Awakening From Your Anger

Author: davemacq

  • We Are At War

    We are at war, and we are losing.
    We are at war, and we are losing.

    Bill McKibben of 350.org has now named the issue. In a New Republic article, A World At War, he leads with “We’re under attack from climate change — and our only hope is to mobilize like we did in WWII.” The article is worth reading in its entirety, and there is a summary on Common Dreams, also worth reading.

    Thus the leadership is mobilizing. McKibben proposes that, following the American election, the new president will mobilize American society. Hopefully!

    But I see a number of deficits.

    First, McKibben’s 350.org is only one organization of many. We need a concerted effort to have all the major players come together in a cooperative movement, all demanding a war-like mobilization. Perhaps then the political machinery will listen.

    Second, as I have been saying, “Leaders lead — followers create the change.” It remains to be seen if the followers will also engage. Worldwide!

    Third, and perhaps most important, the leadership has not yet had the courage to name what must follow if we “win the war.” After WWII, there came the deluge of consumerism. We cannot have such as that to occur again.

    We must be willing to challenge the entire basis of our civilization. Our entire culture balances between the ravages of domination and the desire for cultural maturity. It is time to move beyond this pattern.

    I am currently re-reading The Parable Of The Tribes: The Problem of Power In Social Evolution. At the end of the first chapter, the author names what I consider to be the crucial issue:

    The laws of man require power, for power can only be controlled with power. The challenge, therefore, is to design systems that use power to disarm power. Only in such an order can mankind be free.

    I will write further about this shortly.

  • The Noble Truths of Global Warming

    CCPoliticsI’ve just watched a YouTube presentation The Venerable Bhikkhu Bodhi – The Four Noble Truths of the Climate Crisis. I strongly recommend it (25 minutes).

    I think it is a fine presentation detailing the many factors involved in global warming, especially the impact of marketplace economics on our culture. At the same time, I found my interest was flagging by the end — the pacing is too uniform, and there is not enough emphasis on how to institute priorities. Nor is there an emphasis on rapid mobilization of political will.

    I suggest that we need massive cooperation amongst all parties who are attempting to influence global warming. It seems to me that the agency doing this best, and thus in the position of such coordination, is The Climate Mobilization. Perhaps this is my own bias speaking, but I have looked at a lot of agencies over the past eight years, and am most impressed with TCM.

    I have taken their Pledge (International) and invite others to look at their work. TCM advocates a war-time mobilization of political will, and once established, that we then begin the work on cultural modification. It is not an either/or proposition, but priorities are needed.

  • Authenticity (Daily Living, Part 8)

    In a mature culture, all would contribute authenticity.
    In a mature culture, all would contribute authenticity.

    Daily life in a mature culture — the last posting I painted a picture of major uniformity. I suggest that this is necessary so as to keep the human impact to a minimum, and that such life could still be very satisfying, although the emphasis would be on authenticity, as compared to becoming more competitive in the marketplace.

    So what else about living under these conditions? First, some loose ends (which could become major postings if expanded).

    • Home and work life
    • Guaranteed resources: health, nutrition, education, child care
    • Stuff? We have too much stuff

    Home and Work Life would both be based upon community interaction. Given robotics and electronic communication, much of work life could actually be performed within the “village” settings.

    • Then, if desired, external work interaction would be by choice. For example, food production by extensive local gardening might well be performed because people actually wanted to engage with the soil.
    • Much industrial productivity would be automated, but there would still be many tasks that required direct interaction, especially in the development of new technology that had not previously been explored.
      • The automated productivity would be relegated to products that no longer needed innovation. For example, how many brands of toothpaste are really needed? (Yet go into any modern “drugstore” and you will find dozens if not hundreds of brands. What nonsense!)

    Many aspects of community life would be guaranteed.

