Storywise-The Center for Narrative Studies

Three things I know about Stories.

1.Stories matter!

They create power, incite insurrections, cause trauma, offer healing, feed despair, nourish hope. I am a warrior in the war of stories, mapping their lethal power so as to disarm and expose them, and to foster a new ethics of narrative accountability.

From 30+ years of work with new leaders from Northern Ireland/Ireland, South Africa, Israel/Palestine and USA, I know first hand the power of old stories of hatred and new stories of possibility. My family being Half Welsh, Half Irish and exported to Australia after famine, my culture’s imperative is to cherish the stories.

2. Stories are never innocent. 

Pervasive, persuasive, sometimes perverse and always dangerous, stories have replaced our reliance on facts. Whose stories get told, heard and enacted, are expressions and enactments of power. Equally, whose stories are censored, silenced or falsified bear the masks of oppression. Stories hold up our world because we story our lives into a meaning, and meaning shapes our choices & actions, our identity & community.

The public stories fed to us every day by governments, media, churches and corporations have turned out to be mostly lies. Yet the chance to unleash story power to inspire positive social change has never been more possible or more necessary. After 30+ years in the field, Its time to make Narrative Change as crucial at Climate Change, and foster a renewed narrative ethics that treasures honesty over expediency, trust over trust funds, and need over greed.

3. But Stories are not enough.

As the tools of intolerant ideologies, they blind us to the larger view we need right now. We require Maps to stop stories narrowing worlds into the prisons of only what is believable and what is tellable. Stories transmit inner human experience but their distortion of the singular into the emblematic means we are seduced into making “policy by anecdote” and laws from exceptions.

The world of big data shows us that we can no longer impose one story pattern on evidence that wants to emerge into something quite different. The new challenge is to find new ways to get out of, get above our stories, get to see where they are taking us, and determining if we want to go there or not. That is why stories need maps. We used to think all we needed to get along was dialog and negotiation. But when we have lost our way, the new narrative skill is navigation. We need to know where we are, where we came from, and how far we are from where we need to go.

4. Stories need to be harvested.

My own included. We have even invented a new Non Profit we are calling “Save Our Story Inc,” dedicated to cherishing the stories that are most in danger of being lost. The dangerous memories of history still haunt us, to remind us that today is ours more by choice than by chance. We must change the world by changing the stories and to do that, we must preserve those stories that remind us that there was once, and still remains a different way.

And boy do we have work to do! Not just the Middle East, Ukraine, but the economy, climate change, poverty, the environment, the economy, energy, immigration, health care, education. If ever there was a time for a new story, new leadership, that time is NOW. I am eager to meet other story-inspired people out there to help create a movement for change where WE shape the stories that shape us, not the other way around.  that is why we founded storywise.com to do 25 years ago. Consider yourself invited to connect here.

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Specialties: Leadership Training, Personal/Group Narrative Coaching, Narrative Room Listening Laboratory, Living Stories Process, Public Speaking, Story Coaching, Mentoring, Narrative Design, Group and Conference Planning, Executive Retreats, Speech writing, Web Publishing, Narrative Tours of Washington DC, Group Spiritual Direction, Spiritual Guidance Groups, Social Media, Life Stage mapping, peace education,

Welcome to the 118th Congress. What a show!  And what amazing timing. Two years to the night, the members meet to empanel a new Congress as their way of remembering the January 6th, 2021 attempt to disrupt the orderly transfer of power.

One would be forgiven to suspect that for some members, the agenda was exactly the same. Create chaos. Build a platform to perform grievance politics. Denounce the system, attack the character of your opponent for not being “true” and “pure.” Then show statesmanlike principle by declaring “No Compromise” and “Never Surrender,” just before you saddle up to the clerk’s desk to change your vote.

Conviction is reduced to the cynical exercise of “make your point” and then move on to your next rhetorical flourish.  All show and no substance, but  as far as the ratings go, what a show.  I could not drag myself away. Congress has never looked so Netflix ready. “Democracy” in action. But did we vote these people into office to behave like this?

