Finding our way...

Each month in the SMP Center we explore a theme. I choose themes that I believe can help us grow through this circumstance we share of parenting one or more children who choose to navigate the world through a trans-identification. February’s theme focused on the types of stories we’re telling ourselves and how to apply consciousness and agency to change those stories. Humans are natural meaning-makers, and how we make meaning of the events in our lives determines the quality of experience we’re having.  

One of this month’s prompts invited members to share their thoughts on this quote: 

One of our moms shared this comment in response:

…The past decade has been HARD with both my kids and for a long time I wasn’t able to dream or see the beauty in life and was really just in survival mode. But it’s also where so much sh*t was turned into fertilizer in my life to create new ways of seeing and being and now I feel like I have more capacity to breath and to step back and observe and consider different ways of looking at things, noticing which story is showing up within me. -Marie B.

(I know, right?! We do have such an amazing group of moms. Gotta love that metaphor: sh*t turned into fertilizer.) 

During our latest live group discussion, another (related) theme emerged. What are we feeding our minds (and our stories)? You know the old saying, “You are what you eat.” I’ve consistently noticed in my work with moms that the meaning of our stories directly correlates to the content we allow into our minds each day, and I’ve certainly found this to be true for me.  

Could it be possible that many are stuck in anger simply because they’re feeding it? Moms (me included) often claim to have acquired the equivalent of a PhD in Gender Ideology, like somehow if we can just understand it, we’ll be able to make it stop, make it go away. “Knowledge is power,” right? 

There’s another ancient saying, “What you focus on expands.”

Boy, I remember feeling so much gratitude when I discovered 4th Wave Now and Benjamin Boyce. It was so important to be able to check my sanity; to confirm that I wasn’t alone in this. 

I found online support groups and spent hours each day reading articles, listening to podcasts, spending more time on Twitter (before it was X) than I ever had, making snarky comments and rooting on “the good guys”. My description on Twitter for awhile was, “I’m just here for the sarcasm.” And oh, it felt good. It felt righteous!  

I lived in a hostile world, and I was on the right side of history. 

But I started to notice that the more stories I read and listened to of ruined lives and families, the more I was convinced that this circumstance would also ruin mine. I noticed that when I went to support meetings, I came out of them feeling worse than I did going in. I always left even more afraid and utterly convinced that if I didn’t save my daughter from this cult, it would blow up her future, along with my whole family.

And then, one night, I found myself doom-scrolling. Actually, this was a regular practice that often kept me up way past a reasonable bedtime. (Truthfully, this was at a time when I’d avoid sleep because it just meant waking up to another day of the nightmare.) 

But this time, I noticed something. I was seeking a certain level of satisfaction, of outrage, and I couldn’t seem to stop. It hit me that this was clearly an addiction. Was this really who I wanted to be? 

I started paying attention to how I was responding to the world around me based on the stories I was consuming on a daily basis. I profiled people, judging their intelligence and their motives, assessing whether they were friend or foe depending on which side I assumed they were on. And thankfully, it did not escape my notice that my daughter was having a parallel experience, also perceiving herself to be in a hostile world while on the right side of history. 

It didn’t happen overnight, but slowly I started changing my “diet” of information. And as I did, I noticed something else. The less I fed my fear and anger, the less I felt it. And the less I felt it, the more peaceful my household was. When I looked at my daughter, I no longer saw a representation of the collapse of all I knew and loved. Rather, I saw my kid doing her best to figure out who she is in this world. 

And I thought about who she needed me to be as her mom and primary model of womanhood.

I once thought it was important to model for my children that you fight for what you believe in. In fact, you die for it if comes to that. I was truly ready to do just that, imagining being strung up on the wall alongside my gender critical comrades. 

I even wrote a whole article about how easily we could adopt JoJo Rabbit as the theme movie for moms in our circumstance. SPOILER ALERT (if you’ve not seen the movie, I highly recommend it and don’t want to spoil it for you. I’d suggest skipping this entire next block:) 

Jojo is young boy in war torn Germany who wants to be a Nazi, and whose (imaginary) best friend is Hitler. At one point in the film, Jojo asks his mom about the people hanging in the square, when she won’t let him look away from the bodies. 

“What did they do?”  