    • The provision of nutrition and health care will be universal.
    • Education in the future will be universal, and must emphasize personal development, especially the development of wisdom and governance.
      • Historically education has emphasized skill development, especially the transcribing of religious texts, and has been restricted to only certain societal groups.
      • In general as well, human beings are experiential learners, with age-appropriate processing to an experience so as to learn from it. What seems to work best is to have a brief exposure to a problem, engage in a physical experience related to resolving the problem, study the outcome (especially since first attempts are seldom successful at resolution), and then further engagement in problem solving (until resolution).
    • Child care would be guaranteed. In particular, we must find ways to optimize child care.
      • It is becoming well-recognized that early child development, especially in relationship to attachment needs, is central to the development of healthy adults (healthy both physically and mentally). We can no longer afford the erratic child care provisions of our modern society where we expect young parents, struggling with a multitude of issues, to provide effective child development on top of their other stresses.
      • Sorenson (1998), in Preconquest Consciousness, emphasizes how “groups of people can be simultaneously individualistic and collective — traits immiscible and incompatible in modern thought” (p. 82), but at the same time he noted how such cultures shrivel “with alarming speed when faced with harsh emotions and coercion” (p. 80), traits common to our current society.

    Stuff? We have too much stuff.

    • A huge aspect of modern life is the provision of stuff for consumption, with little attention to the actual cost of production and the cost of the garbage created when the stuff is outmoded.
      • We cannot afford this! Everything in a future world must be recyclable.
      • Given our population density, we cannot afford garbage on a finite planet.
    • I suspect that if a society truly valued appropriate productivity, most of what we “consume” would be provided free as modular recyclable units, standardized to fit the needs of the product, efficiently designed for long-term usage.
      • A small aspect of productivity could then be applied to two areas:
        • innovative development of truly new products
        • creative development of individual artistic products.
      • when people moved (from job to job for example, or for educational training), they would simply take their clothes and their artistic products with them, and leave the rest to the next occupant.
        • The status associated with “new, improved” would not be part of the cultural milieu.

    Your thoughts? (Remember, my musings are only intended to stimulate thinking about what really matters to a mature culture.)

    Coming next: Interactions between communities

  • Worse Than We Thought

    Coming soon --- bigger storms.
    By 2100, most coastal cities will be underwater!

    As indicated previously, I am now promoting The Climate Mobilization — largely because my take on the climate issues is that we are no longer near the edge of disaster — we are starting to fall over the edge!

    Here are a few recent articles that are very pertinent for me:

    Over the past seven or eight years, I have found that every major scientific report indicated that the previous report underestimated the dangers. These reports continue that theme.

    As well, National Geographic is reported as about to launch a landmark climate series just before the American election: A Murdoch-Owned TV Channel Will Air A Landmark Climate Series Before The Election — Years of Living Dangerously (the trailer on the webpage looks very informative). Given that the Murdock empire has had a reputation of climate disinformation, surprisingly this series promises to be very blunt as to the dangers of global warming, again emphasizing how serious the issues are.

    Such programs provide leadership, but as I have been saying recently, change is created by followers — the leaders provide the direction, but the work is done by followers. We need to mobilize the followers, and it seems to me that The Climate Mobilization is doing that.

  • Living in A Mature Culture, Part 7

    Glitzy and exciting, but urban sprawl has major disadvantages.
    Glitzy and exciting, but urban sprawl has major disadvantages.

    Daily life in a mature culture — now that we have looked at the possibility of a Victory City, what would daily life actually be like in such a city? As noted, I am proposing that the high-rise buildings would consist of a large number of village-like settings, where people would actually live much of their day-to-day activity.

    A reminder: these postings are simply my thoughts on what it would be like to live permanently in a mature culture; I present them mainly to stimulate your thoughts.

