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Related to Grief & Sadness & Supremacy

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Introduction #

this post is very drafty, but has been sitting around getting longer for a few weeks now, so I’m simply posting now and will do some more rounds of cleanup, probably.

I’d started writing some of this in a letter to a friend, then noticed that, with a little modification, i’d want to share it with a different friend. Then it kept iterating, once I started down this line of reasoning, I kept finding more and more things. It’s nice to have things named. It’s long for a blog post, short compared to watching a movie. Usually my process is ‘get it out’ and then organize it later. Sorry in advance for the length, organization, (lack of) flow.

Many other people than just me claim that to fully feel joy, one also is able to fully feel grief. I’m dramatically less into the idea of ‘suffering’ than I once does, and yet, I agree with the sentiment. Wanna access joy, without resisting when it passes? Get güd with grief.

So, there’s many nods to sadness in the coming words, please also know I evaluate myself as very able to feel joy, peacefulness, connection, etc. Indeed, it’s my capacity for and appreciation of joy and connection that gives me some of my energy around railing against suffering, sadness, grief.

I also affirm that to repress sadness or grief is to eventually lose the ability to experience joy and presence. We cannot ‘choose’ the emotions we feel, and it’s not helpful to try to hustle ourselves out of sadness, just as it’s not helpful to try to cling to a sense of joy or happiness, after the time for it is passed.

So, in this piece, I’m attempting to move out of myself some of the sadness, perhaps externalizing it into this artifact, and in doing so, feel Witnessed, validated, by myself, and i’ll reclaim some emotional energy that feels stuck, pent up.

On this being read by evangelicals, or my parents #

Obviously, I imagine people like my parents (or other religious authoritarian supremacists) might read this. Part of the composition process indeed demanded that I expect that they would, or people like them. But when I’m channeling anger at someone like one of my parents, I’m condemning the standard american colonial supremacist, with or without religious components to their being.

The real theorized audience besides myself is others who were raised within any sort of structure like evangelicalism, or a structure shaped by evangelicalism. (operant conditioning footnote? BF Skinner was QUITE traumatized by vivid depictions of hell, told to him by his mother, and says everything downstream of that in his ideas was affected by his desire to not go to hell)

I just read this very interesting post. The title is “The Joy Is Not Optional: The Growing Kids God’s Way protocol” and noticed (sadly) all the familiarity between how the author of that post was raised, and I was raised.

So many similarities. Yikes. Poor all of us. Gary Ezzo’s ideas, the quiverfull movement, james dobson, and his kind of people were familiar names in my childhood home.

Expectation of instant obedience, on threat of physical assault, was an ever-present energy. To this day, I maintain that the emotional damage done by the willingness to assault someone to get their compliance is such a deep betrayal to the idea of love and care. It broke my brain, to believe so hard, so needfully, that the people I loved and loved me were also willing to terrorize me, if I made a mistake or wasn’t in full-enough compliance to how they thought I should be. (“fix your mood, josh” was a common-enough sentiment)

Children are to be seen, not heard, any sign of ‘willfullness’ needs to be stamped out with a genocidal, colonizer-worthy energy. (The ‘paternalism’ between parents and kids in evangelicalism is the same as the ‘paternalism’ between slavers and the enslaved, and the colonizer and the original peoples. One truly needs to be willing to murder, and to believe it’s a good thing, to justify the mistreatment.)

The person who was my dad would brag about how once he finally got me to do my homework by emotionally bullying me until I was sobbing, and then I did what he was demanding me to do. (it seems to have never crossed their mind to consider asking me of my experience of them in any way, and both of my parents begin to deploy heavy, aggressive defensiveness and opposition, when I would ask them to consider me. I sometimes feel a very real sensation of sickness, discomfort, deep in my belly, when I think of some of these experiences, sometimes)

Lots of traditional education is based in shame. To exist in an environment where someone is considered ‘educated’ means someone else is considered ‘uneducated’, or all of us are considered uneducated in some ways. Ivan Illych’s excellent Deschooling Society is a useful antidote. I’ve had horrific experiences around ‘education’, and I know others that internalized the shaming messages as a result of interacting within educational institutions.

And the same is fully felt by anyone who is succeeding within those institutions, too, by the way. Or it can be. Some surely get through it with only a little shame, surely, but enough don’t. Plenty of people who perform exceptionally well in an endeavour are at least sometimes quite bound up by shame. I once saw someone send his second v13 on a tension board in a session and he said diminishing, self-shaming things about himself, based on how hard they felt for him!!!! Many of my friends have experienced me saying something like

Hey, if you said that thing about yourself, about me, or {someone else present}, we’d all be aghast that you were being so mean, even you’d be shook at how mean that was. When I hear someone saying mean things about themselves, I assume this was the kinds of things a caretaker told them when they were younger, and damn, what a bummer. Also I’ll keep slightly judo-ing this toxic inner critic, sorry, I cannot not.

The combination of a toxic shaming evangelical family system, using a shaming religious and academic system, to try to squeeze, contort, hack into a prim and proper shape the humanity of a child who is waging an actual emotional insurgency… it’s tragic.

much of this list will reference evangelicalism and/or supremacy #

I believe it’s our responsibility or our opportunity or our ease-of-insight to discuss ‘our own people’. I have substantial lived experience inside the homes and minds of supremacists, colonizers. The kinds of people who have perpetuated genocide, ethnic cleansing, stripping children from their parents to apply a regime of social control to the children.

Whatever practices were common in Australia, against the native peoples, and the i-still-cannot-appreciate-hardly-the-shape-of-it supremacy that defines the history of south africa. Israel’s genocide of palestinians, these are tactics of european american supremacists wanting a regime of social control and willing to, well, murder everyone and themselves.

So, I can channel an insiders perspective to help others defend themselves. Ideally no one would have to defend themselves from people like this. Alas.

Since I was raised by evangelicals, and a primary tool of evangelicals is “shame the children”, I had shame poured on me constantly, as the first line of defense against indications of my humanity.

The people who were my parents used shame differently on me from each other, because of their respective damaged ideas about sex and gender. So I’ve got beef with some constructs around sex and gender, and I’ll talk about that later. (my stance is “don’t push your patriarchy kink1 on me unless I consent to it, and I do not consent to it”)

The-person-who-was-my-father’s full-throated embrace of patriarchy causes him to erupt with a constant verbal stream of criticism at the idea of feeling feelings, and the-person-who-was-my-mother’s studious refusal to ever see me as a person of dignity, and her instead constant objectification of everything about me caused her to also evaluate the emotional side of me as ‘nonexistent’, in a different way. Abuse is the active, inverse of neglect. Even as I can construct exculpatory excuses for culty people who abuse and torture their kids in general, I note a growing sense of specific, focused anger over some specifics of these instances of people, and these situations. stamps foot.

(keep reading for entries from her diary that she published of physical and sexual assaults upon me as a child, “for jesus”, as early as my third birthday!)

Technically, my parents couldn’t meet me at a better place than they could meet themselves, their unaddressed childhood wounds, etc etc.

The reason I can apply that treatment to them and still evaluate them (technically, their actions. don’t they say things like ‘hate the sin, not the sinner’?) as contemptible is because they are unable to receive input from the people they are interacting with, how they are being experienced, and they’ll do damage to someone else in the clinging to their own self-image.

They would beat me, physically, and interpret the tears of kid josh as evidence that I needed more of a beating, instead of evidence of the relational harm they were inducing and that they could, should, move differently. Anyone who sees someone else as a person would not be able to throw away the person’s humanity and apply hurt and coercion to that person.

doing nothing would be far, far better than making up rules for someone else to follow and then beating them, torturing them, for not following the rules. This would also have obviously been an applicable sentiment in that era of American Chattel Slavery, and yet slavery persisted for hundreds of years, warping the soul of everyone who even only perceived it, let alone the victims of the oppressor/complicit classes, and the people comprising those groups.

the currency of shame inside of supremacy culture #

So, here’s a ‘grand unifying theory’ of why josh is so damn sensitive. It is endemic to the supremacy culture of the people here to categorize and group and rank and order things, so there’s a part of me that resists even recounting all of this.

often-enough, I’ve been shamed, sometimes severely, for disinhibited self-expression. grief, joy, wonder, curiosity, grief, enthusiasm. Evangelicalism is obviously a shaming institution, and so to is everything reliant upon operant conditioning structures. That last piece might seem a hot take, it really is not.

Pete Walker was the first person I encountered who articulated something like “people, who hurt others, and then refuse to feel shame about it cause the shame to be felt by the others. Even if it’s only dim echos of that shame being felt by others, they are still being forced to experience someone else’s shame and that stinks.”

thus virtually every supremacist walking around clinging to supremacy is a tiny little factory of shame, emitting noxiousness like a car emits brake dust and tire rubber microplastics and noise and danger.

Photos of my mom’s journal entries describing her repeated assaults of me #

Obviously this is some delicate terrain. I don’t remember any of the events described below, that happened to three-year-old-me, of course, but adult me certainly knows what he’d feel about witnessing this happening to child me, or happening to some other three year old. I happen to have my own child, so I can easily access a rather alivened sense of disgust over this behavior, especially when I appreciate that my parents think this behavior is so right, I should be applying it to my own child.

