As 2026 begins, one of my strongest resolutions is this:

to have—and own—more of my anger.

I’m writing this both as a therapist and as someone who learned early to move away from anger rather than toward it. Those two voices aren’t separate for me. What I’ve learned professionally has grown out of what I’ve had to learn personally.

Over the years, I’ve noticed something again and again in my work:

The more comfortable people are with their anger—
along with contempt and healthy skepticism—
the less distress they experience in their closest relationships.

Not because they’re “angrier,”
but because they’re more at home in themselves.

I vividly remember my grandmother’s response to anger—a face of utter disgust. Like many people, I learned to banish my protests rather than give them a home.

When I say I’m choosing anger now, I don’t mean indulging it or acting it out.
I mean something quieter—and harder.

I’ve learned that anger wants company.
Not agreement or solutions—just presence.

To be heard.
To be joined for a time.

This is a shift that transforms relationships.

Anger becomes constructive the moment it’s appreciated and supported rather than feared or dismissed.

We were never meant to carry anger alone.

In isolation, it hardens into bitterness and resentment.

When met with presence, it becomes clarity, strength, and courage.

Over time—listening to my clients and being supported myself—I’ve learned that beneath almost every expression of anger is a simple truth waiting to emerge:

A longing for closeness without disappearing.
A longing to matter without having to earn it.
A desire for connection without conditions or demands.

This is also why I don’t want to sharpen my anger into blame.

Anger is an emotion.
Blame is a strategy.

Anger says, Something matters here.
Blame says, I don’t know how to stay with this feeling—someone has to carry it.

When anger has no safe relational landing place, it often turns into blame—not because it’s wrong, but because it’s alone.

There’s a bodily difference, too.

Anger, when it’s owned, has energy and strength.

Eyes sparkle; there’s something solid in the chest or belly.

Blame is tighter and sharper.

It narrows the breath and points—inward, outward, or both.

Unowned anger doesn’t disappear—it leaks.

It shows up as: irritation, withdrawal, moral superiority, or quiet contempt.

But anger that’s met—early and honestly—doesn’t need to accuse.

It can speak in the first person.

It can stay connected to what matters.

I see what happens when people don’t have this option.
They become tired—and sometimes, quite literally, sick.

A client once said to me:
“I’m not angry. I’m just tired.”

She was tired of saying yes when she meant no.
Tired of carrying the emotional weight of the relationship while calling it love.

As we stayed with it, her anger took shape—and her body changed.

Her shoulders dropped.
Her breath deepened.
There was less edge in her voice, not more.

Not rage, but a steady, aching clarity.

Her anger didn’t turn into blame.
It organized her.
It showed her where she had disappeared.

This is the kind of anger I’m choosing to take more seriously.

I’m angry about how many of us were conditioned to give up ourselves to keep others comfortable.

I’m angry that so many of us don’t know how to say no clearly—or how to ask cleanly for what we want—without guilt or collapse.

And I’m angry that relationships between people who care for one another can become so painful and threatening that distance feels safer than closeness. That conflict goes unresolved. That silence masquerades as peace.

This anger doesn’t feel hot to me.
It feels like deep caring—grieving and awake.

When I stay with it, when I don’t rush to be reasonable or understanding, it sharpens into something useful.

It tells me where I’ve over-adapted, where I’ve swallowed protest in the name of harmony, where I’ve accepted too little and called it maturity.

Owning my anger isn’t about becoming harsher.
It’s about becoming more honest—and more honest sooner.

Because anger, when it’s allowed to have company, often becomes the doorway back to self-respect— and from there, back to authentic connection.

This year, I’m practicing something simple — though I know I may never master it:

Listening more closely to myself.
Naming more clearly.
Letting anger be known before it hardens.

Not carrying it alone.

Photo by icecloudxx from Pexels.

This reflection is part of the work we explore more deeply in our approach to relational healing.

Over the years, I’ve noticed a pattern in therapy: the more comfortable people are with their anger—likewise contempt and cynicism—the less distress they experience in their closest relationships.

Not because they’re “angrier,” but because they’re more comfortable with these emotions. They seem more authentic—closer to themselves.