She replies, “What they could.” 

If you’ve seen the film, you know Jojo later discovers his mom in the square, having met the same fate for her efforts in the resistance. After many views of this film, my thoughts about it have shifted a bit. I still see the many parallels to our experience. There’s clear love between mother and son, and she allows his identity exploration though she’s obviously not a fan of his misguided hopes and dreams. 

And he suspects that his mom is up to some “traitorous” behavior. We also often see her swigging from the open bottle of wine in her hand, grappling with the loss of loved ones (including her teen daughter to illness,) and the state of her homeland. 

Jojo is 10 years old when he loses his mom and is left alone in the world. (There’s a hint that his dad is alive as a refugee in another country, but he’s not there when Jojo is essentially orphaned.) 

And now I think, hmm. His mom chose to do what she could and it’s even possible her efforts, combined with those of other members of the resistance, helped to pave the way for Allied forces to liberate the city from the Nazis. At one point, Jojo hears the gun shots as one of his protectors–who wears the Nazi uniform–is executed by the city’s saviors. 

Honestly, I don’t know if there was another way to go about ending the Holocaust. It’s hard to comprehend WWII’s staggering loss of life, the atrocities that were committed, both sides demonstrating some of the ugliest of what humanity is capable of–it’s a lot. We find ourselves, once again, in an incredibly unstable and divisive period. How does it end this time? And what emerges from the ashes? 

It’s a brutal scene when Jojo recognizes his mom’s shoes–attached to her dangling body. He clings to them and sobs. She died for what she believed in.  And orphaned her son. The movie ends on a happy note, and it seems Jojo’s captured mind has been freed from Nazi tyranny, along with his country. But I can’t help but wonder, what happened next for Jojo? Who looked after him and mentored him through adolescence? 

I do think it’s important to figure out what it is we can do that aligns best with our values. A sense of agency is important to our sanity. I certainly don’t condemn any choice as wrong, but our choices do indeed have consequences.

I’d like to think that if there were a gun to my head, I wouldn’t utter things I believe to be untrue. I want to believe I cannot be coerced into pretending I share a worldview that doesn’t seem to me to honor human wholeness; that doesn’t encourage the best in us. 

And it’s complicated isn’t it? Like in The Good Place, it’s so difficult today to live a virtuous life. We all do the best we can. For me–knowing that my kids are more likely to absorb my way of being than they are my words of lecture–I ask myself, what do I want to model for them? 

When I extricated myself from the information bubble I was existing in, and started looking for what was beautiful and worth living for, I found plenty. I found so much. In fact, it seemed I was even more capable–on the other side of my “dark night of the soul” –of the emotions of awe and wonder; it seemed my heart had burst open and could handle deeper levels of all kinds of feelings. I realized my fascination with humans and all we’re capable of had not only survived, but had intensified and now drove me to share my discoveries in an effort to help others grow bigger than the pain this causes, so they too can experience more Life. 

My obsession with the human experience and with Life itself continues, but I no longer feel I live in a hostile world or that I have enemies. I look around and I just see people, fellow humans struggling to make sense of their own painful experiences. Unsure of how to feel better, confused by how bad things feel yet not recognizing the influences that are making them feel this way and the agency they have to change it. Like humans will do, they’re seeking answers and solutions, even if what they’re finding isn’t actually making things better. 

In this information age, where so many of us are slaves to the algorithms, I think it might be possible to actually use these tools to find our way back to ourselves. I agree with what Lisa Marchiano says when I interviewed her; that we’ve been divorced from our intuition. She says this in reference to the effects of gender ideology, but I put forth—and she agreed—that this has been happening for a very long time, and we’re just seeing the latest effects of what humanity looks like when we no longer trust ourselves.

So how do we find our way back? Or maybe, a better question is how do we find our way forward? How do we tune back in to ourselves to make our way toward whatever the future holds, because there is no going back. That’s just not how things work. 

Our feelings are one way that we figure out where we are; what story we’re in. If we know how to use them as information, our feelings and emotions can help us navigate toward the things that provide us a better experience of Life. Personally, I think when we’re doing it right, Life mostly feels good. (There will still be plenty of hardship and suffering along the way, but we’re built for this and again, if we know how to use our feelings as information, they’ll help us know what to do. To be on a growth trajectory, we have to hit rough—and inevitably even tragic—patches that invite us to develop our capacity.) 