With no rules, C-Span cameras were allowed to roam at will, and show us the spectacle unedited, raw, in the heat of the moment.  The dignity of members was reduced to a Friday night, over-boozed tailgating crowd. “You dirty rat,” screams GOP Rogers, “You’ll pay for this.” “Don’t do it, Mike!  Calm down!” And in the midst, phone calls from a certain DT being shared around the circle of rebels.  Or was it ET saying “Phone home.” Up the front, the only calm presence coming from the clerk, Cheryl Johnston, who restored some semblance of sanity amidst the madness.

The cliché being thrown around was that “democracy is messy” but that is hardly the word.  My kid’s room is messy. With some urging from me or his Mom, he will clean it up. There is a better metaphor. Congress is a train wreck. And the 118th Congress hasn’t even left the station.

“So this is Christmas”.….sings John Lennon,
in the anthem of our season.
So what? Many might say.
But it might be worth trying to recapture the event before it became a song or a carol.

O Little Town of Bethlehem…
When Jesus was born in Bethlehem,
Judea was under occupation.
The Roman General Varus quelled a Jewish revolt
only 3 years before,
crucifying 2000 rebels-history records.

Silent Night Holy Night…
Long before Jesus was called Prince of Peace,
Long before the Holy Land became Holy,
it was a bloodland, the site of violent resistance
Mary and Joseph knew their baby
would grow up as part of an occupied people.

I saw three ships a Sailing…
What they did not know was his peaceful resistance to oppression,
would see him arrested, tortured, abused
and finally executed,
another martyr to freedom.

O Come all Ye Faithful…
Fast forward 2000 years,
And we ask ourselves.
What if Jesus was born today?
Oh, How different his world would be?

But how different?

Hark the Herald Angels sing…
Jesus born in Bethlehem, December 25th, 2022 is born,
into a land under occupation,
checkpoints, surveillance, demolitions, military violence.

Do you hear what I hear…
He is born as a member of an oppressed people.
His parents would be grieving with other families,
for the 6 shot dead this week in Hebron and Ramallah,
The 60 murdered around Nablus and Jenin this last month,
for the dead children of Gaza’s last wars,
Herod the Great is back for another slaughter of the Innocents.

Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen…
The new empire feeds on blood no less than the old.
Christ 2000 years ago is born as a pawn of empire, an empire that kills him.
Christ 2022 is born as a pawn of empire that has an army that is a killing machine,
even more efficient, more ruthless than the Romans.

Holy Night…
Every Christmas, no matter who we are,
No matter what we believe,
we cannot resist the message of peace and goodwill.
Why would we?

“On the first day of Christmas…
If Christmas is real,
if Christmas is more than shopping,
if Jesus’s message still speaks to us then and now,
his peace is never easy,
for it is preached in the middle of war.

to the World…
His message of love is never sentimental,
for it is preached to a people despised.
His message of freedom is never a gesture or a token,
for it is preached to a people ruled by empire.

Bells, Jingle Bells…
That is why the people embraced him as their Rabbi, their Teacher.
Whether then or now,
he proclaims a day of judgment coming for the unjust.
“God is not mocked” he thunders,
That is why he is still such a threat.

Deck the Halls…
Jesus born in Bethlehem today
is even more likely to be
imprisoned, abused, tortured and executed
than he was 2000 years ago because
This modern empire is
executing children and young men every single day.

Its bloodlust is insatiable.
It will not even let Christians celebrate in Bethlehem.

Holy Night…
At Christmas, celebrate peace, spread the joy, give the gifts,
but remember it means nothing
unless we anchor it in the real experience of Jesus, from Palestine and with Palestinians,
both then and now.

Angels we have heard on high…
So when we sing so cheerfully about angels and shepherds and kings,
We will hear within their soaring harmonies,
a call to resist.
We will hear that biblical summons again from Micah,
to do justice, to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with our God.

One of the nation’s largest therapy conferences happens annually in Washington DC. This year, the first in person for two years, the theme was “Meeting the Moment.” At first sight, I thought, “Yes” that is a great theme. How are we meeting this moment recovering from the pandemic and racial strife and four years of dysfunctional leadership on so many levels?