Many of us learned to hide, rather than be comfortable with these emotions. To be angry at a parent or authority figure was met with disapproval or punishment. Sometimes it was framed as a moral failure: Turn the other cheek. Don’t make a scene. Be grateful.

Anger became a threat or a sin. Witnessing rage in our homes—physical, verbal, or emotional—reinforced the belief that anger destroys connection. So we learned to swallow it, minimize it, rationalize it, or exile it altogether.

It makes perfect sense that we don’t recognize anger in ourselves, especially toward the people we love. If the only model of rage we’ve seen is destructive, the last thing we want to do is allow it.

But anger denied does not disappear. It finds other routes:

• Control, including burdened caretaking and accommodation

• Withdrawal

• Addiction and numbing

• “Being fine” while resentment builds

• Erupting or seeping out sideways

Anger is energy. If we don’t allow it to move honestly, it moves in disguise.

And when it finally comes out, it often arrives with justification, defensiveness, and righteousness—long explanations trying to prove it’s valid. The anger itself, somewhere in the body, is far away. So it sounds like criticism rather than vulnerability, like uncaring rather than fear of harm, like control rather than truth.

But the problem isn’t anger. The problem is isolation.

The body feels alone with an experience it doesn’t know how to express. Connection becomes a battleground of self-protection rather than curiosity.

So what do we do? We welcome the anger. Not to unleash it, justify it, or moralize it, but to witness it.

I’m struck by how amazed, relieved, and confused people are when, in a session, I say:

Those words are usually met with skepticism. We are not used to anger being appreciated.

But anger is often the only part of us that still believes we deserve better.

It says:

Because anger has been so powerfully conditioned as wrong or dangerous, welcoming it home can be a long and complex journey. As anger learns it is welcome, the nervous system settles—not because the conflict is resolved, but because the person is no longer alone inside it. When it arrives, it’s seen as both desirable and needed, like a warming, crackling fire in the wood stove on a cold winter day.

Welcoming anger doesn’t mean hurting anyone. It means shifting from blame to presence.

We move from: Who’s at fault?
To: What is this anger standing up for?

Anger stops being a weapon and becomes information.

Anger, when resonated with—not analyzed or fixed—creates connection:

• The body stops bracing.

• Shame loosens.

• Stories become clearer.

• Needs become speakable.

Anger wants company. Not agreement. Just company. To be met. To be heard. To be joined.

This is the shift that changes relationships: anger becomes constructive the moment it is allowed to be relational.

We were never meant to carry anger alone. In isolation, anger becomes bitterness, resentment, and hopelessness. Met with presence, anger becomes clarity and courage.

And beneath almost every expression of anger, there is a softer truth waiting for permission to emerge:

These are not destructive needs. They are deeply human ones.

We don’t heal by getting rid of anger. We heal by bringing it into connection—held, witnessed, respected.

Because anger was never the enemy. Isolation was.

Photo by Bruno Silva, from Pexels.

People in close relationships often come to me after years—sometimes decades—of being stuck in painful cycles. Individuals come for similar reasons, hoping to find relief from internal patterns so deeply ingrained that nothing they do touches them.

They’ve read books, listened to podcasts, and tried to “communicate better.” They’ve tried to be more patient, more open, more empathic. Nothing seems to make a difference.

Sometimes therapy does loosen something. Sometimes it changes enough. But when it does, it’s rarely because people suddenly figured out how to do something new. It’s because the conditions around them changed enough to support their natural evolution.

People don’t evolve under pressure. We transform when the air becomes breathable and healthy.

A therapist in the room—with enough steadiness, attunement, and emotional capacity to hold the heat—changes the emotional climate. The nervous system registers, Oh… It’s safe enough now. I can unfold.

And what once felt impossible suddenly becomes available. New choices appear. Old reflexes loosen. A different conversation becomes thinkable.

While it can be a precious gift to those who receive it, therapy is not the only place where this can happen.

Because suffering is so widespread, and because therapy is expensive, time-limited, and not consistently effective, I’ve been focusing on other ways we might support transformation. Ways that don’t rely on professional hours or an office setting.

