Image description: A hand is holding a tarot card, Three of Swords by Pamela Colman Smith. In the image a symbolic heart (the valentine’s kind) has three swords stuck through it, facing down. In the background is a gray sky and rain. Behind the card is a grassy area littered with dead leaves; oak and black walnut.
I am thinking about Palestinian people and how there’s so much I don’t know. Stories and histories and images. So many people who are hurt and afraid. So many babies and elders. More than four thousand killed. In naming Palestine, I’m making a statement. That incomplete knowledge is enough to participate, to take incomplete steps.
Action Toolkit from the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights
Scholar Sharon Welch has considered the success of religious doctrines in terms of how accountable they are to women’s experiences of sexist oppression. Her work illustrates how ideas about omnipotence and omniscience—being all powerful and all knowing—have been used to affirm knowledge as a tool for domination, and how that’s paved the way for the militarism of the west.1
I’m thinking about how fantasies of doing everything—I’ll do the perfect thing that yields the total healing—and knowing everything, are pervasive. How they’ve stopped me in my tracks. I’m thinking about Welch’s idea of truth as “that which liberates and furthers specific processes of liberation.”2 I’m thinking about how the partial perspective is weaponized, hurled as an insult, named as proof one has no business acting.
I’m thinking about this passage in Becoming Divine:
“The partiality of perspective negates the ‘god-trick',’ the idea that anyone could have the whole truth in ‘a view from nowhere’; but it is compatible with—indeed it requires—criteria born of cumulative engagement and therefore the impetus toward joining with other partial perspectives in mutual critique and efforts towards wider vision and solidarity.”
I’m thinking of subjectivity, and a view from somewhere, and what it means to be accountable to experience. And how incomplete knowledge is enough. To join a larger “matrix of resistance.”3
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In the Daily Cards email last week I mentioned that I’ve been thumbing through a nineties self-help book called Reinventing Your Life by Jeffrey Young and Janet Klosko that I’m a little embarrassed about.
Reinventing Your Life is based on a model of cognitive behavioral therapy called schema therapy which goes against everything I’ve come to hold “true” these last years, and which despite all of that has been helpful.
According to the Schema Therapy Society, schemas are “broad, pervasive themes regarding oneself and one’s relationship with others, developed during childhood and elaborated throughout one’s lifetime, and dysfunctional to a significant degree.”
Schemas are believed to develop in childhood, “from an interplay between the child’s temperament and the child’s ongoing damaging experiences with parents, siblings, or peers.” There are eighteen schemas that fall under five categories: disconnection and rejection; impaired autonomy and performance; impaired limits; other-directedness; and over vigilance and inhibition.4
Narrative therapy, which I’ve been studying all year with Jill Freedman and Gene Combs, is critical of categories. Categories tend to impose meaning rather than invite it, and are easily corrupted by the interests of the ruling class.
I am a promiscuous thinker and like to work with ideas across modalities. The narrative worldview has taught me to think of even the most compelling idea as interpretation at best. So I don’t have to reject the assertions of schema therapy of they’re useful, but I should hold them with flexibility and a critical eye.