Photo by Vidar Nordi-Mathisen on Unsplash
When I was 24 I drove across the U.S. for the first time. I love driving, and so did the person I was dating. We’d stay in crappy hotels and eat a big diner breakfast the next morning, then drive for 10 hours, barely stopping. We’d chosen the low-slung belt of Interstate 40. We started in Charlottesville, Virginia. After a few days we crossed the top of Texas—that little rectangle of land that kicks up into the space of Oklahoma. The sky and the dirt were the color of milky coffee. The few stalks of tall grass whipped back and forth in the gusts.
We pulled off to the side of the road to switch drivers and when I got out of the car the wind swept the air out of my mouth so hard it made me cough. I squinted down the freeway but there was nothing for my eyes to catch: no promise of a town, or gas station, or abandoned barn.
Morning faded out and the sun burned through the haze. We opened the windows and in that wind I now smelled something rank—a scent I’d never encountered—fetid, pungent, sour, wet, and so potent I wanted to retch. I scanned the horizon but there was nothing to see. We drove into the smell and it continued to crest and deepen in intensity. Thirty minutes later—2000 miles—an enormous stockyard came into view. The cows were massed too close; pushed, bellowing, into shoots; hock-deep in mud and dung. What I saw matched the smell.
We drove past in silence. Fifteen minutes later, I said: “I’ve always known in the back of my mind that my politics didn’t match the fact that I eat meat. For some reason, I never actually considered becoming a vegetarian. But as of right now, I am.”
That split-second decision, born of my disgust and horror, stuck. I didn’t see it coming. I just decided, with my body leading the way. Even now, I can’t explain why that smell and that jarring sight tipped me into a change that impacted the rest of my life.
Not all decisions are like that. But I have noticed that my mind chatters its arguments about what I should do and why, and if my body doesn’t assent it’s unlikely I’ll truly move into action. The decision-making process is more complex than the logic brain lets on. I think the people who devote themselves to making propaganda understand this better than the people in education.
Despite our knowing how complex it is to even persuade ourselves to change, let alone our clients, if we work in mental health, it’s often still the first impulse to provide information, or a helpful explanation of why X will be so much better if only Y happens. Facing the contradictions and complexity of embodied existence, we often cling to the simplicity of a logical explanation. We can thank psychoanalysis, then, for teaching us how squirrely the mind can be when it’s confronted with information or arguments about how it should change, when it doesn’t want to.
There’s denial, when the pain that arises at the thought of sundering a cherished coping mechanism, like substance use, contorts our consciousness and behaviors so that we won’t have to face it.
There’s repression, pushing a desire or truth out of conscious awareness, or keeping an unconscious drive or thought below our waking mind. The energy we use to push the information away often erupts elsewhere, in a somatic symptom such as hives, or chronic pain, or inflammation, further distracting us from the content itself.
There’s compartmentalization, repression’s cousin, which walls off from our awareness the need to act, or the pain that keeps intruding into our thoughts or dreams, stealing precious energy from other areas of our lives, and sapping our will to change.
There’s fetishistic disavowal, often formulated as “I know very well, but . . .” which we see so often in relation to climate: “I know very well that climate change necessitates that I radically rethink the way I live my life and what I consume, but my impact is so low compared to corporations and there are so many new inventions happening right now that maybe I can just keep going like this a little longer . . .”
These concepts help us understand how even the most moral argument, or the most earnest appeal, or the most thoroughly fact-checked research cannot make it through the thicket of our defenses.
What’s less discussed in mental health is the complex interaction between our individual defenses and the ways the larger structures that shape and consolidate the dominant culture work together to make change appear much more difficult than it actually is.
Structures, and the ideologies that animate them, shape what counts as normal, usual, or valued by the dominant culture. One way these structures work is to make us believe that there are certain areas of the social order, certain aspects of being, that are fully outside our control as individuals, or so entrenched in the culture—so much the “accepted consensus”—that the idea of speaking about them as if they can change can elicit shame or disbelief, even in those who desperately want the change to occur.
We can see this today in conversations about abolition, in relation to the criminal justice system. We can see it in the calculated speech of those advocating for the end of the growth model in capitalism. We can see it when people ask what reparations for the enslavement of African Americans will look like. We can see it when we try to imagine large corporations whose top boards are made up predominantly of people of color, some of whom identify as women or nonbinary. We can see it in the confusion that arises when decolonization is understood not as a metaphor for deep transformation, but as the actual insistence that land be returned to indigenous communities.
I choose these examples because they elicit in my body a simultaneous combination of longing, and curiosity, and terror, and deep knowing. I choose them because even as I write these sentences, I am nervous about what you will think about this post and imagine you will click away when you get to that paragraph. I tell myself to choose more “palatable” examples of social change, so I won’t be thought of as too radical, too naive, too outside the ostensible topic of mental health and structural violence, even as all these issues are about mental health, and the efforts of institutions to police and cordon off the arena of structural violence from its responsibility or purview.
Notice how I have assumed you don’t share my longings, my terror, my curiosity. Notice how if I delete that paragraph I can never know what it’s like for you, or if you too are sitting with these wonderings, or if you are talking and working daily with people who are already putting these changes into action, and have been, for years.
Ideology works by recirculating the idea that the social consensus is infallible and that to be granted the safety of participation in the dominant culture there are certain ideas, certain changes that cannot be said aloud, or that will be treated as absurd, or idealistic, or simply dismissed without comment.
I was struck, recently, by a study in Nature whose authors shared that “We find a form of pluralistic ignorance that we describe as a false social reality: a near universal perception of public opinion that is the opposite of true public sentiment. Specifically, 80–90% of Americans underestimate the prevalence of support for major climate change mitigation policies and climate concern. While 66–80% Americans support these policies, Americans estimate the prevalence to only be between 37–43% on average.” (italics in the original).
How many other issues are suffering from this same false social reality? How many changes that we now celebrate as evidence of our culture’s ethics, or generosity, or willingness to confront our history, were once regarded as threatening and absurd?
What psychoanalysis and structural analysis give us, in these concepts about how change happens or is prevented from happening, are ways to talk about power. We can “know,” in our bodies, or in our minds, that we need to change. But whether we believe we can act, and what we think will happen to us if we do, is inseparable not only from our lived experience, but also our conceptualizations of power.
What are your go-to “explanations”—to yourself, your clients, your friends and community, about how change happens, and how it gets stuck? What do you tell yourself, when you start to dream of changes you want to see in your own life, and in our collective future? I wonder if the words get stuck in your throat, or the image blacks out in your mind.
I wonder how those of you whose expertise is in somatics, or ritual, or other healing modalities, can add to this conversation about how change happens. I hope all of you will write your ideas about change in the comments section, so we can thicken what I’ve sketched here with what you know. And also—on a pragmatic note—Substack has just created a kind of Slack channel option for us, and I’m thinking about turning it on, and I wonder if y’all would be interested in contributing to that—do you want me to do it?
That’s all for today—thank you as always for reading, and have a lovely day.
Rebecca
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