    • Each “village” would consist of three floors within a high-rise complex, each complex perhaps holding approximately 30 “villages.”
      • As such, there would be a communal living floor sandwiched in two floors of private living/sleeping quarters.
        • Much would be modular, both for efficiency and minimal environmental impact.
      • Most food preparation and eating would be within the communal space, or in more central cafeteria-style buildings within the city.
        • There would be an emphasis that such food be both nutritious and of very high quality (not at all like the typical cafeteria of modern life).
      • Each village would consist of about 200 people, likely about 50 families, interacting with each other. There would be about 125 adults (including late teens), and about 75 younger children.
        • There would be extensive day-care facilities for child care (approximately 25 per village, or 625 per high-rise); essentially the village would raise the children, and children would be able to attend every process of village life.
        • school-aged children (approximately 2000 per high-rise) would attend school in the high-rise common area.
        • late teens would attend some kind of college or university, of which there would be 5 – 10 in the city, with the possibility of outreach to other cities.
      • The “adults” would meet several times per week in small groups, perhaps 10 people each, for personal development. Each week, there would also be a variety of local governance groups planning the needs and development of the village community, and a number of meetings with other groups outside the “village,” planning governance on a broader level.
        • The adults would be engaged in work activity 25 hours per week, 5 hours per day, approximately half of which would be virtual meetings or some kind of activity that could be performed without leaving the local village.
          • Children of all ages would be welcome at all activities.
        • Given that the cultural narrative would be that of a permanent state of sustainability, then perhaps most of adult life would be lived out in these environment.
          • We would no longer live the current cultural model of continuous improvement and discovery (such living is not compatible with being the dominant species of a finite planet).

    Your thoughts? Would this be too commune-like? Would this be too sterile? Both Rupert Ross (Dancing With A Ghost) and Louis Herman (Future Primal) have a lot to say about this.

    Ross, when reflecting on “primitive” native culture, notes (pp. 103-108):

    Each generation’s turn at the wheel might include performances better or worse than the last, but they would be essentially the same performance, with the same set and script and plotting. . . .

    We post-industrial societies, in contrast, seem to run a cross-country relay race, passing the baton to a generation that will never set foot upon the ground we have covered . . .

    There is a temptation to conclude that such a repetitive existence would be boring in the extreme, that it would feel binding and imprisoning.

    I suspect . . .  no such sense of limits. . . . they [native peoples] may have perceived their lives as holding a virtually limitless scope for challenge and accomplishment. . . .  their lives did not center on building things, but upon discerning things. Life’s challenge lay in observing and understanding the workings of the dynamic equilibrium of which they were a part, then acting so as to sustain a harmony within it rather than a mastery over it. One aspired to wisdom in accommodating oneself

    . . . they sought that wisdom not only to better ensure survival but also as an end in itself, as something in itself exhilarating.

    Herman notes (Kindle location 7130):

    Our wilderness origins fashioned our creative self-consciousness, which is both expanded and balanced by following the primal dynamic: face-to-face communication within a caring community of individuals, passionate for living and learning in a mutually enhancing resonance with the natural world. This is the truth quest, and it is our primal inheritance. We can ignore it, or we can cultivate it in all our endeavors and bring it into a creative engagement with the reality we find ourselves caught up in: a civilization rushing to self-destruction while displaying tantalizing possibilities of a more beautiful, joyful way of life.

    As a therapist of 25 years’ experience, centered largely in my own emotional growth, I know that exhilaration. Personally, although such “village” life as I am describing would have challenges, it could also be immensely satisfying.

    To be continued.

  • What Is Anger?

    MacQuarrie Email Program #02 — What Is Anger?

    Note: This is a sample of my email anger management program.

    If interested further, please access this link.

    This email is fairly long. Apologies.

    To begin: Are you still reading your outcome title (Email #01), at least once a day? If yes, great. Congratulations. If not, that is the difficulty of discipline — you are not wrong, your behaviour is not wrong, but to the extent that you made a commitment, you did not keep your commitment. And people who do not keep commitments are much less likely to get outcomes that they want. Simple, yes; painful, yes! I did not say this program would be easy; I did suggest that it is effective. Please continue to read your outcome statement each day.

