The Simplest Explanation Almost Never Tells the Whole Story
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UPDATE (September 5, 2025): The US Department of Justice is weighing banning ownership of guns by transgender people. It is stunning to me…
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It’s been less than a week (six days, as I’m writing this) since 23-year-old Robin Westman, a trans woman, opened fire from outside a church in Minnesota during a Mass, killing two children, and wounding 18 other people, including two churchgoers in their 80s, and then turning the gun on herself. In the first couple of days after this horrific incident, there was wall to wall press coverage. By today, virtually nothing. We’ve become so inured, or more accurately, numbed, to violence that the shock of the moment quickly fades away, because it’s happened so many times that it's become just one more terrible thing in a long line of terrible things...
There are many things about this event that have troubled me, deeply. First, of course, is the sheer horror of what happened. As the father of three children, I cannot begin to comprehend the sheer devastation of losing a child, much less in such a violent and horrific way. I hope I never have to...
Today is the 241st day of 2025, and the Minnesota shooting was the 262nd of the year. And, if that weren’t bad enough, since 6 days ago, there have been five more mass shootings in the US, bringing the total to 267, more than one mass shooting each day...so far...there are still 121 days left in 2025.
But this isn’t a post about politics or gun violence or crime or mass shooters or anything like that. What troubled me in the aftermath of the shooting was how it and the shooter were characterized – by the sheriff, by federal government officials, and in posts I’ve seen online.
The sheriff called it a cowardly act, and called the shooter a coward. The shooter was many things, but a coward was not one of them. The American Heritage dictionary defines “coward” as “One who shows ignoble fear in the face of danger or pain.” Nothing that has come out about the shooter points to cowardice...quite the opposite in fact. The shooter showed no signs of being afraid. Rather, she had a fierce determination to carry out the shooting. That doesn’t make it honorable or good or anything like that, so don’t misinterpret what I’m saying. But it’s definitely not the act of a coward.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called Westman a "deranged monster." This is the person who shot Cricket, a 14-month-old dog she had intended to train for hunting pheasant, dead, after the canine ruined a hunt, killed another family’s chickens, and moved to bite her. She didn’t discipline the dog, didn’t seek a professional trainer, didn’t shoot it on the spot. Rather, she lured the dog to a gravel pit, and shot it there, cold-bloodedly. I’ve owned several dogs in my life, never found one that couldn’t be trained. I guess it takes a deranged monster to know one.
Even though Westman was identified from the start as transgender, the sheriff continuously referred to her as “him,” even though she had transitioned and legally changed her name in 2020. Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of South Carolina claimed: "Today's evil church school shooter was a trans [what the actual fuck is that supposed to mean?] who was likely groomed and transitioned as a teenager." Groomed? By whom? How do you know?
FBI head Kash Patel wrote on X: "The shooter has been identified as Robin Westman, a male born as Robert Westman." Right wing commentators seized on Westman’s gender as an explanation for the shooting. Several postings on Facebook purported to show that transgender shooters are responsible for a number of recent mass shootings. They (viciously) made that up. In fact, from 2013 to 2025, only five out of 5,729 mass shootings involved transgender perpetrators—representing just 0.087% of all incidents. Similarly, The Violence Project found only one confirmed transgender mass shooter in its database from 1966 to 2024. Rather, most mass shooters are cisgender white men. But nobody in the media (at least what I heard and read) pointed that out...nobody.
To his credit, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey responded to what quickly grew into an online outburst of transphobia: "Anybody who is using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community or any other community out there has lost their sense of common humanity."
The point of this is that we fear that which we don’t understand, and, more often than not, rather than seeking to understand, we make the easy, far too convenient call to vilify those whom we don’t understand. Immigrants, trans people, brown and black people, Asian people, and on, and on, and on. It added absolutely nothing to understanding Westman’s motivation to highlight that she was transgender. It only gave scared people a far too convenient “reason” they could latch on to, and confirmed their belief that transgenderism is evil, aberrant, sinful, and whatever other negative things they believe.
