Nan Alamilla Boyd helped me to understand that my lack of academic training makes me literally “undisciplined.” This news was very freeing, and a gift I wish I had been handed decades before. I now am able to ask you to read this book the way you would watch a play: not to emerge saying, “The play is right!” but rather to observe that the play reveals human nuance, contradiction, limitation, joy, connection, and the tragedy of separation. That the playwright’s own humanity is also an example of these unavoidable flaws. These chapters are not homogenous. As a creative writer I have long understood that form should be an organic expression of the feelings at the core of the piece. Each chapter here serves a different function and that is represented in its tone, genre, style, and form. Some are journalistic, some analytical, some are speculative, others abstract, some are only feelings. As a novelist, I know that it is the cumulative juxtaposition that reveals the story. This is not a book to be agreed with, an exhibition of evidence or display of proof. It is instead designed for engaged and dynamic interactive collective thinking where some ideas will resonate, others will be rejected, and still others will provoke the readers to produce new knowledge themselves. Like authentic, conscious relationships, truly progressive communities, responsible citizenship, and real friendship, and like the peace-making that all these require, it asks you to be interactive. — 19: 166-177
this power struggle over whether or not opposing parties will speak is an enormous smokescreen covering up the real issue, the substance of what they need to speak about: namely, the nature of and resolution to the conflict. — 26: 296-298
People do not always know what they feel, nor do they acknowledge what they really know. Sometimes we say what we think we are supposed to say, or what we are used to saying; we don’t give the actual moment a chance. Sometimes we just try out saying certain things. — 49: 637-639
“Differentiating between Power Struggle and Power Over,” Hodes explained, “is the difference between Conflict and Abuse.” Abuse is Power Over and Conflict is Power Struggle. — 58: 765-767
What we have instead is a devolved definition of personal responsibility, which constructs avoidance as a right regardless of the harm it does to others. This negative standard persuades some people to feel that being uncomfortable signals that they are being Abused, because they don’t have the option of describing themselves as Conflicted. So asking a distressed person if they are unsafe, or rather, uncomfortable, angry, or hurt provides them with an alternative idea that might fit better with their actual experience. It not only elicits helpful information, but encourages the individual to start to think about themselves in a more adult, complex, and responsible manner. — 61: 825-830
Members have to actively take responsibility for the ethics and moral values that their small or large group claims to represent and actually enact this responsibility. — 68: 946-947
I discussed this with my therapist, now deceased, who had treated victims of McCarthyism later on in their lives. He told me that some of his patients had found themselves caught up in the whirlwind smoke of shunning and innuendo, whisper campaigns and exclusions. No one ever sat down and told them what they were being accused of, and they never had a chance to discuss or inform or respond. Instead, group pressures, intimidations, and false loyalties produced a climate of mysterious chill, in which they were denied jobs, kept out of social events, shunned by acquaintances. People were mean to them without ever saying why, and no opportunity for clarification or repair was ever presented. These people found both the material and emotional consequences overwhelming, but even more so they were hurt by the amorphous nature of the problem. Not being able to know exactly what they were charged with, not being able to talk through the accusations, never knowing where they would face these hostile expressions drove many people to extreme suffering. Even later when classic McCarthyism was dismantled and delegitimized, these unnecessarily broken relationships could not be healed. My therapist explained to me that taking extreme bullying actions, like signing a petition against a friend, or denouncing a colleague to others or to the state, as often happened under McCarthyism, was so extreme in its pathology that the participants could never repair. They were so defended against the reality of the injustice of their own action that they couldn’t reconcile it to their false image of themselves as righteous. In listening to him, I came to believe that the same personality type who would ice out or attack someone without talking to them first out of false “loyalty” would be the same person who would later be unable to apologize. It’s a character issue that becomes the building blocks of fascism or any supremacist construction. And for those people, a commonly held expectation or standard of asking targeted people what they feel or how they understand their experience could be a life-enhancing or even life-saving corrective. — 73: 1037-1052