    Task for this email: After reading this email, monitor your emotions for a few days (don’t attempt to change them, just monitor them). When you notice an obvious anger-based emotion, answer the following questions:

    • Do you have a sense of power? Can you move forward with it? If so, likely it is anger.
    • Do you feel overwhelmed? Is there an underlying powerlessness? If so, likely it is rage.
    • Do you feel indignant, determined “it” should not be. If so, likely it is self-righteousness.
    • Where in your body are you feeling this emotion.

    What is anger? Most people know that they are emotional, but often they do not know what emotions are. Most people know when they are angry —  you, for example, wouldn’t be reading this if you weren’t angry, but you do you know what anger is. In this email, we clean up some language. (Suggestion: if you will pay meticulous attention to your language for six months, I guarantee you will change your life for the better. More in another email.)

    What are Emotions? There are many definitions, but my best definition of emotion is “a biologically adaptive action tendency.” What does that mean? Well, you are designed to respond to your environment, and when things change, you as a biologic organism adapt — usually very effectively! When something happens, you (your mind) processes what is happening, usually at the other-than-conscious level and with amazing speed. Your mind then sends a signal to your body to react, to move into action. The very beginning of the experience of action is the felt sense called emotion.

    Another definition of emotion I use is “energy to which I give meaning and direction.” In the so-called pleasurable emotions, I move towards something — I am excited or interested. In the so-called negative emotions, I move against or away from — I am angry, afraid, sad, et cetera. Check it out: notice what you are feeling right now, give it a name, and point to where that feeling is in your body. (Don’t be surprised if you cannot do this — when I first started my own therapy work, I could not do so.) How or to where does this emotion want you to move?(Suppose you are hungry. Where in your body? To where do you want to move?)

    So, what are feelings? Aren’t they emotions also? Sort of. Again many definitions, but I want to make a clean distinction. Examples of emotional words are: angry, excited, afraid, et cetera. Emotions point at my body, and can be described in a single word. Yes, they can refer to something else, but the felt sense is in the body, and can be pointed at. Feeling words point to my relationships: hostile (towards), included (with), ignored (by), etc. Again, one word, but they point outwards. There is usually an underlying emotion, but the feeling points outwards. Then, to make matters more confusing, there are also the feeling judgments — my thoughts about my emotions and feelings: I feel that … (finish with the thought, e.g., “this is wrong.”). There is an underlying emotion or feeling (unnamed), but the description is a thought, and always more than one word is required.

    What is Anger? Anger is an emotion, one that shows that my beliefs have been disrupted, without my intention or permission. Suppose someone in a crowd pushes me — my mind processes this, says this should not be happening (a thought), and sends a signal to my body that I push back: I’m angry. But perhaps I don’t — I also know, perhaps unconsciously, that the consequences might be less than pleasant, so my mind send a second message, very quickly: Stop! Be cautious instead. Angry and afraid at the same time. Did I say emotions, especially anger, were simple?

    Now, suppose the same crowd, only this time we are friends, and we playing football. If someone pushes me, will I be angry? Not likely — because it is expected and allowed as part of the game. Same actions, but different emotions, depending on my beliefs! Complicated, again.

    What about rage? Think about your own rage. Rage is also an emotion, this time more complex. When angry, I feel powerful — I can do something with my anger. But in rage, I feel powerless; I’m overwhelmed, and I puff myself up so as to get back to a state of power. And I don’t think clearly — a dangerous combination. At this point, I am likely to violate others — to violate someone is a behavior — to restrict them without their permission, to hit them, to block them, to scare them, etc. Not fun — for anyone!

    Note carefully! Emotions and feelings are not wrong, or bad; they simply are. They are the way in which my body gives me information, sometimes information that I do not want to recognize. They always have a positive intention — the “negative” ones usually to protect me, in some fashion. What is potentially inappropriate is what I do with my emotions. This behavioral response can certainly be dangerous, unacceptable to yourself or to others, and much else.

    Safety: So, anger and rage can be dangerous, especially if we are unaware of the complexity of what is happening (we will be exploring this in detail over the next weeks). My bottom line is safety, for myself and others — always, and to the best of my ability.