When I viewed the four day program, I was stunned to discover only one session focused on the pandemic. It was called “Rethinking Anxiety in Light of the Pandemic” and that was it. Of course, there were sessions on Trauma and so perhaps the pandemic was folded into that, but ‘Meeting the Moment’ without even naming the Moment seems odd. Is there a different moment we are meeting? These are therapists. Have they been on holidays these last two years?

Fast forward two months and we are attending the ASC East Coast training conference for AmeriCorps, one of three repeated across the year. It’s title was “Shaping the Future.” Again, an apt theme given that every AmeriCorps program has had to maintain service when the world shut down. How do we build a future out of that experience?

Once again, there were seminars on climate change and sustainability and only 2-3 that mentioned Covid explicitly. I went to all of them and discovered that they were not addressing the impact in any direct or personal way. There was one exception and that was the seminar Project CHANGE ran based on our new book “Our Stories Rise Up”

When I proposed that AmeriCorps before the pandemic and AmeriCorps after the pandemic were two different beasts, the attendees embraced the chance to pour forth their struggles and grief, and allow their peers to validate their commitment against the odds. It felt like such a cathartic moment.

The world feels different. We have lived through a national catastrophe that has affected everyone. Even the leaders of AmeriCorps have advocated for increased resources to help with the recovery. But there was no room on the conference agenda to speak about it. Busyness is one way to bury the pain, I guess.

Fast forward to this week and another conference, this time on leadership education, by a prestigious research body. The four days were packed, interactive, fast paced, more an intensive training than a conference with 9 amazing facilitators. And amongst all the theories and approaches, not a word, not a session, not a formal invitation to share what the pandemic has done to leadership and leadership education. And these are leaders and those who teach future leaders.

I was reminded of the old British style “Carry On” comedies. This was “Carry On Leading,” as AmeriCorps was “Carry on Serving,” as the Washington DC Conference was “Carry on Therapizing.”

The more I think about it, the more alarming it is to me that we are not allowing ourselves to address the post pandemic world. We are not even willing to name it. These conferences were probably planned in 2020 and delayed two years, and so, they just rolled out what they had already prepared. The agenda was stale. But what a lost opportunity. Are they symptoms of our clinging to an illusion? Or is the fact that we are not hosting sessions on the trauma of the pandemic because we are still in the trauma of the pandemic? Denial is a classic delaying or diversion strategy.

The book “Our Stories Rise Up- Remembering as Resilience” is a simple and practical guide for people who want to talk about the elephant in the room and not be overwhelmed. Every educator and parent, every leader and therapist should have a copy.

In our work serving students in our local county, we see every day the continuing impact of the pandemic. Kids are coming back to school to be with their friends. They are not coming back to learn. 70% of our sample tell us that they are NOT excited about learning, in the least. The ones that thrived during the shutdown have learned to teach themselves and so the classroom style is too restrictive. If I can ace algebra in my pyjamas, why do I have to go back to this torture of 8 hours, 8 classes, 25 to a room, with exhausted and angry teachers?

The school system has made the same assumption that the conferences made, that their new story is “Carry On and Catch up.” Let’s act as if nothing has happened and then deal with the behavior that is driving teachers in droves to other careers. Something has happened and we can see it all around. Something has happened to us. To pretend the opposite is a classic case of denial. It is only going to make it worse.

And it hurts us. It shows a lack of self-respect for our own pain, or a lack of any empathy for those who are still bearing the brunt, who are mostly the poor and forgotten. What gives us the right to even presume they can get back to our normal when it was never normal for them in the first place?

Perhaps we therapists and non-profit directors and leadership experts rode the pandemic wave with our middle class surf board and did not drown. But the people we serve are still trying to dig themselves out.

Within 10 miles of the White House, One of our members serves food to over 900 local families every Thursday. Food insecurity has become a crisis like never before here in the Capitol area. Who knew, and who cares? The rise in abuse and domestic violence are things we are only starting to see. Some call it the tip of the iceberg. In 2020 and 2021, the country bought more guns than ever before. Think about what 40 million more guns mean for a minute, and think in how many states, any 18 year old can buy one. Experts who say we are in the middle of a mental health crisis are fast being treated like the boy who cried wolf. We shrug. We are fine. No need to worry. Until the next kid with one of those 40 million guns goes to school to make the world pay for our neglect. We will blame guns or we will blame mental health so long as we do not blame ourselves.