It may also be important to distinguish here between different types of “feel good.” And this likely warrants a whole article, but a quick crash course: knowing the difference between hedonic and eudaimonic “feel good” can help us stay in balance and know whether we’re engaged in too much of one or the other: 

From ThoughtCo: 

In psychology, there are two popular conceptions of happiness: hedonic and eudaimonic. Hedonic happiness is achieved through experiences of pleasure and enjoyment, while eudaimonic happiness is achieved through experiences of meaning and purpose. Both kinds of happiness are achieved and contribute to overall well-being in different ways.

Most of us are off balance here because the world seems to run on selling us hedonic pleasures. Do you have enough meaning and purpose in your life? How do you decide what to do each day? Are you on autopilot, letting your obligations and pleasure-seeking impulses steer you? 

For me, once I could see how much my experience was being influenced by what I fed my attention, it was easier than I expected to stop consuming that type of content. There were many times I wondered if this was the right thing to do. Maybe it was important that I stay plugged into what was happening, stay in the fight, even if it meant losing my daughter. Or that she loses her mother.

After much contemplation and meditation, as well as regularly checking in both with myself and with ancient wisdom traditions, I’m more confident than ever that I align with these words of the poet, Rumi: 

When I prompted our community members with this one, as usual, I got more brilliant responses including this one:

I love this quote ... when I have a tight grip on things because of a need to control and fix it has generally wound up making things worse. Instead of pretending I have all the answers I am just trying to be the person I want to be and hopefully let things flow from there. I can be sad about someone’s choices but they are theirs to make. I want to show up in the world in a way I feel good and let go of what does not belong to me.  

“I want to show up in the world in a way I feel good and let go of what does not belong to me.” This. Notice the “feel good” in there? Another mom shared this, but it was when I was able to do this myself that my experience shifted.

I recently had an article shared with me that summarized how the Stoics consider personal responsibility (which you’ll notice aligns well with a focus on the how-you’re-showing-up approach):

You are responsible for your beliefs, your words and deeds...and your values. What are you not responsible for? The behavior of your children (You can be a good parent, but how your children respond is up to them). The opinions of your colleagues, friends, and strangers (Be a good friend, a good neighbor, a good citizen; the rest is up to them). If you focus on the things that are up to you, then you can take satisfaction in having done your part and let go of fear.

So then, the work for the Stoic (along with adherents to many other ancient wisdom traditions) is to discover what “feels good” to help you know how you want to show up. I’d encourage a more eudaimonic approach here to determine for yourself a little checklist. When I spent some time on this, I generated these questions to help me make sure the way I move through the world is in alignment with what makes me feel good.

To check myself, I ask “are my words, thoughts, and actions:

• Creating a sense of division or connection?

• Coming from a place of righteousness or curiosity?

• Rooted in rigidity or agility? 

• Defensive or seeking to understand the other’s experience? 

• Conveying hostility or compassion?”

If it wasn’t obvious, I shoot for what’s closer to the question mark. This checklist also helps me to determine my information diet. Does the content I’m reading, watching, or listening to make me feel good (in a eudaimonic way)? Or does it make me feel like I live in a hostile world where I need to be paranoid about my fellow humans?

I must also confess that I do indulge on occasion in a little hedonic righteousness, but I do it with awareness now–like when I eat a piece of cake on a special occasion. It’s really quite rare these days, and like the cake, I’ve discovered it usually it doesn’t give me the same hit of satisfaction it once did, and rarely do I go in for seconds anymore. 

I’m a fan of paying attention to what’s working. I would invite you to ask if what you’re doing is working for you? If so, what’s it working to accomplish? How are you feeling these days?

Personally, I feel quite driven to spread the message that it’s not only okay, but may even have a more positive impact on the world for you to use your eudaimonic “feel goods” to help you find your way. Feel free to adopt those questions above if you’re ready for more peace and equanimity in your life. I promise it has its own world-changing impact. (I don’t make promises lightly. This has been well-tested throughout recorded human history.)

All SMP member quotes are shared with permission and credited where and how requested.