Offering: June 2022

Power, helplessness, limits & lament

Image description: A backyard in Delaware County, Pennsylvania that is very green, in early summer. There are cut-outs of characters by Pamela Colman Smith from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot. From left to right they are The Emperor, Six of Pentacles, Eight of Swords and Strength.

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

My professional background, as a lot of you know, is in psychology. I’ve studied behavioral therapies in self-help book publishing, trained as a therapist as a graduate student, and then applied what I learned from ten years in that field to write a self-help book on the mechanics of individual change using the images from Tarot. 

Like many trained in what’s called the “helping professions,” I have often felt hamstrung by social problems that cause and sustain what’s then framed as individual pathology in a therapy room. The frustration I’ve felt about this—paired with the privilege and luck of being able to make a living as a writer—is a big part of why I opted out of continued training as a therapist after grad school.

The whole premise of the helping professions is that you’re supposed to be helping. So if I don’t have the tools to address the roots of your struggles, it’s easy for me to feel confused about what I’m there to do, or like I can’t be useful. I bump up against this limitation constantly, in my writing and work with individuals and groups. But these days I try to remind myself that helping looks a lot of different ways, some of which have nothing to do with solutions. One of the big ways it looks is sharing. 

I don’t have solutions. I have ideas, I have images and I have books with lots of underlines in them. I have emotions of my own, which I am working to access and be generous with. 

So today I have a few threads to share that are loosely braided together. They’re to do with power, helplessness, limits and lament. Whether you’re in a space of tending more to private experiences, or wondering about your place in your community, society or the cosmos, my wish is that something here may be of use for you. 

I. Power

In the Tarot deck there are twenty two major arcana and The Emperor is the fourth. The Emperor is often read as a card about authority and power and in my experience with reading, he’s one of the least liked. As such, I’m always on the lookout for language that could reframe this character, maybe as an invitation to rework our understanding of power. 

Environmental activist Joanna Macy has written that there’s power in the “capacity to suffer with our world” because it orients us to our mutual belonging. This matters because there is a “new kind of power” in that belonging (1995). 

Macy describes each individual as a system inside of systems. When we experience the pain of the world, it hurts. It hurts because we are processing the reality that old ways do not work, which is how we begin to reorganize. There is of course, a hidden wellspring of power in the ability to experience distress without trying to make it go away. 

And one of the reasons it’s so important to not shut down or act on a compulsion to avoid—despite every impulse to do so in the presence of overwhelming horror and despair—is that, in Macy’s words, “to experience pain…is a measure of our evolution” (1995).

That makes sense to me, looking back, because it’s often been pain that was too great to bear alone that drove me to therapy, finally, or to spiritual practice, or to leaving the lonely hunter’s cabin in the middle of the night with no permission and no map. 

This isn’t to bright side or make light of pain, but to say that there is power living in the vein of difficult feelings. We can’t always go there, and shouldn’t be shamed when we can’t. But tapping in can be a source of power. Not in the old sense of the word as domination or power over, but in the sense of solidarity, of shared experience and of belonging. Power in Joanna Macy’s sense of it, as “the ability to effect change” (1995).

Macy’s interpretation of power has also a lot to do with nurturance and empathy. She notes that for those who’ve been especially socialized for competition, it might take some extra work to lean into those capacities that have been rejected, neglected or seen as weakness or liability.

On the other hand, if you’ve been socialized to take on more than your share of emotional labor, power might look more like “being assertive, taking responsibility to give feedback, and participating more fully in the body politic.” 

Reading this for me was a big nudge toward noting who tends to take on the emotional burden during tragedy, and who tends to carry on with business as usual. How is power being practiced in those situations?

What is the relationship between appearing unaffected and cutting off your feelings because you don’t feel you deserve to express them if you don’t come with a solution? (This idea also comes from Joanna Macy, see my last Offering on fixation with competence and emotional repression, and how “fear of sounding stupid” keeps people stuck.)

To what degree does silence reflect a feeling of being helpless to effect change? When is what looks like power actually the opposite?

II. Helplessness 

In The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell gives an interpretation of the famous blessing from Star Wars: “May the force be with you.” I often think about this when I work with the Strength card in Tarot, the eighth of the major arcana, which is called The Force in some decks.  

For Campbell “may the force be with you” meant simply, stay human. It meant “learn to live in your period of history as a human being.” And one does this, he says, by holding on to your ideals and by “rejecting the system’s impersonal claims upon you” (1991). 

I think a lot about what those impersonal claims are. One of them, I think, is a system that over polices you, blocks you from access to land and fresh food, pollutes the air and water, thieves your time and then tells you in therapy it’s a you problem. Another is being taught that you are helpless, as you bear witness to relentless horror through social media and the global news cycle. 

