I wrote a book about what neuroscience can teach us about confronting harm, taking accountability, and caring for each other. Look up Disrupting the Bystander.
Jun 24, 2022 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
It is very common for survivors of harm to engage in proximity-seeking behaviors with the very person who caused them harm. This can be very confusing for bystanders: "if you were so hurt, why didn't you scream and leave and never speak to them again?"
Harm is not simply a thing one being does to another that hurts and undermines a person's agency. The action is a big part of it, but there's also a relational component. When harm comes from someone trusted, the breach of trust that happens is a violent trauma all its own.
Jun 15, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Absent an agreement, we are not under obligation to meet the needs of others. We have choice and we get to engineer together what it will mean for us to show up for one another.
The agreements we make with one another are not a static contract, but a living thing we get to modify as we go. Sometimes we make agreements and realize that something we agreed to doesn't work for us -- we get to revisit that.
Jan 16, 2022 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
For a dismissive avoidant working on earning attachment security, this is not an inspirational quote. For us, the assignment is to challenge ourselves to pause, instead of leaving when we think we're unwanted, and ask ourselves: am I unwanted?
What is at the heart of this feeling of not-enoughness? Is it coming from the other person or is it an echo within myself?
Jan 6, 2022 • 21 tweets • 4 min read
When we don't know ourselves well enough to understand our needs and when we don't ask for what we need, we inadvertently impose a load on those around us to figure out our needs and meet them.
If your attachment tends to the avoidant side, you probably spent a lot of time building an identity around Not Needing Anyone Or Anything. This can make accessing your needs confronting, extremely vulnerable work.
Jan 3, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
How many of us were taught that being strong meant not being impacted by anything? Tough ones don't cry, we internalized. Not feeling our feelings, learning to ask for or to receive support is a sacrifice, too.
Being socialized to be "strong" can also mean not having healthy boundaries. Who needs boundaries when nothing fazes you? Instead, we learn to respond to anything that doesn't feel good by withdrawing with a stiff upper lip and/or aggressively reacting.
Nov 24, 2021 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Sporadic 202-level reminder that just because something "feels right in your body" doesn't mean that it's good for you in the long-term. Smoking cigarettes felt right in my body for years.
As @itsmeardenleigh put it during our consent dialogues: "just because you choose it and fully, enthusiastically consent to it doesn't mean it's in your highest good."
Nov 23, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
But also it's such good practice. Who doesn't hate the violence of "we need to talk" with zero context as to what? With an agenda, everyone knows what's going to be covered and can advocate for a time when they'll be appropriately resourced to have that conversation.
I also support the practice of adjourning relationship conversations to sleep, use the restroom, eat, cuddle, reestablish connection, etc. I will never see those marathon sessions where people talk and talk into exhaustion as generative.
Jul 4, 2021 • 29 tweets • 5 min read
Sometimes, the actions we view as "getting safe" are strategies we developed at other junctures in life -- sometimes quite early on -- that no longer work for us and are part of how we got stuck repeating the same cycle over and over.
Sometimes to break the pattern and get out of a cycle, we have to try something different, something that feels a bit scary or upsetting or not-like-us.
Aug 5, 2020 • 20 tweets • 6 min read
One of the things we discuss in transformative justice when confronting harm is how the community -- people and organizations both -- intentionally and unintentionally enabled the harm to occur and to continue.
"When we focus only on abusers, we individualize something that is often a community problem." -- @theleilaraven
Jan 28, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Today I took the first step on the long road to understanding, changing and doing repair for actions that contributed to harm in a process that was retraumatizing for one of the survivors involved. I share this here with the permission of the survivor.
I share it because I believe harm is a community matter, not only a personal matter. Even if the harm happens when we are trying to help, it is important to listen and take steps to understand, change where necessary, and repair.
Jun 22, 2019 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
Mixed signals happen when we act out of alignment. I've been there -- people who avoid our own feelings are notorious for this. We don't realize we are the ones who create the push-pull dance of ambivalence.
I was talking to a good friend about this last night. She told me a man she was dating seemed surprised that women keep having feelings when he's clearly verbalized to them he's not emotionally available, never accounting for the way he acts toward them
May 13, 2019 • 26 tweets • 4 min read
Growing up nerdy and weird, I never learned the importance of the face in connecting with others.
I loved the internet because I didn't need a face. I didn't need a gender. It was a magical time, living what sci-fi had promised -- free from the body.
I didn't have any respect for the body. I thought it was limiting -- a sad, already deprecated artifact. It afforded me some pleasures, but mostly it trapped me, limited me, and made me feel consumable. I resented it.
Jan 18, 2018 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
If a woman was with a guy and he kept trying to go in her purse, everyone would be outraged, incensed. "HE DID WHAT?!" would be the general outcry.
No one would ask where the woman was when the guy tried to get in her purse. It wouldn't matter. Whether in a restaurant or a car or in her house or in his house, going for her wallet would be seen as crossing the line.