The often acrimonious conversation about sex and gender in our society today is a historically recent phenomenon, challenging the long-held idea that sex and gender are one and the same, and binary – you’re either male or female. These are beliefs that arose in Western culture and religion.[1] In fact, in the cultures of the ancient world, there was no difference noted between what we now call “homosexual” and “heterosexual” relationships. Distinctions concerning sexual identity, and prohibitions on same-sex relationships, only began to appear with the rise of Christianity, which rejected those earlier “pagan” religious beliefs. And it was not same-sex relationships that were being condemned, but rather any activity that non-Christians participated in.
In ancient Mesopotamia, the so-called "cradle of civilization," priests and priestesses of the goddess Ishtar, goddess of war and sexual love, were bisexual or transgender. In fact, one of Ishtar’s powers that was most awe-inspiring to her followers was her ability to turn men into women and women into men. Her father, Enki, was associated with semen and amniotic fluid, and therefore with fertility. Enki created a third gender, "neither male nor female" who became Ishtar’s servants. So, what is today referred to as "non-binary" gender was recognized over three thousand years ago as a third gender created by divine will.
There are many more such examples, most pre-dating Christianity, from many different cultures, such as nonbinary Vikings, Native American “two-spirits,” Indian Hijras, Japanese Kabuki theater (where men play female roles), and the Muxas in the Zapotec culture of southern Mexico.[2]
In indigenous cultures in North America (Native Americans and Alaskan Natives), people who embody both feminine and masculine gender traits are known as “two-spirits.” There is a long history of two-spirits in indigenous cultures, which have recognized that people have masculine and feminine spirits that can live in harmony with their male or female beings. In some of these cultures, two-spirits are revered as healers, spiritual leaders, or other exalted roles.
The irony of all this, given present-day divisions over gender identity and the call for a "return to traditional values" is that same-sex relationships were quite clearly traditionally accepted, respected, and even revered for over 2,000 years. And if this historical record weren’t enough, science reveals no clear basis in biology or physiology, and no anthropological evidence to support the idea of sex and gender being fixed and binary. In fact, there’s plenty of data that demonstrate exactly the opposite.
This is not intended to persuade you to change your beliefs, religious or otherwise, about transgenderism. Rather, it’s intended to get you to think, to realize that what you believe may or may not be grounded in biology or physiology or any other kind of science, but may in fact be a set of beliefs that are just that – beliefs – and, as such, can be informed by facts, as opposed to societal or cultural “norms.”
So, what else did we learn about Robin Westman? Numerous news outlets reported that the opinions and grievances stated in the videos and written materials attributed to Westman were wide-ranging, chaotic and often self-contradictory. The videos reportedly conveyed a fascination with guns and school shootings, racist and antisemitic views, a death threat targeting U.S. President Donald Trump, and suicidal thoughts. The footage showed notebooks written in English and other languages, according to ABC News. One notebook reportedly had a sticker stating "defend equality" with an LGBTQ+ flag overlaid with an image of a gun. Being transgender, it seems, really had nothing much to do with what she did. Instead, she was a troubled human being, and was for many years. Were there signs? Yes. Did anybody act on those signs, did her family seek counseling for her? Unknown, but apparently not. It turns out that this was an individual suffering from undiagnosed and untreated mental illness, and perhaps that explains much more about her than anything else. And yet, the coverage of that was very limited, compared to all of the other things that were talked about.
The net of all of this, I think, is that as humans, we are not binary. We’re not one thing or its opposite. Rather, we are complex, multi-faceted creatures, and when trying to understand another, or, frankly, to understand ourselves, it is the totality of who we are and what has shaped us that we need to understand and reckon with. Sadly, we’re a long way as a society from understanding that. It’s difficult, and so we seek the simplest, often wrong, explanations for our behavior.
[1] On April 8, 2024, the Vatican released a statement that gender-affirming surgery and surrogacy are violations of human dignity. Let that sink in for a minute.
[2] https://www.buzzfeed.com/claratsacwang/historical-examples-of-lgbtq-culture-around-the-world
Complex PTSD
You cannot see the future without seeing the past.
