Image description: A hand—with olive skin coming out of an ivory-colored sweater—is holding a copy of a book called Tarot for Change: Using the Cards for Self-Care, Acceptance and Growth by Jessica Dore. The book cover has a frame around it that is alternating pink, gold, orange and blue. Behind it is a wood floor and the wooden cover of a radiator with plants on it next to a window.
To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.
This summer I watched George Carlin’s American Dream, a two-part documentary about the late comedian’s life and work. I’ve always loved George Carlin but didn’t know much about his life. I was impressed by how often he reinvented himself as an artist, and how willing he was to lose fans in the process.
Carlin seemed to understand something that I have been trying to learn, which is that each time I make something and offer it to the world I’m also making declarations about loyalty and betrayal. I’m disclosing my allegiances, and also revealing who I’m willing to turn-off or alienate. It feels binary and extreme and at the same time helpful. It’s an idea I want to keep with me.
In a rare occurrence, I’d prepared something early for this month’s Offering. It was a continuation of a now multi-week exploration called “A fool’s dream of not healing,” which I’ll probably share next week instead. It has to do with wounds that don’t heal. And what kinds of images might be helpful in such cases.
Then on Wednesday I realized it’s been one year since my book came out. And suddenly it felt like a good idea to make an Offering with some of the language I’ve been working with this past year, that’s helped me to conceptualize and clarify the values behind the work I do.
In the earlier days writing about psychology with Tarot, I had trouble articulating what the work was about or what it meant to me. I did a lot of experimenting— updating my Twitter bio, re-writing the “About Me” page on my website, saying new combinations of words during interviews—all hoping to describe in an ultimate way something that was very much still unfurling.
I think that’s common when you’re making meaning in transitional times. A narrative that morphs every other day can be unnerving, but it can also be really generative. Especially when there’s a reasonably safe space to share and be witnessed. It was definitely scary to be doing it in public, but it was also affirming. And I was fortunate to have spaces to perform meaning privately, too.
There were two truths I often came back to, and still do: One was that I wanted to write things that would make people feel less alone; the other that I wanted to share ideas from the psychology field that I saw as being unjustly esoteric. Things I thought could be useful to people, but seemed weirdly hidden away.
I didn’t choose the psychology field. I studied communications as an undergrad and then landed my second job out of college at a psychology and self-help publisher in Oakland. I was interested in the job mostly for full-time status and benefits and the fact that it involved books. But also because I had years of experience living with mental illness, and was genuinely interested in the hows and whys of it.
I’ve said this one hundred times. But before that job I’d never encountered language like avoidance, emotion regulation or distress tolerance. When I did, it really helped me. Home alone at night, I’d synthesize the new language I was learning with the images in my Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot cards. I’d marvel at how the words and pictures played off one another, each more potent in dialogue.
Having new language to make sense of my experience lit up parts of me that were latent and brought them to the fore. It gave me direction about new ways to move, and helped me navigate a way forward. When I started to share that language on social media and in the Offerings, which were called Tarot Offerings back then, people would say that it helped them too, and that they felt less alone. I struggled with that a little bit, because I don’t want people to just feel less alone. I want us to be less alone.
In 2021, when I was doing the last round of edits on Tarot for Change I enrolled in a class with psychologist Mary Watkins, who I’ve mentioned many times in these Offerings alongside references to her book with Helene Shulman, Toward Psychologies of Liberation.
There, I was again given language that gave form to what I wanted to do with my work and life but had been unable to articulate before. Two concepts in particular—psychosocial accompaniment and negative work—seemed to describe what had previously been sort of nebulous but driving visions, about making people less alone, and sharing resources.
The first term, psychosocial accompaniment, is offered as a potential alternative to institutional roles like therapy or social work (2015). To accompany means to go with. With accompaniment, Watkins writes that “there’s an element of mystery, of openness, of trust” because it involves genuine companionship, and the sharing of fates. (2015).
Accompaniment is walking alongside, not wielding power over. It’s a horizontal way of relating and not a vertical one. It’s less about helping or healing or fixing and more about solidarity and being with. Power is shared. And if it’s skewed, it skews toward the one being supported.
Accompaniment used in this way has roots in Latin American liberation theology and I love that it outlines a way of relating with suffering that results in all involved not only feeling but actually being less alone. A radical departure from more established services like social work, it doesn’t settle for the alleviation of depression or loneliness (though their alleviation is not a small feat).
