I was at a festival last year to lead a few workshops on relating and embodiment. The leadership team was quite big and we were something like 30 different facilitators doing separate workshops there.
I was not very happy with the way the event was led. It was framed around listening, inclusivity and openness but felt very directed, forced and tight for me – and not very inclusive of “negative” emotions which seemed to only be welcome in “shadow work” sessions, where they were to be screamed out.
I met quite a few people who felt unhappy, unsafe or angry about the way the festival was run and how it didn’t match the presentation/invitation that had made them go in the first place. But weirdly for me the story in the facilitation team seemed to be that everything was going really well and that everyone was happy.
When I tried to bring in that a lot of people (including myself) seemed to be unhappy, another facilitator answered by saying that maybe people were simply triggered because they were “not used to being in this high a frequency”. This was left uncontested and etched itself into my mind.
I left the festival feeling pretty triggered (although I am pretty sure it was not because it was such a “high frequency” event), with a lot of anger and disgust.
Radical self-responsibility
In the communities and practices that I have engaged with the most in recent years, we put a lot of emphasis on self-leadership, presence and owning experience.
There are plenty of good reasons to practice taking more responsibility for our own experiences and it makes sense to focus more on what happens when I get triggered, rather than blaming and shaming the people around me. We all do project a lot and it’s smart to check if my internal experience of reality matches the outside.
From an inside out perspective frameworks that center on self-responsibility and self-leadership make a lot of sense. They can help us see our own shadows and identifications and enable us to navigate more skillfully in the world, to get in touch with our boundaries and to make decisions on which places, communities and relationships are good for us and not.
However. When it becomes the dominant interpretive lens in a group or in a relationship and takes on the form of an outside-in perspective it becomes oppressive. When it takes the form of ‘criticism of the external world is actually about your internal state’ or ‘everything you experience is something you are doing to yourself’ we are in the danger zone.
When “your reaction is your responsibility” becomes the dominant frame, it becomes very difficult to raise valid complaints about actual harm, poor organization, power abuse, or genuine injustice. When the interpretative framework converts every external critique into evidence of internal work yet to be done, the content of the critique is made invisible.
It shows up concretely when leaders insist that any negative experiences you have are caused by your own wounds and your lack of self-responsibility – not the surroundings. This converts the person who speaks up from someone pointing at a problem to someone who has a problem themselves, which effectively silences critique before it’s even voiced.
If you want a concrete example on how this can look in practice, Ellie Wilde has written a great article series about her experiences in the ISTA scene:
This kind of radical self-responsibility ideology also becomes problematic when applied in intimate relationships. I was recently told a story about someone’s lover insisting that their relationship should be built on the idea that we can’t trigger each other, you can only trigger yourself. Again, as such it could seem harmless and from an inside perspective it might be good to investigate where my triggers come from. When applied from the outside it comes off as a red flag. Imagine ending up in that agreement with someone who has abusive tendencies.
At its worst this appeal to self-responsibility can be part of a trauma bonding process – a weaponised attachment process where intermittent reinforcement serves to create deep bonds to the person or the group in question. You are loved and accepted, but you are not allowed to question or criticize the dominant frame. If you do, you will have to re-evaluate your sense of self and reality or face the punishment:
https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/domestic-abuse-trauma-bonds
This kind of subversion can happen with a lot of frameworks:
Karma can be a useful term that helps me see that the way I relate to the world (my doing) to a large extent creates the reality I live in, but can also be used to justify that anything bad that happens to someone is due to their karma – they caused it themselves.
Spiral dynamics can be useful to see how I have unintegrated aspects of myself and where I can let go of identifications, but can also be a tool to label others as immature or underdeveloped, when they are actually just disagreeing with you.
I see similar issues in the Circling & Surrendered Leadership scene, where I have spent a lot of time. I have heard leaders say that they will only tolerate criticism if there is “no charge in it”, meaning that it should be fully owned by the person who is bringing the critique. This is a very high demand of anyone and comes with a great risk of shutting down critical voices. In my own work as a leader of Circling & Surrendered Leadership I have also seen (and very likely fallen into) the trap of responding to criticism with a “ok. what is it like for you to feel that way?” rather than engaging with it.
There’s a meaningful distinction between responsibility understood as:
- how I choose to respond and show up in a given situation. This is where I can work on myself to find ways of responding more appropriately. We probably all have some work to do here.
- how I discern and address the causes of a given situation. This is where we are addressing something outside of ourselves and discerning the negative impact on ourselves or a community.
When these are collapsed in a way where causation and discernment become seen as irrelevant or spiritually immature we get in trouble.
That is just your experience!
From time to time someone who is steeped in this style of thinking comes to one of my workshops. It stands out to me, because of the particular stance that they have developed towards the feedback they get from others.
“it’s just my experience”
“that is just your experience”.
It’s a bit of a curious stance. It presents itself as epistemic humility, not claiming objective truth, and only speaking from my own perspective, while actually functioning as a form of invulnerability. If everything you say to me is “just your experience,” then nothing you say can actually land. I am permanently protected from being affected by you. And the other way around, nothing I say is really about you, but “just my experience” – so I don’t have to take the impact it has on you seriously.
What looks like radical self-ownership is actually a kind of solipsism — a world where other people can never say anything meaningful about me. It isolates me from the feedback that could support me to grow.
While it might be true that many of us tend to over-attribute causation outward — blaming the world for what’s actually ours to work with – there is also a risk of creating a different pathology: becoming so focused on your inner sovereignty that you lose the capacity to be genuinely touched by another person’s reality. If I am the sole author of my experience, and your experience of me is solely authored by you, then we never actually meet. Relating becomes impossible. It is a world of separation. Self protection masked as having transcended the human condition.
