Growing Into an Unbreakable Will
Don't just stand there.
Early in this week’s episode of White Lotus, Lochlan, the youngest child in a dysfunctional, wealthy family, sits on the porch of a villa on a beach in Thailand, watching videos of tsunamis. He turns his tablet to show one such clip to his father, explaining that the beach in the image is near the resort where they are staying. He comments, “he didn’t even run, he just stood there,” as a big white wave travels over the screen and transforms what was once clearly a person into a tiny dot.
This isn’t the first tsunami reference made in the episode—the opening scene shows Lochlan’s mother standing on a beach in a dream, looking into the distance, while Lochlan (who is sitting on the beach, not too far away) says, calmly, “this is what it looks like before a tsunami.” When she recounts this dream at breakfast the next morning, she suggests to Lochlan that he stop streaming tsunami videos before bed.
Watching Lochlan, I saw myself, for I recently developed a parallel fixation.
Instead of tsunamis, I found myself watching clip after clip of avalanche footage. Unlike Lochlan, I didn’t have proximity to thank for my heightened sense of danger; I haven’t been skiing in years and don’t have plans to visit any mountains this winter. Instead, I felt stalked by the suffocating right-wing Evangelical nationalism of my childhood. Lying awake at night, my ears pounded as snow’s equivalent of white horses with wild eyes thundered in my direction, threatening to trample me beneath their hooves.
To loosen myself from fundamentalism’s grip the first time, I had to accept that by doing so, I would be putting myself on the outside of the bubble in which I’d spent the first two decades of my life. It would mean revealing myself to be the “other” I’d been taught to hate. It would mean taking the risk that I was and always would be entirely alone in the universe.
The flip side of that excision was freedom.
I knew I would have to build a new world for myself, create my own system of ethics, find my own meaning, but I believed that if I left that safe-but-toxic harbor, I would no longer be under the thumb of a system which demanded I participate in my own subjugation and engage in the oppression of others.
Over the past fourteen years, I’ve learned that part of learning how to build a new world is becoming comfortable recognizing when I have bought into something I need to unlearn. Being honest with myself, and willing to admit when I am wrong, even when I don’t yet know what would be right, makes room for possibilities that weren’t available within the strictures of American right-wing Evangelical nationalism.
Yesterday,
shared a new episode on his podcast, Flightless Bird, as well as this piece on Substack, delving into an organization that has had such an inordinate level of influence on Evangelical families that every one of his interviewees’ stories about how their childhoods were shaped around James Dobson’s discipline-driven parenting prescriptions could have come from the same unfinished basement room where my parents took me to enact his advice.Two of Farrier’s guests in this episode, Michael Frost and
, explain that James Dobson, a child psychologist who founded Focus on the Family, an organization rooted in patriarchal values, believed that children should be trained to be 1) compliant and 2) obedient. Through books like Dare to Discipline and The Strong-Willed Child (titles I remember seeing on the coffee table in the home where I grew up), he taught parents “how to discipline kids in a way in which they would learn to immediately comply with authority.”1 The way to do this, he said, was to break their will by quashing any hints of rebellion.As an adoptee, I was predisposed to mistrust the very concept of belonging. Some adoptees blatantly push their adoptive parents’ boundaries, feeling around for the line that, if crossed, will result in their adoptive parents fulfilling the adoptees’ assumption that they will be unchosen (again). Others, convinced on a cellular level that being kept is akin to survival, become master assimilators. I fell into the latter camp. Fearing the consequences of overt rebellion, I either pushed my own feelings and desires down in favor of not getting in trouble or found sneaky ways to poke a limb outside the mold within which I knew I was expected to stay contained.
One Sunday after church, when I was fifteen, some family friends came over to our house for lunch. We sat in the formal dining room, and between courses, my dad asked me to come and stand by his chair. I remember mentally scanning through my actions from that morning, trying to pinpoint what I must have done wrong. When I reached his side, he pulled a velvet jewelry box from his pocket. Opening the lid like a clam shell, he revealed a gold chain, strung through the loop of a diamond pendant. Caught off guard and still uncertain about what was going on, I smiled weakly and tried to avoid the gazes of the people sitting around the table. My dad reached for my hand and said he wanted to acknowledge me, in front of our friends, for being such an obedient daughter. He said he was proud of the way I had harnessed my strong will into achieving academic excellence and competing as a figure skater, but that what pleased him most was my compliance and respect for authority.
