. For the US friends scenario Friend B said oh yes absolutely and then listed out a long string of events and activities they had coming up and then said basically I can pencil you in in three months. For the Spanish version Friend B said “oh yes! I’m available in about 30 minutes, where should we meet?”
This little vignette was a bit of a sting for me, to be honest. I very much see myself in the US version of Friend B. The idea of just going to meet someone at the drop of a hat feels not only foreign but invasive. My introverted need for solitude is offended by this idea of getting off the couch and heading out to meet someone without a solid, relatively long standing plan to do so. And even in times of emergency or crisis, I still feel that sense of intrusion and almost disrespect in being asked to show up for someone, even when I deeply care for them. (To be clear in times of crisis I do get over myself rather quickly, and wholly and lovingly show up, but admittedly there is a moment of “Ugh. Do I have to??” that I am not proud of.)
When did this happen? When did we stop being able to hop up and head out the door to spend time with people we love and enjoy? I remember in my childhood very rarely was play ever planned in advance. Generally if a friend called we were on our bikes in minutes, rushing out the door for whatever grand adventure. And frankly most of the time we were all already out, and found each other, no phone call needed.
(This is not going into a manifesto on the evils of technology. I’m actually pro technology and I don’t believe our current lack of connection has much of anything to do with cell phones, email, or social media).
What I am curious about is at what point in both our individual and collective development did the idea of going out of the house, being in the world, and being around people become so abhorrent to our internal systems and psyche? What was the tipping point for us to move from embracing our evolutionarily social nature to feeling more “comfortable “ in isolation and rooted in our individualism?
A possible idea is that in childhood we were raised under relatively solitary conditions. The myth of the importance of the nuclear family shoved down our throats at every turn. The reality that as children, under the best of circumstances, we only had two adults we could rely on to keep us alive and at worst we found ourselves, as children, being the ones to keep the grown ups functioning just enough to insure we would be fed, clothed, and sheltered. I am curious if this taking on of “adult responsibilities” under the veil of the nuclear family (which exists only to serve capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy) has lead us to a state of burn out that now has us feeling a desperate need to “conserve” our time and energy in the name of autonomy and “self care” at the expense of planting and nurturing a robust and nourishing community?
There is also a truth that under white supremacy, and its minions of imperialism and colonialism, we have been forced to abandon the collective, and our own indigenous cultures, in order for us to individually survive. The plight of immigrants in the forced acculturation and assimilation to “American culture” demanded our ancestors abandon their native language, traditions, and people in order to “fit in” and “succeed”. There was and still is a push-pull for first generation US citizens to be rooted in two worlds - that of their parents and the “old country” and that of “modern society” and US indoctrination. These first generation immigrants are forced to both walk in both of these worlds and to reject both of these worlds, leaving them with the almost unbearable loneliness of always being The Outsider.
My grandmother and her siblings were first generation US citizens, walking this line. The intergenerational trauma that then ensued is still having its impact today, even in my children’s lives. My grandmother’s feelings of being “othered” by not only society, but her own family, is a pain that is running through my veins and is burrowed deep in my bones. I have never had the feeling of belonging, even when I have been deeply loved and cared for, been surrounded by like-minded friends and chosen family, or been in rooms with colleagues solving problems. I have always felt on the outside, different, not-quite-’’right” regardless of how others treated me or whether I technically belonged somewhere.
This sense of being “other” leaves us feeling unsafe. In this unsafeness, we do what we feel we need to in order to survive, which often means following the rules of the status quo. The feelings of unsafeness our ancestors felt when being conquered and having their homes invaded or being forced from their homes in order to survive led them to turning away from their own ancient ways of being, their long held traditions, their own language, even going so far as to try to hide or lighten their skin and hair in order to meet the “standards” of the now “dominant” society. This led our ancestors to being both complacent and complicit in their own assimilation and acculturation which then only further propagated and perpetuated imperialism, colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. And propagating these systems of harm in turn isolates us more and more, feeding the narrative that we don’t belong, that we are alone, that we cannot rely on others for support, care, or our survival.
Round and round the cycles of harm go, being passed down from generation to generation. We simultaneously do not feel safe on our own and do not feel safe with others. We neither trust the systems that continually cause harm, nor do we trust that change will be any better. We feel unsafe yet convince ourselves that it’s “not that bad” and that if we just keep our heads down and are good little automatons, we’ll (individually) survive. We gaslight ourselves, and our body knows it. Our body screams at us, through depression, anxiety, chronic pain and illness, fatigue. Our body knows this way of existing is not natural, is not how we evolved, is not how we are meant to live.