– Dune 2
The past is never behind us, it’s within us.
– Michael Meade
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over 49,000 people died by suicide in 2024 in the United States.[1] That’s one death every 11 minutes. And the rate of suicide by men is four times that of suicide by women. That means that of those 49,000 suicide deaths, 39,200 were men. One man took his own life every 13 minutes. Men make up 49% of the US population but nearly 80% of suicides. To put that number in perspective, the seating capacity of Madison Square Garden in New York City is just under 21,000. And, if that weren’t horrifying enough, 13.2 million people seriously thought about suicide, 3.8 million made a plan to kill themselves, and 1.6 million attempted it. This epidemic of male suicide is not unique to the United States. In Australia, 75% of all suicides are men. In the UK, it’s 74%, in Italy, 78%, France 75%, Brazil 80%...the numbers are remarkably consistent around the world.
So, are four times as many men as women depressed? The answer is not that simple.
Psychologists and therapists have only in the last twenty-five or so years begun to understand that the things I have described, especially repeated and compounded over a period of years, are repetitive traumas – not Trauma with a capital “T,” like sexual abuse, or witnessing a horrific event, but traumas, nevertheless. And those traumas, especially starting in early childhood, create the same lasting damage, the same neuro-physiological effects as more obvious capital “T” trauma. This kind of chronic trauma, such as prolonged child abuse or domestic violence, is called Complex post-traumatic stress disorder, or C-PTSD.[2]
Why has it taken so long to figure out? As Terry Real says in “I Don’t Want to Talk about It,”
“Understanding that innumerable small acts of passive trauma are driven by images of masculinity requires of us an act of conscious deliberation. Like fish trying to get a good look at the water they swim in, we find it hard to keep in focus the passive injuries we inflict on boys, because they are both so subtle and so common.”
Psychologists tend to evaluate and treat trauma (with a capital “T”), but often don’t recognize or treat the many wounds inflicted on us as children. While perhaps individually small, repeated and accumulated over time, they are indeed traumas (with a small “t”) and are equally as damaging as larger, more obvious traumatic experiences. Let me tell you that, despite all the work I've done to understand and heal from my childhood trauma, I am very much still a work in progress, though I’m miles advanced from where I was just a few short years ago.
A 1995-97 study conducted jointly by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente[3] found that childhood abuse and household dysfunction were highly correlated to health problems and death in adulthood. They developed a tool for measuring categories of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and found a direct correlation to later physical and psychological health problems. Persons who had experienced four or more categories of childhood exposure, compared to those who had experienced none had 4- to 12-fold increased health risks for alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, and suicide attempt, a 2- to 4-fold increase in smoking, poor self-rated health, greater than 50 sexual intercourse partners and sexually transmitted disease, and a 1.4- to 1.6-fold increase in physical inactivity and severe obesity.
A few years ago, I listened to the audiobook version of Fierce Intimacy, another of Terry Real’s works, and in the very first session, he talked about his relationship with his father. The similarities between his experience and mine floored me. And he said, “I came from a family of violence.” I never would have thought of my own experience as having come from a family of violence, and it shook me.
Everyone’s childhood experience is different, but like most victims of early childhood trauma, I took on, I believed in my core, that the abuse I suffered from my father was my fault. If only I could have learned how to be less selfish, stronger, more obedient and a better son, he wouldn’t rage at me and beat and berate me the way that he did. And so, I buried my anger, my pain, and my sadness deep, deep down inside me, and I learned that, no matter how hard I tried, it didn't matter. I didn’t matter. I buried it so deeply that as an adult, I had no idea it even existed, until a confluence of experiences caused it to explode into my conscious awareness.
After years of intense and painful personal work and therapy, going through a trauma recovery coaching program, and reading Terry’s books and many others about trauma voraciously, I finally came to understand the true nature of my suffering. I have begun to excavate all the anger, pain, and sadness, and come to realize that when I raged, I was reenacting what my father modeled for me as the way a man acts, and in no small way, defending myself in a very forceful manner that I was not able to as a child. Because of all the personal work I’ve done sitting in groups with other men, in therapy, and reading, I have learned how to understand my anger without projecting it onto others, and I can now talk about and process all the anger and pain that I had to bury as a kid. The most positive outcome of all the work I’ve done is that I’ve learned how to intercept that anger before it explodes, damaging me and the people around me.