    I sum up safety with two statements: No SAD and STOP. No SAD means:

    • I will not intentionally Scare another human being,
    • I will not Attack another biological creature, and
    • I will not Destroy in anger that which I would not destroy when peaceful.

    My experience, after 25 years of being a therapist (including as I resolved my own issues of anger) is that, if I stay within the parameters of No SAD, I can be fully expressive of my emotions, and both I and those around me are totally safe.

    However, that does not mean that those around me will feel safe (more accurately, they do not feel secure) — my actions may still scare them — what I am doing may remind them of painful times in their own past. I do not intend to scare them, but that does not mean they are not scared.

    STOP responds to this. STOP means that if I am told to stop, I stop immediately (no questions, no argument). Someone is scared — always inappropriate. Then I find another, safer way to deal with my anger. Usually this means I will take a time out  to briefly separate myself from others, and thus allow them to recover from their scare (more about time-outs later).

    Coming next: Awareness and Discipline

  • Acedia and Evil

    The desire to give up! Caught in despair.
    The desire to give up! Caught in despair.

    I’ve been reading some of the articles accessible through The Climate Mobilization website, especially those concerning what we are now learning about the risks of global warming, even at our current level. It is so much worse than I thought! And I regard myself as well-informed in this area. For me, the issues are so related to the acedia of our civilization.

    Gradually we are shifting. More and more leaders are speaking out for the need for profound change. However, all that leaders can do is lead! It is followers that create the bulk of the change. We need the majority of our culture to speak out.

    And there is some evidence that the cultural majority are aware of this need. Recent research suggests that 54% of people in four Western countries acknowledge high risk of our civilization ending, and 24% recognize the risk of human extinction, all in the next 100 years.

    Acedia and Evil

    In this post I want to finish with the topic of acedia, in particular the nature of evil.

    In The Hope: A Guide To Sacred Activism, Andrew Harvey tells the story of a major agribusiness CEO who knew exactly what destruction he was causing to the lives of thousands of people, but proceeded anyway simply for the sense of power that it gave him. When I reflect on modern tragedies such as

    • the duplicity of British Petroleum in the 2010 Gulf environmental disaster,
    • ExxonMobil being aware of the impact of fossil fuel on global warming in the 1970s, and deliberately hiding this information (presumably for profit to the company),
    • the Koch brothers’ massive manipulation of the American political system,
    • and many other political-economic-environmental disasters of recent years,

    I cannot but consider these actions as evil — the active antagonism of what life offers, the hiding for political-economic power. Such actions must be identified, and stopped, but there is the danger of focusing on these issues, rather than looking at the system (the Cultural Lie, including myself as part to this system) which allows such actions to develop.

    The Banality of Acedia and Evil

    I also know from Hannah Arendt’s work on the banality of evil and Milgram’s work on obedience to authority, that the possibility of evil is a fundamental human characteristic. I consider evil as the end-point of the spectrum of acedia, as shown in the accompanying diagram. The manifestations of acedia (self-righteousness, laziness, fearfulness) are not evil per se, but they set the stage for evil, especially the acceptance of evil acts by others, wherein acedia displays as an attitude of “it doesn’t matter,” “who cares?,” or “it can’t be helped.”

    AcediaSpectrum1

    Yet the fundamental difficulty of evil is the attempt to eliminate evil — it sets a false dichotomy of us against them, and if only we eliminate them, things will be fine. When we as individuals fail to recognize how our silence and/or tokenism in the Climate Lie perpetuates the system, we support the evil of actions such as above.

    As a culture, we have enjoyed the benefits of technology, and have been unwilling to recognize or pay the costs. We live gross inequality, with massive world poverty (amidst conclaves of richness), extensive hunger (especially starvation of  children), mistreatment of minorities (especially women in underdeveloped countries), waste and pollution (our garbage accumulates), amongst other inequities. We live the acedia cycle, especially in our lack of charity in resolving these issues. We have extensive “charitable organizations,” yet as a culture we lack the charity to resolve these  difficulties.