It is time to convene a critical conversation about these last two years. Let’s assess the losses and the wounds and identify who most needs healing, who cannot possibly carry on as before. We know in our school system, there were thousands of students falling behind before the pandemic. Asking them to catch up when they feel they are not even in the race anymore is nothing but cruel and inhuman punishment. Even our Constitution that the Judges say allows a kid to buy a gun, is against that.

Our Stories Rise Up– it is time to tell the stories of our pain and our hope. There cannot be any way forward without that.

We offer tutorials, materials, meetings, trainings, and customized zoom sessions that are based on the book. If you would like to buy the book for your class or your group, bulk discounts can be arranged.

For more information, please purchase the book and reach out to us at info@projectchangemaryland.org

I wrote to say I would gladly offer an introductory session on Narrative Design, and draw from my recent book on how dealing with the pandemic and its aftermath  is a perfect case study for applying some of these practices.

I get an email back to tell me No, this is not pertinent, that what they want is

“How organization development practitioners can use story-telling in their work and/or how their clients can best use storytelling to help them bring out the best in their organizations. ”

I write back that this was my work a decade or two back but that it is not my stitsch anymore

We have an impactful experience- Our first child speaks for the first time!!!! that sparks us to share a story about it,” Jamie said Da Da on Monday. It was amazing.” As a Dad, we find the experience meaningful. Our boasting helps establish it in the pattern of our memory making, not just because it is coded into our genes or nerves. It is more than that. It is because it is woven into the unfolding story of our lives. That is how we find and preserve meaning and significance. Memory is like language- we have a habit around what we remember and first-times are a gimme. So are last times.

In summary-Experience triggers story and story feeds the memory for easier recall.We do have memories that lack a story but they are hard to communicate. Trauma from a narrative perspective is often described as the experience that has a memory and no story.  There is no mediation into meaning through story. The experience was so unfair, so unpredicted, so unprecedented perhaps that it defied meaning or our resources to make meaning. War or rape or torture tends to do that.

When we recall that memory, the process reverses back so that

3.memory gives rise to
2. a story that we tell and in that recall, we and others relive
1 the experience

We think retelling the story recreates the originating experience, but this is the sleight of hand of our trickster minds.

What we sincerely believe is the memory told recaptures  that moment, the memory of how I felt when we got married, that moment when our first child was born. It’s a good story. But our minds cannot reverse the time machine to go back- Time is always going forward. The remembering of back then is always for NOW because It only made sense then because it makes sense now too. When memories fall out of making sense now, they fall out of being told. Memory updates with meaning. Some memories lost are revived because now they mean something. it works both ways. Memory recovery is not some magical recall, or repressed memories so much as looking back, we see what it meant in a way that we could not see then, when it happened.

This has enormous implications about the malleability of memory. Every retelling is also a reshaping of that memory through how we re-experience it in the story. This gives us a huge headline. We cannot change our past- No, but we can change how it feels and what it means and more importantly, what it leads to.

It means the experience of joy at our marriage ceremony can give way to a memory of grief if it ended up in messy divorce or tragic death through cancer. The sad memory of failing the torts exam can over time become the happy memory of how I ended up in the U2 band because I never wanted to study law in the first place. For oppressed people, the genocide or the ethnic cleansing that is first remembered as trauma, can over time feed a resistance movement that eventually triumphs. Memory of victimhood is the fuel of victory.

Meaning moves and so memory moves with it. That means we need to map it morethan define it because, like quantum physics, once you define something in the particular, it has already moved on to the next moment. If we track movement, we see a wave and we lose a sense of place. If we track place, we see a particle and we lose all sense of movement.

Our ways or apprehending reality distort it to fit into the purview of our senses. As the latest Hubble telescope tells us, there is so much more than we can see or smell or taste or touch. To be a realist means to bow to the mystery of the universe that remains untamed by our knowledge and mocks at our claims to enlightenment.