I heard an interview with the actor Hugh Laurie (who played House on the series of the same name), and he said something which has stuck with me: “Most men are trying to play the role of their father until they find out, if they ever do, who they really are.”
I wish I could tell you that understanding the reasons why you act out is enough to give you everything you need to stop doing it, but it's not that easy. Understanding and healing is just not as simple as flipping a switch. Healing from C-PTSD is a process of recognizing the many small wounds repeatedly inflicted on us in childhood, and recasting them from an emotionally mature adult place. It doesn’t mean denying that they happened. It doesn’t mean ignoring them or pretending that they didn’t impact us, and that those impacts have followed us into adulthood, and in significant ways shaped who we are as adults. Rather, it means seeing them through a lens of emotional maturity, and releasing myself from the messages I took on as a child.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/data.html#cdc_data_surveillance_section_3-suicide-deaths-plans-and-attempts-in-the-united-states
[2] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/24881-cptsd-complex-ptsd
The Power of Language
It all begins with an idea.
The words we speak are a lot like the air we breathe – we need the air, we breathe it without conscious effort, or even conscious awareness, yet our very lives depend on it. Like the air we breathe, we build our world and our experiences and the way we relate to one another with words, quite often without conscious consideration of the power that they have, and that changing our words can change our experiences. Words have the power to build bridges, and they can create chasms. They can bind us to one another, and they can divide us.
We will delve into an exploration of how language shapes our world, shaping our experiences, influencing cultural identities, social dynamics, the things that unite us, and the invisible boundaries that divide us. This insightful journey uncovers the profound impact of words in our daily lives and challenges us to consciously connect to the way we communicate, and connect to the power of language to shape everything about our world.
In September 1962, John F. Kennedy gave a speech at Rice University to rally support for the US’s Apollo space program. He said:
“We shall send to the moon 240,000 miles away, a giant rocket, more than 300 feet tall on an untried mission to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to Earth. But why some say the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why 35 years ago fly the Atlantic? We choose to go to the moon. We chose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we’re willing to accept. One we are unwilling to postpone. And therefore, as we set sail, we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure that man has ever gone.”
At the time he gave that speech, much of the technology needed to achieve that goal was in its infancy, or didn’t exist at all. Computers were behemoths that filled, or mostly filled, an entire room, many thousands of times larger than what could fit in a space capsule. Memory...average apple watch has 500x the total memory in the computer on board the Apollo 11 rocket. Some of the various metal alloys and fuels needed to build and launch the rocket hadn’t yet been developed. And it had only been four short years since the first launch of a satellite into space.
JFK literally spoke into existence putting a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth before the end of the 1960s.
In 1987, Ronald Reagan gave a speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate at the Berlin Wall. The most memorable line of that speech was “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” The Soviet Union had been in existence since 1922, and Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev had only recently begun a policy of glasnost (openness) in the Soviet Union. The idea that the Berlin Wall, which had been erected by the Soviets and East Germany in 1961, could cease to exist might have seemed like an impossible dream. Yet, with his exhortation, Reagan spoke into existence the possibility that it could come down, and by 1989, it did.
While these are grand examples of the power of language, in fact, language is how we create and evaluate every experience in our lives. If I tell you that I am angry, what you understand about what I am feeling is not about what I am feeling at all. Rather, it is about what you understand as anger, based on your own experience of anger. And, by the way, I don’t necessarily know any more about my anger than you do. But if you ask me to describe what I am feeling in my body, and where, I might tell you that my chest is tight, I feel a burning behind my eyes, and a tension across my shoulders. You may ask me to describe those sensations, what shape they are, what color, what size. As I use language to describe them to you (and to myself), I am creating a more tangible bodily understanding of the emotion of anger that I am feeling, and a mental image of the bodily sensations. By connecting to those physical sensations that underlie what I’m describing and working to relax my body – to be present and aware of the bodily sensations and visualize shrinking the size and intensity of them – my feeling of anger begins to subside. Don’t get me wrong – anger is a real emotion, a subjective response to a physiological reaction. By exploring and identifying the physiological experience of my emotions, I’m able to understand and gain control over my subjective response.
