3.2 Let your heart rebel
There’s a book about spirituality that tells us…
We should love what is.
We should embrace the world as it is instead of fighting with it.
I read the book. Then I went to the workshop, skeptical, but I listened with as much of an open mind as I could muster. As I walked out, though, I was clearer than ever that I don’t love what is. There’s too much evil and too much suffering in this world for me to ever love it as it is.
So how do we…
Make a world that is lovable?
I’ve got three steps to recommend as a place to start.
#1 Step outside the tribal system that’s running our world.
Murray Bowen was a pioneer of family systems therapy and a favorite of mine. He launched his work in the 1950s. Instead of focusing on the individuals in a family as if they were independent units, he focused on the system of the family. The big picture. The whole that’s so much more than the sum of the parts.
He got a lot of pushback from other therapists at the time, and his work still gets pushback. We humans are not naturally good at thinking in complex systems
Bowen argued that the therapist has to…
Step outside the family system, if he wants to help the family.
And this is not easy, because family members try their best to rope in the therapist, to drag him into their mess.
Let’s take a look at an example of a family made up of…
Diane, the mother.
Daniel, the father.
Dana, the 15-year-old daughter.
Dean, the 14-year-old son.
Elliott, the therapist meets with the four of them, and he quickly notices that mom, dad, and daughter have formed a team, and Dean is on the outs.
The insiders are a bit like a tribe. They’re dumping their distress on Dean. They blame him for all the trouble in the family. They put all the responsibility on him so they don’t have to carry any. He is what therapists call the identified patient. Or in common parlance, the odd man out. Or more accurately, the scapegoat.
This is how their family system works.
Now Elliott has to make a major decision. He could…
Insert himself into the family system.
For example, he could align with the insiders and agree that Dean, who is indeed acting out both at home and at school, is the one who needs to be fixed. And then he’d design a treatment plan for Dean while giving a pass to everyone else.
Or maybe Elliott was the identified patient in his own family, and so he empathizes with Dean and tells him he’s right and everyone else is wrong.
But Elliott does neither. Instead…
He steps outside the family system.
And steps into…
Compassion for the family.
A system perspective.
And…
His own personal independent moral core.
He can do this because he’s done enough work on himself that he’s his own person. He knows what he stands for personally and what he stands for professionally. Which is therapy that actually helps people instead of continuing their suffering.
He steps outside the problem because he doesn’t want entanglement. He doesn’t need their approval.
Is he cutting them off, abandoning them?
Not at all…
He’s stepping away so he can come back deeper in.
So he gathers family history. He looks back two or three generations to see what dynamics have been handed down to the family in the room with him. He shows them how the past is infecting the present with things like addiction, high levels of anxiety, or low self-esteem.
Here’s what I love best about the system perspective. As the family learns that the problems they’re wrestling with are not primarily the fault of their individual failings. Instead of struggling with each other and hurting each other…
They find common ground.
And…
Partner up.
Because they have…
A common enemy.
Which they can turn against instead of turning against each other.
And now…
Instead of being victims of the past, they get to be heroes of the future.
They get to create a new family system. One that is nurturing and just.
What about us activists who are trying to make a better way of life for humankind? What lessons can we take from family systems therapy?
We need to…
Step out of the tribal system, so we can play against it.
We get to see that if we’re playing the tribal game ourselves, then we can’t disempower it.
So we step out. We make a safe place to do the inner work we need to do. Then…
We come back deeper in.
And as we do our organizing, we can show people that we humans, all of us have…
Common ground.
We’re being hurt by this operating system in each of us that runs us. We’re being hurt by the tribal fundamentalism that is the core of our OS.
So…
We get to hate our operating system instead of hating each other.
And then as we do our organizing, we get to invite person after person to join us in transforming our tribal past into a trans-tribal future. We get to invite them to be heroes.
#2 Journey down into the deepest place in our hearts.
Why do I like that word “hero” so much?
Because…
Breaking the spell of tribalism is profoundly gutsy.
Stepping out of the tribal system so we can turn against it and fight it is the very opposite of the tribal ethos. In our hunter-gatherer days, we had to obey the authority of our group. We had to belong. It was a matter of life and death. We couldn’t survive on our own. All those years of human history taught us that we had to…
Conform to the tribal way of life.
And specifically, conform to the ways of our tribe.
But now that’s the worst thing we could do. Instead, in our current state of emergency, we need to…
Rebel.
And where does this rebellion come from? We look inside ourselves, because it’s there right under our noses. We find it in…
The deepest place in our hearts.
When we step out of the tribal system, this is what we step into. And why does this work? Because deep in our hearts there is something that’s also deep in our genome.
Yes, our genome drives brutality, which is reason enough to hate it.
But there’s the happier side of tribalism, too. Inside classic hunter-gatherer tribes was super-cooperation in the form of…
Mutual nurturance and mutual advocacy.
We took care of each other without fail. In the midst of the tragedy of tribalism there was this beauty. And it’s still there in our genome.
Our ancestors loved it and we can find that love in us, too. Sociopaths can’t, which is their tragedy. And so many people are so stressed out or defeated or lost that they don’t have easy access.
But we activists, those of us who want to do deep work, we do have access. What’s deepest in our hearts is nurturance. And we can help others find their pathway in.
But there’s a caveat…
The best part of tribalism is not good enough for us.
We need to…
Take the best and make it better.
We need to…
Upgrade our love and deepen our nurturance.
And we do that by getting rid of the boundary brutality of tribalism. And getting rid of the mass suffering that comes with competitive hierarchies.
And by…
Making nurturance personal instead of tribal.
It used to be that we always looked to our tribe for guidance, especially when under stress or threat. But now our tribes, in the form of our political parties and our nations are failing us.
So we have to look inside. But there are objections…
How can you tell us to look inside ourselves? Isn’t that going to make us self-centered? In a time when we need to create a better way of life, a better kind of human togetherness, isn’t that going in the wrong direction?
Aren’t you going to end up with a world full of individualistic people who become so separate and tangential they can’t work together?
Not so. Because for so many of us, our hearts are rooted in…
A common longing for us humans to be so much better than we are.
And a longing to find kindreds who share this same passion openly and unapologetically.
In our hunter-gatherer days, no one did deep dives into their individual psyches, or into the depths of their own hearts. That would have fractured the unity of the group and endangered the life of the tribe. So it was forbidden.
But now this is exactly what we need.
Our mass societies are not giving us the answers that would transform the world and save us. To the contrary they’re marching us down the path to extinction.
So we need individuals to step out and do deep discovery and development work. This is the only alternative. There is no other way.
But remember those of us stepping out of the tribal system are doing this so we can prepare ourselves for the third step.
#3 Come back into the world bringing healing.
Guess what? You’ve already read through most of Step 3. Key things I planned to say here elbowed their way into Step #1…
Like helping people oppose the human OS instead of each other.
Like people finding common ground in this common enemy that is our genome.
Like people deciding to quit being victims of the past and become heroes of the future.
It’s a fundamental human question: Do we put individuals first or the group first? But why do we have to choose? Why not go for a…
Sweet synergy.
Why not a partnership of the best of both?
I understand that in practice this can be difficult. But conceptually it’s really quite simple. We can use the analogy of a rock band where…
Everyone is playing the same song, one they love and believe in, but each is making their own personal contribution—guitar, bass, drums, vocals.
We go deep into our hearts, so we can come back with a surprising depth. And join in with kindred spirits so…
Together we do the work of transformation.
Which gives us one more reason to take very good care of ourselves…
So we can be a vibrant and vigorous part of sourcing the future.
Or at least give it our best effort.