Once we know all this as part of epistemology, how we know we know and what we don’t know, we see how ridiculous originalist claims are about being able to know what a revered text written in 1788 or in 2000BC meant in 1788 or 2000BC. All we can know is what they mean now, and what now, we think they meant then.

What did “militia” or “Happiness” or “Freedom” mean when a gun took 5 minutes to load, when there was no standing army, and when happiness had nothing to do with emotions and ‘freedom’ was so boldly proclaimed by slaveowners?

If people are writing in the fluid medium of language, they are not in control of its meaning then or now. The audience determines what a word means, in the end. It defers to usage, not grammar nazis. Dogma coming from church or state are words written on water. Our claims for understanding or even for remembering reflect our hubris.

When we hear someone claim that our relation to this nation is eternally unshakeable- USA and Israel, for instance, that is because we forget when it was very shakeable or non-existent before 1948. Eternity began then I guess.

Or when the church says there never was or never can be women priests, they have to forget or explain away St.Paul’s letters written to heads of churches who were women. The claims we make of memory are eminently forgettable in reverse proportion to the global claims that we make that we will always remember.

The world of work is made of boards and bricks, but
The world of meaning is built of stories, a billion miles thick.

The first relies on strong material means.
The second relies only on meaning and on memes. 

Why we build something, a house, or a nation,
even a resistance movement to an occupation,
is because it is a means to some meaning,
and if it has meaning, it has power that endures,
serving up to life an insistence deeper than mere existence.

The narrative way is to start looking at the world quite differently,
To see it made up of stories, repeated, intertwined, re-enforced, so contradictorily,
The smaller ones built inside the shelter of the larger ones.
Disrupt the faithful’s story of God and their world is undone.
Disprove the conspiracists story of secret codes, and all the mystery is gone.

Imagine seeing your world this way- as a storehouse  of stories, storified from floor to ceilings,
As a construction of meanings, that stand tall like a ten-storey building.
You are only “You” because
“You” show up as You in the stories you tell,
and the stories others tell, wishing you ill or well.

You remain “You” only because you remember the stories of  ‘You’ back then,
and you carry stories of the hopes of what, “You” will become, some day, when.
You are stories, inside out and outside in,
lose draw or win,
before and after,
here, and hereafter.

So too, Your nation is not a land or a people who just happen to meet,
but a story that makes the land speak.
A story that gives your people a voice.
And with that voice comes the fateful choice.
What stories will you build your home out of?
What memories to keep? what memories to silence the very sound of?

If the world, as Terry Pratchett says, is made of Narrativium,
Physics tells us the world is eternal Gravativium,
that nothing is always the same.
When you marry narrative to physics, Einstein to Shakespeare.
We discover the fundamental story of reality is never tame,
it is always and forever the story of change,
making life a predictably unpredictable  game.

That is how our reality shows up, in fire and flood and in the force for freedom.
A narrative view of life gives these shifting moments of life staying power if we seize them.
Swimming in the flow – we must never get stuck, or hear ourselves say
“Things can never change”
because usually things have already gone south,
before those words fly out of our mouth.

The narrative method gives us a theory of change summarized in two:
“If you want to change the world, you have to change the story.”
and it’s reverse is equally true.
“If you want to change the story, you have to change the world.”
Two Paths, Two ways, like the psalmist opines
You are on one or both, so which one will you find?

The first path is carved by poets and singers, authors and filmmakers, dancers and artistes,
Like Van Gogh showing us sunflowers in gold, as if we had never seen such bliss,
Artists change our eyes.
Like Beethoven whose 9th Symphony, “Ode To Joy,” composed when he was deaf and in fear.
Gave us new ears.
Those who change us change the way we listen,
who insist that it is not the stories we listen to, but the stories we listen through.
They change the world.
Perhaps that is your calling in what is about to unfurl.
Your most powerful Stories can change the listening,
like Jesus, Moses or the Prophet, under whose narrative conditioning,
we all still live.

