In the Land of Saints and Sinners
Today is Ash Wednesday, traditionally a day of fasting and prayer for some Christians to mark the beginning of Lent – the 40-day period leading up to Easter.
In some churches, the palm fronds from the previous year’s Palm Sunday procession are burned and the ashes are then used to mark the foreheads of believers the following Ash Wednesday (thus the black smudges you will see on some foreheads today). This is done to remind people of the ongoing cycle of joy, sacrifice, and renewal. Easter is a triumph, but our understanding of its value must be renewed, in much the same way we mark anniversaries or birthdays. Celebrating an anniversary is done to remind us of the value of the initial event.
We must do this because when something good, or valuable, or meaningful, happens for us, the memories of it start to fade almost immediately. We need to renew the positive feelings and remember the value of the thing to remind us of its importance. For some reason, holding on to positive memories can be a challenge for our brains.
Our brains face no such challenge when it comes to remembering the bad things that happen. Trauma lodges itself in our bodies and takes up residence in our nervous system. We remember negative things intensely. Psychiatrist Bessel A. van der Kolk argues that “trauma is not just an event that took place at sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on the mind, brain, and body.”1
Bad things stick. And that stickiness matters, and it matters at some times more than others.
These days, it feels like reading the news is an act of moral courage and mental fortitude. Regardless of where we are on the political spectrum, we are relentlessly bombarded with stories that frighten and disorient us. The world can feel overwhelming, and everything in it heavy. We spend most of our time worried and anxious.
The reasons for this bombardment are a whole separate essay, but the impact of all this bad news is readily apparent all around us. We trust less. We are angry more. We judge others in a way that feels uncomfortable or that makes us feel like… not us. We worry about loved ones near and far. We worry about the future.
We deal with fresh cracks on our heart every day, constantly feeling new trauma. And it all sticks, with no need to refresh it or mark it with a ceremony. It’s there whether we want it there or not.
There are lots of ways to respond to trauma and unfortunately most aren’t super helpful. One of the most common trauma responses is black or white thinking.
When faced with trauma, the brain seeks to simplify things and reduce its workload so it doesn’t become overwhelmed. One of the ways it can make things simpler is to divide the world into binary categories. Things become all one thing or another. People are good or they are evil. Situations are terrible or they are great. Food is delicious or putrid. Once these categories are established, they are final, and everything goes in one category or the other. There is no nuance, no overlap, no gray areas. Black or white, period.
In trauma there are saints and sinners. We tend to see the people who agree with us and agree with our views as saints, and those who disagree as sinners. Imagine for a second the “typical” voter who voted opposite of you in the last election. Imagine what they drive, what they listen to, where they get their news. Think about what their opinion might be on climate change, or January 6, or vaccines. Imagine how they might fill in the following blank: ‘President Trump is ______ing our country.’
Now ask yourself, what do you think about that person’s character? About their values? About their value? And what do you think they would say about you? How accurate would they be? How accurate is your assessment of them?
Trauma causes us to divide people into categories. It’s easier for our brains that way. The reality is that we are both saints and sinners. We do things that are useful, and we do things that are less useful. Some days we make the world better and kinder and some days we don’t. Because nothing – and no one – is just one thing.
To make our way through a world of fear and anxiety we must try our best to see the world as it is, not as our trauma response wishes for us to see it. Psychologist and philosopher William James reminds us that our “experience is what (we) agree to attend to.”2 I love that James points out that attention requires our agreement. Where our attention goes is not something that happens to us. Where it goes is in our control. An algorithm can’t decide what you see if you aren’t looking in its direction.
If what we attend to is fear and anger – if we look for the tragedy and not the helpers – then our experience of the world will only grow darker. If we choose to see all the ways we disagree with someone, and are different from them, then we will never, ever be able to unite to face the most serious (and shared) challenges together. If we are constantly looking for all the things that are wrong, we will consistently miss all the things that are right.
I am not remotely suggesting that a positive mental attitude and a better news diet will make everything better. Fear and anxiety exist because they are astoundingly useful survival tools. They teach us to notice danger. We should never be oblivious and pretend there aren’t real problems that need real solutions that we may be able to be a small part of. At the same time, we shouldn’t be hyper-vigilant either. Fear, anger, hatred, distrust, and paranoia can be poisonous AND addictive.
We must embrace spectrum thinking. There is a lot of space between constant doomscrolling on one hand, and moving to that island Tom Hanks was on in Castaway on the other. Somewhere between those extremes is a place where fear and trauma can live in harmony with joy and hope. We must find where that place is for us.
Friedrich Nietzsche – not exactly the sunniest of philosophers – said that “all joys want eternity.”3 Joy wants to find a way to stay alive. Think of the times you have found yourself smiling for no reason at all. The laugh you couldn’t stifle even when you should. And if you can’t think of a time, then come hang out with Justin because that kid is irrepressibly joy-filled ALL the time.
Joy is a dandelion. It grows in places you never expect and defies all logic about how flowers should behave. Like a dandelion in the concrete, joy can show up in the most unlikely places.
But unlike trauma, which moves into our brains and refuses to leave like a shitty houseguest, joy needs to be seen. It needs to be noticed. It needs to be attended to, if for no other reason than to remind us that trauma is not all there is, no matter how omnipresent it might be. There is a world apart from trauma, a world away from fear.
When I first started going to therapy after my suicide attempt in 2016, my therapist asked me to look at the painting she had on her wall. It was a brightly colored, impressionistic rendering of a food market that she had purchased in Mexico City. She told me that the painting was, to her, a reflection of life. She said that she knew that right now I was seeing that painting in black and white, and that it was hard to see colors. “If you will stick with therapy,” she said, “then the way you see the painting will change.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “I’ll start to see colors.”
“No, Jeff. If I do my job and you do yours, then eventually you will see that it is just one painting on one wall in a small office in a small corner of a small world in a small pocket of an infinite universe, most of which you will never really understand but all of which you come to see as beautiful.”
May it ever be so.
van der Kolk, “The Body Keeps the Score”
Nietzsche, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”
I love the idea of looking for and attending to our joys. Maybe that’s why I love scrapbooking so much. While we do capture some difficult times, most of the photos and stories are of the everyday joys we experience. Thank you for being you and bringing joy into my life.