TW: I’m a settler with German and Slovak ancestry. My analysis of colonialism is from a place of undoing internalized white supremacy as a white person. There is also brief mention of abuse and childhood sexual abuse with no details.

As the world watches the genocide in Palestine unfold by the Israeli government, there has been tug of war here in Canada between the “it’s not complicated” and the “it’s complicated” camps. The “it’s not complicated” camp points to geopolitical issues of capitalist, settler, colonialism that has lead to the justification of the displacement and genocide of the Palestinian people. The “it’s complicated” camp tends to speak to the trauma and pain of either both Palestinian and Israeli people or exclusively to the discrimination and genocide of Jewish people that lead to the formation of Zionism and Jewish people fleeing to their holy land of Israel. Each side, in isolation, misses important details that has implications for how people engage in activism, their communities, and with their friends and families.

I want to take a moment to breakdown what’s not complicated, what is complicated, and how we can access our compassion by staying true to our politics of justice and freedom while leaving space for the messy reality of our full humanity. I will begin by priming us to remember the experience of cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive dissonance is when our beliefs are contradicted by our actions or new experiences. In other words, cognitive dissonance is an alarm bell that rings when our inner world and outer world are misaligned.

Cognitive dissonance is a very physiologically uncomfortable state. We will work pretty hard to get out of cognitive dissonance either by changing our actions to align with our beliefs, doubling down on our beliefs and rejecting new information, or accepting new information and changing our beliefs. It takes a great deal of emotional skill and radical acceptance to stay grounded through the experience of cognitive dissonance. And, perhaps the most difficult journey of all, it requires a passage through grief.

Cognitive dissonance foreshadows loss. To move through the dissonance we inevitably have to let something go. We have to accept that we thought we knew but we actually didn’t know. Or we have to accept that we thought it would be okay, but it actually wasn’t okay. Before the dissonance, I exclaim, “I got this!” During the dissonance, I exclaim, “I don’t got this!” We get confused. We fight. We surrender. We cry. We ignore. We avoid. Until…

We relinquish. We accept. We are heartbroken. We grieve. We find peace. We find clarity. We seek justice.

Why does any of this matters? I believe it matters when discerning between “what’s not complicated,” “what’s complicated,” and “what’s nonbinary” in order to stay grounded in our politics without sacrificing our relationship to our own or each others’ humanity.

What’s not complicated?

Geopolitics. Whether we are talking about sexuality, the genocide in Palestine, or why food costs so much these days, the geopolitics of the world are the same: the biggest, richest, most powerful states are only invested in maintaining that the majority of wealth remains in the hands of the (often “white”) elite. They maintain this by enacting colonial domination of land that offers settlement or resources for the accumulation of wealth. The leaders of these states order the death, removal, or enslavement of the people on these lands as part of their conquest. In order to justify the abuse of others, colonizers have to produce on-going, relentless, propaganda to dehumanize the oppressed and depict the superiority/rights of the oppressor. These states only care about the working class in so much as the working class carries out the work of maintaining the positions of the elite. There may be many stories, myths, or partial truths that add flourish or confusion to this reality, but in the end, all roads lead back to this very basic colonial dynamic. That’s it. It’s not mysterious, it’s not pro-humanity, and it’s definitely not complicated. If you need a primer, check out Bear Waters Gathering, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada From Slavery to the Present by Robyn Maynard or Canada in the World: Settler Capitalism and the Colonial Imagination by Tyler A. Shipley.

What’s complicated?

Tolerating the grief of noticing and accepting the painful truth. This is where the complications begin. For many people living on the outermost margins from the elite, the grief of noticing and accepting the truth of capitalist, settler, colonialism is an early lesson in survival. But we are not always born knowing the full picture, regardless of our socio-political position or identities, because the propaganda of the elite is incessant and very well funded (thanks to all their wealth and power hoarding).

Big picture synthesis from statistics and geopolitics helps us understand the white supremacy of the modern era. But what does that mean for our every day lives? How does that then show up in our friendships? Lovers? Families? How does that show up at work? How does that show up in our communities? Our institutions? Our trauma? Our healing? How does that frame our understanding of protest? Resistance? Relational repair?

And how do we find our way back to our humanity underneath the rubble of the greedy?

When I first started to look white supremacy in the face, MY face, I felt completely disoriented: how much of me is me and how much of me is supremacist indoctrination? What if all I am is the product of supremacy? What does it mean to have worth outside of that? What does it mean to claim my worth? How do I even begin to define worth? How will I even know when I see truth if I’ve been lied to so deeply and for so long?

When I first began to ask these questions I was full of rage and self-loathing and self-disgust and at every other white person. I didn’t know what to do with all the sorrow. I didn’t know what to do with all the horror. I was terrified of what accountability and responsibility would mean. I wanted to appease anyone I “calculated” (read: Oppression Olympics) as having less power than me. I decided my punishment and my atonement were justice. White people were bad and could do no good while everyone else was good and could do no wrong.