The second path is dug by builders and climbers and activists, through sweat and blood and heavy lifting,
Who build the Panama Canal, fly rockets to the moon, who discover insulin, who are shape shifting,
who will not wait for experts to validate their impossible vision,
but, in the face of unbelief,  invent a new world facing down derision,
who impatiently defy the world to ‘Catch up, or die,’
the protesters in Selma, the suffragettes who flood the streets with liberation’s  cry,
The Marjory Stoneman survivors who walk out of school and chose protest over compliance, defiance over silence.
How many people have changed the world so far ahead of what the world understands or even  pays attention to,
And whose story is told as the future of the many, that was created by the few.
A new future for the Middle East in 2052 could somehow begin in 2022 here -fascinating,
and it only survived because no one knew, Shhh!!!  or they would stop it from happening.

There is more of your future in this present now, than there is in your future somehow.
So Seize it. Not “Carpe Diem” for today is already a bust, but “Carpe Cras,” tomorrow’s must.

And If reality does not move so easily to change the situation,
You must be the artist with a revolutionary imagination,
To create it in poems and films and between football posts,
In plays and in appassionatas, in creative boasts,
That give off that erotic energy, a Lust for Love and a for life maximally most,
We teach Life sir, L’Chaim, not strife, a stream that runs deep,
so let your imagination give birth to a dream that builds, even while you sleep.

If the story is old and stuck and full of No’s and Nevers and How Dare You’s,
Then quietly get to work, roll up your sleeve, do not wait, hesitate or refuse.
Act in the world, and act on the world so reality must respond- it has no choice.
Even if the nay saying remains the same in all those  negatively echoing voices
“Praxis”, as Karl said, your job is not to analyze things but to change them.
Not rearrange them, not constrain them, not entertain them, f….g change them. ( Marx swearing is my translation)

You are here to create a new story, and a new world, for posterity,
You have no army, You have no fortune, You have no authority, you are not even a majority.
Selected maybe, but not elected and no one anointed you,
You are not the messiah, no matter what your mother thinks is true.
All you have is the energy of your youth,
And the story you can create and live here in truth
that reveals a new world slowly being born, so long overdue,
And an old world dying, so long overspent among the chosen few.
It’s Your Time. Not ours- Yours. To See and To Do.

You may not see it happen now, not in Nancy’s backyard,
You may believe it is just a new deck reshuffling the same old cards,
But if you are open to this challenge here,
If you are ready to listen with new ears
And see with new eyes
Then, you may have changed your skies
And if you can change heaven, even by a glance,
The old world no longer holds any romance, giving
the new world its chance to dance.

If you have come to defend the old story with rigid fidelity,
If you get triggered by challenges that seem to contradict the sacred ground of your reality,
That threaten to turn your pride in history into nothing but shamble, shame and blues,
Remember you are just a story, the story you were born into. Now you get to chose.
You may as well join the club- The USA is in the middle of that same fiery rebirth, of bursting the bubble, of naming the trouble.
If the key stories we based our nations on, turned out to be lies,
then our whole notion of truth must change or die.
Face it- Don’t Erase it- Embrace it, Don’t underestimate it.

If the ones who cherished freedom most were not Jefferson and  Madison, their words so preserved in the archive,
but the human beings they enslaved, and whose fight for freedom kept America alive,
by holding their nation to its promise to live up to what it says,
Through civil war and Jim Crow and the many George Floyds, tortured till dead,
Then freedom is owned by the slave, from whom it was denied.
And liberation is owned by the occupied.
And equality belongs to those who own it with their struggle and tears, not their oppressors’ fury and fears.
The meek shall inherit the earth because they alone have let themselves be taught by her.

Power returns to the world but in reverse, as “we the people” take it back.
You are here as part of that revolution, as walls collapse into the dust and cracks
Because the story of power is the power of the story,
And that is your singular path, to disaster or glory. 

Ireland and Northern Ireland needed a new story, and they are building it nearly- (ask Leo Veradkar)
Because part of that new story was born here, yearly
Apartheid South Africa needed a new story, and painfully, they are building it nearly- (ask Sizwe Mfopu)
Because part of that new story was born here, yearly
USA  needs a new story- we are so stuck in the old so we need action, not angst, to be respected and not sold,
And AmeriCorps is building it back, not in white blue and red,
but black and yellow and brown instead. (Ask Funa)

Israel and Palestine too need a whole different start,
like us, to undo the beginning and in making whole, heal the parts.
But before you change the world, start here where you are.
Because the San Andreas Fault runs through all our hearts.
What are you going to do to change in you
what you need to change in them, to allow the mutual mending of
Those invisible prejudices which we all keep defending.