    So what to do? Most of the power is held by those who are creating the inequality, mainly the leaders of the multi-national corporations. (Likely only a small minority of these corporations — I presume most are honorable, but we must find a way through so as to disempower those that create the most disruption of equitable society. And in any event, I am not interested in created the us versus them dilemma.)

    The Need for Civil Disobedience

    Gier (2006), in Three Principles of Civil Disobedience: Thoreau, Gandhi, and  King, notes that effective civil disobedience requires that:

    • one maintain respect for the rule of law even while disobeying the specific law perceived as unjust;
    • one should plead guilty to any violation of the law; and
    • one should attempt to convert the opponent by demonstrating the justice of one’s

    I believe that civil disobedience is the only route that we can take. To engage in evil to combat evil will not lead to a mature culture. We have made attempts, such as the Occupy movement, but they need to continue.

    Are we worthy of being a mature culture? I hope so.

  • Emotional Management (especially Anger and Rage)

    Emotional Management, especially Anger and Rage

    As part of my commitment to social change, I offer this free program on Anger Management. There is a huge amount of anger in our culture, some overt but mostly hidden. — it is the ‘canary in the coal mine’ of the pain and dysfunction of our society.  It is only by managing our own lives that we will be able to respond to the difficult days ahead.

    I originally offers this set of posts as a free email program for anger management; subsequently, I placed it here on my blog as as to be available to anyone interested. The information and tasks are suitable for any emotional issue. Simply use your own issue whenever anger is mentioned. If you want personal work, I am still available for coaching.

    Please go to Postings > Anger Management for the complete series: a set of 30 ’emails’, each with a brief concept and a simple task allowing exploration of the importance of the concept.

    If you want individual coaching, let me know via this email link:

    Angry? How to change your life in 90 days.

    (I originally sent this out as part of the email program.)

    Hi.

    Thanks for showing interest in the Angry? Change your life in 90 days program.

    First of all, let me congratulate you for showing this interest. As I reflect on the state of our current world, I am surprised that so few people are willing to admit how angry they are. Recall all the stories of road rage, the frequent mass shootings, and other forms of anger — these are instances that show what is happening to us as a culture, of how angry we really are as a people. But it must be the other guy, right?

    In my own case, I grew up in a family in which alcoholism was rampant, and for me, childhood was an extremely painful affair. (I suggest that anger is a major component of alcoholism; one of these days I will do a post on that to my blog.) Yet for most of my early adult life I was not aware of how angry I was. It was only when I got into my 40s that I was able to acknowledge this to myself. That is long past for me, although I do remain angry with the insanity of our culture — that has created (and for the most part currently denies) the issues of global warming. The major difference though is that I am not caught in my anger.

    Be that as it may, this program is not about global warming. It is about how to work through your issues of anger, so as to achieve the kind of life you want to live:

    • how to recognize when you are angry,
    • how to be more peaceful, living the Serenity Prayer, and
    • how to have better relationships, amongst other components.

    And, as opposed to my usual writings, it is not about understanding anger, nor why you are angry — overall, that kind of understanding is the booby prize. This program, this set of emails, is about skill development, and what to do, not what to think.

    The program will provide you with 30 emails over approximately 90 days, one email twice a week, usually Mondays and Thursdays. Why 90 days? Well, two of my previous mentors, both world-class therapists, indicated that change requires approximately three months of consistent application (one said three months, the other 13 weeks!) — after 25 years of practice in my own practice, this is also my own experience.

    Can this really change your life, for the better? Absolutely. I am not saying that everything will be fine in 90 days; I am saying that in 90 days, you can be consistently moving in a new direction, one where the light at the end of the tunnel is not just another train.

    Be aware it will take work, probably at least an hour a day, perhaps more. And it may bring up a lot of pain — after all, you are angry for many good reasons, and your anger likely protects you from this pain. But at the same time, I do not intend it to be too onerous — you won’t do it if it is. I strongly believe that people learn best when they are having fun; thus, I will do my best to keep it light. Still — it will require effort.