I’d love to see more spaces outside therapy rooms where human beings can practice what their bodies were never taught:

• How to feel and express anger without collapsing or attacking

• How to be with each other in places of vulnerability

• How to hear the truth of another person whose perspective is different from ours without losing or betraying ourselves

Most of us avoid conflict until it overwhelms us and spills out sideways—reactively, defensively, and painfully. The fight emerges only after weeks or months of quiet internal bracing. We then judge ourselves (and each other) for the mess we’ve made, sure that the pain is some personal failing rather than the predictable outcome of a skill we never learned.

Imagine if we approached relational awareness the same way we approach our chosen profession or creative discipline. Not as a moral virtue we should already possess, but as a practice—a skill set that develops over time when we place ourselves in the right environments.

Every profession has its training grounds: rehearsal studios, kitchens, universities, coding boot camps, dojos, internships, and weight rooms. But in relationships, we expect mastery without practice. We assume that love should somehow give us the capacity to stay open, honest, and grounded in the moments we’re most overwhelmed.

What if we created intentional spaces where we could:

• Build discernment and awareness for more precise, shared emotional concepts.

• Express anger and contempt productively so they don’t erupt or poison the air.

• Slow down enough to feel the truth in our body.

• Experiment with new ways of responding.

• Receive feedback and support from others who are also learning?

Our reactive, stuck patterns wouldn’t change instantly. But over time, under the right conditions, the nervous system would begin carving new pathways to deeper connection.

We would find ourselves responding differently—not because we tried harder, but because a different way of being had become possible.

This is something I’m keenly interested in these days: How to build environments—communities, practice groups—where the air is clean enough, supportive enough, curious enough, to allow for relational evolution.

If transformation is less about force and more about climate, then this work is not about “fixing” anyone. It’s about giving people the conditions for their most human capacities to emerge.

By Lori Marchak and Craig Stein

We all know those inner refrains: I’m not good enough. I’m too much.
They’re not random wounds. They make sense in context.

For many men, the conditioned strategies of working hard, staying ahead, accommodating, and withdrawing once ensured belonging and survival. But they rarely meet the emotional needs of their partners or children. Nor do they address men’s own needs for connection, love, and genuine intimacy. These strategies keep life functioning—but they keep love at a distance.

For many women, the deeply ingrained pattern of caring—of tending to everyone’s needs, including their own—can lead to emotions that feel too big for others to hold. The result is a painful paradox: the more they reach for connection, the more others retreat.

Both make sense. Both are rational responses to the worlds we came from—family, culture, and generations of adaptation etched into our nervous systems. They were the best we could do.

When conditions for healing draw near, what begins to shift is not that we suddenly become enough or learn to be less. It’s that we stop believing we’re supposed to be either.

We stop trying to perform emotional perfection—to share our feelings in just the right way, to communicate without rupture, to carry each other’s pain gracefully and without fatigue. These are noble attempts, but underlying them is fear and anxiety. Often, that is the message that others feel and receive, rather than the love we intend to communicate.

The problem isn’t our failure to be good at relationships. It’s that we were never taught how to bear the enormity of the pain and alienation that we’ve inherited.

When we begin to see that we’re not bad or wrong, but lack experience of safety and support, something softens. We can say, with more honesty and less defense:

I want to care for you, but it’s too hard. I’m too frustrated and overwhelmed.

I get to have these feelings, even if they’re too much for you.

I don’t know what I want or need—or how to assert myself without being a burden.

There is no shame in not being enough, and no guilt in being too much. There’s only the invitation to be human, together, amidst it all.

This is what we’re really trying to say: Can we go through this together? Can we be bad at this for a while, and hold hands while we get better at it? I’d rather struggle through our messy but real life together with you than have some fantasy of a “safe” but shallow life without you.

When we stop trying to be the right kind of person in a relationship—strong enough, calm enough, caring enough, not too much—we begin to move beyond the roles that keep us trapped. We start to meet one another as humans, not as performances of masculinity or femininity, competence or sensitivity.

This is the real work of healing: learning to stay present inside the messiness of being two imperfect nervous systems trying, sincerely, to love.

Photo by Fuu J on Unsplash

We all carry negative beliefs and accompanying strategies we picked up along the way—working to please, keeping the peace, staying calm and rational, or taking care of everyone around us.  Most of the time, we refer to the negative beliefs behind these “coping mechanisms” as irrational and belonging to the past.

