The Revolution is Coming!

Wow – what a summer! I thought I would use the time this summer to catch up on blog posting, but instead I’ve done none. I have been too busy reading, listening, and watching, not to mention the time and energy it takes to reconsolidate all of my thoughts and ideas. I’ve started a couple of blog posts, but they just wouldn’t come authentically. But then this week, I had a couple of conversations that had everything falling into place. It was like those milestones we see in our kids, where they are all-consumed in the struggle to master something and then suddenly they get it and everything settles down. Or like a gear grinding while it changes, but then suddenly smoothly engaging. So here’s the shift.

It’s like I’ve been travelling with a group of other people, and we’re trying to decide which way to go. We know that we need to go north, and we are looking at a compass that clearly points the direction we’ve been going. We must be going the right way. But I feel in my bones that we aren’t. I feel lost, and every ounce of my being says we are going the wrong direction. Everyone points at the compass and says, “Look! North is this way. We’re definitely going the right way.” But I cannot be convinced. Every step I take, my body is screaming at me that we are walking the wrong way. But it’s lonely and scary walking into the woods by myself, without a compass, and only my gut to go on, so I hesitantly walk along with the crowd, grumbling to anyone who will listen, but afraid to strike out on my own.

Imagine if someone else suddenly says, “Wait, I agree with her. There is something wrong with this compass.” Even if that person has a different idea of which direction we should go, just the idea that they call into question the accuracy of the compass validates the ache I feel in my bones while marching forward. Even better, imagine the person produces a new compass – one that disagrees with the first one. Now there’s credible questioning of that original compass.

In the past six months, I have found a new compass. I have found a group of people who all agree that the original compass is pointing the wrong way. They are experts, scientists, theorists, practitioners, and those who are living life in the same trenches I am. They have evidence that supports their theories and practices. They have experience, both theoretical and practical. Mind blown! I am not wrong, and I am not alone.

I am not alone, and yet my frustration is growing. I love the words of Maya Angelou, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better.” Here’s the thing folks, we now know better. We know better, but we are not doing better. We know better in terms of education, parenting, racism, mental health, and the environment, but the changes, if any, are unbelievably slow, contested, and sometimes in the wrong direction. When I complain about this to other people, the response is always the same – it takes time to change systems. But I disagree. Or rather, I agree with the statement, but not the idea behind it.

One of the biggest learnings coming out of our COVID experience is that things can change almost overnight. If treated as a crisis, changes can be made to protect society that could not have been imagined a few weeks previously. Who could have imagined that we could take our lives online over a weekend? Who could have foreseen that shutting down human activity would so quickly affect the natural world? Who could have imagined that some people would thrive in a world of enforced isolation? Most of us could not have foreseen, nor even imagined, the last year and a half. It has played out like the plot of a science-fiction novel. What has created the impetus for change is the time-sensitive, fear-based need to rely on science. There wasn’t time to debate and get buy-in. There wasn’t time to care how people felt about the policies put into place. There was barely space to put a political spin on the information coming down the pipeline. Instead, our leaders were forced to lean on experts with the most up-to-date information and steer the ship toward protecting the most vulnerable.

What if we treated these other issues like the crises they are? What if we stopped looking at the old compass, the way things have always been, and our knee-jerk reactions, and instead listened to the most recent research? What if we said there isn’t time to waste on political will and making everyone feel comfortable – we have to do what’s right and protect the most vulnerable? What if we responded out of deliberate decision making, even when it wasn’t driven by immediate fear?

What would it take for us to get there? We would need to trust our leaders. We would need to be willing to have difficult conversations and be open to the possibility that we have been wrong. We would need to relax our fear of the unknown. We would need to offer grace in the face of failed attempts. But imagine the upside. Imagine the society we could create. Imagine the future we could build.

We could reform our school systems, embracing cultural and neuro-diversity, and produce citizens uniquely positioned to thrive in an ever-changing world. We could reform our prison systems to focus on rehabilitation and prevention. We could break the cycles of trauma and mental illness, reduce stigma, and support parents in raising healthy, resilient children. We could reduce the impacts of racism, homophobia, and sexism, embracing the idea that all people have the right to successful, self-fulfilling lives. Perhaps we could even begin to reverse environmental damage and return our world to a sustainable balance.

