Don’t make yourself wrong for getting it wrong
Tags: Unlearning, Behavioural Change, Social Justice, Actionresearch, Learning And Development

How might we design radical unlearning that enrols humanity in collective liberation?

At the time of writing and as part of my action research project, Radicational, I’m currently participating in a multidisciplinary peer-led lifelong learning programme called Enrol Yourself (click the link to learn more!). What attracted me to Enrol Yourself was its approach to learning that lives outside of the elitist, capitalist, and essentialist power dynamics of mainstream education and knowledge production. Bearing in mind my past traumatic experiences of trying to survive in the educational institution of academia, signing up for Enrol Yourself as a nonformal learning experience made a lot of sense for my ever-decolonising practice as an educator and learner. Of course, decolonising my ways of thinking, doing, and being does not come without the intense growing pains of questioning absolutely everything I thought I knew. Along this journey I have had many dark moments, crashes, crises, and spirals that have brought me to the edges of my mental health and existential identity. Along the way, I’ve had my buddy Braden who has witnessed, held, and shared my anger and despair and in doing so has also brought me light-ness. In one particular sob session, I was beating myself up for falling into the same colonised thought processes and Braden shared a poem that inspired me to breathe easier.

Autobiography in Five Short Chapters by Portia Nelson

When zooming in on the process of unlearning, this poem is particularly useful. Unlearning as anti-oppression education is neither linear nor straightforward and so we relapse. It’s important to understand that relapse is very almost quite literally inevitable. And so what do we do with our relapses when we find ourselves in that deep hole in the sidewalk that we’ve fallen into so many times before?

My hole-shaped relapses in learning and unlearning. Photo credit: https://unsplash.com/@valentinlacoste

My tendency is to make myself wrong for getting it wrong. I promptly get out my self-flagellating whip and whip myself up a shitstorm of frustration, disappointment, contempt, regret, sadness, victimhood, despair, and hopelessness. And that’s where you’ll find me for the foreseeable future, in a shitstorm of self-loathing. So I’m guessing that this tendency is relatable for fellow humans influenced by 21st century perfectionism and instant gratification, e.g. almost everyone? But what is really going on here?

When I fall into an old attitude, habitual behaviour, or default belief that no longer serves the purpose of what I’m up to in the world — I render a judgement of myself that I am wrong; that I am the one to blame for permitting a particular attitude, behaviour, or belief to persist. I judge myself, for not being quicker, smarter, or more efficient at learning, adopting, and integrating new ways of thinking, doing, and being (*mouthful alert!*). I judge myself even after an entire lifetime of thinking, doing, and being the old way and being reinforced and rewarded for the old way, by everything and everyone around me. Pulling apart this expectation (and the self-blame that goes with it) reveals the unrealistic shortcut thinking that underpins it. Furthermore, what is the function of this thinking? To pathologise ourselves and others? To overlook the insidious and overwhelming nature of systems of oppression? To ignore the messy, nonlinear journey of learning, unlearning, and relearning? Check, check, and double fucking check.

In fact, from a cognitive science standpoint, our brains create neuropathways (or sidewalks) of attitude, behaviour, and belief that we cognitively walk again and again. Over time, our nervous systems get very efficient at firing up these neuropathways in response to external stimuli. These neuropathways become the paths of least resistance that our brains rely on for speed, ease, and safety. It’s that moment when you realise you’ve walked all the way home without realising it because you know the route so well. But what happens when you move house and you accidentally walk to your old house out of habit — is that a reason to get the self-flagellating whip out? No of course not. Our brains and nervous systems work like this because it’s an evolutionary outcome, nothing more nothing less.

So it takes intention, time, practice, and support to not only avoid the deep holes in the sidewalk but to choose another street entirely (a.k.a. unlearning). The amazing adrienne maree brown talks about how “we become what we practice”. In the same breath she also references Richard Strozzi-Heckler’s idea of ‘300 repetitions produces body memory, 3000 repetitions creates embodiment’. Furthermore, trauma-informed performance coach Mastin Kipp and social psychology researcher Phillippa Lally both talk about habits taking on average 66 days to build for some folx (when done religiously everyday) — and up to 12 months for others. Not to mention that two deep holes in the sidewalk are never the same because we are always a different person by the time we’ve fallen into the next one — and every single time we do fall in, we strengthen our muscle to notice, reflect, and climb out. Though not an enjoyable or comfortable process, there is value in relapse and it is never a life sentence.

So it seems that behavioural change simply ain’t that easy. Making ourselves wrong for finding ourselves in that familiar deep dark hole without the infrastructure needed for sustained unlearning is not useful or well-informed. Instead of blaming ourselves for getting it wrong (again), it would serve us to understand the nature of learning and unlearning and proactively put the scaffolding in place to help us move out of the path of least resistance and onto a new sidewalk free of deep holes.

Moral of the story is: Go easy on yourself. Remember to slow down to speed up. Be gentle, kind, and compassionate to yourself and your unlearning process because this is, in itself, an act of defiance against systems of oppression that fool us into thinking perfection is possible and that we must be trying to attain it perpetually. In fact, if you look closely, this is the oppressive thinking that created the deep hole-filled sidewalks in the first place. Think about it… perfectionism is binaried thinking that creates an ‘ideal’ that others anyone who does not look like or fit that criteria, which results in top-down oppression. And as Einstein always reminds us “problems cannot be solved with the same thinking that got us into them in the first place”. Instead, embrace the messiness and make peace with the fact that we will inevitably relapse and that unlearning oppression is a lifelong nonlinear learning journey that will never be attained in one night, let alone one lifetime. If it were that easy, systemic oppression would be solved by now and we’d all be busying ourselves with more cheerful things.

Ultimately we must never stop seeing the deep holes in the sidewalk. And we must always remain committed to walking down a different street.