Fear, Anger, and the Mythology of Difference
It all begins with an idea.
What follows probably won’t have much of an impact on the people I think could benefit from it most, and will probably piss off some of the people who read it. That said, it has been banging around in my head for a long time, especially during this last year plus of political and social unrest in the United States, and the re-election of Trump. I need, for myself if not for anyone else, to get it out of my head.
In an article I wrote in October, 2024 on Medium, I talked about the power of language, the unique ability that we humans have to literally create and shape our experiences in the world with the language we give to those experiences. This is not an aerie-faerie philosophical discussion. Think about bridges, cities, electric transmission lines, office buildings – whatever it is, it began with an idea (talking to myself in my head), given form by language. If you think I’m full of it (try thinking that without words), go ahead, stop talking. See if you can shut off that voice in your head that’s providing running commentary on your world 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Language is like the air we breathe, in that we take it for granted – we speak, and it rarely occurs to us, if at all, that how we speak, the words we use to express our feelings and beliefs, shapes our experience. Breathing is an autonomic function, controlled by our nervous system, necessary to keep us alive – it changes if we’re exerting ourselves, under stress, relaxing, sleeping – and if we bring our attention to this involuntary bodily function, we can consciously control it. This fact is at the root of most meditation modalities.
Can we change our experience by speaking differently about it? Just as we can control our breathing by focusing our attention on it, we can control our language by making a conscious, not reflexive, choice about the words we use to create and describe our experiences.
We can speak great things into existence. In September 1962, JFK gave a speech to rally support for the US space program. He said that, before the end of the decade, we would send a man to the moon and return him safely to earth. The materials and technologies needed to make that happen either didn’t exist, or were in their infancy relative to what would be necessary to bring this vision to life. And, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human being to set foot on the moon. JFK literally spoke into existence man on the moon!
What does this have to do with anything? For as long as we’ve had language, we have used it to create our identities, individually, and as groups of people. And we divide ourselves into different social groupings. White vs. non-white (a massive overgeneralization, by the way); Christians vs. non-Christians; Christians vs. Muslims; Christians vs. Jews; Jews vs. Muslims; Christians vs. “non-believers”; Republicans vs. Democrats; conservatives vs. liberals; progressives vs. conservatives; left vs. right; pro-life vs. pro-choice; “Americans” vs. anybody else...I could give a thousand more examples. We use those divisions to help ourselves feel comfortable with who we believe ourselves to be, and superior to other social groups, or to claim higher moral authority, or to denigrate those who are not included in our particular social hierarchy or political philosophy or income class or a host of other things. We are afraid of what we don’t identify with or understand, and we learn to fear and vilify “the other,” and our otherwise baseless fear motivates sometimes intense anger focused on whichever “other” we’re obsessed with at the moment. This has worked to the advantage of despots for centuries.
We make tangible and real what is nothing more (and, indeed, nothing less) than a creation wrought with words. Let that sink in for a minute. These divisions among us, to which we cling as though our very lives depend on them are just one of many possible fictions which we’ve chosen to speak into existence.
Let me give an example to illustrate what I’m talking about. America is a racist society. The divisions between black and white or brown and white or Asian and white could not be more stark. Racism has led to inequality and violence over and over again in our history, and we talk about racial purity, racial (in)equality, racism, reverse racism (an absurd concept on its face), and on and on and on. Yet, the very concept of race as a way of segregating one group of humans from another is a fiction! There is only one race, the human race, and even that concept is fallacious, because there are no other “races” that exist.