There’s a phenomenon called learned helplessness—which I bet some of you already know—which is essentially that when bad things happen over and over again, and you have no way to stop them or escape, you’ll come to believe that you’re helpless. And that later, even when there are choice points or escape routes, you’ll forgo them. Believing you cannot affect change so there’s no use trying, you’ll act as if you don’t have choices.

Not surprisingly, social psychologist Martin Seligman and his colleagues identified a link between learned helplessness and depression. People who learned helplessness tended to wind up with three conditioned limitations: They’d believe their situations were uncontrollable, they’d lack the motivation to respond when given potential ways out, and they would become depressed (2018).

It is not at all new to be living under big forces beyond our control. Ancient humans had to reckon with the rain and the sun and unpredictable weather patterns. For us, it’s all that and the Internet. The crossroads where the forces within and outside of us link up is an ancient human problem, and in a way a sacred meeting place. 

I wonder about what it means for the force to be with us, and about the strength it requires to stay human in the face of so much that is hostile to life. I wonder what it looks like to hold to ideals, and to resist the force of conditioned helplessness. 

I think about waking up everyday and choosing to locate power. Not in the sense of power over, but in the sense of the power in suffering with the world, in belonging, and as a way to participate in the painful, terrifying and necessary process of reorganization. 

III. Limits

Joanna Macy also wrote that in order to move as a collective we need a “boundless heart.” As someone who has suffered many years with poor boundaries, I struggle with this language. I want to notice and to honor my limits, not disintegrate them. 

When I worked at New Harbinger I spent a lot of time learning about compassion-focused therapy, which emphasizes compassion—to suffer with—as one of the things that it means to be human. I want to be compassionate. I want the force to be with me. I want to stay human. I also want to be able to function, to get out of bed in the morning, and even to experience ease and joy.

There are so many fine lines to find here. To suffer with the world is a necessary piece of accessing power and belonging and also the pain is unrelenting whereas I, a mere mortal, am finite. 

I notice when I want to push pain away. And I think of the first line of the first poem in Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters, which was my charm, junior year of high school when I became politicized in part through di Prima’s writing along with Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, Assata Shakur and others.

Revolutionary Letter #1 begins, “I have just realized that the stakes are myself.” 

What this means to me is that to push away things that are too hard to bear is to gamble with my own selfhood, my own being alive. At the same time, to be open to all at all times is to risk something too. And while the extreme perfectionist in me likes the idea of one day having the distress tolerance and coping skills to hold the depths of all the pain in all the world, I don’t think that I can. Also, I don’t want to. I have limits. 

I get curious about why I believe I do not or should not have limits. Inside of a socioeconomic culture that’s goal is limitless growth, it’s hardly surprising. But it isn’t who I am. And so I want to know about how to utilize boundaries inside of a felt understanding that no one is free unless all are. 

IV. Lament

In any case, when lamenting is needed, as it often is—if it is sobbing, wailing, screaming, we need, or shouting, kicking, writhing, convulsing and heaving—one thing I do know is that we have to be able to do two things: go down, and come back up.

People need different things to go into the Underworld and come back alive. Adequately calloused hands for climbing, beer-soaked bread, a few drops of joie de vivre in a perfume bottle in the back jeans pocket, a lit match and a free hand to protect it. But if you don’t have something to get back from the depths when you go down, you're in trouble. 

I am still learning what I need and I surely don’t know about you. But I will share this visual, that I find useful. In Isabelle Stengers and Phillippe Pignarre’s book Capitalist Sorcery, they talk about ferry people, the steerers of boats in stories, who they call the sounders of the depths. 

The sounder of the depths, write Stengers and Pignarre, is focused on two very specific questions: “Can one pass through here, and how?” (2011). And at first this may sound like a role pointed squarely at solution. But the authors assure us that it is not. 

The sounder of the depths is not concerned with being right. They are concerned with knowing the traps: the currents that pull under, the sharp rocks that cut and sink and the sandbars that maroon. One common trap, they write, is believing that tolerance of difference is enough. Another is thinking that shortcuts will work when it comes to the necessary shift from seeing difference as a problem to be solved, to seeing it as a force (2011). 

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

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Sources

Ackerman, C. (2018, March 24). Learned helplessness: Seligman’s theory of depression (+ cure). PositivePsychology.com. https://positivepsychology.com/learned-helplessness-seligman-theory-depression-cure/

Campbell, J. & Moyers, B. (1991). The power of myth. Anchor. 

Macy, J. (1995). Working through environmental despair. In T. Roszak, M.E. Gomes, A.D. Kanner (Eds.), Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, healing the mind. (pp. 240-259). Sierra Club Books.