Shame and the rise of the far r*ght
- HeardinLondon
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
Spam Filter For Your Brain - Episode 184
There's no cute little introduction this week. I want to talk about shame and the far right.
I want to talk about why you making the commitment to learning how to manage your emotions is gonna be essential over the next few years, as we are in such a political turbulent time.
I think quite often self-care gets a bad rep as a bit of sort of navel-gazing indulgence for folk who have the time and money to be able to stare at themselves in the mirror and tell themselves that they love themselves 1,000 times.
I suspect that if you're listening to this, you're probably not one of those people. But you might have a lot of conversations with those people, and there might be a little bit of an inner voice for yourself that criticises yourself for spending time looking at your own stuff when there are bigger fish to fry.
And I think that those bigger fish to fry can't be resolved, or indeed looked at, unless we look at our own stuff first. Because everything that we process, all the conversations that we have, all of the actions that we take, are filtered through the way that we respond to things.
And they're also intrinsically linked to the way that you speak to yourself.
So if you are constantly undermining yourself in thought, word, energy, and impact, and telling yourself that you're not good enough, the amount of energy that you have to go and stand up for other people, to be able to go and vocalise opinions, to be able to make sure more people have access to more things, that more marginalised folk are being able to feel safe and welcome in these wild times that we're in, if you are constantly undermining yourself, you are simply taking away a finite pool of energy from things that very much need our attention right now.
My invitation this week is for you to just notice where you try and take action, to avoid feeling a bad emotion. I'm not too big a fan of the binary good/bad emotions, but things that don't sit well with you.
When it comes to the politics of the far right, the narratives that we're seeing on our TV screens, in our newspapers, on social media, what are the things that you don't wanna feel? I imagine probably quite a lot of you are comfortable with feeling angry about it.
But what about shame? What about disappointment? What about hurt or fear? We take an awful lot of action to get away from experiencing these emotions, and that distracts our energy. It pulls us away from the things that are important to us, and quite often it detaches us from our own values.
It's not that we need to be full-on in grief and sadness and despair the whole time, but avoiding an emotion doesn't move us through it. It pushes it down. Our brain gets a signal that not only is the danger here, something bad is happening, but also you're not listening, so it's gonna make that signal louder.
Avoiding an emotion doesn't mean that you are processing it, even though your brain wants to tell you that.
When we have tools to be able to notice what emotions are going on for us, and where something starts to rise and we find ourselves trying to escape from it; if we have tools to be able to go, " Okay, this is a very human response to something. There is threat, there is danger here. Who do I want to be? How do I want to respond to this? How can I respond to myself compassionately with something that feels really uncomfortable or frightening within me? How do I navigate this so that I can stay present so that we can move forward?"
Not so that we can move forward to avoid it or to trample through it or to deny that it's not there, but so that we can move through it and do the things that we want to do, take the actions that we want to take, and stay true to ourselves, rather than getting lost in doom scrolling, finding ourselves getting lost in despair, Finding ourselves thinking that nothing can change.
In the great old arc of history, we are in a moment which is quite a predictable swing back from things starting to get better. I have a friend who's a historian who told me last week that in the big old arch of looking at where we are now, yes, we are in some terrible times. Things are likely to get worse before they get better. But the 2030s are very likely to be a lot better than, than things are now. And whether that's true or not, he studies it, He's got a very big brain, and, I'm latching onto that hope.
The reason why it is crucial for us to be able to understand how we can navigate difficult feelings coming up for us in these times, as there is such a rise of racism, of homophobia, of misogyny Of all of these different areas of marginalised folk experiencing things that were very hard-won rights and gains being stripped from them and being attacked, we're gonna need to have some difficult conversations with people occasionally if anything is gonna change. All of us need to be engaging in these conversations.
And sometimes when we have these conversations, they can be difficult. We're gonna want to people please. We don't want to be rude. We're gonna tell ourselves that we should have said something different. We're going to possibly leave these conversations and think that we didn't get things right. Things can get heated, and we're gonna need to know to be able to manage the feelings that come up within us with that kind of stuff, or we won't be having the conversations. We won't be taking the action. We won't be turning up on the streets and going to these demonstrations.