When I look back on when this internal dialogue shifted for me, it was during the opening circle of the Bear Waters Gathering course The Sacred Gift. They asked what had inspired me to take the course. I shared some platitudes about the importance of decolonizing my practice as a therapist on stolen land and then I decided to take a risk and really truthfully admit what brought me there, “I am trying to figure out where it’s okay for me to be.” I talked about having German and Slovak ancestry but not being German or Slovak. I talked about never really relating to the dominant British “Canadian” culture having been partially raised by German grandparents who were just “a little different” than everyone else. I shared since learning about colonization I certainly did not want to assimilate into the normative British colonial thinking and being that was the foundation of Canadian identity. I talked about feeling awkward on stolen land and not knowing where else I should go.

I am going to respect the privacy of the exact conversation that followed as I feel protective of how my synthesis of that moment out of context may be understood. What I will share is that I was told I was a welcome guest on the land if I respected Indigenous sovereignty and took responsibility for being a good steward on the land. The rest of the course was an unraveling of supremacist thinking and how to be in deep mutual respect of one another while working towards equalizing power under white supremacy and uplifting each others humanity. In other words, it ended with, “now that you know, how are you going to show up for us?” And that was the beginning of a deeper form of activism that began to take shape in my life.

I did have to let go of many of the ways in which I defined “goodness” for myself and others. My relationships started to change as I became clearer in my values that formed the bedrock of my politics. I had to grieve the loss of important relationships that did not know how to join or witness me on this path. I had to grieve the loss of simple answers or the myth of the single-solution that would fix it all. I had to grieve the world as I thought I knew it. And the more I grieved the easier the grief flowed. And the more it flowed, the more space I had for new ways of being! And the more it flowed, the more people I met who were also on this path! And the more space I had the more present I became and the suffering fell away leaving the comfort of pain: the evidence of my love.

Admittedly, I have a terrible habit of learning something new and then forgetting that once upon a time I did not know. I notice myself getting impatient or angry with other settlers who have not had the opportunities or education I have had on colonization and decolonization. When I find myself getting stuck in that old habit and getting frustrated with others who are stuck in the insidious indoctrination of the greedy elite, I think of the grace, patience, humour, and honesty I was generously gifted in my untangling. I think of the trust we built slowly over time. I think of the good faith we held toward one another. I think of the unconditional compassion I was offered without appeasement. I think of the care that we offered each others humanity. I think of how can I carry that forward with others who want to walk this path? And what does protest look like when others want to destroy or obscure that path?

When trauma begets entitlement that begets more trauma.

You’ve probably heard this piece of trauma data in some form or another: all people who abuse have been abused but not all people who have been abused will go onto abuse. In other words, “hurt people hurt people.” But it begs the question: what is the difference between a person who has been abused who goes onto perpetuate that abuse and someone who has been abused and makes a commitment never to inflict that kind of pain on someone else?

I had been turning over this question in my mind for many years until finally I realized the difference lived somewhere in the experience of entitlement.

On a very lucky day, I came across a free book at a bookstore closing titled Feminist Approaches for Men in Family Therapy. I picked it up, despite not yet training to become a therapist, but knowing one day I likely would. I carried this book around for several years before I finally cracked it open. When I began to read about men who enacted childhood sexual abuse the author wrote something to the effect of: although many of the men who sexually abused children had been sexually abused as children themselves, something lead them to believe they had a right to enact this violence in adulthood. Although the chapter did not go on to muse about the origins of this entitlement. So, I turned inward.

What I did notice for myself was that whenever I felt entitled to my “messiness” (read: a soft way to say I took out my anger/rage from a past trauma onto an innocent partner or friend), it was because I did not want to confront how fragile and overwhelmed I truly felt. I did not want to feel disempowered. In other words, I wanted to feel powerful. I was told it was my right to feel powerful! All I had to do was claim it! No one was going to give it to me!

Sounding familiar?

It took a lot of a lot to heal. A lot. I had a history of numbing-out with drugs and alcohol. It took many years of gradual weaning, moving from one substance to a “less strong” substance to get sober. All the while, I was doing trauma therapy programs for some specific experiences and forgiving myself, reparenting my wounded inner children, learning about how to take responsibility for my actions in relationships with others, leaning heavily on friends who had a knack for caregiving (read: possibly co-dependent relationships or possibly no need to pathologize loving community). Skip to after several somatic therapy sessions over two years, I finally had a nervous system that could support my new values and my new commitment to justice of seeking power-with relationships rather than power-over relationships.

If you’re thinking, wow Tynan, that sounds like it took a lot of resources including time, money, and social capital. Not everyone has all that! You’d be correct! Which is why it is has become all the more important to me to show others some grace when we don’t have the same ability to access healing and to show up for each others protests when we seek liberation from oppressive states. Healing also doesn’t have to look like any one way and there are many ways to imagine community care that does not require expensive therapies. Not to mention the ways in which many psychotherapists can recreate systems of oppression and pathologies of white supremacy in the way they do (or don’t do) the work.