I can appreciate why something in my nervous system goes big when I face icy, stern, cold behavior from others, after reading these entries and remembering the ways this disposition kept showing up my entire life, despite me clinging to hope that my mother had love or affection for me.

In my mother’s words, from a diary she maintained and then printed/distributed to her offspring, here’s an early formative experience of shame. I appreciate the irony that this particular incident happened on my birthday. My 3rd birthday:

journal entry 0

On Joshua’s birthday Joshua asked me for his train set. Now, a few days ago he didn’t want to put it away. I told him if he didn’t want to put it away I would do it for him but I’d put it away out of his reach so he couldn’t play with it anymore. He wanted me to put it away anyway, and I did. Each time he asked for it after that I reminded him that he couldn’t play with it because he didn’t know how to put it away. When I told him that on this day, he assured me that this time he would put it away himself. I got his train set down for him. He played with it. When he was done, I asked him to put it back and he said “Mom put back train set.” He expected me to do it like I had before, and I reminded him that he had to put it away. He repeated, “No, Mom put back train set.” I repeated that it was his responsibility. He refused again and received a spanking. This time when I told him to please put away the train set he cried but he did it and then proudly said “Look, Mom!” I thanked him and then he told methe secret of his obedience. “Yord help Josh put back train set.” Oh how God answers prayer.

Wow wow wow. The constructed ‘power struggle’. In religeous authoritarian families, male-passing children are assumed to be ‘strong willed’ or something like that, so the parents are attuned to all displays of preference or agency, and they take it as evidence of evil, ‘sin’, in their kid, and they fantasize situations that justify things like ‘sexual assault of a child, blamed on the child’.

Miriam phrased this, “he refused again and received a spanking”. So, a 3 year old me opted out of a developmentally inappropriate ask (or maybe it was develpmentally appropriate, I’ve seen three year olds put things away, but usually not under threat of assault), then, the person who at the time represented, in theory, safety and nurturance to me, terrorized and hit me, to extract compliance from me, damn the concept of… emotional attunement? Putting the train set away herself? Letting it be out? my god.

Parenting From The Inside Out is an adequate primer for an answer to the question “if not by assault, how am I supposed to interact with a child?”

Key lines:

he refused again and received a spanking

I’ve spoken before about how I view ‘spanking’, and pulled into it’s own post long quotes from Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse

but it’s de-dignifying to tease that part out as much worse than the rest. “spankings” are what less-propagandized people call “adults hitting children and blaming the kid for it” or “physical assault” or “child sexual assault”, as any kind of assault that targets or involves sexually intimate places is default-escalated to sexual assault.

When I brought this up to my dad, he dismissed it. So I updated his status in my mind, appropriately. When I mentioned it to my mother, she never responded and eventually blocked me on whatsapp. Ditto, my father. Shunning and refusing to communicate is a classic move of power retention within supremacy culture. If I still lived in their house and made the same issue, they beat me and assaulted me, now that I don’t live in their house, they block me. It’s the classic appeal of white women’s tears, when encountering some forms of push back against their supremacy.

My dad tried verbally fighting back with me, and when that didn’t work, applied the “shunning” treatment, or at least this is my experience of it. In their defense, I suggested both that they deserve whatever sort of peace they think child abusers deserve.

Here’s another entry:

journal entry 2

Lately I’ve been trying to teach Joshua to put away his toys when he’s told. Lately, he’s been in the ‘why’ stage. When I ask him to put them away he asks “Why?” “Because it’s bath time.” “Why?” And so on. The questions go on and on when I ask him to pick up his toys. At bedtime timight I asked him to pick up his blocks and he again asked “Why?” I was too tired to think of any logical reasons so I just told him the end result: “Joshua, pick up your blocks because if you don’t you will get a spanking.” “Okay” he said, as he happily and immediately went to pick up his blocks!

These were obviously the bedrock ideas of Miriam’s understanding of the world, and my childhood is full of other stories in line with this kind of thing. I note now, less happily, how often feedback has been about me, happily, in a work setting: “Josh is so [compliant] when given instruction, and works hard at doing whatever we tell him!”

God, in light of how hard I was working to manage the emotional state of my mother, at the age of three, by repeating back to her versions of her broken view of reality rather than expressing something true to me, like

I am so mad at you for hitting me, and I feel hurt by, and betrayed by and afraid of you now.

As an adult, when I experience coercive, punishing behavior, I can more readily identify it and defend myself against it. Yet every time, the absolute crushing betrayal that it represents, feels like it breaks something in me that I didn’t know I had to break. I recognize a similarity, perhaps, between what I must have experienced, the sadness over the emotional loneliness, the hateful, icy, withdrawn, brutal emotional energy that seeped into every crack and pore and surface of those relationships I had with my parents.

I realize now, when I thought I had a good relationship, it was because I was basically playing for myself both sides of the relationship. I knew how to relate to others without violence or hate, so I simply kept assuming my parents had that capacity within them and occasionally felt well about me.

I could imagine someone like my parents reading the above, and ‘whataboutism’ing me with “well, James Dobson said…” or “it was just a few swats on the butt” (said in 2025 by my 6 foot 1 inch, 180 lb military officer/doctor/preacher father who’s pleased to tower over and terrorize and bully people).

Frankly, the dual processes of 1) their inability to feel grief, sadness, over my/their/anyone else’s situation 2) the heavy cloak of defensiveness that gets drawn over the wound of ‘lack of sadness’, or something. Digging in, doubling down.

(a proper response would be something like a full embrace over my anger, the sadness inherent in this. Evidencing doing work to reduce how quickly they dissociate from the experience of others, welcoming the depth of the human experience, showing that they’re beginning to appreciate how wrong it is to strip someone of their agency, will, bodily safety and lie to that person about why they were assaulted.

I don’t think the damage is repairable. My dad’s last sentiment was something like “If you, josh, want to repair the relationship with me, you’re welcome to come grovelling to me over how you hurt my feelings by saying things that made me feel bad.”

…sigh…

I can appreciate now a bit more why there’s so much emotional deadness within me, towards them, and I find myself angering when it feels like that skillset I built, out of desperation, to defend myself against them, shows up in unhelpful ways today, as an adult. The hot/cold energy they pointed towards me, emotional devestation that went unaddressed and then ‘love’ was performed, later, and because I desperately wanted love, I accepted all of it. The fake love, and the real harm. What else could I have done?

I don’t think repair is available until someone can speak extensively about why they used manipulation and bullying. And if there’s a power dynamic involved, it’s obviously abuse! And all of the exact same underlying ideas of entitlement and obligation hum along in the exact same way, in both of their ways of being today, that are obviously evident in how they perceived others then.

Section FAQ #

I could imagine:

well this seems pretty condeming, josh, I don’t see how repair could be done, while you…

blah blah blah, focusing on my attitude marks one as the kind of person who’s complicit with bad things.

I’d suggest The Verbally Abusive Relationship: How to Recognize it and how to respond.

An early chapter talks about people who live in reality one “power over” and reality two, “shared power”.

Ppl in reality one feel anxious in some situations when they don’t feel like they’re dominating someone else, because that means they might be getting dominated. Or they might be soon to be dominated, because they dominate others, sometime, when they feel entitled to it.

Since they’re willing to dominate and see it as useful when ‘push comes to shove’, so if someone else shows to this reality 1 person that they’re feeling as strongly as the abuser does about something, the abuser sorta… telegraphs/projects their own problem solving strategy onto the other, and then ‘moves defensively’ by attacking, in order to not get got.

From the POV of someone in reality 2, who does not see violence or domination as anything but vastly hurtful to any situation wants to see the problem resolved. “shared power” appreciates the existance of power dynamics, and generally moves to flatten/reduce the power differential. The book also uses “co-creation” and “Mutuality” to describe reality 2.

Co-creation and mutuality assume out of the gate certain things about positive intent, assumptions of dignity, etc. I notice in myself not even wanting to pollute my own brain, the part of me that loves others and loves co-creation and mutality, when I imagine that ecosystem overly affected by someone that moves through the world like Donald, Miriam, trampling delicate things beneat them, unable, unwilling to feel the sadness over what has been lost.

and my god, the cost of all this is far, far beyond the individuals involved in this story. My own life, and two interpersonal relationships, compared to all the potential relationships I could have, or my actual relationships, OR compared against the billions of people alive today, or the billions lived and died, any of whom experienced good and bad things, fair and unfair things, from some of those lines of reasoning, none of this matters.

So much of this document will talk about supremacy, and colonialism, and evangelicalism, as I view them as like three different lenses, three different frames, of the same underlying dissociation from grief and sadness, belief in the world as dominating, fear of power sharing, and thus entitlement to obedience, of them and others.

I can certainly see how this has affected me, in some ways, I feel i’ve “resolved”, in others I’ve not, and I’m sure in a few more years I’ll be able to speak about things that I’ve not yet found awareness of yet.