I think a better path is one of humility and welcoming our humanness.
In defense of anger
I believe that there is wisdom in our reactions. There is good reason to trust and get curious about experiences of, for example disgust and anger.
Our emotional reactions are there for a reason and they are there in connection with what is happening to us. One of the more important pieces of advice I have received the last few years is that the feeling of disgust is important as the first indicator that something is off - that whatever is happening is bad for me.
Similarly, anger is fundamentally relational — it arises in response to something that happened between us, not just inside me. When a framework trains people to immediately metabolize anger inward (”what does this anger tell me about myself?”), it risks short-circuiting the relational information that the anger is carrying.
One of the ways in which we tend to really get in our own way is the tendency to want to be better than we are. We want to be calm, compassionate, friendly, unbothered etc. and we don’t want to be anxious, resentful and someone who causes harm to others. But we are.
It doesn’t make sense to feign compassion, calmness and care if what you are experiencing is anger.
For sure it is useful to practice ways of being with my experience that are less contracted and where I am less identified with something being wrong. The optimal state, as far as I can see, is one where I recognize if someone is doing harm to me and set an appropriate boundary or move away – without making identity out of the experience. That someone is abusive to me doesn’t mean that I am a victim or that they are evil. But holding something lightly doesn’t mean that I should allow people to punch me in the face.
I would want for myself and others to speak the truth that the anger holds, welcoming the emotion, but holding it lightly. And then staying with the impact it has on the other.
But if that is not possible I would argue that it’s better to express the anger than to hold it back out of fear of not being seen as spiritually developed.
Almost 20 years ago, on a couchsurfing trip in California I got to stay with a guy who shared a sentence that has stayed with me since then. He told me that the only really meaningful dogma to follow for himself was don’t be a hypocrite.
The healing lense I often see promoted in some spiritual circles, where you can work through and be done with your emotional reactions, increasingly seems to me like a lost cause. I don’t seem to be transcending my humanness so much. Rather I see the potential to continuously work on seeing how I am not in integrity – being less of a hypocrite.
Or maybe I am just triggered by people who are more spiritually developed than me. Who knows?
Abandon hope! You are not going to be a fully developed person
A friend of mine who participated in a SAS training with Circling Europe back in covid times was continuously disappointed during the whole training because she kept finding herself to be limited, resentful, anxious and all the other things humans are. After struggling with this for 6 months, she landed on a new insight – that maybe she could hold herself a bit more lightly and let go of the idea of being a “fully developed” human.
The ideals we hold for how we should be in the world create a lot of suffering for ourselves as well as others. The other day I was listening to a podcast about the ways in which young people these days are struggling with the ideals that shape their realities. A central point was that most of these ideals are focused on how you can be better in one way or another. One of the young people who were referenced in the podcast said something that I really liked.
‘I am really myself when I am something for others’
What resonated for me is that there is a clarity in my experience when my focus is on something or someone other than myself. This became very clear for me after the covid lockdowns ended in Denmark and I could start leading workshops and taking clients again – I felt so much more present and connected to myself when I was working with someone else than when I was spending most of my time in my own thoughts, focused on myself.
Similarly, it is easier for me to take seriously the ways in which I am not in integrity when I focus on the harm it causes the people around me. How does the way I am showing up (or not showing up) harm the people I love seems to be one of the strongest motivators I can find for changing.
I am reading When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön these days. One of the things she is speaking to is the impossibility of finishing – of finding the way of being in the world where there is no pain or struggle. I don’t think we finish anything, rather we just seem to get a bit better at relating to ourselves and the world around us. There is no solution to the situation of being a human being and we would be wise to abandon that hope.
Another thing I really appreciate in her writing is how she points to the experience of wretchedness as a gateway to compassion. When I start to access and accept all the ways in which I am a hypocrite, hurt myself and others and don’t show up it makes it easier to see how others also struggle with these things. I get in touch with the human condition rather than holding myself above it.
Abandon hope!
Then practice!
Compassion. Not as an abstraction.
What I want to practice is this; Being loyal to the experience I am having rather than trying to have the experience I think I should be having. Welcoming the wretchedness that comes with being human, doing my best to own my experience and show up in the world. But also to listen to others without demanding that they show up perfectly or implying that what they are experiencing is somehow an indication that they are not healed or developed enough.
Returning to where I started. The festival where I got massively triggered in the leadership team. The way I hold it is that it would have been great if I had not been triggered and pulled off by the waves of emotion.
On the other hand, the fact that I was overly emotionally engaged in the issue doesn’t mean that there was no issue or that it was something I made up, because the “frequency was too high”. It is more of a both/and situation. I could have taken more ownership of my emotional experience while still pointing out how the event was not living up to the promises of inclusivity and listening that were in the invitation.
Reactivity creates noise in the signal and most of us could certainly benefit from being a bit less reactive, but I lean to a position where its better that people fuck up some in their attempts to set boundaries and bring their truth, than silence themselves because they are not able to bring it perfectly.
I have been in tantric communities for some years now, and last year experienced massive spiritual bypassing by a partner who told me that my emotions were to strong and unhealthy … and then kept overstepping my boundaries. He was well trained in the tantric language of development you display.
What about accountability for how our actions impact other people? Thank you for writing about how emotions can be more than our own triggers but signals about values and boundaries to be voiced and acted upon 🙏
I enjoyed reading this, Peter. Thank you <3