We have come to a place where the system replaces the role of the collective in our minds. But our bodies do not buy this story, our bodies know that the system is not looking out nor caring for our invidual or collective welfare. Yet we still look to the systems - government, capitalism, the militarized police state, charities - to keep us safe, fed, and sheltered, and turn away from connection with other humans, from building communities of support and mutual aid, from nature and our interdependence on and with all living (and non-living if we consider rocks, water, and the air to not be “alive”) beings on this planet and beyond.
This disconnection and distraction is killing us, not so slowly now. The consequences of imperialism and the assimilation, acculturation, and pure genocide that came with it, are now coming to a peak. We are faced with the reality that we need each other, but also don’t know how to find our way together. We live in a society that places the problems of the individual on the individual to solve alone, when those problems only exist because of the systems we now exist under. We no longer try to solve community issues at the community levels. Therapy itself, my chosen profession, focuses on helping the individual heal while ignoring the greater issues of the illness of our separation from the collective.
We are so focused on our individual freedom and autonomy that we reject connection and collaboration with and within the collective. We demand privacy, while feeling lonely and betrayed because no one knows or understand us or our struggles. We turned sharing concern and information about others into gossip, hearsay, meddling, even slander. We have taken something that was an important part of keeping the collective, and the individuals within it, cared for and turned it into something that supposedly causes harm.
When did that happen? When did the struggles of others in our community become “none of our business”? When did our privacy become more important than our survival? How did the imperialist colonizers convince our ancestors that the only way for them to survive and thrive was to isolate and move away from the collective and traditional ways of connection and healing?
We may never know the answers to these questions, not fully. However we can agree, I believe, that this has been thousands of years in the making. We cannot undo the damage done over millenia overnight, and still we must find our ways to change, to both going back to our ancient ways of being and creating new ways of living.
As each of us do the work of dislodging our internalized indoctrination, of reconnecting to our ancient ways of being attuned and intune with nature, of finding our ways back to each other and the very core of our humanity, the systems of harm and oppression will begin to crumble, but they won’t go down easy. We need to reconize how we have each internalized the lies of the police state, classism, racism, misogyny and find our ways to removing them from our bodies and replacing them with acceptance of the truth of interconnection and interdependence. This asks us to be able to tolerate the discomfort of change, in fact to actually revel in it. To understand that the discomfort we are experiencing means that we are creating change. To know in our core that our comfort is at the price of our humanity and so to find our ways back to humanity, to each other, to the humans we are meant to be, we had evolved to be, means to be in the often terrifying space of not knowing, of trusting our own inner knowing, of seeking connection with others in ways we have been told are wrong, bad, even wicked or uncivilized. It means living in the dissonance of true change, of evolution, of revolution.
The systems of harm, oppression, domination, and coercion want us to stay focused on ourselves individually. To not see the ways all beings on this planet are interconnected and interdependent. To stay focused on “self” care, “self” improvement, and “personal” growth while ignoring the ways we need each other, all beings, for not only our survival but also for us to have a sense of aliveness. To be distracted from the truth that we are meant to be together and instead focus on all the ways we cause each other harm.
I wish I had a simple answer of how to dislodge and unravel all of this indoctrination, acculturation, and the trauma that comes with it. I wish the process itself were straightforward and linear. But I don’t and it’s not. Finding our ways to seeing our interconnection, the ways we truly need not only other humans, but also animals, plants, water, soil, air - and the actual symbiotic existence we all share, is both an individual journey and one of the collective. Finding our ways to each other, all others on the planet, is a choice we each need to make, but the details of that are up to each of us. What works for me in finding ways to break out of my own harmful patterns and indoctrination, may not work for you, and vice versa. This process begs us to engage with our own curiosity, our own willfulness, our own knowing that we need to do something and then doing something through the fear and resistance that bubbles up both internally and externally. To stop distracting ourselves from the truth of our need for each other and to begin living in the moment, the now, instead of putting things off until [fill in the blank].
I invite us all to sit with these thoughts. The ways we are told we individually are wrong, the ways we have been traumatized not by our families of origin but by the isolating, abusive society we live in and under. To focus more on the collective and a little less on our individual experiences (while also doing the individual work necessary for us to be in the collective and cause as little harm as possible). To think beyond the truth that the political is personal and sink into the greater truth that the political is meant to isolate and segregate us, traumatizing us more and keeping us in a frozen state of complicity. To expand beyond our dual thinking into the multitude of non-duality and reality that multiple, even opposing, things are true at once. To find our ways to helping individuals and coming together in community through the process.
Revolution has many layers. Change has multiple facets. Evolution happens in fits and starts. The best any of us can do is to begin now, today, and every day make the choice to begin and continue, dismantling the systems of domination and the propaganda they spew, again and again.
Some questions to explore…