Unlearning Helplessness
In the Economy of Emergency, emergency, depletion, and victimhood are currency.
That oft-discussed accusation "you're being a victim" wouldn't be thrown around, full of derision, if there wasn't a gross way of occupying victimhood.
The gross way is the way of using victimhood as currency. It buys you an "out" of any activity. It buys you attention, even from those who would rather not give it. It buys you resources, showing up depleted. It buys you care, having been harmed.
The way this calls to our compassion is what makes it gross. The way this is a compassion wolf-cry dulls our compassionate responses. It is evil, even to question whether someone "really needs" a resource they're asking for. Yet it feels gross to have my generosity bypassed by a reason I "have to" show up.
Wouldn't I love to gift you a dollar? Wouldn't it be an affront to my generous nature to hear how I absolutely must give you a dollar or else you will starve to death? Bro, I don't need the stakes to be that high to share what I have with you.
But we did need high stakes, women in our recent ancestry took refuge only there, because we engineered disempowerment into a system with innate irrepressable power.
We all ARE in control of our experience. We all ARE free to do any manner of things in any moment. The disempowerment needed to be engineered, and it convinced us disempowerment is not only possible (it isn't) but a fact. That maintains a populace who only knows how to enact power from a disempowered place rather than an empowered place.
There is always power, it always has to go somewhere.
Disempowerment and Empowerment are not power itself, they are permissions and guidelines about how my power is and is not allowed to operate. Disempowerment is most effective as a lens, but the lens can be forced over the eyes by certain circumstances, and it can come to color the world ever after.
This has been called "learned helplessness," proven in many sad experiments with animals, that an animal's circumstance can be hopeless in such a way that they won't use their power in other circumstances, and, sadder still, their lack of will to use their power has them outcast by their empowered peers.
The animal remains physically capable of the tasks. But they are mentally unable to imagine that they have the power to be successful.
How has disempowered circumstance in our recent ancestral lineage contributed to practices of learned helplessness in dating, marriage, and romance?
For one thing, the only way mom got any sort of break or could claim any sort of resource was for her to be sick or crazy.
For another thing, the only path for a woman was to be a mother, no matter how sick or how crazy she might be. Even hospitalized women got impregnated, via their husbands or the staff.
The economic and social disempowerment of women, so contrived and thorough, had men (and women, themselves) dismissing women's concerns until they reached an undeniable emergency, and women who wanted their concerns taken seriously had to frame and present them as an undeniable emergency. Anything less than an emergency, she had to handle for herself, while she needed a man to sign off on anything truly important and relevant to her body or its material resourcing.
This was happening until 1972 in America.
Argue amongst yourselves if the material empowerment is now truly equal, I trust that fight to those with better information. What I know is that we need to LEARN empowerment, that claiming it is not enough. Much empowerment has been won which women aren't truly LIVING INTO. They don't know what it looks like to live empowered because their mothers and grandmothers had no chance to show them.
Women need to know how it looks in the world to be less than thrilled by a man and LEAVE, easily, immediately, for no good reason. The landscape has shifted and actually I don't need any reason at all to live under my own stewardship, actually that is the default. Without a man, without any romantic partner whatsoever, I have every power available to me. I need many incredibly good reasons to share my time, energy, and attention with one person in particular. I need no reason at all to walk sovereign on my own.
There is no reason to give a man a chance. There is no reason to work things out. There is no reason to process my experience of this person. There is no reason to try to have sex or to try not to have sex.
We have actually transcended the NEED for any unit at all, including tribe and family, spouse, friends. We have the technology to go without these things. This truth is actually a tragic one for those who steward their independence to live independently.
The advanced technology is not empowering without the KNOWLEDGE of how to use the technology to advance my experience. Technology itself gives us what we do with it, and what we do with it is based on what we know how to do.
We have the technology to live independently, but we do not know how to use it to foster closeness and connection, which is its most miraculous use.
Teaching myself how to use it FOR my experience has been my mission for many years now, without knowing it. Because I can live independently, I choose the people in my life. I invest and divest easily without entanglement. I use the technology of independence to leverage my freedom to interact with those I FEEL like interacting with, totally independent of need.
Because I don't NEED a man, I have been free to cultivate a rich ecosystem of relationships including the very best men I have ever met. The practices of these men which make them assets in my life and my experiences were something I could not have imagined. None of the templates I had for relationships via media or life experience showed me anything like what I'm living now.
Long before I had words for it, I decided within myself that I would not leverage the Economy of Emergency, that I would participate in the Economy of Abundance. I decided to live empowered, to check all my learned-helplessness by TRYING OUT my power in lowkey experiments. It started as simple as turning away from a kiss my mind told me I "should" receive, because he wanted it. It's ended with me adored every moment in a tessellating pattern of loved ones dipping into now-moments with me to be context, to be refuge, to be nourishment for my life.
Plans form and commitments emerge, not because of need but because when our nourishment is relentlessly assured, the best part is having that TOGETHER.
This is wealth like humans have NEVER seen. It makes sense that we wouldn't yet know what to do with it.
If the reason to be together can only be that we "need it," we go on manufacturing need. We see ourselves as disempowered and helpless, we prevail on the goodwill of others, we cry aloud until someone shows up to soothe us. We bring ourselves to the ones who seem to be in the most pain because we know only how to help the needy, not how to have and hold abundance in communion. We keep stories of trauma and attachment, of brokenness, of victimhood, like a hundred dollar bill in a secret place in a wallet—in case of emergency.
Getting out is simply a relentless commitment, I AM the one living this life. I AM the one this life is for. I AM the one who will face every single experience I encounter, no matter what or how. I AM the one to empower myself, to use my power, I AM always deciding what to do with my power, including when I use it to tell or act out a story of my disempowerment.
Yes, it is that simple. Sometimes I deliver this to a woman and watch it glitch her brain, and then hear for MONTHS AND YEARS afterward that it continues to gird and guide her life path, that since then nothing has been the same.
Once I watched a video of my friend folding his headphone wires so that they cannot become tangled. It's worked for me ever since. The headphone wire and physics itself always had this technology, yet only when I LEARNED to use it was I capable of using it to appreciate my experience.
The technology of abundance, of right relationship, has always been, and now we have the circumstances to use it. All there is to do now is learn how.
There may not be any templates, but when I walk the Way, no larger vision is required.