Scientists classify organisms, whether plants, animals, insects, or indeed, us humans, on the basis of scientifically observable characteristics. Carl Linnaeus was a Swedish biologist and physician who formalized binomial nomenclature, the modern system of naming organisms. He is known as the "father of modern taxonomy." The taxonomy which Linnaeus described classifies all organisms as follows – kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species (“race” is not one of the classifications in the taxonomy!). For us humans, that looks like this:
Kingdom: Animalia
I hate to break it to you, kids, we are animals.
Phylum: Chordata
Among other things, these are creatures that are bilaterally symmetric, with a spine.
Class: Mammalia
Mammals are warm-blooded, have milk-producing mammary glands, and fur or hair, as well as a number of other distinguishing characteristics.
Order: Primates
Large brain sizes, binocular vision, color vision, vocalizations, shoulder girdles allowing a large degree of movement in the upper limbs, and opposable thumbs (in most but not all) that enable better grasping and dexterity.
Family: Hominidae
Yes, creationists, in common parlance, “the Great Apes.” I get it, you don’t like where this is heading.
Genus: homo
Pongo (the Bornean, Sumatran and Tapanuli orangutan); Gorilla (the eastern and western gorilla); Pan (the chimpanzee and the bonobo); and Homo, of which only modern humans (Homo sapiens) remain.
Species: sapiens
Yep, us.
In case you missed it, let me say it again – there are no subgroupings anywhere in this taxonomy which describe and differentiate “race.” Yet we have fought wars and killed countless millions of ourselves over this fictional concept, not just in the US, but in various places around the world in our roughly 300,000 year history on the planet, though mostly in the last couple thousand years.
There are countless more examples of what I’m describing, equally incendiary. Think about sex vs. gender, Diversity Equity and Inclusion, national identities (in case you missed it, there is an ongoing genocidal war in the Middle East between Jews and Palestinians), men vs. women...
Scientists who study the brain and PTSD, particularly Complex PTSD[1] have shown that the language we associate with traumatic incidents quite literally wires circuits in the brain in response to those traumas. Trauma recovery, therefore, is a process of giving different language to those traumatic experiences, thereby rewiring those circuits. If, as a child, I was repeatedly emotionally and psychologically abused and ignored by my parents or caregivers, and I learned through those experiences that I don’t matter, healing the resultant trauma is almost entirely about re-examining those experiences, recognizing that what I suffered was a projection of my parents’ own childhood wounds on me, and learning to love myself as I am, and that, in fact, I do matter. This then frees me to see my adult experiences through a different, emotionally mature, lens than the one triggered by (usually unconscious) childhood memories.
As a trauma recovery coach, this is perhaps the most important skill that I teach my clients. It’s conceptually simple and straightforward, and it takes presence, awareness, and lots and lots of practice to hone this skill to the point where it almost becomes second nature – stop, breathe, recognize that you’re not in danger, that you’re reacting to an old experience, and you can choose to respond differently, as an emotionally mature adult, rather than reacting reflexively as that wounded child you once were.
So what? The first step to solving a problem is recognizing that there is one. Do I naively believe that we can change humanity by all of us choosing to speak and think differently? Well, yes, that is the key, and no, I recognize that affecting that kind of change on a global scale would be all but impossible. As the saying goes, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time!” My encouragement to you, then, is start with you, one bite at a time. Start to be aware of how you speak, to others, yes, and also to yourself! When you find yourself having an opinion about that jerk that just cut you off in traffic, and how you’re going to pass him and cut him off in return, with some choice words and gestures hurled his way, stop. Breathe, consider that you don’t know what’s going on with that other person. Are they rushing to get to the hospital because their wife is about to give birth? Are they late for work for the third time this week, and afraid of being fired? And so what if they are just a jerk? Of all of the things that are going to happen in the course of your day today, how much value is there in giving an outsized amount of your energy to that person?
The only person you can change is yourself. By your example, perhaps you will inspire others in your life to be more attentive to how they speak to themselves and others, and they may inspire still others by their example. Be the butterfly in the butterfly effect.[2]
We can have a world in which we all realize that we want the same things, for ourselves and our children and our children’s children, and our energy is far better spent on bringing that vision into reality than on tearing ourselves and others down based on perceived differences that are really just a grand fiction we’ve created. We can create any story we want, so let’s make it a good one with a happy ending! Or, we can continue to divide and destroy one another and the world we live in.