I feel a little like I wish a younger version of me had gotten some of the resources current me has. I could have more easily bolstered my own sense of self, clocked the misbehavior around me, etc etc.

this is indicative of… again, unwellness. ‘spanking’ is a propagandist term for adults hitting children.

I’m so angry that she today, in 2025 thinks it’s admirable, laudable, necessary, for adults, caretakers of kids, to threaten children with sexual assault to force them to comply.

This is colonialism, genocidal energy, I welcome it exactly as anyone thinks I would.

If you’ve not been raised within the cult of evangelicalism or a different institution of religious authoritarianism, this approach might be full of unfamiliar language. The first 18 years of my life was full of this motif, after which I was hauled off to college by my parents, and mostly never spoken to again. I’m recovering anger these days over the emotional abandonment of it all. It was bad when I was a child, and as I move through my life today, I anger again at the emotional abandonment I experience from my parents. It’s easier to learn to hold your own pain when you have a memory of sometimes been tenderly held, in pain, safely, by a caretaker. As I rolodex through experiences with miriam and donald, and other evangelicals I relied upon for attuned connection, but esp with miriam and donald, I remember brutal coldness, indifference, or the intentional infliction of deep emotional pain. Donald often enough was physically bullying, grabby, pushy, quick to grab and squeeze and move someone’s body simply because he felt entitled to it. How gross.

So, having my own kid has been great, and healing in some ways for my own ‘parenting the inner child’ journey - I can see my kid developing normally, without our relationship being poisoned by violence and the dangerous superstitions of ‘authority’ and ‘obedience’, and I can appreciate that when I was policing myself, with an intense and devastatingly critical inner voice, I was not channeling ‘truth’ or ‘god’ or ‘me’, I was channeling the delusional, bullying influences of my parents, who hated themselves, me, and many, many others.

So, I can turn down my inner critic, often-enough, and the simple naming of it’s prepense has a nice disarming effect on the worst of the harm it causes.

And yet, this blog post. Why this blog post?

Sadness. Shame.

Other people not easily-enough attuning to me in an expression of pain. When I feel misattunement, the rest of my vulnerability is quick to exit the interaction, because the environment gets labeled as ‘obviously/possibly not safe enough’. Misattunement is endemic in supremacy cultures, so it’s part of the damage done to all of us, and part of the way we might unwittingly propagate that hurt outwards on others.

This is manageable, but is made less so by a key prior intimate relationship partner said, often, plainly mean & aggressive things simply upon witnessing sadness in me. Tears, especially. This happened repeatedly. Eventually, I ‘managed’ my emotions, to alleviate that particular pain, at great cost.

i currently feel “low” on the number of sensitive and non-shaming people in my life. Unfortunately, bc ✨supremacy culture in america✨ many, many people, with all sorts of genitalia, have incomplete or uneasy relationships with grief, their own grief and others. Yes, plenty of ‘men’/people with penises do not have easy access to wild amounts of emotional depth. AND! plenty of people who call themselves female/people who have vulvas also do not have easy access to emotional depth.

Now, most people do not run around intending to openly shame others for expressing emotions, but when someone’s uncomfortable with their own grief, that discomfort gets telegraphed outwards to others. Sometimes it’s subtle, sometimes it’s extremely not-subtle.

Some of the stories, the contents of the original intent of this written work #

when I smell someone responding to an expression of my sadness or grief with something that feels like shame, a part of me operates in a powerful way to shape my future presentation within that relationship. I’m working on naming this thing a bit more directly, so I can give us all an opportunity to perhaps move differently next time.

I am skilled, now, at either 1) hiding when I feel grief, or 2) avoiding within myself the sensation of grief, so I don’t have to hide it/hide it so effortfully.

I don’t love the development of this skill for me. I don’t blame any particular person, I have simply come to resent supremacy culture, which causes grief to get mishandled in many ways, for everyone. It goes back generations. Grief, and the systems we live in, is complex and it takes a lot of humanity to hold it well, our own grief and the grief of others.

In {friend’s name} I grew sensitized because, I remember {friend} saying something like:

If I ever saw {partner of friend} cry, I’d think it was strange, odd, [vaguely unsettling].

sorta trivial, but it felt like an admission of:

if I saw grief I didn’t understand in the visage of someone else who I don’t think deserves to feel grief, I would not be curious or enter into the experience with them, I’d label it as unexpected and deploy coping strategies.

EVERYONE IS WELCOME TO DO THIS! This is simply not the kind of response that helps me move with more emotional safety instead of feeling withdrawn a bit.

another time, in response to something I shared, there was a “well, at least…” or ‘oh, that seems better than {other bad thing}’. I note that this lands on me as dismissiveness, which unfortunately drafts onto other times I’ve experienced dismissive energy, and something in me withdraws, again, relationally.

I could follow the thread of ‘sorta invalidating responses’ farther, maybe another time. I have an actual fear of dragging someone into an emotionally uncomfortable place, without their permission, so if I detect discomfort around grief, I bottle up my own tears, my own grief, pretty firmly, pretty quickly.

There’s been a few other things that round to me having an assessment as “I don’t know how to handle my own sadness in the context of us. My current strategy is ‘mostly avoid my own’, while still modeling fully welcoming anyone else’s grief, and, in fact, continuing to honor my own grief. I’ll name it, and I know people mean well for me, so I can kinda do both sides of ‘handling my grief’, as needed.” It’s nice to not have to hold both sides of it.

This leaves me feeling like I need to, or I want to, minimize something about myself, to preserve something that is otherwise very alivening and appreciated. I have often-enough been overwhelmingly, vastly crushed by sadness because of little things & big, and I feel stuck with it, stuck by it.

<please read onward for a now-long-and-detailed list of some of the sadnesses I have found at times hard to articulate, or hard to articulate without perhaps finding myself feeling very sad, and sitting around crying in your company is not something I am comfortable with>

There’s stuff that arose around {another person} and I continued a strategy of avoidance. a little turns into a lot. I feel like throughout {friend} experienced bits of this, from me, with your own sense of disappointments or questions or hurts.

Josh’s long list of miscellanea that engenders sadness #

One of my first sadnesses is a meta-sadness.

I’m sad about how unskillfully sadness is handled within supremacy culture. In some ways the lack of skills is accidental, a feature of the damage and violence of supremacy culture. yet in other ways it’s necessary. to maintain supremacy culture, one needs dissociation from other’s pain. is a function and coping mechanism of supremacy, war, capitalism, slavery, violence, obv. And it’s rooted in dissociation from one’s own addressed pain or relational betrayals!

Lots of my childhood experiences were fully informed by growing up with supremacists. These supremacists fabricate the concept of ‘whiteness’ and then use that to justify the supremacy, but I won’t call them ‘white supremacists’, even though it would be an accurate label. It’s simply ceding too much intellectual ground to the delusion of race-as-a-real-thing.

So, I am sad about living inside of a supremacy culture.

Supremacy culture vs…? #

I’ll be referencing supremacy and some other stuff a lot, but I won’t be talking much about ‘white supremacy’, for the same reasons as I refuse to not airquote “spanking”, I find my wording simpler for me, here is why:

the very concept of race was created to support the ideals of a certain group of supremacists. I might use ‘european american supremacy’, or ‘european colonial powers’, or something like that, but ‘white’ supremacy for me cedes a bit too much power to european american supremacists.

Supremacists also invented a lot of patriarchy

what do you mean by ‘supremacy culture’, Josh?

Take a look at this list of characteristics of the supremacy culture of the greater united states:

the 15 characteristics of supremacy culture #

Some of the 15 tenants of supremacy culture seem germane here. Reading the list helped me turn down my inner critic, a bit. When you’re getting after yourself for something that’s also on this list, consider blaming someone for playing on you their own internalized colonizer.

I suggest reading the whole piece. These are all subtle and not-subtle messages poured upon me and maybe you. I find an increasing peacefulness from the ‘toxic inner critic’ that once operated constantly in my life.

Especially as it relates to “firing the inner cop”, or “expelling the inner colonizer”. I found many parallels between how the US military does it’s “counter insurgency” tactics, and how I ended up defending my emotional safety from my parents.

It’s not just evangelicals or the military that believe it’s necessary to “stamp out willfulness” wherever it lives - it’s a colonial religious thing, one that white-passing women fully participated in. Patriarchal white women (or, as I call them, people with vulvas who are supremacists) uphold patriarchy as much as a classic patriarchal white man.

These tenants are non-gendered, non-ethnicity-based characteristics of supremacy culture. Wherever these tenants thrive, so too does supremacy culture. Lets not let these things thrive inside of our own minds, crushing our own sense of self.

Here’s a great, detailed expansion of the list by the original author.

Fear #

Phew.

“Either/Or thinking”. #

I hear a response, when I say “not this, because…”. The supremacist will say “Well, if that thing cannot be had, WE HAVE TO HAVE THIS OTHER THING!!!!”. That’s thought-stopping. Not helpful.

