(Healing, connection is) to hold space for each other

Phew. My initial reaction to the results of the election last month was relief. The anxiety that had been churning in my stomach and bearing down on my shoulders and chest lifted, creating a little more space to breathe. It is not lost on me that this language of breath and of release comes in a year when George Floyd was killed by a police officer as he said the words “I can’t breathe;” these three words resonated with many people across the country. This feeling of relief – of a safe space to be again – seems to be the reaction of so many people to the election followed, for some, by joy at the possibility of what could be. The space created in this release makes a path forward for returning, for restoration, and then maybe for something new, too. First, though, as a close friend said to me: “Now the healing begins.”

Healing asks of each of us, regardless of who we voted for, to restore in each other, first, a basic belief in every person’s inherent worthiness. Perhaps this lesson was never lost on some. But others in power worked hard to dehumanize and to sow disconnection through fear. Fear is many things: it is evolutionary and it is conditioned; it is reactionary (a response to a specific stimulus) and it is an emotion that settles and can remain in our bodies long after the stimulus is gone. In a cheap trade for political gain, some in power use fear as a tool to remain in that power; they condition us to fear each other (for example, white people to fear people of color) sowing division like salt in the soil so that connection will not flourish. Fearmongering is the work of disconnection. As research professor Brené Brown observes: “[d]isconnection is both the source and consequence of shame, fear and blame. Insulating, judging others, blaming, raging, stereotyping, labeling – these are all forms of disconnection.” I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn’t) (New York: Avery, 2007) at 241 (public library). This, perhaps, is the greatest trick of all because we cannot connect, we cannot fertilize and restore the soil and build the relationships essential to the health of our communities, in fear.

In How to be an Anti-Racist (New York: One World, 2019) (public library), historian and antiracist scholar Ibram X. Kendi describes the insidiousness of racism, particularly its transformation in the decades that followed the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s to a declaration of victory over structural forces hundreds of years in the making in the span of a few decades. See id. at 19-20, 38, 54. Color-blindness became the new norm, but without continued conversations about racism (color-blindness making discussion of race itself somehow racist), see id. at 38, 54, the essential work of listening to and of acknowledging the harm caused and perpetuated by racism cannot take place. Id. Wrapped in the armor of color-blindness, white America cannot listen and so we deny the lived experiences of so many people of color. We do not hold space for them. We must not confuse our dreams with reality lest we stop working towards them. The communities that we work for must be spaces of belonging for everyone, places, in the words of Audre Lorde: “for relating across our human differences as equals.” Age, Race, Class and Sex in Sister Outsider (New York: Crossing Press, 2007) at 115 (public library). She writes: “[W]e have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating across our human difference as equals.” Id. (emphasis in original).

Now, even after the election, fear of the other is at work again, some of the same political leaders using it as a tool to deny the legitimacy of the election in a blatant attempt to retain power. This includes targeted attempts to discredit, even deny, the votes of entire communities, like Detroit in Wayne County, predominantly home to people of color. When our political leaders capitalize on these human instincts, they commit the very harm that they proclaim to protect us from: they divide rather than nurture and cultivate our communities. Even after fearmongering leaders transition out of their political roles, this fear threatens to settle like salt in soil to slow or stop the nourishment of connection across differences essential to the life of our communities.

Connection is the path to healing and politicized as it has become – or perhaps always has been, just look at the response Jesus received to his engagement with Samaritans or women, for example – connection is political. Connection is a value statement: a commitment to engagement with another person in a way that acknowledges their fundamental humanity even across difference. And it is essential to our growth; we do not thrive in isolation, writes researchers Jean Baker Miller and Irene Pierce Stiver: “Our fundamental notions of who we are are not formed in the process of separation from others, but within the mutual interplay of relationships with others.” The Healing Connection (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997) at 22 (public library).

So what is connection in the context of our relationships and our communities? Baker Miller and Pierce Stiver define connection as “an interaction between two or more people that is mutually empathetic and mutually empowering.” Id. at 26 (emphasis added). (Disconnection, then, is the opposite. Id). Mutual empathy, they explain, is the ability of both people in an interaction to “receive and then respond to the feelings and thoughts of the other” so that through this exchange, shared acknowledgment and understanding grows. Id. at 29. From mutual empathy flows mutual empowerment. Baker Miller and Pierce Stiver see mutual empowerment in five parts: 1) “zest” (increased vitality from the interaction), 2) action (encouragement to act), 3) knowledge (growth in knowledge about yourself and your relationship with other person), 4) worth (increased sense of self-worth) and 5) desire for more connection with the other person. Id. at 30-34. Our relationships then are a series of these interactions that may be a mixture of connection and disconnection, id., though one interaction alone can be a connection, one new addition that can begin to revive the soil of our communities.

Connection was essential to my healing journey and, I believe, it is for us all, particularly after the election. Here are a few suggestions to begin the ongoing work of connecting with each other:

• Study history from a different perspective. Those in power often write history; we must seek out different perspectives that acknowledge that power and privilege unfolded and affected people differently. This is the work of resurfacing and growing a shared history to which all Americans belong, and therefore, must reflect the experiences of people of color, including Indigenous peoples, from their perspective. Last month, for example, was National Native American Heritage Month and 400 years since the Mayflower landed in Plymouth; read the history of that notable event from the perspective of the Chairwoman of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head Aquinnah, and continue to seek out different perspectives through organizations such as Facing History and the stories and people that did not make it into mainstream history. 
• Listen to the story of another; share your own. A precursor to building the connections essential to our community is our ability to listen to each other; we cannot listen in fear or anger or hatred encouraged when we trade someone’s opinions for their humanity. Connection is about acknowledging that everyone belongs. It is the work of holding space for people and the stories and experiences that they bring through difference or disagreement or difficulty. Even strangers held that space for me after my daughter Eliana died when, feeling the hurt rise within me after I shared the sum of her story (Yes, I have one child who died), they leaned in (What was her name?) and I settled with them in the space they created by sitting with me and listening. Likewise, we need to create these spaces of belonging for people in our communities.
• Engage in dialogue about what matters to you, even with someone who may have a different perspective. Participate in these conversations with family and friends and in your community or through community organizations like Braver Angels and Essential Partners, which seek to bring people together across difference, including politics, for conversation and engagement. Disagreement is essential to our growth, but it must not come at the price of our humanity.

Connection is seeing complexities in each other. Connection is the act of acknowledging each other’s hurt across difference and even disagreement. As Audre Lorde writes in imagining “new patterns of relating across difference”: “Change means growth, and growth can be painful. But we sharpen self-definition by exposing the self in work and struggle together with those whom we define as different from ourselves, although sharing the same goals. For Black and white, old and young, lesbian and heterosexual [people] alike, this can mean new paths to our survival.” Sister Outsider at 123. Connection is work that challenges the way we have been wired and then conditioned. Connection is shedding fears we may have of each other so that we can see what we share first: our humanity. What follows is empathy and empowerment with the capacity to restore our communities.

*Photo by Suzy Hazelwood from Pexels.