The Dark Times

Reflections on anger and fear

Dear Reader,

How are you?

When I left you last spring for the fecund mound of dirt beckoning me from the window beside my writing chair, I promised to return in the dark times, when the butterfly weed and the bee balm had turned black, and the garden had gone into its winter slumber, preserving itself for yet another burst of life in the spring.

The dark times. I didn’t mean these dark times.  These frightening, upending, post-election times when every new story about who Trump has chosen to lead this or that government agency feels like a stab to the heart, when contemplating the word immigrant brings wrenching grief for the fate of millions of men, women and children, when his promise to drill baby drill brings nightmare images of a small window for the possibility of a life-sustaining planet slamming shut. 

In 2019, I put up my first Substack, Process Notes of a Pandemic.  I wrote those essays for almost two years. They were my attempt to order my own mind: the fear and the uncertainty, to find language for something so beyond the experience of anyone living today that few of us had any idea how to process the experience.  And I wrote to find connection at a time when we were all so isolated.  When, in March of 2021, the miracle of the vaccine allowed me to go back out into the world with less fear, I thought I might be done writing. 

But then in the fall of that year, the wildfires out west cast so much smoke into the atmosphere that the sun rose scarlet over the ocean.  I took it as an omen.  I was once more frightened, once more uncertain of the path ahead and once more feeling isolated as so few people were talking about the climate crisis back then. 

“Don’t say crisis”, I was warned. “You will scare people.” That’s all I needed to hear to resolve to write Code Red and Me: Rethinking Everything which was born that fall. Since then, I have been writing weekly essays in the six dark months about the climate crisis, about how we got to this point where mankind’s quest for progress and dominion over the natural world left us with a planet terribly ill and at risk for collapse of the ecosystems which support our every breath, our every bite of food and drink of water.   

Then on November 6, I woke to yet a third mind-altering event: the election of a man who has promised, from day one, to be a dictator, to drill baby drill, to give tax cuts to billionaires, to deport millions of immigrants, to cut Social Security and Medicare, to take away the rights of women over their bodies.  You know all this reader; likely you too wake every morning and feel despondent as you watch yet one more chunk of democracy and good government crumble and wash out to sea.

Like you I have read the pundits’ shredding criticisms of the Democratic leadership, of Harris, of her campaign message, of her campaign’s on the ground organizing, of Biden. All of it makes some sense but none of it feels quite enough to explain why millions of people voted for him in what seems to those of us from East Coast liberal enclaves as irrational votes against their best interest.  I am desperate to understand this moment, for without a deep understanding I have no way to know what to do next, how to change anything, including myself.

I think you would all agree that meeting the violence and blame that was stoked in this country as a means of manipulating people and winning votes is not to be answered by the same tactics or we will all surely burn in some sort of societal hell.

In my search for the meaning of this moment, so fraught with emotions, I am drawn to use my psychotherapist clinical skills as a lens for deeper learning.  In all the analyses I have read so far, little of it is about the emotional forces in play in our society which delivered us to this brink.  Perhaps, I think to myself, I could use that lens here to deepen my understanding and offer a different perspective to you, readers.  I fear the division, the disconnection from neighbors and family members, the isolation and despair that this crisis could bring.  I want to write whatever I can to begin to allow myself to stay engaged, to help bridge divides, to increase our care and connection for each other, no matter what our lawn signs say.

My journey to understanding by using my clinical skills starts here, in this room in my mind:

I am sitting in my therapy chair in my old office, a cluttered desk behind me, a painting of an old sailing ship on the wall and across from me perched on chairs in a semicircle: a family, the American family. They are talking about a problem they are having but all I can hear is their anger, deep anger which mounts with each question I ask about how this problem started. They blame each other and call each other names. 

I close my eyes and breathe. I do what I have done for fifty years as a therapist, I dive deeper into my own process and associations and see what rises. The angry faces fade, the voices change their tone and what I envision is that behind that anger is fear, unnamed and unspoken.  The image softens my body and draws me empathically towards them.  I put up my hand and say, “Stop.” I feel not only compassion but curiosity. “I hear how angry you all are, but I have this feeling that there is also a lot of fear and worry in this room.  Maybe I am wrong, but I wonder if we could talk about that?”