Worship of the written word #

Individualism #

Quantity over Quality #

Sense of Urgency #

Paternalism, Perfectionism, One Right Way, Objectivity #

Progress, or Bigger is Better #

Fear of (Open) Conflict, Power Hoarding, Right to Comfort #

Or “right to emotional comfort”. This sometimes looks like “you know what my preference is, how can you not have given it to me” or “this conversation causes me to think of myself in unflattering ways that are inharmonious with my self-image, I need it to stop and I’d like to distract myself.”

Discussing conflict (rather than accepting the presumed hierarchy/correctness of the way of things)

Power Hoarding #

Urgency #

Defensiveness & Denial #

Seems self-evident. It’s an intimacy-destroying response, and i appreciate how childhood me, and often enough adult me, survived in a desert of emotional intimacy, getting occasional sips of fake intimacy that I convinced myself was real, and good-enough. The last time I spoke to my dad on the phone, I felt many things. I have detailed notes, I noted how scared I was, going into the conversation, and I relived the many, many times I felt a terror having to go speak to him. It arose within me, a disgust for the kind of person who would want children to be afraid of them, out of a need to control others.

I interrupted him as he was monologing, and he got very affronted, and said “if you cannot speak to me with respect I don’t want to be in this conversation.”

Like many of his generation, he confuses respect with control. He’s never experienced me outside of the context of ‘is josh being obedient to me?’ because he and I have not spoken or interacted since I was 16, more or less, and he felt fully entitled to control every aspect of my being, then.

Ooooh, I have anger for behavior like this. More on this later, perhaps.

These concepts have been top of mind for me during my few recent interactions with both of my parents. The interactions were extremely illuminating to me, and saddening. I feel so sad for the me that spent so many years living with these people! Their fear of open conflict, for instance, or desperate entitlement to emotional comfort, would be radiating from them in every word.

an alternative, better response than supremacy culture #

I can hop around with different frames, as does the supremacy.2

Curiosity is helpful. An ability to sometimes confidently generate a sense of peace within oneself. Mutuality and Co-creation. Opening questions. Silence. ‘tell me more about that’.

There’s many, many options besides ‘characteristics of supremacy’, and it’s tricky when people reach for available power dynamics to exploit.

SIIIIIIIIGH.

Anyway, here’s my big ol’ list of things that relate to sadness and grief. 3

The one, single time I spent 1:1 time with my mom over the last few years she kept defending her abuse, saying things like:

Your father and I tried everything to make you do what we wanted, and nothing else worked! [Nothing but threatening you with sufficient emotional and bodily harm made you give us what we wanted].

I almost threw her out of my house at her unselfconscious utterance of those words. She wasn’t even angry, just matter-of-fact about it. (That changed, quickly, of course. To quickly name certain dynamics in someone else’s passive observation of something can be a pretty strongly-felt statement)

Her dissociation from others is ironclad. Earlier in the day, I was questing for the possibility of establishing any authentic attuned connection, and like an expert practitioner of judo, she kept blocking and blocking and blocking, reflexively, the possibility of connection.

As the conversation continued, and I kept discussing her parenting decisions, sometimes in light of observations made as I’ve been a parent myself, it became clearer and clearer she hated me then, and hates me now. “hate” is a bit strong for the emotional deadness that usually exists in the space. She’d say “i don’t hate, I feel nothing” or a vague sense of dis-ease. I don’t dignify that with a serious response, because it continues to center as of primary import her non-experience of a very-bad-for-me experience.

An attentive reader (or any reader?) might notice the relatedness of what I said above, and how someone might experience someone else in a sexually coercive situation, or sexual assault. There’s a needful emotional deadness + a plausible excuse for why the deadness existed.

Maybe that’s why patriarchal women cannot attune to the sadness of their children. To do so might cast light on other things in their life of issue. Like,

if I take {specific_issue} seriously for {relationship_z}, I will also take it seriously for {relationship_h}, and {relationship_a}, and that could become Problematic, thus I’ll try to avoid it all.

Both of my parents either hated me, or tolerated me, but the ‘tolerance’ was dispensed when I was not being problematic, which i often enough was just that.

I feel a need to mention that there’s available third-party evidence that I’m not at all times a disastrous piece of shit, which is certainly the dominant vibe I get from my parents in every conceivable way. Yet in conversation with both of them, I kept noticing the constant emission of energy that rounds to either “someone who does X is fundamentally flawed” or “you do X, and are thus fundamentally flawed”.

There’s a HEAVY, overwhelming lean into role compliance. Non-compliance is met with deadness, non-responsiveness, silence, skipping over, if it can be. If it cannot be, they emotionally ‘slap back’. they’ve experienced me as vastly less compliant today than I was when I lived in their house, and are both obviously shook.

Also, some of you might do this kind of stuff to yourself. There’s a cost to this treatment, but that cost can be lowered a heck of a lot if you can quickly name-and-witness-at-least-to-yourself the phenomena.

She said over and over, her only goal for me was “to grow up successful”4, which to her meant becoming a faithful evangelical/republican supremacist. Every aspect of my personhood that stood beyond my compliance with her narrow view of the world was simply flushed down the toilet. I’ve been climbing, intensively, for most of the last 20 years. She and I have never discussed my rock climbing. It’s not listed as a thing in the bible, so how could it be discussed?

I have memories of her unleashing icy, cold, contemptuous judgement against me, and not a single memory of tenderness or attuned time in the same space. When I read They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, lots clicked for me. I now strongly endorse this book to others as a form of bibliotherapy. I’ve got lots of kindle notes here.

Several years ago, the last time I saw my father in person, I hadn’t the presence of mind to realize I had no desire to sit next to him for a family photo. He was pretending things were nice between us, even though obviously, obviously, they were not. He decided I should be sitting closer to him than I was, for a family photo, so he did what he always does to people he views as less than/other. Instead of moving himself, or asking me to move closer to him, with his hand, he grabbed my knee hard and tried to drag me closer to him. This piece of shit probably does this thing to kids all the time.

If I could tell you the speed with which my hand moved to his arm, grabbed his upper arm firmly, not bruisingly, and said with harshness befitting his violation of my body: “stop.”, or maybe “don’t do that”. He let go like he’d touched a hot pan. If he’d yanked again, i would have simply shoved him down the bench, out of reach of me. he felt it. i had my own kid sitting on my hip. Things were obviously not unfolding the way he’d expected. I don’t think Donald often encounters resistance to his emotional/physical bulliness, and what he experienced surprised him.

Back when he used to beat me, and long after he stopped physically assaulting me (understanding that physical assault on kids is uncouth after a certain age, he went for emotional/verbal/psychological bullying), I was in a skinny, small, thin, body, and even my (no longer skinny) adult height is dozens of pounds lighter and 15 cm/6 inches shorter.

I was small, bony, unmuscled, shorter person, relative plenty of my peers, growing up. I didn’t really care with my peers, I wasn’t physically bullied by them, and got along with my friends fine, but my dad, he’s over six feet tall, I remember him with big hands and a pushy physicality about him, especially along side his verbal and emotional bullying. I still sometimes fantasize about beating him, I think something in my body remembering the terror and helplessness he would induce, and wishing that I then had access to the same safety I have access to now. (Krav Maga, living inside my body which is also strong, an embodied physical confidence of deserving access to physical autonomy, verbal peacefulness).

I could write a whole article about the last phone conversation he and I had. it was the first time we’d spoken together 1:1 on the phone in several years. I have notes from before/during/after, going into it I saw it as likely a standard template for what it’s like to talk about supremacy with supremacists, and that’s exactly what it was.

He instantly moved aggressively for the control of the ‘frame’ of the conversation. He maintains the fantasy that I call alternatively ‘pro-slavery christianity’, or ‘sky daddy-ism’. He loves the ‘frame’ of ‘we are all under authority. you, me, we’re all under authority. it’s just that that authority ALSO made me authority over you. convenient, eh? so, with that established, lets proceed…’

He said I should thank him, for his child sexual assaults, and it’s irrelevant that I have a single opinion of how he treated me then, because it’s in the past, and he did what he did, and he found a book by a eugenicist advocating child abuse, so he “was doing what experts recommended”.5

My only purpose to contacting him was to make sure he know that he had no permission to ever physically assault eden, or make jokes about adults assaulting children in her presence. I don’t get my druthers of fully excising him from the life of my kid, and it’s not worth the effort of actually trying. Most of the danger he represents to children comes from no adults in the space ever naming his behavior as abusive.

So, his response, when I told him to not assault eden?

Josh, you misunderstand [sky daddy’s wishes]. He doesn’t wish for grandparents to assault their grandkids, he only wishes for parents to assault their kids, so i don’t have to hit your kid. that is your job.

I told him he’s a weak, fearful person for avoiding the book “The Origins of Pro-Slavery Christianity: Black and White Evangelicals in Antebellum Virginia”, because so many of his load-bearing cognitive structures are perfectly described in that book, and I resent being raised in the house of a person espousing to a T the views of slavers.

