Get Over It!

• Lucinda Garthwaite, ILI Executive Director

  “I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense that once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”

  Those lines, attributed to novelist, essayist and activist James Baldwin[1], appear sometimes on my social media feeds.  When they do, I’ve noticed responses often veer toward something like “get over it.”

  Commenters say hate has contributed to hundreds of years of oppression, injustice and inequity. They say that the pain haters seek to avoid is small compared to all that.  They focus on stubbornness, as if everyone ought to be able to shed fear of pain like a merely uncomfortable coat.

  Let it go, they say. Get over it.

  But coping with emotional pain, even the fear of it, requires emotional resilience, which is not always easy to come by.  The American Psychological Association (APA) defines resilience in terms of mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to demanding or stressful experiences. 

  Emotional resilience is what it would take to “deal with the pain” that is masked by hatred. It’s what it takes to look histories of genocide and enslavement square in the face and recognize the impact on today. It takes some degree of emotional resilience to cope with having caused or benefitted from harm.

  But by some estimates fewer than 30% of Americans are emotionally resilient. Research results and opinions vary, of course, but in my reading, I haven’t found any evidence to suggest a majority of humans are capable of simply shedding emotional challenge. 

  Injustice and inequity on any scale are rooted in complexities that are hard to take in, history, identity, generational and ancestral trauma, tenacious errors in thinking, and more.  Without some solid degree of emotional resilience all of that is hard to sort out. Facing up to, or living inside, the impact of those complexities can be a demanding or stressful experience.

  Not everyone can, as the APA suggests, “successfully adapt” to that experience.  That makes some more vulnerable to fear, and to manipulation and twisting of history that capitalize on fear, and  that depend on hate.

  In light of all this, I can get frustrated with approaches to change that rely on insisting that everyone face up to and embrace the same understanding of systemic and historical injustice. The science is clear, and so is my personal experience: many people aren’t resilient enough to respond well to those approaches; instead they avoid, get defensive, resist and disrupt efforts to drive liberatory change.

  But those hundreds of years of oppression, injustice and inequity remain. For far too many, living in the wake of that history is a constant trial.  Patterns and behaviors of injustice still prevail.  Both history and present can be life-destroying.

  Something has to be done, but it cannot depend on or assume a collective emotional resilience that doesn’t exist.  “People cling to hate” James Baldwin is said to have written, “so they don’t have to deal with the pain.”  If fear of pain will keep them from behaving in ways that make it possible for others to thrive – if they really can’t deal with the pain, then maybe don’t try to make them.

  There’s no  more time for responses to hate, injustice and inequity that no longer work, or are based in assumptions that are not true.   It’s imperative to find another way.

  That’s the core of the work we do at the ILI. It’s why we’re working right now to teach personal practices and systems skills that can create systems where all can thrive, without requiring emotional resilience. Happily, the more people try out these practices, the more resilient they seem to become, the more they will counter injustice.

  Because for many (not all, I know) clinging to hate is not being stubborn; it comes from a lack of resilience. It’s about being afraid. Responding to that fear is, to be honest, fiercely strategic. It is another way.

  [1] I’ve tried without success this week to locate those lines in Baldwin’s work, to read him in context in hopes of understanding what he may have meant if and when he wrote them. They may well be misattributed to him, as has happened before.