They are silent for a few minutes, stunned at my intervention.  We sit in that silence.  I look around the room.  Breathe.  The mother begins to cry quietly.  Her son, sitting beside her and so recently hostile towards her, reaches his hand across the space between them, finds her hand, holds it.  She doesn’t speak but her married daughter looks at me and says, “Yes, I think there’s some truth to this.  I wake up every morning anxious about how I am going to afford food for my kids and pay the rent.” 

My point in telling you this story is not to suggest you tell people to stop talking when they are angry.  Or that you jump in and ask them to tell you their fears.  What I mean to say is that we need to be curious and empathic about the voters who voted for a despot, to keep in mind the old adage in my field: anger is a defense against fear.   I mean to say that we need to learn how to connect with and solve some of the real problems making people frightened in this moment.

Even before the elections this world was fraught with deep anxiety.  Climate change is one of those hooded terrors running around our psyches at night when we sleep.  I think it is there even for the deniers.  In order to survive, mankind evolved to be exquisitely connected to the seasons, to heat, cold, sources of water and food, and all of us, even privileged me sitting here with a full fridge and a backup generator, are unsettled by the 80 degree weather in November, the droughts, the hurricanes hundreds of miles from the coast.  Climate breakdown and ecosystem decline are background threats to our security.  It’s like having a mother who presents a brave face, but whom you know is sick, tired, struggling.   

On top of having a sick mother we have a massively fraught economic system which, before Biden made significant changes that never registered with the populace, embraced “neoliberalism” to move about $50 trillion dollars from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.  What this looks like on the ground is high unemployment and job insecurity in rural parts of America and no sense of agency for how to dig out of this hole. Then we have AI, crypto currency, boys coming home from school telling their parents to call them girls, women gaining unprecedented power, Native Americans still here and gaining respect, a Black woman running for President and social media that plays on fear, the war in Gaza. Add to those massive shifts in cultural expectations of male identity, white identity, shifts which shake one’s sense of self to the core. 

Our problems are systemic and intertwined and neither party has figured out how to address the underlying fearfulness these problems generate, either on a policy level or on a messaging level. 

There is so much to fear. But we are a people, a culture, unused to dealing with fear, to knowing how to skillfully use the feeling to understand our problems, to connect to others, to make changes to quell that fear.

Instead, we duck and cover.  Deny.  Swagger.  Snap our bootstraps.  Make fun of crybabies.  Buy guns.

Feel it, name it, talk about it, find connection, take action.  And for god’s sake if someone comes to you with a problem, tells you they are afraid, don’t ask them if they are “seeing someone.” As in seeing a therapist.  The profession of psychotherapy has claimed anxiety and sadness as theirs, and deprived community of the honor and privilege and confidence that comes from helping and caring for each other. We need to build our emotional resilience muscles and say, “tell me more.”

We need to normalize anxiety and not pathologize it.  WE SHOULD BE ANXIOUS.  WE SHOULD TALK ABOUT IT.  WE SHOULD CONSIDER THE FEAR BEHIND ANGER. WE SHOULD LISTEN TO OTHERS TALK ABOUT THEIR FEARS. WE SHOULD FIND WAYS TO TAKE ACTION, GAIN AGENCY. CHANGE.

There are a few things I want to clear up.  I am not saying that we should walk around feeling scared all the time.  There is so much more of this world to take in: the full moon lighting the forest and casting moon shadows on the forest floor, the brave squirrel climbing the bird feeder for the thousandth time, the ocean’s constantly shifting refraction of billions of years’ of time.

And one more thing.  My compassion has its limits.  It will likely be a cold day in hell before I feel compassion for the very angry man about to break democracy into smithereens.  Or for the man with the Starlink money about to take jobs, services, homes away from millions of workers.  None.  Nada.  

So reader, are you ready to run after reading this?  Are you saying, that’s it, I won’t read her again, I need to listen to the upbeat folks, be positive, hold hope. None of this fear stuff. 

Do let me know. 

Meanwhile I am going to close with these words from the recently published and wonderfully written bestselling book, What If We Get It Right, by our neighbor, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson who spoke to us so eloquently here in Freeport last week.

Keep showing up. Join something.
Find your people.
Bring your superpowers.
Be a problem solver. Choose your battles.
Nourish joy.  Love nature.