I know what I choose…
[1] Complex PTSD is the term used to describe what can result from experiencing chronic trauma, such as prolonged child abuse or domestic violence.
[2] This term is closely associated with the work of the mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz. He noted that the butterfly effect is derived from the example of the details of a tornado (the exact time of formation, the exact path taken) being influenced by minor perturbations such as a distant butterfly flapping its wings several weeks earlier.
Judgment and Projection
It all begins with an idea.
Language powerfully shapes our interactions with others. As humans, we all have judgments bouncing around in our minds all day long – “It’s a beautiful day,” or “The guy driving in front of me is a jerk,” or “Gee, Frank is such a sharp guy, so smart, and a real man’s man!” What we choose to do with those judgments is a whole other thing. I can lean on my horn when the guy in front of me is going too slow, cut around him, give him the finger, or yell out my window at him. Or I can just let it go – pass him, put him in my rearview mirror, and continue on my way.
Perhaps the most unhelpful thing I can do to myself with language is to project my feelings onto someone else. In the example I gave above about anger, if I witness someone behaving with anger, I will absolutely have judgments about the situation, and about them. I might tell them that they’re a bully, or they’re not being very mature, or to just shut up, or that they’re generally a flawed human being for getting angry about whatever it is that they’re angry about. Here’s the thing – those judgments have nothing to do with that other person. They are my projections onto that other person about what kind of person they are. In the same way that I filter my observations about their anger through the prism of my own experience of anger, my judgments about another person are not about that person at all, but rather about me, myself. Whether they trigger something old in me, a memory, let’s say, about how my father used to be when he was angry, or something that is true about myself, projections are always rooted in something that is true about me, not the other person.
Projections do not just have to be negative evaluations of someone else. I might project that Mike, my neighbor, has it all together – a beautiful house, a beautiful wife, nice cars – clearly he’s super successful, and has a perfect life. The truth is that I don’t know anything of the sort about Mike. Behind all the amazing things I think are true about him, he may have demons he struggles with that I know nothing about. His marriage may be on the rocks. He may be stretched to the breaking point financially, not sure how on earth he’s going to continue to sustain what looks like a storybook life. What’s far more likely true is that my beliefs about Mike’s amazingness have a basis in my own feelings about my own life. Maybe I believe that my house and my cars aren’t nearly as nice as his, and so I’m not as capable or successful a human being as Mike is.
The power of projections lies in what they can teach me about myself. If I can take a step back, breathe, and probe myself for what’s going on that is leading me to project those feelings onto someone else, I can uncover whatever it is that generated that reaction in me, process it, and see something I may not have seen in myself before. And that is a big step toward understanding and healing my wounds. Whatever I think about somebody else is never about them. While I can observe someone else’s behavior (the facts of the situation, if you will), my reaction to it, and my beliefs about that other person and about the world are exactly that – my beliefs. Having the self-awareness to realize that, and to be curious about what’s going on in me when I project is one more step in my journey of self-discovery and healing, and it is entirely shaped by the language I give to it.
Accountability and Integrity
A basic definition of accountability is when your words are aligned with your actions. “Her word is her bond,” or “when he says something, you can take it to the bank.” Accountability is about doing what you say you will do. Integrity is a closely related, but different idea. Integrity is about being who you say you are. Let me give you an example to illustrate the difference. Let’s say that I make a commitment to meet you at a particular place at 5:00 this afternoon. 5:00 comes and goes, you don’t hear from me, and I don’t show until almost an hour later. I am out of account with my agreement to meet you at 5:00. When I arrive, I tell you that the reason I didn’t make it on time, and didn’t call to let you know I was going to be late, is that I came across an accident, and I stopped to render aid to the injured people in the wreck until the police and paramedics showed up. Even though I am out of account, I am in integrity, because if the same thing happened again, I would do the same thing – stop and render aid.