It behooves us, then, to remember what is likely to happen when people are not afforded the appropriate care they need to heal. Or when people are dehumanized, occupied, displaced, disregarded. Combine the vicious cycle of trauma and entitlement with power imbalances and you have a recipe for horror. It’s also important not to lose our power analysis in the trauma-entitlement cycle. There is a difference between feeling entitled to enact power/control on innocent people in our present because of a history of violence from others in the past; and enacting violence toward an oppressor in our present who we are trying to escape or survive. The power analysis is not complicated. The geopolitics are not the complicated parts. What is complicated is each, unique, individual’s experience and relationship to indoctrination of colonization, power, and their own journey toward humanity.

Longing for single-identity spaces: queer lessons on the myth of monoliths.

Okay, so we understand what’s not complicated, we understand what is complicated, including how painful it is to try and access our grief… why not just create spaces where we all generally have the same shared oppression, generally move through the world in the same way, and are already on the same page in our thinking and way of being?

I, personally, know how comforting it is to walk into a space where I know everyone in attendance is queer in some form or another and probably white like me. But I’ve also seen ways in which queer spaces have fallen apart when assumptions of shared experience come crashing into the reality of the totality of our personhood… including when everyone is white.

There are several ways in which this utopian dream can also quickly fall apart, despite it’s best intentions:

1. If it’s existence is built on the displacement or oppression of others
2. It’s sold as being a place of equality for all qualifying members, but it’s reality includes supremacist hierarchies that create “less desirable” members
3. There is an expectation that shared identity assumes experience and shared values
4. Those outside of the group are demonized or stereotyped out of their humanity

Single-identity spaces do not bypass unaddressed trauma and entitlement. While they can be a welcome respite from supremacy and a safe haven in a world that otherwise feels (or is) impossible to survive in at times, they don’t ultimately address the capitalist, colonial, settler, supremacist elites who don’t want us to notice they are trying to run the world. And when those spaces become one of those elites, they are no longer places of respite, either.

What’s nonbinary?

Compassion for everyone’s suffering is not political betrayal. We can hold both the uncomplicated pieces and the complicated pieces at the same time. The reality is, unless you are one of the very few elites at the very top of this capitalist hellscape, we are all treated as having varying degrees of disposability by our governments who serve the capitalist power-houses.

One of the most profound experiences of connection I ever experienced in a queer space was talking about the internalized homophobia that has lead to me being a “bad bi” person with a lesbian-identified woman who admitted to enacting biphobia when her own trauma of being marginalized outside of heteronormativity pushed her insecurities over the edge. There was an immediate fondness and warmth between us. We saw each other in our full, wounded, complicated selves. We didn’t date, we didn’t even become friends, but we each left that conversation having understood something deeper than what we had known before. And although our pain had not hurt each other directly, we recognized each other as the kind of person who could have really harmed the other in another lifetime. And I, as the white heterosexual-adjacent power-holder did not stop knowing the power I held in the world around us and the longing I had for queer intimacy. And she did not crumble under the weight of her oppression with her connections in queer community. We held it all together knowing a truth greater than ourselves: struggling under hetero-patriarchy we were seeking belonging and love.

The reality is, also, that facing my internalized white supremacy from the comforts of the home I own in a post-pandemic housing crisis that is not under attack by my local Nazis’ is not the same as finding a swastika on your house in the morning, is not the same as feeling like your own community hates you or your family disowns you for being leftist or Zionist, is not the same as being beaten by supremacists for being Palestinian because of a 1600% rise in Anti-Arab racism, is not the same as losing loved ones in an act of resistance for survival under occupation and apartheid is not the same as losing 60+ members of your family in a genocidal war. My compassion for myself or a Zionist friend does not take away from my compassion and protest for Palestinian people, it invigorates it by bringing clarity and grounding me in justice.

We somehow have to reckon with this while finding the humanity in our grief so we can gift that humanity as a peace offering and a promise to take responsibility for our entwined lives. Here. Right now. Together. Your freedom is my freedom: My wound is your oppression. Your oppression is my dis-ease. Your liberation is our power. Your healing is my healing. Your world is my world. We are interconnected.

Freedom through power-with relationships.

I am reminded of the Two Row Wampum treaty between the Haudenosaunee and the Dutch. When I learned of the Two Row Wampum I could feel the seed being planted in my heart and my head. I know this treaty is not being honoured in Canada today and I want this treaty, and all other treaties, to be honoured. I need to believe we can learn how to live together but in order to do that we have to face reality, whole heartedly, no matter how gruesome. We have to disengage with power-over relationships and commit to power-with relationships. Collective action. Collective grieving. Collective growing. Collective uplifting!

I am not suggesting you need to find a way of being in power-with relationships with people who are clearly oriented in a power-over mindset. Part of the grief and messiness of the complicated parts is knowing when to walk away from an argument or a person who only seeks to antagonize you or assert control over your values. Part of our collective power is holding our ground for justice and not allowing the “elite” to assert dominance and control over our lives. Part of our collective grieving is recognizing the suffering in others so we may support each others healing and ultimate liberation.