    If you desire, I am available for coaching,
    and I still require you to work through this material.

    So, are you still interested? If you are, click the following link, and send me an email ([email protected]) or give me a call (604-725-4707). Predominantly I work with people over Zoom so distance is not an obstacle. We can discuss what you want and, as part of our conversation, my fees. I’m open to negotiation largely because I seek a more healthy society, not a focus on income. Still there is the adage: ‘You get what you pay for.’

    Not sure? Check out a sample.

    You are welcome to print these ’emails’, and use them in any way you wish. If you pass them onto others, my only request is attribution. If useful, I can provide a Word document or pdf to allow easy printing. Simply let me know your need.

    Note also that, in these emails, there will be occasional attachments, and links to my blog. Mainly these will provide diagrams that I believe you will find useful in understanding the tasks (the diagrams will also be in the Word document), but the separate image files may be of some use to you also. Simple emails are not a good way of sending such information, so look out for them please.

  • The Blowing Out Process, Part 1

    MacQuarrie Email #07 — The Blowing Out Process, Part 1

    A time bomb needing release.
    A time bomb needing release.

    Two more emails (plus a summary email), and then we start the process of skill development as to how to explore and manage your anger. I hope by now you are starting to recognize that the concepts thus far allow you to get a handle on your anger, but I also imagine you want more specifics — coming!

    As mentioned, the concepts of the previous emails became the process I call Blowing Out®, a method of utilizing unpleasant experience so as to create positive outcomes. For most people, when something unpleasant happens, they get stuck. The something reminds them of their past (their values, beliefs, memories, expectations, what I call their VBMEs), and they feel powerless. They label the something as some kind of conflict, and they don’t feel safe. Perhaps they are angry, or some such emotion, but lacking safety, they are also afraid or say to themselves, “I shouldn’t feel this way” — the sailors in action. So they stuff their energy — but eventually that doesn’t work, and they become a time bomb of some kind (the pressure cooker). This goes on over time, and eventually they explode outwards (family violation or social massacre) or inwards (depression or suicide). Not a pretty scene, but common in our society.

    Create safety, then release in any way that works.
    Create safety, then release in any way that works.

    Safety for all is absolutely essential.

    In my personal pain, I too recognized that this process of getting stuck did not work, and that the most important aspect was safety — for all! Instead of blowing up or blowing down, I discovered that I could blow out, like blowing out a candle — but instead of blowing out the light, I could blow out the darkness of my pain (the basis of my first book Blowing Out The Darkness).

    We get stuck essentially because we mismanage our energy! First, because we are not safe (both with ourselves and with others around us), and second because we do not safely discharge our emotional energy — we generally dump it on someone else in some inappropriate fashion. We somehow believe that we have to resolve the conflict before we can manage our energy.

    This is not only nonsense — it is also a recipe for disaster. We hold the energy inside ourselves; the conflict is outside. We can separate ourselves from the conflict, and manage our energy — in so doing, we can then decide if the basic issue is what others are doing (the conflict), or is it what we are doing to ourselves (our powerlessness) because we are caught in issues from our past.

    Don’t take my word for this. Think about how you feel and act when you get to the edge of your rage. In some fashion, is this not how you act?

    Task: So your task for this email is to think about what else you could do with your energy. And test out these possibilities; don’t just think — act! safely! Re-read Email #2 What is Anger? so as to really get No SAD and STOP. (You have probably noticed that all the tasks I assign are really focused on observing yourself — not for the purpose of self-criticism, but for recognition of how you actually create your own experiences. Over time, this will become your most important skill.)

    Some hints: you can discharge energy silently, or you can make lots of noise. You can discharge privately, or you can do it in the presence of others. But if you are going to do it when others around, those others must agree to the parameters of No SAD and STOP — otherwise, they will not likely be secure and because of that, you will criticized! As such, it is very likely that you will shut down, and the time bomb scenario will resume.

