It's time to heal our addiction to punishment and suffering.
Photo by Milad B. Fakurian on Unsplash
Driving down the street one day when I had just moved to Denmark, I asked about a building we were passing.
It looked like an official government building, and as a curious new resident, I wanted to know what it was for.
I learned that it was a prison (it didn't look like what I had known prisons to look like). And then I was given a brief lesson in the Danish prison system.
I was told that the maximum life sentence in Denmark averaged at about 17 years, and that only 4 people in Danish history have spent over 30 years in prison.
Convicted murderers can, after demonstrating good behavior, leave the prison campus during the daytime in order to attend college classes and get educated.
I was so skeptical of this prison model and its efficacy that as soon as I got home I researched everything I could find about it.
I learned that Scandinavia's prison model is built on the belief that those who are committing crimes must be doing so because they feel disconnected from society or have otherwise not learned another way of showing up in the world. And so their therapeutic model of rehabilitation involves educating them and reconnecting them with their environment as much as possible, not punishing them by removing them from it.
It was a far cry from the American prison (and justice) system that I had grown up with.
I was shocked. It was the first time in my life that I had had the opportunity to consider whether an alternative besides severe punishment and isolation could exist in the face of a heavy crime.
This was the day that I realized that I had, as an American, an incredibly dysfunctional view of punishment.
As I began to explore this further, I realized that this was one of the collective belief systems Americans held that I suddenly wasn't terribly proud of.
I began to question why I felt that my fellow humans deserved to suffer. I began to notice where I expected to be punished for my mistakes (everywhere, all the time) and saw how that fueled a twisted form of perfectionism in me. I noticed how that impacted my stress level and my ability to show up authentically toward the people around me. I watched myself try to punish others when I disagreed with them by withholding my love, giving them the silent treatment, verbally accosting them, or unfriending them on social media.
It was deeply ingrained in me and I saw it everywhere I turned. I found tons of evidence of this behavior being normalized in my American conditioning and education. My family constellation was also rife with it. And I was horrified.
It's taken me years to untangle this singular belief. To stop immediately drawing punitive conclusions based on isolated events about myself and others. To learn active practices of compassion instead.
Yes, every single action has consequences (both positive, and negative). Yes there should be consequences for breaking the law, causing harm, and bad behavior.
And, if we're going to make progress on anything, we absolutely must start with kindness and compassion. To everyone.
Bad behavior does not beget bad behavior. Period. It literally never works.
Right now, it's especially important that we check *ourselves*. Being activated does not always look like blue-blooded anger. Some of the most sophisticated and socially accepted forms of nervous system activation are righteousness, justification, and punitively withholding love. They are invisible, and they are dangerous.
And right now I can't scroll more than two posts down on my newsfeed without seeing appalling expressions of this in my community. Facebook and other forms of social media have become a war zone for many, and it's got to stop if we want to get anywhere together.
You don't educate and inform your friends and loved ones who might be unaware of their own unconscious bias by yelling, swearing, making them wrong, or shaming them. Holding someone accountable does not equal permission to be mean. You don't empower and uplift the Black community by coming from a place of superiority amidst your own network and making Black people your martyr. And when you're righteous and justified and punitive, that's exactly what's happening.
In victim consciousness work, this is classic rescuer behavior.
It's possible to be active without being activated. Say it with me now: 👏IT'S👏POSSIBLE👏TO👏BE👏ACTIVE👏WITHOUT👏BEING👏ACTIVATED👏.
I like the golden rule here: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
My guess is that if there was something you were unconscious to that might be negatively impacting those around you, being yelled at or treated as inferior would not work for you, either.
How do you like to receive feedback?
Sit still for a minute and think about your answer to that question.
I know for me, I love it when people drop off their assumptions and get curious with me. Of course there are things I can't see. OF COURSE. There are also things you can't see. These are called blind spots, and we all have them. Punching someone in the face does not help them become less blind.
People are overwhelmed, and while I agree that this uprising that is happening GLOBALLY is long overdue, we also need to be compassionate to those who are genuinely showing up, and making mistakes.
We must replace the belief that those who aren't perfect deserve to be punished immediately with something more constructive. We've got to stop blaming people for not being good enough. We've got to stop blaming ourselves for that, too.
This is the same mentality that has been imposed on Black people that we're trying to change. This is why we are marching, protesting, committing to being actively anti-racist, educating ourselves, and holding people accountable to their unconscious biases (WITH LOVE): so that Black people are not immediately punished for just being Black anymore.
Because you need to understand that Black people being punished for being Black is an externalized representation of a societal limiting belief that needs to die. Black people have been bearing the burden of this unchecked belief that lives inside all western people for centuries. We've been projecting this garbage on POC for far too long.
The solution, though, is not to just relocate the dysfunctional behavior. The solution is to heal from it, in all dimensions.
And standing before us is a massive opportunity:
To heal our addiction to punishment and suffering.
And race is of course one of the biggest players in that game, and absolutely deserves our humble and active attention.
But it exists on a small scale too. Deep in the minutia of your most subtle thoughts. This is where the seeds of change take root.