How to change the world

When the world is burning down

The day after the election I shared my experience of crying in my kitchen as I began to grieve and process what had happened. In a vulnerable Instagram post, I shared that my heart felt broken in two, that I was afraid and sad and disappointed.

Within a few hours of my post, I received a text from a childhood friend, not someone I hear from regularly but enough that it wasn’t completely out of the blue. The text was a picture of my friend smiling and wearing a Trump hat, no words, no message. I will never forget how it felt to see that picture, how it felt like an assault, like a jump scare that you had no idea was coming. There is something especially painful about being hurt when you’ve let it be known that you’re hurting and there is something especially especially painful about being hurt by someone you thought you could trust.

I engaged the text a little, even though it was clear there was not a lot of common ground. I think my response was, “Why would you send this to me?” He said someone had told him about the post where I said I was crying in the kitchen floor, that he hadn’t intended to wound me, he was simply sending what he thought was a light-hearted joke. He said he had sent that text to others that morning and they had received it as he intended. It hurt to be told that the problem was me, that I was overreacting. He went on to tell me that I shouldn’t be sad or scared about the election results, that I should be relieved.

But I wasn’t. And he knew that. This was data for me. If someone responds to your sadness or fear or grief with anything other than empathy, they are not a safe person. I can tell you this for sure: their inability to be a safe person is about them and not about you. This is incredibly difficult to remember and believe, especially for those of us who learned to stuff or dismiss or perform our feelings in order to make other people comfortable. A few years ago, I might have responded with the light-hearted tone he expected. I might have said something sarcastic in return, blown it off, let it simmer and hurt me but not enough to burn down a friendship. But now I see too clearly to say anything except what I actually said: your trauma is showing.

I can see that that statement might come across as arrogant. I’m willing to risk it. I believe that when someone does something out of line with their true selves, when they are willing to hurt or dismiss or mock or abuse someone in an attempt to buoy or protect themselves, this is almost always a trauma response. It is a way to appear brave and self-assured and tough but behind that facade, we find weakness and fear, a deep untetheredness. We find a small child who needed care.

A few years ago, I became absolutely obsessed with the show Succession on HBO. By the end of the series, I was completely enraptured with the origin stories of the characters and the way that their childhood wounds were wrecking their relationships and careers. More than anything, Succession is a show about how unresolved trauma and unhealed pain shows up again and again and again. The reason Succession is a successful show is because we get to see the way trauma unfolds in a fancy designer way, the way that extremely rich and powerful people try to cope with their pain. It’s interesting to watch someone try to resolve their mother’s abandonment and the rejection of their father and the abuse of their siblings if they’re doing it in an exclusive resort in Norway. It’s not quite as compelling when you watch these things play out in our every day middle class suburban lives. But no matter who you are, the script is the same.

All humans are wired for love and belonging and safety. If you don’t get these things, you spend your life chasing them in all kinds of ways. Your childhood wounds, your teenage loneliness or stories of shame, your coping mechanisms, your strategies for getting your needs met, your propensities toward high-control religion or numbing substances, all of it will affect you and the people you are in relationship with. If you’re rich and famous and have a lot of power, you might end up making choices that affect millions of people. If you’re just a normal with a regular family sized kingdom, you might only affect the lives of a few people. No matter how big your circle of influence is, you will eventually hurt or heal the people around you. One way or another, the stories of loss and pain in your story and whether you choose to engage them or not will affect people that you love. I don’t make the rules.

I don’t make the rules but every day I watch the way that childhood trauma plays out in real time, in real marriages, in real parent-child relationships. I see the ways that abuse and abandonment in childhood has led to men and women who cannot be the kind of parents and spouses they want to be. I see the sensitivity in men that I know, sensitivity that could be their superpower if they could embrace it. I see the strength in women, strength that could be their superpower if they knew how to welcome it. Over and over and over again, I watch the way that our culture’s inability to raise men and women who honor instead of reject their tenderness leads to marriages that are falling apart, husbands who continue to make excuses and blame their wives for the lack of connection in their marriages instead of actually engaging their own healing. I see wives who are shut down and closed off.

When I look at DJT, you know what I see? His trauma. A little boy who wanted to be loved and wasn’t. An abuser who was abused. A hurt person who was hurt. I’m not letting him off the hook, I promise you that. That man has every resource to get the help he needs. But he will never do it. His ego and his pride will always be in the way. The most human I have ever seen or heard him be was the few seconds that he asked to put his shoes on after getting shot. He is so armored in self-protecting disconnection that I would feel sorry for him if I wasn’t watching the active and intentional harm he continues to perpetuate on others.

Christians talk about evil a lot and I, as a recently decided-again Christian, am ready to talk about it too. Because I’m tired of evil and all the ways that we call it something way more benign than it actually is. Evil isn’t the gay kid in your child’s class that you want them to be nice to but not TOO nice to because they might turn your kid gay. Evil isn’t sitting with your friends who have a trans child and listening to them cry because they don’t know what’s going to happen to their kid. Evil isn’t someone putting their pronouns on their profile as if that actually affected your life in any real way. Evil is way more insidious than these things, way way more deceptive and conniving.

Evil is convincing a generation of men that the thing that will heal their lonely, broken hearts is pretending to be tough right after you’ve gotten shot in the head. That’s not toughness, that’s delusion, that’s a separation from your own humanity. Evil is the delight of someone posting a picture of themselves with their fist raised when you know this is a person whose career is built around a faith in Jesus and the dissonance is palpable. Evil is the way Christians have let themselves make excuses over and over again for why it’s okay for a man who has no integrity, no real sense of family values, no desire to love others more than he loves himself become not just the president but their leader.

One of the most powerful things I heard during my massive intake of media consumption leading up to the election was on an episode of Pantsuit Politics where Sarah and Beth and two of their staff members interviewed their husbands. One of the men interviewed said something to the effect of “any man who doesn’t know where he belongs can put on a red Maga hat and immediately be accepted.” I have not been able to shake this line as I have watched person after person sacrifice their own internal compass for the sake of a false gospel. People are searching for a place to be known and loved. That desire is good and holy. I believe we can honor that desire and also name the extremely broken way that so many people are trying to meet that need.

You want to change the world? Do your own work. Honor your brokenness. Go toward what hurts. You can do it. It’s not easy or fun or quick work but it is within your power to enact generational change. It’s not fancy or showy or cheap. But it matters. You are worthy of it. Your children are worthy of it.

If you have any interest in engaging your own healing work, I hope you’ll stick around here. I am working on building resources and being a person to coach and accompany you as you do this work in the hopes of loving your children and the other people in your life. There is no silver bullet to this kind of work and no easy downloadable plan of action, I’m so sorry to tell you. But I can help point you in the right direction and would be so honored to come alongside you.