But what if they aren’t just old baggage? What if they actually make sense, even now?

When I say that views of self like “I’m not good enough” or “I’m unlovable” are rational—not irrational—I usually get puzzled looks.

People often respond with, “Right, those negative beliefs were adaptive when people were kids.”

But here’s what I really mean: they are rational now, in adulthood. They still make sense. They still help us survive.

Think about someone who grew up in a typical middle- or upper-class home in Western society.

She might have learned that the safest way to belong was to stay responsible—organizing things, anticipating others’ needs, taking care of herself and everyone else. He might have learned that the safest way to belong was to meet expectations in the eyes of others or else stay under the radar.

These weren’t just childhood coping strategies. These adaptations may still be needed today. They may still create a sense of relative safety and belonging. They likely still protect against unbearable feelings like emptiness, exhaustion, rage, and shame.

“Letting go” of core beliefs and their accompanying strategies is incredibly hard. It’s not just dropping old habits or seeing things differently. It’s dismantling the very scaffolding that holds up our inner world. Without that scaffolding, we risk being overwhelmed by feelings we’ve never had support to face.

I recently worked with someone—let’s call her Mia—who was the glue that held everyone together.

At work, she was the one who stayed late, sending the emails no one else thought to send, catching the mistakes before they caused problems. At home, she was the planner, the one who kept the calendar straight, who anticipated what her partner or kids would need before they asked. With friends, she was the reliable one who showed up when others didn’t.

On the outside, Mia looked composed and competent. Inside, she was tired—so tired she sometimes fantasized about disappearing for a week with no phone, no one needing anything from her. But that fantasy was terrifying, too. If she collapsed into her exhaustion and pain, who would want her?

So she pressed harder. When things didn’t go according to plan, she blamed herself, raising the bar higher still. And when people told her to “relax,” or “lighten up,” she didn’t feel liberated— she felt judged and unseen. They didn’t understand: her strategy wasn’t irrational. It was the thing keeping her world from collapsing.

No one had truly seen or been prepared to support Mia with what her strategies were holding: profound fatigue, anger, shame, and the raw fear of being unwanted if she stopped holding it all together. In survival mode, she couldn’t fully recognize this herself.

Of course, she clung tightly to her way of being. Anyone would. Until she had enough support to face those buried feelings, letting go would have risked chaos and retraumatization.

Strategies don’t soften when we sense others see them as irrational or unhealthy. That suggests others are ignorant of the wisdom inside them.

What helps is being fully seen and understood.

When Mia finally felt that I could see, and helped her see for herself, how much her strategies had been carrying—with no one else to see or support her—she could relax from defending herself. Something softened.  She could begin to imagine that transformation might be possible.

Healing doesn’t start with trying to change our negative beliefs and strategies.

It starts with recognizing their intelligence. By honoring their ongoing truth.

When someone can look at us and say not just, “Of course you did that. It makes sense.” But also, “Of course you’re still doing that. No one has truly seen and had the capacity to support you with all that you’re carrying.”

With that degree of understanding and acceptance, a new reality begins to form.

We can rest. And in that resting, new possibilities emerge.

Photo by Harry Phạm from Pexels.

The turning points in my life have most often shown up unexpectedly. A door closes. A new path appears. Something shifts—sometimes before I have words for what’s happening. Those moments have asked me to change before I fully understood it.

Sue Johnson and Emotionally Focused Therapy arrived at just the right moment and opened a door that changed my life.

EFT changed how I understood myself and other people. It helped me see the intelligence in our defenses and the longing that lives underneath reactivity. It inspired me and gave me a map to appreciate people rather than try to fix them. I’m deeply grateful to the mentors and the EFT community; their influence stays with me.

But like every doorway, EFT eventually led me to another threshold—one I resisted crossing. A quiet whisper told me something was missing. I denied it. I fought it. And then, in another unplanned turning point, I had to accept it: EFT isn’t enough.

It wasn’t that the model was wrong. I was the one who needed to grow beyond it—to explore what felt most alive for me.