This is the story, and this is its beginning,
You did not come here to be losing or winning.
But so let that new story begin, around this table,
Not a lie or a myth or a fable, but that
Once Upon a time, 9 people came to DC
And this is what they came to learn and see.

Story, Power, can Change a nation
these three things, the trinity of transformation
Its About story’s power for Change
That is its order and that is its range.

1. Grab back your story
2. Tell it to compel people to listen
3. Gather a community of witnesses to tell it with you
4. Learn the power of telling the story together
5. Use that power to change the unchangeable

Good Luck Storytellers, from your cheering audience.

Welcome to the Narrative Method.

For 25 years we has been teaching people to do three things

1- Recognize that Stories have power

2- Understand their real affects in  shaping our identity, destiny and community

3- Knowing 1. and 2, to Act more effectively dealing with conflict and change

The coach was well experienced and ready to lead the group. Let us first thank Mother Earth for birthing us, and let us thank Mother Heaven for earthing us. Let us acknowledge the four winds and the 4 ancestors and the unborn and aged for seeking and searching us and finding us.

Next came the invitation questions- “Tell us what you are grateful for and what you are struggling with. Then listen if anyone wants to offer you support.”

All innocent enough, you might think. Who is not grateful for something, even if today I am still raging that the IRS did not give me the refund I deserved. And who is not struggling with something or someone, even if today, I have given up smoking for 3 months and feel I am no longer struggling with the cravings. Today I feel I am seeing the light.

The group sharing unfolds and some folks who are miles away from feeling thankful about anything have to switch genres and suddenly, they find themselves in a new field of grace and joy they did not chose.  How did that happen? The neglectful parent is grateful for his kids, the greedy boss is thankful for his workers who work so cheaply, the girl is glad she broke off with the boyfriend because she fell in love with his sister. Gratitude sprung as an epiphany reveals lots of surprises. But the mood is not allowed to dominate. It is what you share first, as the appetizer, the warm up act.

For the main course, you are invited  to enter the territory of struggle town, to fess up that your strength or your confidence are just veneers of a deeper drama, to share where according to the dictionary, you are ” making forceful or violent efforts to get free of restraint or constriction.”

Once someone shares their deepest fear of waking up and finding they are a grasshopper, the avalanche begins. The unploughed territory of struggle becomes like a gold rush. I struggle with deep anxiety about the state of the world. You struggle with a gender confusion where one day you are as mad as a man, and the next, as wise as a woman. Your friend says he struggles with knowing what life is about and whether breathing the air is stealing from those who need it most in polluted cities. Another struggles with struggling,  just to stay with it, whatever it is. I struggle to know what to struggle with, and that is my struggle.

The group is now well into the game. Gratitude is the softening up- who needs to out grate the grateful, but struggle speaks to struggle like a solar panel speaks to the sun.  Now we can play the therapist, because around us is wall to wall vulnerability. We feel needed and we can give all the unneeded and unheeded advice that was ever invented to be given. It is a feast of the needy made to feel necessary to the shared plight. My struggle ordains me to  pontificate on yours.

The group sharing feels therapeutic, feels cathartic. Some who have never shared before now share and it feels like doors are opening, that hearts are softening. But that is the point of the game. If when I am feeling bad,  I can discover someone feeling worse, I am made automatically to feel better.

The witness is being led into the territory of the facilitator’s projection. What if today I do not feel grateful at all? Then there is no room for my voice. What if there is no struggle, that I feel I am thriving? There is no room for my voice. This is strugglers anonymous and the vulnerability empowers the group to step up and be grateful that everyone else is as needy as they feel they are. No shame, no gain. And lets all end with a big group hug, in celebration of our mutual weakness.