It takes aim at the very structures—including ways of relating and supporting one another—that proliferate hopelessness and alienation in the first place. Anything that undermines “the integrity of body and mind, relations between self and other, and between one community and another” (2015).
Related to accompaniment, the concept of “negative work” has also been helpful for clarifying my values and visions. Negative workers, according to Italian psychiatrist Franco Basaglia are “professionals who give their allegiance not to bourgeois institutions but to those who most need their help” (2015).
Making a living is often an ethically tricky business, and this feels especially true in fields that deal so directly with human suffering like psychology and social work. This is something I’ve struggled with a lot. In her essay “Psychosocial accompaniment,” Watkins writes:
“If accompaniment is to be a role with integrity, it must not feed off those who suffer from the collective traumas of our time, but be genuinely committed to changing the conditions that sow the seeds of these difficulties. Whatever psychological knowledge is useful should be made available to those who would express a desire for it, instead of being hoarded to make one’s expertise more valuable” (2015).
This idea has been useful for me too, because it strengthens my resolve around the sharing of resources and of these Offerings. They are one fruit of a processual, public research practice that strives for transparency about what I’m learning, where I’m learning it, as I’m learning it.
It also asks me to continually identify my allegiances, to reflect on how my life and work reinforces or betrays those loyalties, and to be willing to transgress if it means remaining with the interests I want my life and work to stand for.
I shared the bit about George Carlin because I have very much felt between worlds this last year as my consciousness and loyalties have shifted. I’ve always sensed that the work I do is political, but haven’t always had the social or historical context to really align what I’m doing with existing movements.
I know that I’ve lost followers this past year as my work has been more overtly political, and will continue to grow and change in ways that will turn people off. That’s not political so much as it is par for the course of living and creating. I think anyone who does public work goes through this in some form or another, and it certainly touches on all the deep scary things.
Because I absolutely fear abandonment and rejection, in times of growth and change I try to focus on who I’m aligning with rather than who I’m losing when I’m willing to speak truth about things that don’t sit right anymore, or maybe never did. When I can do that, which is far from always, I feel excited and connected and alive. I turn myself on, and feel my horizons open up to new worlds and ways of belonging that weren’t accessible before.
Conversely, in a thousand ways I’ve learned that whatever perceived protections I’m afforded in exchange for my silence about the things that I see and know to be true, it is not worth what it costs in shame, isolation and alienation from those that I know I belong with and to. And I’m of course thinking of poet and essayist Audre Lorde who, two months after a life-threatening breast cancer diagnosis said:
“In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life…what I most regretted were my silences…I was going to die, if not sooner than later, whether or not I have ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences” (2017).
So on the one year anniversary of Tarot for Change I’m excited to declare my values and loyalties. To keep learning, encountering good language for what I already know, and to continue sharing what I come to learn with those interested; “Words to fit a world” that I believe is possible, and that I know many of you, across our differences do too.
If you’re still reading, I’m thankful to you for being such good company on this journey, and for however long it feels right for you to be here.
To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.
Sources
Lorde, A. (2017). Your silence will not protect you. Silver Press.
Watkins, M. (2015). Psychosocial accompaniment. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 3, 1. http://jspp.psychopen.eu/article/view/103/html
Offering: November 2022
This idea of accompaniment, if I'm understanding it correctly, is a thing that I've become curious about in the last few years, too. I look at how the people in my life struggle, and how common, accepted practices of assistance and support seem to leave people out in the cold in a way I hadn't fully questioned before. I think I'd seen it, but thought I had to accept it. I'm curious to see how you explore it from here, because it's something that I come back to often in the sense that I can't unsee the problem now that I've identified it. It's challenging to figure out how to live differently--how to stop deferring to systems that have pat solutions that simply don't offer long-term change, or how to be of help in a more substantial way than I've thought I had a right to before--but I want to. Looking forward to seeing where you go from here.
"Whatever psychological knowledge is useful should be made available to those who would express a desire for it, instead of being hoarded to make one’s expertise more valuable” (2015).
Appreciate this mentality so very much, and it is why I wanted to subscribe and support your work. Your offerings help one to obtain the language and resources to navigate information when the academy is out of reach.