If everything flares the whole time, we are not going to be in that place of being responsive and making active choices from a place which is centered in knowing what we want.
I believe that curiosity is a massively underutilised strategy for disarming a lot of these conversations.
So for example, if someone is saying something explicitly rude, racist, misogynistic, coming at someone, if you are in a place that is safe to do so, with, " Sorry, I don't understand. Can you explain that?" And getting them to unravel themselves. "No, that doesn't make sense to me. Can you say more about it? I'm curious why. Have you, have you ever personally experienced that?" Keeping yourself from rising to the bait, is the best way that I have personally found in many, many conversations to diffuse things that people are expecting you to fire back at.
If everyone is having conversations which are along the lines of, "I'm right, you're an idiot," we're gonna get nowhere. Things are gonna stay as they are, if not get worse. I believe that each conversation that we have which can take someone from a place of, "I'm right, they're the enemy," to a place of, "Hmm, you know what? I do believe that. I think I'm right. This is true, but I actually, in the last six months, I haven't experienced that, personally. I haven't seen that with my own eyes."
I was having a conversation with a taxi driver a couple of days ago, and he was talking about how people " coming over here in small boats, getting, council houses really easily." And I was like, "You're a grown man." You know, this guy was in his 60s, And I said, " hand on heart, have you ever experienced anyone, anyone getting a council house easily? Do you know anyone who's landed, a place, a roof over their head, and it has been easy. I hear what you just said there. You think that these people are just getting free handouts. Have you ever witnessed it? Have you ever experienced it? I get that you read about it. I get you have the conversations with your friends. But you personally, I trust your experience. Do you know about this? Have you ever had a conversation or seen it with your own eyes?" .
I've been trying this tactic for years. Occasionally, I get someone who comes up with a, "Oh, yeah, this one time." But it's really amazing how it makes people sort of go into their own experience and start questioning this stuff.
I remember seeing an article years ago which, , I'm gonna fudge the statistics, but the point is still there. And it was something like if you ask the great British public who thought the NHS was a complete shambles, like 80% of the people thought it was a complete mess, and then of those 80%, if you ask them how many of them had had direct contact with the NHS in the last three months, it went down to about 5%.
And that shows us that the power of the stories of the media, the power of the voices around you makes such an impact on how you view the systems at play.
Asking people to question their own experience Allows them to know that you are respecting them as a person, you see their humanity, and you are asking for their opinion rather than telling them why they're wrong. And I find that that is such a good way to cut through a lot of the noise and a lot of the nonsense.
You can't have those kind of heated conversations if you are feeling embarrassed, shame, frightened, angry, and don't know what to do with those emotions. They're gonna come up. These conversations are often difficult, often heated. People really frequently, when they're feeling challenged, want to attack, and it is a skill set to know not to rise to the bait.
I have a course in www.SelfCareSchool.co.uk which is called How to Feel Big Feelings Without Feeling Like Shit. It is £27. I think that is the most preposterous price for being able to learn how to manage your emotions that I could possibly ever put out there. They're enormous life skills. However, if you don't have money, you don't have money, and £27 is a lot of money. So if you can afford to pay for it, it helps me try and run the world's most stupid business model that anyone's ever thought of. If you cannot afford that and you want this skill and you need this, message me and I will make sure that you have access to these tools.
I do not believe that we can counteract what is the rise of the far right in this moment if we are not resourcing ourselves with the things that we need in order to keep ourselves safe and keep others safe.
And I want to be part of a picture where we don't gatekeep the access to some of the tools that we're gonna need to be able to do this.
If you would like that information, please do contact me. There's lots of stuff in the show notes underneath. And I hope that this has been a useful breakdown of why self-care is essential, now more than ever. If I can be of help in any way, please do reach out.
I look forward to speaking to you next week
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