village marination
I’m marinating my brain with village things these days. My depth psychology therapist friends and I used to talk about cognitive behavioral therapy with a lot of disdain, discussing at length how the way we worked was just So Much More Superior. And then as I got further and further into the work of being a therapist, I found that without realizing it, I was a cognitive behavioral therapist at times. (Surprise, surprise, that binary broke down like all the rest.) The way I used it and loved it was that in order to change, we need to broaden our imagination about possibilities. And we don’t have to wait for them to be spontaneously born from inside us, which may or may not ever happen, we can bring them in from the outside and start to see what they bring up in us, what are the resistances, what do we do to block these beautiful directions. (Yes, this is one of the things depth psychology is really good at.)
So. As a (white het cis) person recovering from individualism and self-sufficiency, which we are all extensively culturally indoctrinated in and so even if you never really liked it or subscribed to it, you’ll have leanings in that direction, AND if you bought in in a significant way like me with its roots going down deep and wide, well, a lot of marinating in a different way is required.
As I marinate, I’m thinking about the actual village of 600 people I grew up in. Not highly educated, not super emotionally articulate but all in on what we’re now calling collective care and mutual aid. I’m thinking about being part of churches which had a village-ish way, but with higher demands for belonging and a general sense of a sickening controlling claustrophobia.
Then I moved to the most unfriendly city I’ve personally lived in (Seattle), moved further and further left politically and socially, had my children and started my career in earnest and did what everyone I know in Seattle does, and I think it’s pretty normal across the urban U.S. - pulled way in and focused mainly on raising my children and doing my work. It’s not that I haven’t had friends here, I have really lovely friends, but when the nuclear family is the structure we’ve all been trained to make primary, time with friends always comes second and the madness of trying to schedule will for sure be a barrier, and after you throw in chronic illness, I’m out. I’ll see people other than my partner and kids and my clients when it works. It’s not woven in, it’s not essential, I’m not carrying anyone else or being carried by anyone else. And I was overwhelmed for so long with parenting, working and being sick that I had no desire for more. I actively for a long time was mainly in touch with desiring less, less responsibility, less doing, less being needed, less contact, less of fuckin’ everything.
Now I’m trying to unlearn. And it’s really only because I’ve moved into a different phase of life where my entire life is blessedly more spacious and in that, shockingly lonely. It turns out making your nuclear family your relational center and hustling in a capitalist economy has some flaws. I’m unlearning because I’m lonely, not because I’m enlightened.
What’s my point? Mainly because this post started writing itself in my head and it’s so satisfying to put down the words. But also my point is to point to how there are more and more voices inviting us all to a different way of living and their reasons are really compelling. What we’re doing isn’t working - structuring everything around nuclear-family-first, hustling for the man or for ourselves to pay our bills, and maybe perseverating on how much being connected with more people demands of us, rather than what it offers us. It’s not working. Whether you’ve gotten in touch with it yet or not, it isn’t fuckin’ working.
Just to spell out how it’s not working a little bit more -
If you didn’t hit the jackpot with having great parents, you’re screwed. It’s all up to them, our entire wellbeing and thriving, and don’t get me started on how many of our psychology modalities reinforce this endlessly endlessly endlessly, analyzing to fuckin’ death the dynamics with your mom and dad and too often completely ignoring the soup we’re all swimming in, which has so much more to do with who we’ve become than the influence of two people, because those two people were traumatized by the soup and channeled the soup into our childhood homes. That’s for another post though. My point here - there is no safety net if your parents can’t do the thing they’re supposed to do, and let me tell you right now, no one can do it. It’s too much. It’s completely insane that we still somehow think this is a good idea, to put this much on two people. Attachment parenting experts - please start talking about the village or fuck off. The people who have done it well? They’ve been harmed in the process, I promise, UNLESS they did parenting spread across a group of adults, which some people do. But it’s not the norm.
Capitalism rewards a few specific career tracks and the rest of them are basically screwed in terms of feeling financially secure across an entire lifespan. The government offers a few basic supports if you’re really hitting bottom, but if you’re somewhere in between the bottom and rarely stressed financially, you’re back to needing good (financially resourced) parents or family members to have any sense of a safety net. And of all the ways of asking for and receiving help, money is the surest path to feelings of humiliation, shame, or at least very ruffled offended feathers if you try to reach out a financial helping hand.
I could go on and on. About how we have a blue party and a red party with no bridges in between. Because we don’t know how to stay human with each other when we disagree because we lost a connection to all belonging to each other a long time ago. About how I am 48 and have longed for wise elders my whole life and don’t have any. About how we’ve come to focus so so so much more on growing self-love and rich individual internal worlds than on building communities that don’t leave you wondering if you’re lovable in the first place. Where every single aspect of being a person doesn’t have to be brought in house and can instead be spread across the many outside of us. A whole group carrying the load of each other.
I’m starting to drift further into the vague ether. I’m not remotely an expert on this. But I plan to be. Here’s something I know about myself from having developed an isolated and very rich interior world - when something like this clicks into place, the dog-with-a-bone part of me isn’t gonna let this go until not only can I articulate more clearly on the topic, I’ll have changed my whole life to embody it. (I have one more kid to launch in a few short months and then I’ll be hitting the road until I find the eco-village that’s calling my name.) So, more to come.
(I re-posted from Tad Hargraves’ substack On Culture Making awhile back. He’s definitely more of an expert if you wanna go deep dive on his writing.)