I view Donald Thompson, Miriam Thompson, as supremacists, prototypical of any other run-of-the-mill emotionally damaged person common in the greater united states today. Their own humanity has been disregarded, by people and systems, starting as children, and they internalized the dehumanization as they aged, eventually projecting it outwards, in some ways, and inwards in other ways. Since the capacity to be a feeling, grieving human is lost to them, every part of his personality exists to paper over the holes and project a sense of togetherness, cohesiveness. The banished bad parts get put on any other definable group, and the psyche finds piece.

I wish I’d never had to meet them, and instead had a real source of healthy-enough maternal and paternal energy in my life.

Anyway, this is but one of the stories i have flowing around my brain when I think of things of parenting, my kid, my parents, and more.

Shaming (non)responses #

Part of why I’m even writing this section is because I’m much less affected by this sort of response than I once was. I’m less affected because I can more clearly label diminishing or minimizing or dismissing responses, and be more comfortable in whatever my response is.

When I’m shamed for something, it’s less likely that the other person is trying to shame me out of feeling a particular way about something, though that has certainly happened (thanks, evangelicals), but it also is the other person deploying a reflexive strategy to deal with their own grief. They shame themselves out of feelings of grief, as an adaptive strategy to their own formative relationships, and then deploy the same strategies on others.

They don’t intend to project shame, but all forms of distraction, avoidance, dismissiveness, vs. connecting and letting the feeling breath, projects shame. :(

Like I said, trying to explain a list of things that’ll traverse a lot of territory. Often enough, in American society, especially white-passing society, when someone encounters a whiff of sadness, there’s a collective disgust reflect, or shame or fear. Countermeasures are deployed, like:

“oh, bummer. At least it’s better now.”

or:

“oh. At least it’s not worse.”

I don’t think anyone’s experience is extremely unique, generally. Even my most distinctive trait (heavy scooter usage) is common-enough in the USA, and the default for people of the global majority. It’s rare to ride a scooter as a white-passing person in denver/the greater united states, especially as a primary vehicle, etc etc)

Possibly by writing it all down, once, or so comprehensively, I can also symbolically reclaim some of the emotional energy tied up in it all. Sometimes it feels so heavy, or one piece of it feels heavy, which is ‘fine’, and then that clears up (as it always does), and then another piece of it leans heavily upon me.

There’s plenty more responses that telegraph some shame. Avoidance telegraphs shame, so even as I know intellectually most of these responses are driven by the persons own relationship to their own grief, some of me is an animal with a nervous system and a good-enough response from another person goes a long ways. A good cry does nice thing.

Josh’s list of sadnesses #

not ordered in any particular way. There’s about 50 items? I expect I could do 150 without breaking a sweat, I’ve got other hand-written lists floating around, I need to update this written document with those…

  1. lots of family stuff I’m ‘sad’ over. Related to Eden, her mom, my parents, siblings, the dense fabric of relations represented by those words, contrasted with the reality of my particular situation which is that most of those relationships are slightly/severely impoverished, obviously.
  2. Eden! Sadness over the sparseness of our relationship, certain dynamics in her life. (I’ve heard from some, a sentiment like “oh, well, she’s young and won’t remember much.”, as if that either 1) addresses my own sadness. I’m not so young as to not` remember this. the fuq? also, it presumes that i don’t have a meaningful-to-me relationship with my kid, because dads don’t actually love or have real relationships with their kids. Also, this overall fits into the category of a ‘closing response’, so when I get it, the entire conversational space of ‘eden’ feels like it gets closed. Bummer)
  3. Increased sense of fragility of everything. I drive through 100x more dangerous intersections in a normal week in 2025 than I did in 2020, and it feels like a respective increase in risk. I think so intensely about riding around safely, and I resent how effortful it is, how dangerous the roads are, by foot, on a bicycle, a scooter, and yes, of course, the roads are outrageously dangerous in a car. I cannot help but notice when a car is pointed at me, when I’m relying on someone else’s decision making to not die. (walking a crosswalk in front of waiting cars sometimes feels like walking in front of loaded gun. “If any of these people move a limb an inch in the wrong way, I could die”. It feels like most people feel the same anxiety that I do, but dissociate from the experience a bit more than I do.)
  4. loss of so much that represented interestingness and joy to me. Cool projects, golden, a meaningful relationship, interesting outdoor places, easy access to outdoor climbing, better but still not ideal bicycle infrastructure.
  5. cars & car supremacy, the danger I clock. holding how ‘big’ the groups affected are, across time and space, today, and over the last 100 years. About 1 million people in America have died “accidentally/inevitably” in car-related deaths since the November 11, 2001 blowback event that killed 3,000 people and sparked yet a new round of total, global military domination by the USA. 40,000 people a year die on american roads. pedestrian deaths ‘going up’, the spaces where there is refuge from cars are always getting smaller. I look out my window and can witness close-enough-to-injurious interactions between cars and people all the time.
  6. the NOISE of car engines. Even on a third floor apartment, thankfully safe from a car being able to drive through my front wall or whatever, I still am not free from hearing every passing vehicle. Tire noise, engine noise, brake noise, wind noise, they are loud. During the day, and at night. Cars and motorcycles. Loud loud loud. Racing to catch a light. Honking to announce someone’s right of way. I despise it. I wear ear plugs most nights except hot winter nights where I close the windows and run air conditioning. I almost always have a window cracked, for fresh air, even when it’s very cold outside. I love apartment life! I almost never run my heat or my AC, too. Anyway, an open window and quiet indoor space means I hear everything. and I notice the cars. All of them. feels intrusive, disruptive, but it seems like many others I see IRL just… accept, cannot perceive it. I wear ear plugs a lot, and I seem to usually be distinctive in this way. I don’t know how others are not also wearing ear plugs a lot.
  7. parking lots. omg. walking through them. the ethnic cleansing they represent. The standard pattern of downtowns with parking lots where there were once buildings is… ethnic cleansing. There was an ethnic neighborhood, the supremacists didn’t want it there, they used zoning and highways to attack the neighborhood, eventually displacing and murdering and harassing and suppressing the area. Disrepair, fabricated, at first, then real. Then the justification of parking minimums to keep non-wealthy people from being prioritized. And now there’s parking everywhere. New development, of the last few decades, is different, the buildings and lots are laid out from the beginning for parking and parking lots, and… the evil spins onwards.
  8. past partners handling of driving, the dangers inherent within it. Multiple partners, not just one. Truly shocking levels of conflict emerge sometimes from me expressing a desire for more safety while driving. Years ago, a then-partner almost hit me in the car they were driving while I was on my bicycle and got mad at me for wanting to talk about it. 💔
  9. friends treatment of driving. Multiple friends, not just one. Not only have partners driven dangerously and fought me about it, friends have to. My orientation towards my entitlement to my own safety with a partner is different than that of a friend. My friends who drive dangerously, I simply find myself spending less and less time with them. It’s sad, and I cannot prevent my own nervous system from registering the issue, eventually it becomes easier for me to simply not experience the issue.
  10. urban renewal and thus ethnic cleansing in america, plainly visible in every way in every city. Every vista of mine during the day, of Denver, marred by the history of ethnic cleansing, the tragedy of the lives lost and lives being spent, in it. genocide is ethnic cleansing. I’m so sad, watching the evidence of this all around me. Then my (usually white-passing) friends would imply that I am deficient for not being able to dissociate from the grevousness.
  11. supremacy and ‘whiteness’. it’s effects on others, on eden, on me.
  12. grief-phobic people, people groups, among family, ‘community’, friends.
  13. repeated exposure to malevolence and in-the-moment dissociation from the other party. (car drivers, at the same time aggressive and depersonalizing in their treatment of others)
  14. betrayal and betrayal-adjacent behaviors in specific ways w/groups. parents, paternal/maternal, siblings, legally-established family, communities.
  15. how shame spews out of some people/memes in culture
  16. pregnancy & 4th trimester for K, Eden. I obv wasn’t pregnant, and i felt unfairly eliminated from the emotional landscape of the whole thing.
  17. ‘death’ of many friendships
  18. as an adult, I want to wander my environment the same way I did as a kid, and I am so outside-constrained. Every city, esp Denver. America, also beyond, so many places are so constraining in the urban environment. Bad roads function as emotional walls to cross.
  19. I am so sad over the painful loss of relationship and friendship over the last few years, leaving family systems and religeous structures. Through little or no fault of them, many people remaining in those systems feel unavailable to me. “I’ve not changed” they might say, and correctly. I have. My heart breaks for it. My heart breaks over varieties of loss of relationship, even as it seemed to pre-break even in some of those same relationships. I miss feeling safe and vulnerable at the same time. Safe enough for disinhibited self-expression. this written document stands as a version of my exercising disinhibited self-expression.
  20. death of a friend to cancer
  21. death of a another friend to cancer
  22. another friend killed in a preventable avalanche incident
  23. another friend killed in a car over-run of a road. Friend was walking, passing car drove onto sidewalk, killed her. Her partner was with her, severely injured. If there were a bollard like the ones discussed here, instead of plastic flex posts, Lovisa would still be alive. Bollards can be installed for free.
  24. the grief and burden of Witnessing mistreatment (to see something bad and fulfil the obligation of naming it as such to the parties, either the victim, or the oppressor, or both). It’s tiring.
  25. an ocean of sadness and pain over the loss of time and experiences with Eden.
  26. the psychological distance caused by Colefax, Park Ave, Speer, Broadway. Not even saying anything about the I-25 and I-70 highways, running of course through ethnic neighborhoods. Not every highway mile goes through an ethnic neighborhood, of course, but enough of them do. The danger and violence of the vehicles and noise and physics of existing in these space. To drive on these highways with eyes to see it is enormously emotionally painful.
  27. people that reflexively attack their own sadness, as a [at one time reasonable] coping strategy with dehumanizing grief-phobic caretakers, and thus attack yours when it arises in the environment, even years later.
  28. i do not personally care too much for most gender construct conversation, and am annoyed when it seems like others do, or do too much. I’m usually annoyed when I get read strongly into the ‘MAN’ gender construct, usually by other people who have penises. ‘MEN’ are expected to not feel things, to not be sad, certainly to not love their children (fuck you, donald thompson) or to feel really anything at all, except dehumanization and objectification of the self and others. It’s a breath of fresh air to encounter male-passing people not traumatically socialized into the reflexive suppression of their emotional nature, but it’s certainly not an affliction exclusively born by english-speaking white-passing people with penises in the greater united states. I’m always pleased to hang with anyone who has easy-enough access to their own humanity.
  29. The book Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Journey Into Manhood and Back Again does a good job of painting how strongly the emotional damage of people passing as men can be experienced by everyone. The people who consider themselves men, perhaps seemingly willingly clinging to patriarchy (I say propagandized), and everyone they effect with their lives. The tl;dr of the book is thanks to skillful use of skills common in acting and theater, the author became convincingly male-passing, and could thus ‘go undercover’ in a long-term way, building relationships across time with different individual men, or groups of men. The author was harmed, in the same way that you or I would be harmed doing a long investigation into an area where pollution was being spewed into the environment.
  30. I have, in my family, multiple doctors, a therapist, a psychiatrist, many different versions and flavors of these types of people. My dad is a doctor, and we heard about it constantly. Most of these people I have no special respect for. I have very low regard for american psychiatry. That low regard is partially informed by most modern psychiatrists seeming to not know the supremacist origin of american psychiatry, which gave us things like the concept of ‘mental illness’, for not being sufficiently conformed to supremacists ideals. Go read the description for drapetomania, and meditate on how these sorts of people would go on to create the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM 1). The DSM 1 is such an abhorrent document, it feels self-abandoning to fantasize that anything downstream of it could be credible.
  31. i keep appreciating the new, visible, sad ways it manifests that my parents have hated me. (They would feign love towards me if I’d adhered to the pro-slavery christianity cult I was raised in, the patriarchy, nationalism, support of the state of the greater united states. Even when I participated in those systems, fully, I recount confidently the vibe that they hated me. It was simply slightly hidden behind the lie of ‘we all love each other and you’re doing what we think you ought so we give you fake affection!’)
  32. a regrettable number of times, key people in my life have attacked me for looking sad. (this happened in distant memory, from my parents, and much more poignantly, this happened during the end of my marriage, and indeed is part of why the marriage ended. I was tolerated when I performed mood-lifting for others, and utterly rejected when my mood was not deemed sufficiently ‘good enough’). As a in-the-moment useful coping mechanism, I can now ‘manage’ and hide my sadness, so, so well. It feels like this now gets unintentionally activated or used, by others, because it arises in me easily, now.
  33. I tried all the steps of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States with them. First loyalty, and I got abuse and torture. Then voice, and I got more punishment, abuse. Then exit, got me pretend peace, because “strong-willed Josh was finally out of the house”. Now I’m back to voice, and get more shunning and avoidance.
  34. I’ve always been quick to defect and undermine the control being dropped on me, heavily. the first time I read about anarchist calisthenics I thought “oh, easy, I’m already well-practiced at routine, small acts of non-compliance with abusive totalitarian systems! 1.

