You are not your thoughts.
Photo by Noah Buscher on Unsplash
I remember the first time I learned that I had unchecked intentions behind my actions by way of my belief systems.
It was shortly after my first encounter with Lynne Forrest — a woman I mentored with for two years — and The Victim Triangle.
I was so mortified to discover that most of my days were spent actively rescuing or selling myself as a martyr of my circumstances, imploring others to rescue ME, that I stopped speaking for a solid two weeks.
It was humiliating.
I quickly became terrified of rescuing; of saying the wrong thing; of manipulating without knowing it.
I went through a few stages of development from that point:
The first was righteously vowing to never exude rescuer behavior again now that I had become aware of it.
(spoiler alert: how futile that vow ended up being!)
Then, because I hadn't yet understood that I am not my thoughts, I went through a whole phase where I overly identified with each new limiting belief as it came to the surface.
There was this whole interlude of my life where I trauma bonded with the people around me about my belief systems around abandonment and betrayal and inadequacy and not enoughness and too muchness, and otherwise general codependent behavior.
THEN, I proceeded to persecute the crap out of myself for all the things I heretofore could not hear or see but had been governed by that had negatively impacted those around me (and myself).
If I had masking tape to make a triangle on the floor I'd basically be walking around it from rescuer, to victim, to persecutor, to rescuer, to victim, to persecutor...
(as an aside, here’s a link to one of Lynne's most visited blog posts where you can self-identify your own starting gate position on the victim triangle, an exercise I highly recommend doing for your own transformation.)
Anyway, the reason I'm telling you this story is because it feels like a good time to remember that
We
Are
Not
Our
Thoughts
Had I been clear about that back in those days, I might've weathered my own illuminations and awakenings a little bit more gracefully. But here we are.
When we identify with our belief systems (which by the way is the case for MOST people), being told that what we've said or written is racist can feel like a death threat.
Why?
Because what we hear is: "You are inherently wrong."
And because, as I covered in my post a few days ago, most of us also have belief systems that tell us that we (and others) deserve to be punished for our mistakes, I'm sure you can imagine the sort of despair, paralysis, disassociation we'd be capable of taking ourselves to JUST by thinking about it.
And so we end up ultimately standing still and not taking steps forward at all, or only taking steps we can pre-approve as “safe.”
It's important that you understand how the brain works.
We create long term change in one of three ways:
By association
By receiving feedback
By observation
We cannot simply commit something to memory after hearing about it once and then never touch upon it again. For this same reason, having an awakening does not exactly mean much until you embody it.
We have to create new neural pathways using one of the methods above, all of which involve continuing to take action.
(this doesn't mean there is anything wrong with you slowing down and hitting pause right now so you can sustain yourself for the long-haul, for the record, it just means that you will fully integrate and commit to habit a new way of seeing the world when you start to LIVE the things you're learning right now full time)
In the meantime, while you absolutely do have a responsibility to what you say, it's essential that you loosen the grip on it a little, if you want to survive the necessary transformation the world is going through right now.
We are all here for learning. All of us.
Even the most socially justice of social justice people say the wrong thing sometimes.
I say the wrong thing A LOT (and yes, I still sometimes beat myself up about it).
Be kind to yourselves. You are here for learning. We are all here for learning.
If you, and everyone else, already knew how to be an ally to POC, we'd be doing it already.
This is called awakening. And we are IN IT.
It's humbling. I know. And while this may not be the thing you want to hear right now: this is only the beginning.
In order for us to change the way that we think, we have to stop identifying with our thoughts and belief systems. We have to stop thinking that what we think is who we are.
Because we are all so much more than that.