The Taboo Behind the Taboo
By: Ren Powell
Tags: Compassion, Healing From Abuse, Mental Health, Healing From Trauma, Buddhism

Thoughts on Our Culture’s Second Arrow

I read an article last week about how secrets make us ill. Supposedly — statistically — people who out their secrets are healthier. Happier. While I’m not entirely convinced that there is a true correlation between health and happiness, I’m definitely skeptical of any research design that relies on self-reporting as a reliable measure of who has told their secrets. Confessing to midnight raids of the refrigerator is one thing…

I find myself thinking again of the improvisation workshop instructions: say the first thing that comes to mind, don’t censor yourself… really? I don’t know about you, but it’d be cruel to impose on an acting partner what first comes to my mind after hearing that instruction.

“Come up with an everyday task!”

“Ironing,” shouts my colleague.

“Masturbation,” shouts the uncencored voice in my head.

It’s accepted hypocrisy, this kind of “honesty” that we congratulate ourselves for. It’s actually a demonstration of knowing the unspoken, subtle social boundaries. It is a comforting exercise in “normalization”.

There’s an assumption that few of us have wounds that have blurred the lines of decorum. Of course, there are, “Those People”. Even: “Those Kinds of People”. If you’re not one of those people, you might be surprised how often those phrases come up in casual conversation. You probably don’t notice the judgment as it slides by wrapped in an ostensibly compassionate bit of chatter.

I am one of those people.

I have yet to experience opening my box of dark objects in front of someone without feeling like I’d inflicted pain on them. Freaked them out. Maybe shaken their world view for a minute. They want to slam the lid back down on the box, hand me a lollipop, and turn on an after-school special: generalizing the specific can be comforting.

For others.

“You’re not alone” is a camouflage. And a dismissal.

We congratulate ourselves for “breaking” taboos by acknowledging what we normally ignore. We smack a label on the pain, stick it in a box. Breaking taboos is a coping mechanism for the real world. We’ve done our work: identified it, aww-ed for a minute or two, and sorted it out. We can move on, having done our bit. Gotten our hands dirty.

“Those people.”

I try to remember these thoughts when students come to me with their secrets. I try to resist the impulse to generalize their pain with all the stories in my head — even my own. I try to be there with their ugly little object and help them hold it for a little while. This thing — that isn’t a category, isn’t a statistic, isn’t a social phenomenon. It’s the shape of their pain. A unique shape.

I believe I am a good listener. But I have no idea what to do after these moments. There’s a reason patients and psychiatrists avoid eye contact at the grocery store; a reason we so often find ourselves deliberately confiding in strangers: we are all hit so hard by what the Buddhists call the second arrow.

I wrote above: There’s an assumption that few of us have wounds that have blurred the lines of decorum. But this is wrong. Decorum is a social construct. Wounds are natural phenomena: shit happens. Decorum is the way we handle it. It keeps the surface of our social lives smooth.

Decorum is also the second arrow.

I believe attention has always been a reward in any culture, even before our era of “the attention economy”. But there’s an innate duality in the moment of being seen: desire/fear. Celebrity culture demonstrates this phenomenon on steroids.

Demanding to be seen as an individual is an imposition on others. We resent it. We punish it — because we envy it.

Daring to be seen as an individual leaves us naked: our individual story is always a story of shame. From the cultural perspective: we are attention-seeking.

Healing our wounds, getting beyond the taboos entirely requires another perspective.

Maybe real healing is a necessarily anti-social act.

I am put in the position of passing judgment on myself as on an object, for it is as an object that I appear to the Other.

- JEAN PAUL SARTRE, BEING AND NOTHINGNESS

(An earlier draft of this essay was published as a diary entry on Ren Powell’s personal blog: renpowell.com)