“Mainstream Domestic Violence advocacy,” Hodes said in a correspondence later that year, “is committed to assuming that the victim is telling the truth, and any exploration around that trope is met with heavy resistance. Historically, that makes sense for a host of reasons. But this analysis is not about disbelieving, it’s about pinpointing where the problem lies.” One of Hodes’ many valuable suggestions is to lower the bar for what must happen in a person’s life for their suffering to be acknowledged. “The current paradigm is encouraging all of us to think we are in abusive relationships,” Hodes explained. “And if you are not in an abusive relationship, you don’t deserve help. Being ‘abused’ is what makes you ‘eligible.’ But everyone deserves help when they reach out for it.” This is a strikingly humane idea: that the collapse of Conflict and Abuse is partly the result of a punitive standard in which people are made desperate, yet ineligible, for compassion. This is a non-cynical reading of a human condition in which people who have suffered in the past, or find themselves implicated in situations in which they are afraid to be accountable, fear that within their group acknowledging some responsibility will mean being denied their need to be heard and cared for. So they fall back on the accusation of Abuse to guarantee that they will not be questioned in a way that confirms these fears. — 77: 1110-1121
know from my own experience as a CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) worker in a feminist health center that the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 quickly dismantled this twenty-year-old job-training program that had assisted many grassroots organizations. The search for new funding transformed politically motivated services into containment by municipal, state, and federal agencies. Anti-violence politics, along with other revolutionary impulses, changed from a focus on working to transform patriarchy, racism, and poverty to cooperation and integration with the police. This has proven to be a significant turn because the police are, ironically, the embodiment of patriarchy, racism, and the enforcement of the US class system. — 83: 1176-1182
The law is designed to protect the state, not the people who are victimized by the state. So while police intervention can importantly separate violent adults from their victims or each other after violence has begun, this job of “stopping violence” has shifted from stopping the causes of violence to reacting punitively to the expressions of those unaddressed causes. — 84: 1194-1197
Being reminded that one was once in danger has to be differentiated from whether or not one is currently in danger. — 94: 1364-1365
Overreacting in the present is often a consequence of unresolved anxiety from the past. — 106: 1577-1578
Lesson: never, ever decide that you know who someone is, what they did, their objective, context or goal, how they feel or what they know, until you ask them. And not asking means a direct investment in not understanding the truth. — 124: 1857-1859
From the most intimate realm of romance and desire to that of public policy: the state victimizes to avoid facing its own internal instabilities and contradictions. Instead of public health menaces, HIV-positive women are just people in need of services and care. — 126: 1894-1897
we are neoliberally headed. Gay rights produces new insiders, — 132: 2016-2016
Canadians often complain, rightfully, about US cultural domination, but are very thin-skinned about the kind of self-criticism that US leftists learn to integrate. — 132: 2011-2012
Creating HIV-negative people as a new class who can punish others by calling the police may reduce their ability to negotiate, nuance, problem-solve, communicate, and take responsibility for their own actions. — 134: 2049-2051
As Bertolt Brecht said, “As crimes pile up, they become invisible.” — 140: 2086-2087
We all have an ideal imagined self and a real self, and there is always a gap between the two. I’ve never met a person who was exempt from this. The process of moving forward in life requires, I guess, constant adjustment on both sides. We each come closer to a more mature understanding of who we really are, some kind of acceptance, while at the same time working to change the things we can in order to get closer to our desired self. In this way, that gap narrows from both sides: acceptance, and change. But it never goes away. When we can’t move forward and the gap widens, many of us become paralyzed. The breach between the real self and the imagined self is unbearable, and the reality of our lives becomes unacceptable, undoable, and we become stuck: we can’t move out of our parents’ house, we can’t take a job that compromises our entitlement, we can’t actually fulfill our dreams and, finally, we can’t adjust those dreams. — 142: 2121-2128
Ideally, the people to call before are the healthy, fair, and self-critical group—family, friends, community—who have the love and awareness to see what the conflicted cannot see, and who can help the anxious calm down and seek communication and negotiation, and in this way create reconciliation. But because we misunderstand what real loyalty means, we often do the opposite within our groups: exacerbate escalation rather than relieve it. — 149: 2248-2252
We know now that determining punishment by the feelings of one party is the essence of injustice. — 154: 2348-2349
As Sara Ahmed says, learning from Audre Lorde: while actually dealing with the substance of Conflict may initially feel more upsetting than repressing it, the response to high levels of distress should sometimes be to create even higher levels of distress. In this way, internal and external domination systems are revealed, and ultimately dismantled. — 156: 2384-2387
Unfortunately, groups that rely on perfection, the good/evil dichotomy, and are motivated by a paralyzing fear of ever being wrong, often deny that mental illness/distorted thinking is in play. Bad families, bad friends, negative communities, and supremacist identities hide and deny contradictions, and rely on the projection of blame onto others to maintain their cohesion as perfect. Pervasive depression gets called sadness. Anxiety that is so severe as to control one’s life gets called upset or difficult or sensitive. And no one is allowed to talk about why any of it is happening. I had a friend, C., with whom I was discussing someone we both love. I told her that I was concerned that our friend was suffering from an anxiety so severe that she could not think clearly enough to solve problems. C. rejected any explanation that implied a lack of access to the unconscious, saying that her own mother had been confined to a psychiatric hospital and that “there was nothing wrong with — 161: 2462-2469