Many people, even sometimes myself, are grief phobic, and thus reflexively, instinctively, push away all evidences of grief.

So, I’ve had experiences of crying, hard, alone, and crying gently, to my self, in the company of others, and overall hiding it from them, AND I HATE THIS! Sometimes the best thing for a nervous system is a good cry, and a good accepting hug.

I’ve received “what is wrong with you?” or “have you considered medication?” as a normal response to sadness. It hurts to feel disgust pointed at me, for being affected by something, to the point of tears.

I’ve felt the loss of connection to my own grieving and angering, as I so often avoid perturbing others with the upset that would be experienced by me or them, witnessing my sadness.

In about a year, i went from thinking I had four good-enough parent figures (two parents, by blood, two parents by marriage). Then, some death via heart attack, and the remaining three quickly evidenced their incompetence and abandonment, and I sadly appreciated that I actually had zero good-enough parent figures.

As I became a parent myself, hope after hope dashed itself against the rocks of the supremacy and emotional immaturity of those people. I got shunned, pushed aside. My parents often made jokes about how discardable I was: “I could kill you and make another one like you.”, and more

Part of my anger today, is fully rooted in things of the past, and in the context of the relationship with my parents could be fully addressed and resolved, except they’re continuing today exactly the same bad things they did in the past, thus there’s a second layer of anger piled on top. I wouldn’t imagine entertaining the idea of something like ‘forgiveness’ or ‘a repaired relationship’ without

I can only guess how my parents feel about my divorce - neither of them have ever mentioned it, and both seem to studiously avoid me, so I suspect I’ve committed the Greatest Sin in their mind (a divorce), and nothing else matters to them. They’ve never spoken to me about my own child. I have never spoken about parenting, with my parents, in an emotionally regulated way. Perhaps they know that their own parenting was such an abomination there is no point in discussing it with me. All they did was emotionally and physically abuse and neglect me, while my dad was completely absent from the house, giving his entire life over to work, or the church. When he was at home, he was in his office working, continuously. Never once carved a shred of affection and tossed it my way. I experienced my own father as exclusively consumed by himself, or exclusively disappointed in me, disgusted by me.

automobile supremacy & grief #

I feel sad that nearly every one of my friendships is mediated by the car dependency common to the greater united states. I don’t have a car, and nearly every single one of my friends has a car and is fully dependent upon it. I want to meet someone in a park? I have few friends that live within walking distance of the park I want to meet at, and so they spend forever driving their car around, finding parking, walking from the parking to the destination, and then however the day unfolds, they have to return to where they parked their car, to move it again.

I’ve had relationships end, in part, because my partner refused to drive gently in the car. I despise being stuck in a car being driven dangerously, and even now when I go places with friends I weigh asking them to sometimes modify their behavior (hey, there’s .75 seconds of stopping distance between you and the car in front of you, and we’re going 60 mph, could we get a little more stopping distance?)

highways, literal highways, now separate me from eden. Not just miles, and distance, but the spiritual/psychological distance of the highway. Tragedy, for all of us.

I feel the weight of slavery, family destruction, I’m re-saddened over the violence, the experience.

If one models police as deputized slave patrollers, one models “no-knock drug raids” as state-sponsored night-riding. It’s simply terrorism and supremacy. Unlike reconstruction-era night riding, when it’s modern policing, all the night riders are getting paid! What a nice arrangement one would set up for themselves, if they wanted to maintain the racial caste system that is white america.

Police riding around with sirens?

Casual emotional neglect in friendships, partnerships, familial relationships. I don’t miss emotional bids for connection, usually, and it’s hard being around people who discard emotional bids for connection. I’ve found voicelessness, within me, disempowerment. A sense of ‘asking for change might cause the relationship to end’.

I deserve to ask for things, so I’ll ask for change, but the number of times this has led to the end of relationships for me has me feeling weight of grief and loss, and increases my sense of fear around asking for change. :(

and I have to fawn my way through the interaction, because if I ask directly and they say no, that’s awkward as fuck, and can rapidly become quite uncomfortable to me. I asked one friend to slow down, and he started arguing with me that my risk perception was bunk, and because he has great reflexes we’re actually completely safe. Another friend said he had great car insurance so if he got in a car accident he’d just get a new car. I never drove with the latter friend again.

I’ve only infrequently driven with the former friend since, and eventually heard me asking him to drive slower, and once he heard it in that way, he changed his behavior.

When I say

I feel uncomfortable

or

I feel that the risk of a bad outcome is unnecessarily elevated because of X, Y, and Z, could we discuss ameliorating it?

I’d rather not be told “your feelings are wrong”. That’s dismissiveness, defensiveness, and damages the relationship. Certainly is not in line with relational flourishing.

I have so often found myself drawn into what ends up feeling like an argument because the other person acts more threatened by my POV of something than the risk I’m trying to collaborate on, and so much relational damage ensues.