What I struggled with most wasn’t the model itself—it was  the culture of loyalty and allegiance that I grew up in, and bought into. At times, it felt like there wasn’t space to experiment, to cross-pollinate, or to bring in the body, spirit, or other modalities without being seen as disloyal. I doubted myself when I was drawn to different ways of working—like EMDR in the beginning, when emotions felt too big, IFS when parts work brought space and clarity, and plant medicine when ordinary consciousness wasn’t powerful enough.

Eventually, I realized I wasn’t enough for me to idealize Sue and EFT; it was time for me to step into trusting myself.

These are some principles and forces that guide me today:

• Healing isn’t about doing the “right” thing. It’s about who we are. More than acquiring tools, I’ve come to value the lifelong process of healing myself.

• Appreciating models and mentors for what they offer—without needing to idealize them. We’re all human, fallible, doing our best, and in this together.

• Working with the body’s survival states—not just big emotions like anger or shame, but the deeper currents of contempt, cynicism, freeze, collapse, and dissociation, and what they need to move.

• Honoring mistrust as wisdom, not pathology. We all have good reason not to trust—and deserve to be met there with dignity. Prioritizing trust too quickly can be a disservice to ourselves and our clients.

• Seeing “negative views of self and other” not just as formerly adaptive in childhood, but as necessary, ongoing adaptations in couple, family, and community systems.

• Seeing cultural and systemic burdens not as side notes, but as central to our work.

• Embracing the spiritual—welcoming the mystery and intelligence that emerges beyond thought, but is perceived in the body through faculties that are usually called intuition as well as feeling.

EFT remains one of the most beautiful models I’ve learned. But like every significant turning point, it was a stepping stone. I didn’t walk away in rejection—I followed what felt most alive. That path has led me to a way of working that’s more intuitive, embodied, and spacious.

Trusting myself turned out to be the way to connect with healing powers that are more than personal, more than material, and more than words can ever adequately name—but that each of us can know and experience for ourselves.

These days, I don’t align myself with any one method. What I care about is presence—being open to the forces that move through us when we’re not trying so hard to get it right.

To follow what is most alive—this, to me, is the heart of healing.

Photo by Unsplash

I’ve spent a lot of time learning how childhood trauma and neglect shape the nervous system. However, lately, I’ve been considering other influences that may be subtler and less visible, particularly for those whose identity and personality align with mainstream society. 

What we come to believe about our worth and what we expect to receive from others isn’t solely a reflection of our caregivers. It also mirrors what we perceive and absorb through our schools, workplaces, televisions, devices, and all our social interactions.

That shaping is powerful. It can define us as profoundly as early trauma or attachment patterns.

When I was in kindergarten and elementary school, I lived in a predominantly Black, urban neighborhood. My best—and only—close friend was Black. 

The classrooms, where I often felt invisible, were packed, with 40 to 45 kids to a teacher.

At seventeen, I won the lottery to secure a summer job at a chemical factory in East Chicago Heights, then often referred to as “the worst slum in Chicago.”

It paid high union wages, and I loved it. At the top of every hour, I’d walk the plant floor, in and out of concrete buildings, gathering small production samples. Then I’d hustle to the lab to dissolve, weigh, measure pH levels, and breathe in a mix of talcum dust, boiling acids, and burning chemicals.

My coworkers were all Black and Hispanic adults. The executives—who were primarily white—stayed in the administration building and rarely set foot on the plant floor.

I didn’t yet understand that I was moving through a world that saw and treated me differently—and that those differences, though mostly invisible, had been shaping us all along.

At the time, I didn’t think much about it. I egocentrically saw myself in a positive light, viewing myself as naturally intelligent, motivated, and inclined toward advanced education. I assumed that was the reason my path differed from those around me.

It would be decades before I learned from anti-racist teachers how profoundly different the culture’s expectations were for me. I had internalized them without even realizing it. I hadn’t “earned” my future in the way I believed—instead, I had been groomed for it, encouraged and supported in ways others were not.

What I also didn’t realize until much later was how much I had gained from those early environments. In ways I’m still discovering, they inspired me to grow beyond who I was otherwise conditioned to be.

I felt more at home in that factory than I ever did in the quiet, self-conscious middle-class suburb where my parents had bought a house.

My coworkers laughed and flirted, calling each other out and trading insults. Everyone teased, complimented, and criticized one another, and no one seemed to take it too personally.