In his book, On Tyranny,
warns:“Do not obey in advance.
Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”
Authoritarianism, in whatever form it comes—whether that is parents or partners or bosses or churches or cults or political parties or hegemonic powers—relies on its subjects to “just stand there,” like the person obliterated by the wave in Lochlan’s tsunami video.
It took a long time for me to realize resistance was an option. For years and years, I allowed my power to leak out of me, like air from a punctured balloon. I gave it away.
Having questioned my way out of that world, I know very well what the people backing the current US administration believe, and how serious they are about maintaining control. I also know how adept they are at convincing good people, who genuinely are seeking ways to live well and to follow Jesus (I still love Jesus!), to subscribe to the sort of us/them thinking that keeps the cogs of this monstrous machine turning. I’ve sat in churches where the pastor has told parents that their children, if they stray, are as good as dead to them, and my own father has admitted on stages and in his book that when his first wife (my second mom, see last week's post) decided to leave him to be with a woman (my birth mom), she became the enemy, and he started plotting ways to kill her.
This is what it looks like before a tsunami.
Depending on those in power to be reasonable, or to follow an established order, isn't going to bring reality back to what most adults in the Western world think of as “normal.”
All of those rights they have and are trying to strip away came at great cost to the people who fought to secure them for us. If we submit to the wave, it will erase the remaining rights we still currently have.
Watching those avalanche videos reminded me of a quote from
’s book, Cultish, in which she explains why we are so entranced by things like tsunami/avalanche videos, stories about cults/toxic relationships, and even accidents on the side of the road:“I once heard a psychologist explain that rubbernecking results from a very real physiological response: You see an auto accident, or any disaster—or even just news of a disaster, like a headline—and your brain’s amygdala, which controls emotions, memory, and survival tactics, starts firing signals to your problem-solving frontal cortex to try to figure out whether this event is a direct danger to you. You enter fight-or-flight mode, even if you’re just sitting there.”
When we are in fight/flight/freeze/fawn mode, it is very easy to give away our power. That’s why it’s so important to learn how to take care of our nervous systems, as well as taking time to educate ourselves (this is not the same as doom scrolling, although sometimes I admit I find the line blurry) and to connect with other people who want more for our world.
When we refuse to give away our power, we can do more than just stand there.
During my recent spell of nightly meltdowns, I felt like the little girl I used to be—the girl who didn’t recognize her own agency. It seemed like the authoritarianism of my youth, which I’d sacrificed so much to escape from, and from which I thought I was free, was chasing me, and I felt afraid it would swallow up the rest of my life. That even as an old woman, I would be under its heavy thumb.
The reality is that people do get swallowed up sometimes. Even when they run or ski or snowboard as fast as they possibly can. Even when they are experts. Sometimes, though—more often than you’d expect—giving everything you have to get free, like in this video, can save your life.
I am not a parent, and most likely never will be, but I am an enthusiastic aunt and grown-up friend to many small humans. I care about the world in which they will spend their lives.
I keep thinking about George Orwell's essay, "Why I Write," which I referenced in this post. He writes about how, if he had lived in a peaceful time, he “might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of [his] political loyalties.”
Sometimes I wonder, in a similar way to how I occasionally allow myself to hypothesize about who I might have been if I hadn’t experienced the trauma of being cut from my first family on the day I was born, who I might have been if the peaceful future I imagined growing up into actually existed.
Looking to the future from where we actually are now, thinking about who I want to be when the little people in my life are my current age, my memory draws me back to a climate protest in London in 2019. I remember standing, hesitant, but deeply moved, on the fringes of a crowd as elderly protesters lined themselves up in rows, linked arms and sat on the ground in front of police, offering themselves up to protect the younger people behind them, for whom being arrested would have longer-lasting and potentially more severe consequences.
When I think about the person I am aiming towards growing into, I see them.
A quote from the podcast discussion.