Because of the similarity between Supremacy and Traumatized behavior explored in Chapter Five, it may be unclear in which of these paradigms the overreaction is based. As we know, both can exist in the same body. And since these experiences are so connected to and reflective of the state apparatus, these emotional reactions can have geopolitical expressions. Shunning, interestingly, often accompanies the trigger reaction. — 166: 2539-2542
Shunning is not only a punitive silencing, but it is a removal from humanity, and therefore reliant on the Making of Monsters. After all, no one owns humanity and humans cannot be removed from themselves. It’s a delusion. — 167: 2564-2567
At their root is a refusal to alter one’s self-perception of a threatened perfectionism. — 174: 2684-2685
the theme of perfectionism as a tenet of both Supremacy and Traumatized behavior, — 177: 2749-2749
I believe that a truly “good” family is one that is deeply and in fact primarily concerned with the behavior of its members towards other people. That instead of reinforcing indifference, exploitative behavior, arrogance about class, race or gender, blind allegiance to the state, and cruelty towards sexual partners, they systematize methods of accountability. In this way, each family member would grow up with a loving practice of opposition, with the commitment to psychological insight, individuation, and a means of discussion that emphasizes context, objective, and the order of events. Blind adherence would be the definition of “disloyalty,” as it is detrimental to peace and justice. Our model for relationships within groups can be transformed from obedience to biology, biological assumption, or simulacra of biology, emphasizing instead the ethics of each individual’s actions, cumulative consequence, and the necessity of self-criticism. In other words: accountability. — 194: 3011-3018
It is now time for an overt conversation about the responsibility of queer friends in response to family systems that are corrupt, or as we politely call it, “dysfunctional.” — 199: 3094-3095
There is also the adjacent idea, comforting but false, that the sons and daughters of lesbians are inherently feminist. Because they don’t have models of intimate male power at home, somehow they are supposed to extrapolate a connection about refusing male privilege in the world. But feminism, or full and complete personhood for women, is an idea. And each human being has to do the work to explore it, build a relationship to it, and understand what their own changes must be in order to be part of it. “On ne nait pas feminist, on le deviant” (one is not born a feminist, but becomes it), said Simone de Beauvoir. I know a man who advertises himself as an “eco-feminist,” but he expects his mother and her female partner to clean up after him. So actually he is neither eco nor a feminist. His mother thinks he is because in her birth family, women shopped, prepped, cooked, served, and cleaned up after men at every meal. Her son cooks his own eggs in the morning and sometimes makes them for her. So she believes he is a feminist, even though he often leaves the dirty pan in the sink. Politics is a consequence of how a person understands their experience. In that way, the son of a feminist is not a feminist. He may become one, but he would have to learn how not to exploit women, including his mother. And in this world, it is the responsibility of his peers to make sure he understands what that actually means. His friends have to parent him as well as his actual parents, because that is where real values are established, in the conflict between what our families tell us and the reality of the world. We have to be separate from our families in order to come to this evaluation, in which we build our own understandings and values, taken as much from critical understandings of what we have experienced as what we haven’t. — 203: 3178-3191
But I knew they had no self-reflexivity, so I took the initiating step. — 272: 4579-4580
In fact, in my experience, it is the person who is suffering who wants things to get better, while the person who is repressing their own conflicts usually wants to be the one to feel better. So, it is the person with HIV, the Palestinian, the object of group shunning, who wants to talk, to be heard, and thereby to transform. — 275: 4635-4638
Most of us—probably all of us—have times in our lives when we risk losing favor by standing up for someone who is the object of everyone else’s blame, whether it is people with HIV, the homeless person on the subway, or our friend’s ex-girlfriend. Those of us who present ourselves as “progressive,” who support others, or help out, or take stands, are the ones most responsible for bucking the trend of cruelty. When we don’t refuse cruelty, ultimately we stand for nothing; we are hypocrites, and our public selves are phony. Progressive people do not shun, and in fact they intervene when group shunning is being organized. Finally, ultimately, when groups bond over shunning or hurting or blaming another person, it is the state’s power that is enhanced. Because the state doesn’t want to understand causes, because the state doesn’t want things to get better, it doesn’t want people to understand each other. State apparatuses are there to maintain the power of those in control and punish those who contest that power; that is what bad families do, and that is what bad friends do. And nothing disrupts dehumanization more quickly than inviting someone over, looking into their eyes, hearing their voice, and listening. — 279: 4710-4719