During the midnight shift, the foremen joined us in the lab at 3:00 a.m. to play poker for an hour, then we plugged in fake test results with a collective wink.

It was reckless and irreverent—and also deeply human. I could have fun with people. Feel closer to them and more alive.

From that world, I learned that people can care more about each other than about their careers, homes, or appearances.

I saw that being seen doesn’t have to mean being impressive. That connection can flourish even amid chaos. I didn’t learn this from my white, middle-class suburban culture. I learned it from my Black and Latinx coworkers on the night shift in a factory.

We often focus on how trauma shapes personality, and it does. But the ongoing social conditioning we receive from the world around us plays a more powerful role in shaping who we become than we often realize.

Often outside our awareness, social conditioning teaches us what kind of person we’re allowed to be.

It determines which gets noticed, ignored, or judged.

It shapes whether and how we’re expected to grow.

It influences our self-worth, our capacity for joy, and our sense of belonging.

Sometimes, the places we think of as rough or broken turn out to be the places that teach us how to be fully human.

Always, the possibilities for learning, growth, healing, and transformation are multiplied by the variety of people and cultures we experience. 

In the previous post, I shared a story of a motorist whose car broke down in a snowstorm in rural Montana. After a long walk along a lonely road, he finally arrived at a ranch. Walking up to the door, he pounded and shouted, “Never mind, I don’t want your help!”

He wasn’t wrong. While many people may see his attitude and behavior as irrational and harmful, it can be validating and supportive to see it as functional and necessary.

If the motorist had let his guard down, he would have exposed his pain from a lifetime of rejection. If he had no prior experience of being met with accurate empathy and care for his protective stance, and the pain beneath it, revealing his pain would be intensely vulnerable.

Few people on the unexpected receiving end of raw pain and fear would respond with genuine understanding and attunement. For the motorist, it is better to feel misunderstood and rejected for pushing the rancher away than for inviting him to care for his pain. It’s better for the rancher, too, to experience the motorist’s angry mistrust than his more genuine rage if the rancher had been offered but was unable to respond sensitively to his pain.

What if the rancher understood the motorist’s pounding and shouting and didn’t mind because he didn’t take the attack personally? Suppose, as a wise witness, he responded accurately and compassionately:

“Hey, I’m so sorry that people in your past were so uncaring. I get that, buddy, it’s a tough world out there! Come on in, you’re welcome here.”

If, incredibly, the rancher was so kindly understanding, it would not be so easy for them. Such a response would likely elicit confusion, disorganization, and more mistrust. When a door opens, saying, “It’s safe to be seen and cared for now,” often, the person opening the door doesn’t appreciate what they are inviting.

Are they ready for all the pain and terror behind the protective strategy?
For the rage inside the receiver, that asks, “Where have you been all my life, when I’ve needed you?”

It’s helpful for givers and receivers of care to anticipate and appreciate various mistrustful responses, such as increased anger, confusion, and dismissal, likely to arise in the presence of unexpectedly compassionate care.

Facilitating healing and transformation often requires a strong and secure enough container to welcome and hold powerful reactions of mistrust.

Of course, to give this level of care to others, we must first receive it for ourselves.
We need surprising experiences of being seen and appreciated. We need to be able to rant and dismiss and see others as incapable and uncaring, then continue to receive hospitality and understanding.

I remember a story my father told me in childhood, perhaps because he rarely engaged with me that way.

A man’s car broke down in a snowstorm in the middle of nowhere in rural Montana. After pushing his vehicle to the side of the road, he found nothing but open fields around him. Trudging down the road for a few miles, he saw lights ahead. He became increasingly agitated as he walked toward the ranch house off the road.

When he reached the door, he pounded with his fists. When the rancher opened the door, he hollered forcefully: “Nevermind, I don’t want your damn help, anyway!”

As a child, I understood the story’s point was to invite curiosity about the man and wonder, “Why would he behave this way?” It was not to invite judgment. It’s a lot harder to be curious when you’re the rancher, answering the door to an angry, accusing stranger. Yet we therapists often find ourselves being the rancher.