A small instance of someone saying ‘i do not like that treatment’… #

… and how I responded

When Eden says “i don’t like X”, I say “oh, thanks for telling me” and then I check in a few times subsequently to make sure it’s all good. There was a time she felt I was laughing at her in some situations. I was indeed laughing sometimes when she did something, and she was experiencing it as me laughing at her. I saw it in her face and disposition, and the emotional energy when she said “dont laugh at me!”

I’ve been laughed at, mocked, criticized by people who think it’s fun to say hurtful things to others, and don’t care that it hurts me. Many family stories I grew up with rounded to “our family (mostly the patriarch donald) mocks Josh because he is sensitive, and ‘men’ are not sensitive, so we’ll bully him into manliness.”, and lots of other mocking behaviors.

I hated this experience. So, when eden says “don’t laugh at me!” I didn’t fight her on if I was laughing at her. I said “my gosh, I don’t want you to feel laughed at by me. I have memories of some versions of something similar, I can easily sort this, thanks for telling me.”

I told her what my plan was: I wrote a sign to myself and taped it up in the kitchen:

josh, do not laugh at Eden

  • josh

And I told her “going forward, please tell me again if/when you feel laughed at, thank you for telling me already, i’ll check in on this a few times over the next few days”.

I stopped laughing at her, including sometimes refraining from laughing in a situation that I knew I wasn’t teasing her, but I didn’t want her to think she was being teased. I don’t know how other people do/don’t handle her desire to not be laughed at. I’m not going to accidentally be like them.

of course, humor is not gone, in any way shape or form. sometimes when I would laugh with her (in response to her sometimes doing funny things, saying clever things, being funny) I’d make sure we were both seeing it the same.

Eden, a moment ago when I laughed, I was laughing because {x}, and I think you found it funny too. Was that all okay with you?”

she’s since validated several different times that the issue she clocked is resolved, to her satisfaction.

I did not tell her: “I didn’t INTEND to hurt you, I was simply laughing because it was funny, don’t worry about it, don’t be upset by it. It’s how I show love.”

Further emotional abandonment from siblings, which I also assess as the partial responsibility of my parents. They set us all up for gross failure. Once when I said:

Gosh, I’m sad over the current absence in my life represented by my supremacist, propagandized/propagandizing father

A family member (who I think blames me for my relational ‘difficulties’ with my parents, rather than saying ‘the current relationship is a good reflection of the relationship they built with you’) responded:

Well, what would he do that’s nice for you anyway?

Implying, perhaps:

what possible difference could you be experiencing in your current life if instead of an abusive, assaulting, bullying father, you had an emotionally attuned father who occasionally embodied healthy paternal and maternal energies?

what a thing to think and say. supremacy needs gender essentialism (patriarchy) and patriarchy proclaims the message that people with penises have no emotional nature, and I am sometimes angered, or saddened, or both, to encounter people who think they’re not ruined by patriarchy, playing the same tired message upon me. I no longer am surprised to run into overwhelming patriarchal energy from people with vulvas. I’ve been (ineffectively) critizied by supremacists with penises who have sometimes told me, as if revealing a shameful truth about me, that I have a feminine communication style.

This is why I get a blank face in response to grief and sadness so often by these people. I cut outside of the proscribed “rule” of emotional suppression, and someone else’s brain sorta fuzzes out when they witness it, until the moment has passed.

If I am experiencing sadness, and I see the other person with a blank face, I reflexively move away from my own sadness, because if they started assaulting me for my sadness I’d be even more unhappy. I am simply pissed that these people then proclaim that because they experience nice things in the relationship with me, it must be healthy for both of us.

When everyone is committed to the cult, it’s hard to access a sense of aliveness in anyone’s soul. Platitudes abound.

Relational interdependence is impossible with supremacists #

My view of relationships has always been that we are influenced by the people around us, their positive or negative regard towards us. Because of that interdependence, it’s reasonable for us to all be mindful of how we hold our loved ones, in our own minds, or in the shared words/ideas that fill the space of relationship. Like, if you’re dear to me, I’ll try to tell you as such and reflect to you the things that I find distinctive, interesting, laudable, appreciable, about you.

When dealing with evangelicals, in particular, I began to note that even as I pointed the above energy towards my loved ones, they reflected back to me not anything distinctive about me, but only things that they thought were laudable that emitted from me playing the role they wanted me to play. (example: my mom’s favorite thing to talk to me about was what I was reading in the bible, not anything real about my life)

next, lets talk about parental coercion towards kids, and the way parents like this used alternatively emotional/verbal/physical assault and emotional warmth as a stick, and carrot, to farm from kids desired behaviors. this is called operant conditioning, and it sorta stinks, yet it’s everywhere. It’s dehumanizing.

I will hurt you unless you do what I want

is not so different from:

I will dispense rewards for you giving me what I want

So we ought to be as sensitive to the latter energy as the former.

josh, have you considered that you’re choosing sadness? #

Based on other books, like ‘the courage to be disliked’

a line of reasoning, could be followed:

I think josh is choosing sadness. The sadness and resulting frozenness (‘depression’) is helpful to josh, it gives him something he wants and needs

OOOOH I am 100% ‘choosing’ depression and unhappiness and sadness. I’ll explain why:

First, I’ve had some horrible experiences of disinhibited self-expression, along many dimensions. Intimate partnerships, marriage, family. Expressing hopes, joys, sadness, all has often enough led to emotional devestation. “depression” is a good way to avoid some of those bad things happening again.

when I make the kinds of moves I made when i was happy, I kept triggering the disgust response from people close to me. My then-partner, friends, church friends, others. Or a profoundly blank face. The disgust was when I brought up issues with zoning and land use norms in the USA, that are crippling all of us. I kept unintentionally maligning something core to how they were (evangelicalism, patriarchy, car-normalized culture, militarism, violence, dismissiveness of the other) and often-enough they would want to control me/the conversation to achieve emotional comfort.

To achieve relational comfort, I chose strategies that accomplished safety, which could look like sadness, depression, stuckness. The happy, ageiatic version of me kept running afoul of people near to me. Bummer.

or “sadness is instrumental” in the same way that any form of hiding is instrumental.

bibliotherapy #

Here’s some of the books that have helped me, over the last few years. Some themese weave together in interesting ways.

For instance, what’s it like to be colonized by american supremacists? I strongly suggest reading Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism, with special attention given to the experience with american missionaries. Both of my parents spent their entire lives fully participating in colonial missions around the world.

  • recovering a capacity to grieve. I don’t agree with everything in this book, and found it enormously helpful The Tao of Fully Feeling. I learned only recently that Spotify has quite a lot of books on it - turns out this book is available on Spotify, so I gave it a re-read/listen recently. It’s helpful, logical, friendly. The author (and anyone else) loses a little of my appreciation whenever speaking positively of Alcoholics Anonymous or any sort of 12-step program. I strongly dislike those sorts of groups. Most other parts of the book were helpful to me.
  • Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, also by pete walker, is v helpful.
  • Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Dang. So good. Talks about the deep, aching emotional loneliness that comes from being ‘stuck’ on emotionally vaccuous subjects and people.
  • How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States The delusion of the people of the greater united states of ‘political authority’ and the way those entitlements play out on the world is very similar to ‘emotional immaturity’ and ‘verbal abuse’. The cost is infiniately high. I weep when I read books like this. This book is also why I will never vote again. Native people cannot vote. Imprisoned people cannot vote. Colonized people cannot vote. You know who can vote? The tiny group already almost certainly in favor of more colonialism, so the sytem gets what it wants. More colonialism.
  • The Verbally Abusive Relationship: How to Recognize It and How To Respond what a bummer of a book to read, and so damn useful. I’d say it’s worth the read even if you’re not remotely questioning your own key relationships. Reading this book gave new color to my relationship with my own parents, and sparked lots of interesting conversations with peers about their relationships with their parents. Turns out lots of parents, because they feel entitled to control their children, make casual, routine use of verbally and emotionally abusive behaviors, to accomplish that control. Bummer, eh?
  • White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color I just finished this book, exceptional. I’d note that “white tears” is how miriam usually responds to my occasional questing along the lines of this post, the thing I wrote about evangelicalism (her… mental dis-ease-dampener of choice?). What I observe is first a loss of attunement, or maybe a never-achieved-sense-of-attunement, and then I’d be clocking many signs of dissociation, in her mannerisms. The physicality of someone trying desperately to look like they’re relaxed when they’re really not relaxed. Totally fine, by the way, these are not easy conversations, I too sometimes do a little box breathing or grounding exercise, or try to shift the topic and attention to something else, so the system can settle back down to peacefulness. (Frisbee! Look at that thing we can both see since we’re out on a walk together!) With someone like miriam, there is no settling or peacefulness. no progress. no connection.
  • When I watched Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke trailer I felt so much familiarity with my experiences with my own mother. Do you see how she operates fully emotionally alone, continuousy, coercing her kids, keeping up a front. Often, my mom (and not just my mom) would

Anyway, I now have to think that when the supremacist is feeling overwhelmed, they’re not mindfully staying in a difficult state for the sake of an improved outcome, they’re dissociating from the experience and thus not able to hear you. Then, when you do something so provocative like “So, what do you think about this? What are you hearing me say? Whats coming up for you as you hear it?” it feels like being put on a stage, or being given a test.

