Offering: December 2022

Denial, witness, & willingness to give up

Dear Friends,

It’s been another year of Offerings.

Maybe because I’m back doing clinical work, I’m feeling more drawn than ever to old, simple ideas that might be life-saving if we could stay with them long enough to find out. Things like witness and testimony, which are much of what this month’s Offering is about.

I’ve opened up a couple of previously locked posts which are linked to in today’s Offering, including this one which came out exactly a year ago titled Joy, harmony & the arrival of new Gods. I hope that if you have the bandwidth and interest to read them, they’re in some way useful.

Offerings recently became a Substack Bestseller which I’ll be celebrating with a free talk and q&a for paying subscribers in January. If you’re a fan of the monthlies and want to support (& get access to the event) you can upgrade at the subscribe button below for as little as $5 a month or $50 a year. There’s a growing archive of text and audio Offerings, which paying subscribers get access to.

Finally, Lee Clarke—who engineers and makes all the music for the Audio Offerings—has a new full-length project out on memory and degradation and lineage, which features finished versions of a lot of the cuts he included in Offerings this year. It’s good cooking or lounging or cold winter walk music, if you like beats and vintage audio of grandmothers and great aunts talking about jazz and playing piano.

Hope you enjoy the December Offering, and I’ll see you next time.

Onward,

JD

Image description: A hand is holding a Tarot card, Pamela Colman Smith’s Eight of Swords from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck, in front of some wet, greened concrete. On the card, a person is dressed all in red with a blindfold on and their arms bound to their body. Their legs are not bound. They are surrounded on two sides by swords which are sticking straight up out of the ground. The land they’re standing on is speckled with small pools of water, and there is a castle in the distance.

To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.

Here in the Offerings, I’ve written about witness a lot this past year. As the calendar year comes to an end I’ve been reflecting on an aspect of witness that I haven’t explored yet directly, which is denial. 

It’s tempting to think of denial as witness’ unruly twin, the unwanted flip side that lives out back in the woods. But if you believe in a kaleidoscopic reality made up of many truths, that view is too binary. What I experience as denial is someone else’s version of testimony, and vice versa. Storytelling is a survival skill, and that is not allegorical; we tell the tales that we need to get by. 

I’ve just finished reading a book called Practicing Prodependence: The Clinical Alternative to Codependency Treatment, by clinical social worker Robert Weiss and professional counselor Kim Buck. The book is based on a critique of codependency as unfairly pathologizing to those who love people who have addictions that are traumatizing. 

One of the ways the authors’ approach is different from classic codependency treatment is the language they use, which aims to normalize what happens when a primary attachment in your life is threatened by a significant other’s attachment to substances, or some other behavior that generates trauma. 

It is completely understandable, from their perspective, that in such cases people will do all kinds of things that might be otherwise out of character, in order to preserve their relationship with a troubled person. And rather than use judgment-laden language common in codependency circles—like enmeshed, obsessed, controlling, manipulative, and even denial—Weiss and Buck suggest the use of phrases like worried, concerned, trying to help, and attempting to feel safe. 

This shift in language serves to “validate the client’s understandable desire to protect a deeply important relationship. Even in situations in which the client’s efforts to help are leading to a negative result, the source of those desires is viewed as arising out of love rather than pathology” (2022).  

So even as I want to explore the more painful aspects of denial, in cases when a person really needs witness, I want to do so with the possibility that a lot of denial is rooted in survival, and in the need to preserve attachments to significant others. 

And so while it can feel incredibly painful and confusing to be on the receiving end of one’s truth being diminished or negated, there’s also room to be curious about why that happens. And even to conjure a degree of compassion for it as we relentlessly pursue witness for ourselves and others. 

I have been thinking again about simple technologies. Testimony and witness are two such things that I strive to practice in all areas of my life; intimate relationships, writing, and social action. 

When I’m struggling or feeling confused, something I often do—with varying degrees or relief and success—is I go on Reddit. Sometimes I’m looking for advice, but mostly I find that I am drawn to the testimonies; strangers on the internet bearing witness to themselves and others. Regular people like me saying truths in simple ways that make me say to myself in my bedroom alone, “yes. exactly.” 

My friend Charlie, who I’ve been missing a lot lately, used to say that if a client in therapy said “yes, exactly,” that meant they felt seen and that was always a good place to start whatever work you might hope to do together. I’ve taken that with me into my personal relationships and while I can’t always muster the strength to try to understand those I love when I’m hurt or afraid, when I’m able to, it’s immensely powerful.

Testimony and witness become especially critical when you’re steeped in a culture that is convinced it needs denial to survive. In place of denial, the authors of the Prodependence book suggest the use of the phrase “unwilling to give up on a loved one.” To make it a bit more applicable for those reading, I’ll adapt that phrase here with “unwilling to give up on a dream.” 