Often, people seeking our help demand our understanding because they don’t expect to receive it otherwise.  Unconsciously, they may not believe they are worthy of help.  They may not think we are capable of helping. Alternatively, they may have parts that hold deep pain around asking for and needing help. They tend to be judgmental and openly criticize their partner, not trusting that we will see and hold their partner accountable for their role. They expect us to judge them instead of their partner. Their tone may convey contempt, not just for their partner but also for us.

We therapists often respond by saying, “Here’s the understanding and validation you’re looking for.” “I can see what your partner is doing, and it makes sense you’re angry and judging of them.” It’s almost as if we’re saying, “I’m not the person you’re accusing me of being, someone who wouldn’t help you if you broke down in a storm.” In other words, we’re busy defending ourselves, hoping that we can influence their view of us. This comes from a young part of us.

Validating and responding to demands for support and understanding generally backfires. Whether the partner is in the room or not, we are caught in a back-and-forth match of ‘who’s the bad guy.’ In EFT language, we are caught in a negative cycle with the person we want to help, defending ourselves from implicit accusations of being incapable and uncaring. As people hear implicitly that we feel attacked and are protecting ourselves from them, they feel less safe and more alone.

Being a therapist is often a lonely position where we are in the role of caring for others, with no one to see and care for us. When we feel not seen by our clients, it’s natural for our parts to step in and protect us. We need care and support for what it’s like for us to be the rancher, one who’s often responsible for our own feelings in order to be there for others.

When we have that, we can come alongside the person who’s demanding care by reflecting on the emotional learning in what we are seeing.

“I see how hard you’re working to help me understand you and to stand up for yourself. It’s almost like, in your experience, caregivers haven’t stepped in and come to your rescue when you’ve been hurt. I wonder if you’ve always had to stand up for yourself. If no one has been there for you?”

Photo by Chuck Cochran on Unsplash.

In my learning journey, I’ve been surprised to discover that everyone I meet—not just those with Big T trauma, histories of oppression, or who meet the criteria for a mental health diagnosis—carries enormous burdens of trauma and neglect.

This includes those who care for others—medical, mental health, and social work professionals, teachers, religious leaders, politicians, parents of young children, and partners in close relationships. It also includes those who don’t see themselves as carrying burdens but have family members who suffer greatly. In my healing journey, I’ve been astonished by the extent of burdens I have discovered within myself.

The perpetual conflict, contempt, and cynicism I observe within individuals, couples, and families mirror the hyper-polarization and divisions within our society. Terms like “white supremacy” and “patriarchal, capitalistic culture” have become normalized on the left. Meanwhile, “woke” and “liberal” have become terms of scorn on the right.

But what is at the root of these polarizing dynamics? Have they always existed? How do we raise consciousness about what maintains suffering and divides us as families and communities—without creating another narrative that can be turned into a weapon?

James C. Scott, a prominent American political scientist and anthropologist who passed away last year, was intrigued by the unwritten histories of those outside the ruling classes. Scott noted that hierarchies granting power and privilege to insiders while oppressing outsiders through methods like slavery and genocide have existed since the rise of city-states in Mesopotamia around six thousand years ago.

Compared to hunter-gatherer societies, cities were vulnerable to disease, crop failures, and the depletion of natural resources. To endure, they relied on taxation, strict enforcement measures, continuous technological advancements, and the domestication of people as producers for the state.

As city-states competed for dominance and resources, they grew increasingly powerful. Northern Europeans triumphed over other city-states around 1500 CE for various reasons. They became so powerful that their culture now prevails across much of the globe. 

On an evolutionary time scale, it’s only been a moment since hunter-gatherers lived in harmonious relationships with small groups of trusted others and the land. Increasingly, I suspect the burdens we carry today result from generations of living in city-states, where people either must submit to oppression, become oppressive themselves, or become complicit with the oppressors to survive.

While the oppressed carry many layers of psychological burdens, so do those who are granted, achieve, or are complicit with positions higher in the hierarchy and who have power over others. When individuals today become aware of the extent of their burdens and view them through a historical lens rather than a personal one, they can more easily redirect their judgment and blame toward awareness, healing, and cooperation.

Scott, J. C. (2017). Against the grain: A deep history of the earliest states. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Photo by Nejdet Duzen on Flickr.