This might sound crazy, but I think they are all related. I’ve been reading, and listening, and watching, and talking… and the compass is coming clear. The common threads are attachment, the nurturing of creativity, and the reliance on proactive rather than reactive strategies. Sounds pretty reasonable, right? Let’s be clear, the compass we are currently following points to compliance, conformity, and reaction. We expect children to comply, using time-outs, shame, and consequences/rewards to manipulate their behaviour. We expect students to conform, learning the same things in the same ways, despite understanding that we are teaching a wide variety of children, with no idea what their world will look like when they graduate. We expect those living in poverty, abuse, and marginalized situations to somehow buck up and drag themselves out of situations that were never of their own making. We support systems designed to uphold the status quo and live oppressed by the very systems designed to protect us. Our politicians are punished for proactive solutions and criticized for their reactive solutions, always having to do what’s popular to avoid losing the power to do anything.

We are so afraid of change that we cannot even see that our fear and difficulties are mostly caused by the status quo. We are working so hard to preserve it that we are not open to innovation, or even receptive to new data. We are stuck in familiar theories, supported by beliefs absorbed from society, or taught to us before the new research was available. We have designed society such that people don’t have the time or energy to learn new things or challenge their own beliefs. We have made it culturally unsafe to change our minds.

Psychology is a new field. We’ve spent thousands of years learning about physics, biology, and chemistry, understanding how our world and bodies work. But psychology as a discipline has been around for less than 200 years. Imagine if we were operating under the physical laws as understood in the first 200 years of physics, or worse, medical knowledge in the first 200 years of medicine! And yet, that’s how we’re treating psychology. I graduated with a B.Ed. over 20 years ago. In the time since then, research has changed our understandings of how children learn substantially, but we still cling to the same strategies and theories that I was taught a quarter of a century ago, many of which were the same theories taught to my mother thirty years before that. We are still advising parents, teachers, and therapists using those same outdated theories. But there is hope! There are a growing number of voices calling for change. The revolution is coming. I only hope I will be alive to see the changes that cascade from the acceptance of our new understandings. It just takes a critical mass of understanding and will to change, and that mass is growing.

One of the most profound shifts for me has been the simple mindset shift that people do well when they can. Dr. Ross Greene, author of The Explosive Child, Raising Human Beings, and Lost at School (among others) explains how no one WANTS their lives to be difficult. We all want our lives to work. We are all motivated to do the best we can. So when we are not doing well, there’s a reason for that, often a lagging skill of some sort, but I would add unprocessed trauma as a complicating factor. Imagine if we applied that belief, that people do well when they can, to society at large. Who would we value that we don’t right now?

Professionals like Dr. Gabor Maté, Kelly McDaniel, Patricia DeYoung, Dr. Gordon Neufeld, and many others are talking about the lifelong effects of disordered attachment and shame, explaining how these can affect almost every aspect of our adult lives. This includes a huge number of people, and is a self-sustaining intergenerational problem, affecting people of all socio-economic backgrounds. Relational wounds in childhood, often inflicted by loving, well-meaning parents, constitute a build up of trauma that affects people’s abilities to connect with themselves and others. These and other childhood traumas are increasingly seen as the backdrop for most mental health challenges, and emerging research is showing connections between childhood trauma and many physical health challenges as well. Imagine if we could start to break these cycles and raise truly resilient, healthy, and empathic children. How could they change the world?

Then there are those talking about creativity and the benefits of embracing neurodiversity. The idea that ‘lagging’ skills often come along with a high degree of creativity, and that the problem might not be in the individual, but in the environment in which they are living. The late Ken Robinson, Jonathan Mooney, Susan Baum, and Kristy Forbes are just some of the people advocating for an acceptance of neurodiversity and systems that allow and encourage creative, innovative thinking and alternative solutions to the myriad challenges people face trying to fit a box that doesn’t. We talk a lot about valuing creativity, but imagine if we could actually embrace creative solutions… what could we solve?

This is the world I want for my children and their children and their children’s children. I believe it is a world worth fighting for. If you are interested in being part of the change, join the revolution. Get in the conversation. Hone your compass. Educate yourself. Read. Watch. Listen. Talk to your friends, family, and colleagues about what you learn. Start looking at the world through new lenses – that people do well when they can. Instead of asking what’s wrong with people, start asking what happened to them. Start to think about where creativity or new ideas could change systems that keep us mired in fear instead of focused on love, acceptance, and the messy beauty of humanity. What can you imagine?