Unwillingness to give up on a dream is incredibly common. It’s a really human thing to look away, given the choice to either stare a burly god straight in the face and go down for it, or stay intact another day. 

I think of Psyche and Semele, mortals who learned the hard way that if you look straight at the gods you’ll either lose everything, burst into flames, or both. I think of Peel, the Venetian brother, who turned to stone when he spoke what he knew to be true. But I also think of how, in all three cases, these stories ended in varying kinds of redemption for the brave.

When unwillingness to give up on a dream—in other words, denial—is primarily a resistance to change, its force can be so immense that it blots out the possibility of loss and therefore of new life. In such cases, those involved might start to feel hopeless or stuck. One way to get unstuck is to begin to wonder about which forbidden truths it might be time to decriminalize, or allow in. 

Another obvious problem with denial is that it can be an antithesis to witness, which is an integral part of healing from traumatic experience. Professor Darryl Stephens has written that “Bearing witness is a spiritually significant social action involving recognition, empathy, memory, and imagination.” Witness involves four practices: “grounded being, attentive presence, historical clarity, and meaningful participation.” 

Both trauma and spiritual experience, writes Stephens, “fall outside of ‘normal’ perception and coping, both involve the holistic body…both are inadequately communicated through words yet demand to be shared…and both are politically disruptive, changing and challenging existing relationships, one’s sense of justice, and self-perceived place in the world.” (2021).   

Sometimes when I’m unwilling to give up on a dream, I am refusing the demands of traumatic realities and spiritual experiences to be shared. I am resisting disruption, however necessary, and thwarting what hopeful change may come to my relationships and to my place in the world as a result. Denial holds firm what both trauma and spiritual experience can shake up and transform. It rejects my bid for new symbols and stories that would allow me to move forward. 

In an environment of denial, an individual may know something’s off but can’t find validation or is unsupported in interpreting events to corroborate what they know to be true. With time, they may start to believe it is they who are wrong, ought to be ashamed for their hard time adapting, or whose perception of things on the whole is untrustworthy. 

Because an environment of denial is unable to be accountable to experiences that challenge its version of reality, it becomes an individual’s job to sync up the discordant rhythms that emerge between what they know to be true, and what the environment is willing or able to validate.

The taking up of that task marks entry into an unspoken agreement: That the individual will be responsible for more than can be reasonably managed on one’s own. They may see no other choice but to forgo the tempo that is true for them, in order to sync up with the pace of the environment which remains unwilling to give up on the dream. 

In a system that depends on denial to survive, it is always the individual who must change, to remain. It is on the individual to fix what is broken, even as the environment refuses to name what needs repair. Because the individual has long accepted, even if not consciously, that to expect the house rhythm to change is an exercise in the looping of heartbreak. This is no hero’s journey. It is a path of puzzlement and confusion as the individual carries alone what should be the shared burden of a collective. 

For a person who has made the difficult shift toward relinquishing a dream that their environment continues to cling to, witness is a simple and enormous medicine. There are as many ways to witness as there are sets of eyes on Earth, perhaps more.

Looking at Pamela Colman Smith’s Eight of Swords is a powerful example of both witness and testimony to this experience. Here is a person at odds with their surroundings. They are dressed all in red, permeated from head to toe by a pulsing force like fire that demands transformation. Their arms are bound. Desperate to move, they are on a terrain that clearly prefers they stand still, probably more due to fear than to malice.

What this person needs is for someone to listen closely for what they’re holding inside, and to say “yes, exactly.” I actually think that all those little pools of water around them are something to do with the oases of witness that are all around us, at all times. Spaces ready to receive and to validate when we’re ready to look for them. These lit up spaces inside of us, are real and they matter. Whether the environments we’re in are ready to acknowledge them, or not. 

One of the trickiest things about all this, I think, is that when you are someone who desperately needs witness, you may also be someone who is most likely to prioritize witnessing others’ experiences, including at the expense of your own. Knowing how hard it is to not be seen, you might be tempted to slip in the trap at the trickster crossroads which says it’s either your or their experience that can be valid. Do not. 

What glows and pulses and is inflamed in you, matters. And the same can be true for all of us. To me it is less a matter of deserving our own witness, but requiring it. Because to bear witness to anything involves “grounded being, attentive presence, historical clarity, and meaningful participation.” And all of these are things that, to the extent we’re unable to do with our own hot truths, we may find hard when it comes to being a witness to others.

To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.

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Sources

Buck, K. & Weiss, R. (2022). Practicing prodependence: A clinical alternative to codependency treatment. Routledge.

Stephens, D.W. (2021). Bearing witness as social action: Religions ethics and trauma-informed care. Trauma Care, 1(1), 49-63. https://doi.org/10.3390/traumacare1010005