The group dynamics has been studied before and it is the most powerful means for mass indoctrination that was ever invented.  Stalin and Lenin would be proud. Have a group accuse you of betraying the fatherland and you will have comrades competing for shame and guilt, one they did not feel at all till you asked the question. Or a recovery and relapse group get asked “How close you came to the edge since last we met?” So even if you are miles away from throwing your life away again, you have to move to the edge of relapse, so that the therapists can earn their pay for relapse prevention.

The whole sharing is authentic to the manufactured moment. If the questions were less incriminating, such as “Where were you at your silliest this last month? and “Where did you get serious?” we would have the same dynamic of people creating a space that is invented by the language. At least being serious does not mean you have to play weak as “struggling” does. But this process demands you sign up for the weakness and struggle club so WE can help you. We want to HELP you so please, find a struggle that makes us feel our pain can gain some value. Plus, who does not love hearing our own voice giving advice.

The session ends and we close, thanking Mother Sun and Sister Moon, and going back to our lives knowing that others are struggling and that life sucks and that we are right to feel so down and so depressed and that we need to “take a moment” to process what the sharing has triggered as a ricochet  about our life.

And if and when we wake up, we would realize that we just got conned. We were hyenas feasting on the wounded and the bleeding. There was something pornographic about the whole display. Take it all off and reveal your struggle.

That is what I am struggling with. Vulnerability and empathy have become the new buzz words and anyone showing courage or resilience or “daring to thrive” is obscene.

We are talking ourselves into our own depression and demise and making the discourse of our weakness into a voluminous treatise that crowds out any story of human persistence. Needy people need needy people. It makes them feel at home. Meanwhile, the rest just suck it up and move ahead. If you have that much time to elaborate your need, you are clearly needing someone to tell you to try breathing instead of crying, and Get on with your life which is too short to waste on the tragedy of the trivial.

The lessons of history are that people do not learn the lessons of history.

And even if these same lessons quoted, by chapter and verse, are proved over time to be totally wrong, and that the history we cite to inform a current decision is in fact the opposite, that will not stop us. Take for instance, the argument of standing up to Putin over Ukraine so as not to repeat the “Peace in Our time” disaster of 1938 appeasement with Prime Minister Chamberlain. Posterity forever blames him for Hitler’s war because he would not stand up and fight.

Crimea in 2014 and Georgia before that, and Donbas,  goes the lesson, all gave Putin the reason to invade. We let him take territory because we say “weakness encourages the bully.” But then, you have to ask the same question that no one asks of poor Chamberlain. What were the alternatives?

The whole appeasement idea is Churchill’s last revenge on Chamberlain, his political point scoring to link “While England slept” to “While Germany rearmed.” It got him the Prime Minister post, but the only strength that England had when he took office was his oratory. England was exhausted by WWI.

Historians of that period have known for years that Chamberlain could not have stopped Hitler if he tried and that what he did achieve with “peace in our time” was strategic delay. The UK had no military, it had no defenses. To stand up to Hitler then and risk war would have meant suicide. Chamberlain’s policy gave England more time to get ready for what they knew was coming. The policy of appeasement in the end failed not because no one said No, but because Hitler was unappeasable. Remind you of someone else? The policy of appeasement in fact was a success because it allowed time to arm. If you read Erik Larson’s best seller “The Splendid and the Vile” you will read how Churchill’s challenge was creating and arming an adequate defense force. For the first year, England was in retreat because there was nothing to fight back with. So much for standing up to Hitler?

This appeal to a myth- used by us over Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, is used now to defend aggressive action against Russia. We know nothing is going to stop Russia, just as nothing was going to stop Hitler. It is a total but convenient misread of history that echoes the blindness of political debate in the 1930’s. We know better but we do not do any better. We mindlessly repeat these old stories that seem so true but are poison because they were never true when they happened.

Appeasement when you have no forces to fight back is not giving in, but strategic retreat to wage the battle when at least you have some chance of winning. This bravado of standing up to tyrants is exactly what they encourage when they know it is nothing but a mice roaring like a lion. It is all so convenient for us to urge Ukraine to fight back because we don’t have a dog in the fight. We exert the full moral force of the nation to defend the right, which sounds like a WMD redux of 2003. We have our own twisted history since 9-11 that makes our policy seem logical but lets not use histrionics instead of history to justify it.