(I’ve heard “i just cannot say the right thing to you and that’s why I don’t want to talk about this” so many times). It’s that i am no longer accepting appeals to authority to dismissiveness towards me so, if all someone has is dismissiveness or appleas to authority, for instance, their experience of me is indeed “i just cannot say the right thing to josh”. I simply disagree with their frame. link to frame control piece? it’s still a draft. The collapse from that is to just start sobbing, playing the ‘damsel in distress’ trope. Tears are fine, natural, healthy, please note where in this piece about my own tears I’m putting commentary on someone else’s. When this pattern plays out repeatedly, every time I press her directly on supremacy, I cannot help but clock it. Especially having just read White Tears/Brown Scars. Here’s my notes/highlights from the book.

I view my parents as colonizing powers, where “the mind and body of male child #1” was just one part of the colonized territory. Part of what caused me to realize they treated me as colonizers treated the lands and people they violenced against, was as I heard stories of resistence to colonizers, and found so much I resonated with, in my own emotional disposition towards them. Like Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism

So, my parents responses to me all perfectly fit the script for ‘colonial powers responses of their victims’, which is also the abuser’s syllogism:

I didn’t hurt you. And if I did, I didn’t intend to. If I did intend it, you deserved it. If you didn’t deserve it, it wasn’t that bad.

So, I keep naming dynamics in the conversation, sometimes, and that feels quite uncomfortable for people like my parents. They make appeals to authority, I say “That’s an appeal to authority; I continue to evaluate you as the ultimate responsible person for your decisions.”

Here’s a particularly interesting quote:

The concept of whiteness and racism as a form of pathological narcissism that manifests in some individual white people has a long research history. In 1980, Carl Bell, a clinical psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry, outlined how the hallmark symptoms associated with narcissistic personality disorder, such as grandiosity, entitlement, and lack of empathy, apply to individual racists. More recently, in 2016, assistant professor of education Cheryl Matias described whiteness as narcissistic because its emotional nature insists on positioning itself as the center of the discourse, “especially when one is trying to push it to the margins.”

Another quote:

Strategic White Womanhood is a spectacle that permits the actual issue at hand to take a back seat to the emotions of the white woman, with the convenient effect that the status quo continues unabated. White women’s tears are fundamental to the success of whiteness. Their distress is a weapon that prevents people of color from being able to assert themselves or to effectively challenge white racism and alter the fundamental inequalities built into the system.

In this case, the person trying to assert himself against her is someone who was once a kid, not a person of color, but the diminishment that supremacism applies to the non-supremacist groups it creates is constant, across class (“child”) and ethnicity.

Even more books #

In the last few years, I’ve read books like:

Footnotes #

not-yet-integrated loose notes, categorize the above list before randomly adding these entries: #

  • ongoing devestating harm of ‘car-dependent culture’, which even that frame is dismissive of the reality. a supremacist ideal, a regime of social control, is represented by ‘single family housing’ on one side, and the requisite zoning regime, and the highwaymen (rubber, asphalt, petroleum. you know, gdp stuff). urban renewal as ethnic cleansing

  • the greatest threat to my and eden’s ongoing wellness is the possibility of getting crushed by a car for whatever reason, on our day-to-day. The other main risks are related to car-dependent, car-propagandized american culture. taps sign 40,000 people killed on american roads, not evenly distributed in anyway, by appreciating this it can be fixed

  • all the sadness of less social time w/friends, bc of how much spiritual/psychological/time/risk/hassle exists for anyone to get in the same physical location, if it’s in america, regardless of the distribution of car users.

  • I don’t have a car, often-enough wish at times that I did. My scooter works so well and is such an improvement on a car, and I still wish I had a Toyota Sienna, which I’ll purchase whenever I next find myself obtaining a vehicle.

  • even when I’m just walking to cheesman, I have to cheat death repeatedly crossing Franklin, Colefax, 14th, 13th. I have plenty of valid beef w/supremacy culture materialized in cars proliferating like cancer or girrardia.

  • sadness that fire department is not part of the solution to improving their domain. (I visited local fire department today, chatted w/Tom Ford, the person in charge and a few others. It was an odd vibe.)

  • my parent’s routine use of silent treatment as punishment. Kid josh was so damn relational (adult josh is too) that depriving me of interaction, affection, warmth, while still in the same physical place, was such a shocking betrayal. I’d get upset and sent to my room or grounded, abandoned, said “you are not welcome here unless you’re putting on a fake face” and we’ll hurt you until you do.
  • I experienced few opportunities of ‘disinhibeted self-expression’ until I’d fully left the toxic family/religeous situation

A kid’s addendum #

My kid has a few things that bum her out. I live within walking distance of several parks, several libraries, a botanic gardens, three climbing gyms, grocery stores, and more.

Some of these are long walks. My favorite climbing gym for ropes is a 7 mile round-trip walk. 3.5 miles each way. Totally doable, but not something I relsh doing often. I usually ride my scooter, of course, but with Eden have done much more walking than I’d do without.

It’s tons of fun to load up her jogger, and chain trips together. The park, a friend’s house, the gym, another friend’s house on the way back, etc. We can have a super fun trip.

Walking at night is particularly challenging, as cars have wildly bright headlights, especially the LED lights.

Eden says “I don’t like it when the cars eyes look into my eyes”

She’s three feet tall - the car headlights are blinding, a stunning amount of pollution, sometimes travelling hundreds and hundreds of meters.

She also sometimes says about some trips “The walk is too big”.

If we could subtract from the walk, all the distance that exists explicitly for cars, these walks would all be dramatically shorter. I estimate 1/2 the distance, conservatively.

Land utilization is terrible when it’s allocated to vehicles. Of course, that was the point in america - urban renewal as ethnic cleansing. Supremcists WANTED to have parking lots and wide, dangerous streets instead of lively neighborhoods. They went hard in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and less hard since then, but we are all living amongs the rubble of their slow dismantelling of society.

American cities destroying neighborhoods via ‘urban renewal’ is very, very similar to what people in Israel (with the support of people in America) are doing to the people in Palestine. The bulldozers rumbling around, tearing things down. Look at the photos of where Robert Moses destroyed neighborhoods for the ‘cross bronx expressway’

Devestation reigns.

  1. Is not “patriarchy kink” not a brilliant phrase? I did not come up with it. Nor did I originate ‘sky daddyism’, and found it to also be worth a few giggles. ↩

  2. TODO finish draft, publish “frame control”, it’s inherently coercive to ‘force’ someone else into “your frame”, it’s inherently mutual to follow someone else into “their frame”, for their best understanding of the dynamic. https://knowingless.com/2021/11/27/frame-control/. For an explanation and origin of the willingness to enslave and colonize: The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia. I view a belief in authority now as an dangerous superstition, if it mattered to you to keep an appreciation for the figure of Jesus Christ, as one drop-kicks the rest of the structures to the curb, the politics of jesus post, but its not necessary. to treat others gently, one needs, needs to re-access treating oneself gently. I suggested to one friend that they “fire their inner cop”, someone else I pointed out that if they called someone else a fraction of what “they” called themselves, we’d all be horrified. Pete walker calls it ‘the toxic inner critic’, or the internalized voice of a parent, usually or some other caretaking figure who used shame and punishment and coercion to bully others. ↩

  3. Years ago, I encountered this list of 300 ways it can hurt to be a man, and certainly appreciated some of them, and appreciated the impressive number. perhaps it could also be called ‘300 ways it can hurt to be a man inside of american/western/supremacist culture’ ↩

  4. What is her definition of successful? Of course talking directly with her about it involves lots of thought-stopping cliches, but it rounds to the standard toolkit of ‘evangelical religious authoritarianism’ which is a regime of apocalyptic social control? is that too strong? Read some of my notes/quotes from on hitting small(er) people ↩

  5. this is, of course, the classic ‘appeal to authority’, or ‘nuremburg defense/just following orders’. This is why belief in authority is such a dangerous superstition. As a reminder, this is my father, who claims he loves me, enlisting the full weight of his cognitive powers and story making potential to double down on defending child abuse ↩

  6. When passing old white people deign to make remarks now that openly affirm a racialized, supremacist view of the world, out loud, with their full chest, I clap back. the last old white-passing woman that spoke in such a way of eden, to me said in passing to or about my kid “oh, you are such a beautiful little girl” (reinforcing a message of ‘there is a standard, you happen to meet it, therefore you are fundamentally different than someone else, I approve of your seeming conformity to my version of a eugenic ideal.’ Also a bunch of presumed crap around gender roles, femininity, conformity, etc) I stopped, turned, looked at her face, and said “what a strange thing to say to someone.” female-passing people get stripped by ‘society’ of permissible access to rage, by anyone embodying patriarchal, supremacist, emotionally immature ideals. Remember, Rage Becomes Her

    I wish I’d said something a bit more specific, but it is enough. I was not neglecting the role of the Witness. Eden heard me. The supremacist heard me. Its enough. ↩

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