    The second most important aspect of Blowing Out is that the conflict must be resolved. Even if you discharge your energy, all that you will be doing is emptying the pot. It is essential that you then stop the pot from filling again.

    My stance is that I can empty the pot in 10 minutes (I likely need another 10 minutes to process what happened that the pot was stirred — powerlessness or conflict?). Stopping the pot from filling again may take weeks or months of work — but I can keep the pot empty while I do this work! I need not stay stuck with a full pot — ever!

    Coming next: The Blowing Out Process, Part 2.

  • Acedia and the Climate Lie, Part 2

    The desire to give up! Caught in despair.
    The desire to give up! Caught in despair.

    The Climate Lie

    I take this term from what I read in The Climate Mobilization website — it refers to:

    Our society is living within a massive lie. The lie says, “Everything is fine and we should proceed with business as usual. We are not destroying our climate and, with it, our stability and our civilization. We are not committing passive suicide.

    The lie says we are fine—that climate change isn’t real, or is uncertain, or is far away, or won’t be bad enough to threaten humanity. The lie says that small changes will solve the problem. That recycling, bicycling, or closing the Keystone Pipeline will solve the problem. The lie allows people to put climate change in the back of their minds. To view it as someone else’s issue—the domain of scientists or activists. The lie allows us to focus on other things. To proceed with business as usual. To be calm and complacent while our planet burns.

    … [The lie is] sustained by people living within the lies. Our lie is a lie co-created by the government, corporations, the media, and the people. These organizations encourage the lie, but it only exists because we, the people accept it and choose to live within it. The basic lie is “We should continue with business as usual, for everything is fine. There are three  major ways that the Climate Lie operates: intellectual denial, emotional denial, and environmental tokenism.

    I agree that all this is the climate lie, and I suggest the problem is even bigger — it should be called the Culture Lie, subsuming scientific materialism and consumerism.

    The Difficulty of the Climate Lie

    It is so hard to write about — it is so big, and so entangled, that I cannot do justice in this small space. Yet I strongly urge the reader to take the time to read the key documents on The Climate Mobilization site. They are well-written, but long, and require a lot to time to digest.

    And that is the weakness — the intricacy of the Climate/Culture Lie is such that the average person is likely to give up — it takes too much effort. Frequently I give up — I am forced by time and despair to accept descriptions that I cannot adequately validate nor can I understand their complexity, but yet the descriptions seem to make imminent sense in how they describe the complexity. Examples for me include my attempting to understand the older Keynesian economics and how they were replaced by neoliberalism, both of which have led to the destructive consumerism of modern culture.

    Acedia and the Lie

    It is this giving up that pushes me towards my own acedia, and I suspect underlies the vast acedia of our culture. In my PhD research, I proposed that the internal conflict that precedes acedia is a force field of many factors. On the positive side are the processes that could lead to resolution (phronesis): wisdom (sophia), discipline, hope and playfulness, all of which are disparaged in our present culture.

    A balance of forces, heavily weighted to acedia
    A balance of forces, heavily weighted to acedia

    On the acedia side are the ways in which we treat ourselves. Inherently we are pain avoiders (basic biology), but our cultural models generally push us to self-deprecation (especially self-criticism when we do not fit the cultural models of size, shape, success, etc.), familial trauma (as families struggle with many internal and external demands of success, personal satisfaction, finances, etc.), and cultural trauma (in the many subtle ways in which we struggle with the failed promises of technology and economic life). And from this stance, we treat the planet: we allow world hunger, the maltreatment of women and children, the subtle maltreatment of men (witness the farmer suicides of India), environmental disaster after disaster — the list goes on.

    What a mess! It is the mess that requires long-term correction to take us to a culture that intrinsically values all human life, and all of creation.

    But the first order of priority is to stop global warming, and its immediate antecedents, the fossil fuel industry in its many pervasive forms. If we do not do that, the rest doesn’t matter.

    I have therefore joined the Climate Mobilization in its pledge of action.

    Coming next: Acedia and Evil.