6.4 Childhood sources of activism
If you want to deepen your relationship with your activism, if you want to revise it, if you want to give it new life, you can look back into your childhood to find its roots, and see what that reveals.
You might find that your best activism…
Comes from your deepest childhood pain. And you want to change society so going forward no child has to suffer what you did.
Or maybe…
You were treated very, very well as a child and you want that for all children and all adults.
Bu there’s another possibility. Not a very happy one…
You might find that your childhood set you on exactly the wrong path in your activism.
Let me show you two examples from my own childhood.
1. Turning pain into power.
I grew up in a church that followed a bleak version of Calvinism. My minister, my Sunday School teachers, my parents, everyone taught me…
I was unlovable.
There was nothing I believed more deeply as a child and…
Nothing that troubled me more.
Why didn’t I just submit quietly to being unlovable? Why did I have rebellious feelings? Because in the deepest place in my heart, it just simply felt wrong to hurt a little child in that way. Not just me, but any child. I couldn’t put words to the feeling, but it was there.
And though the people in my church talked about love every Sunday, but it was preached more than it was practiced.
In all my years of growing up, no one ever asked me what mattered to me or what I thought or what needed or how I might be hurting. No one cared about me in that way. That essential part of love was missing.
And I didn’t hear adults asking each other those kinds of questions. I didn’t see them caring about each other in that way. And that felt wrong.
So there I was…
A little child taking a big moral stand.
Not even knowing what a moral stand was.
And I consider this to be deepest source of my activism—this adamant, steadfast, even obstinate sense that hurting people is wrong, just plain wrong, no explanation needed.
But where did that come from? How can a child so new to the world be able to take a moral stand? We can explain it if we look back into the earlier years of our species.
In our hunter-gatherer tribes, we became masterful at mutual nurturance and mutual advocacy. This was the key to our success as a species. It was at the very heart of our way of life for tens of millennia, which was long enough for it to settle into our genome.
So inside each of us, integrated into our DNA, is…
A love of nurturance.
Not that everybody has access to it or wants to have access. But it’s there anyway. It doesn’t show up out of the blue by chance. It’s a blessing from our ancestors. We don’t have to invent it from scratch.
And this makes sense because if children were born valuing nihilism instead of nurturance, we would have been gone long ago.
I’d bet that a wide range of activists share this childhood stand for nurturance as one of the deepest sources of their work.
How did my stand show up in my activism as an adult?
Back in the 1980s, my dear friend Kate and I found out about a program for grade schoolers called CAP, the Child Assault Prevention Project. It was created by Women Against Rape in Columbus, Ohio, and we fell in love with it, because it really worked.
So we started setting up chapters in counties throughout California. We didn’t just give kids information. CAP had an action bias. We taught self-defense. We taught kids how to shut down bullies, get away from molester and kidnappers, and how to stop familiar people from hurting them.
Maxine Waters, then in the State Assembly, asked us to work with her to pass legislation to fund these programs. We were successful and got $10 million a year for five years. During that time, we reached four million kids from preschool through 12th grade.
Sometimes people would ask me, “Were you abused as a kid, is that why you’re doing this work?” And I would answer no, because I wasn’t abused, not sexually or physically like so many of the kids we were helping.
But why was I doing this work? It was so big and exhausting. It took everything I had and then demanded more. What kept me going?
It was years before I looked back into childhood and saw exactly where my drive came from…
That early teaching that I was unlovable.
And how there was nothing I could do about it. That’s the way God made me and that’s the way it was going to stay. So I grew up under a cloud of despair. And I hated that.
By contrast, with CAP…
We were empowering kids.
We helped them take a stand for themselves. We helped them feel worthy. We taught them they each had the right to be “Safe, Strong, and Free.”
So through this work, this activism, I was doing my best to give them what I never got as a kid. I was redeeming my childhood pain by helping them. I was giving my pain a positive meaning.
And as we taught the kids how to claim their power, I was learning that lesson myself right along with them.
And there’s more. Being taught I was unlovable had the contrary effect of making me obsessed with love.
And one day a question came to me…
What if we can make of love something way better than the default evolution gave us?
What if instead of settling for love as it is, we could…
Upgrade our love.
This has been the driving force behind two of the books I’ve written during the last couple decades, Love with Fight in its Heart and Asking More of Love.
So, in sum, my deepest childhood pain is the direct source of the best work I’ve ever done. I wish I hadn’t had to suffer the pain, but given that I did, I’m so thankful for what I ended up doing with it.
Sometimes, though, a childhood lesson gets you rushing headlong down the wrong path.
2. Stuck on the wrong path.
I grew up on Jesus. And what were the two main facts about him?
He was our savior.
And…
He sacrificed himself on the cross to save us by taking away our sins.
He was the quintessential…
Sacrificial savior.
And what were we supposed to do? We were supposed to follow in his footsteps. We were told to embrace him as our role model. So that’s what I did.
For my first two decades as an activist, I did my best to play savior. I sacrificed my personal life in order to do my work. Which made me feel noble. It turns out I would have done much better work if I’d taken much better care of myself. And if I’d asked more of the people I was trying to reach. And…
If I’d been a genuine organizer, instead of a pretend savior.
What drove me to do this? It was more than just the message about following in the footsteps of Jesus. I was driven by the belief that I was innately unlovable, so the best I could do was to earn approval from people and hope that would fill up the hole in me where love should have been.
Which of course it never did, but it was the best strategy I was able to figure out as a young man. Over time…
I earned more and more approval, but felt less and less satisfied.
I began to look around for an answer to my distress. I found a network of people who explained to me what a co-dependent was, and that I was one, and how to stop being that.
So now I got to get free of my dependencies—on Jesus, on my sacrificial-savior mindset, and on my quest for approval. There was a long road ahead before I got to be my own person, but I was finally on that road.
Going deep into your childhood, which is a part of deep self-care, can help you get clear about how the activism you’re doing in the present is helping you, fulfilling you, giving you what you need. Or if it’s hurting you.
Exploring your childhood to find the sources of your activism.
Some sources of your activism might be immediately obvious. But the deeper the source the more hidden it might be.
So here are some recommendations…
Get a friend, someone you can count to be totally on your side, to join you in this. You might find they will push you just that bit you need to be pushed in order to recover a memory you have mixed feelings about.
Get out all the childhood pictures you have and see what memories they trigger.
Go year by year. Don’t rush. Settle in with the exploration. Give it the time it needs.
Remember details like the rooms in your house or apartment, the clothes that you wore, the friends you had, your teachers, the personalities of your parents and other relatives, the games you played, the food you liked, your birthday parties. Getting concrete in terms of memories helps you find your way deeper into the hidden memories.
Interview people who knew you at different ages about what you were like, what you cared about, what you stood for, what trouble you got into. Trouble is usually a very good place to look.
Record all conversations and interviews so you can listen back over them and pick up on nuances and layers you didn’t catch the first time through.
Let me finish this page with a story I heard forty years ago, but it’s stayed with me.
Rose was sexually abused by her father from when she was eight into her teen years. She told her therapist, “I hated it, but I wasn’t able to stop it, and nobody was there to help me. But one night I said to my father, ‘God doesn’t want you to do this.’
“It didn’t stop him, but right now in telling you this I see something I haven’t seen before: I was a victim…
“And I was a protestor.”
6.5 Playing with possibilities
PS:
You can find the full story of how my mission to upgrade love here.
And more about the sacrificial-savior mindset here.
