Healing America's Narratives: An Introduction
Recognizing, Owning, & Integrating Our Collective National Shadow
Welcome, and thanks for checking out this first edition of the Healing America’s Narratives newsletter. This introductory post provides an overview of the content we’ll explore each week and the lenses that inform that content .
The newsletter is an ongoing expansion and application of the ideas in Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow (September 2022).
More specifically, we’ll explore the disposition and mood of the United States in this third decade of the twenty-first century through the intersections of history, developmental psychology, politics, culture, and spirituality. More intersections and lenses are available, but these five will suffice for now.
I will be making the case that our current dysfunction, while worrisome, dangerous, and complex, is neither surprising nor inconsistent with our history — rather, it is inevitable. Much as Neil Sheehan wrote about the My Lai massacre in A Bright Shining Lie, “…the civilian leaders who permitted the generals to wage war as they did, had made the massacre inevitable,”1 American citizens — all of us — the corporations we run and that run us, and the people we elect to represent those corporations (and on occasion, us) have made and continue to make today’s America inevitable.
There may be a way through our current state of affairs; it is complex, inevitably messy, and not guaranteed. Elected officials (including those I vote for) and performance news celebrities (very few of whom I can endure) either are not aware of or choose not to acknowledge what we’ll explore here, and instead play whack-a-mole as stories repeat, fingers point, eyes roll, and the pesky moles show up elsewhere again and again.
Some Language
Our nation is cursed and blessed with competing narratives that, even at their most oppositional, share aspects of a collective Shadow — in the Jungian sense — that which is denied, repressed, unknown, or unacknowledged, and projected onto others. Elements of America’s specific national Shadow include ignorance, arrogance, fear, bigotry, violence, greed, excess, bullying, and untrustworthiness — each of which is present in varying degrees throughout history, amid current events, and across the political spectrum. These elements arose historically and arise currently through an unhealthy manifestation of masculine energy and a virtual absence of healthy feminine energy. I’ll unpack all of this language in future posts.
I will be making the case in the coming weeks and months that in order to heal these narratives, Americans will have to recognize, own, and integrate both individual and collective Shadows. To heal, as used here, means coming to terms with things as they are in order to move toward wholeness — that is, accepting what is true, even if I don’t like it or I disagree with it. Healing begins when I acknowledge and accept that I just spilled the milk — even though I wish I hadn’t — rather than railing against how or why it happened or who’s to blame. Healing differs from curing or fixing. Ideally we heal and cure/fix, but it’s possible to heal without curing/fixing and to cure or fix and not heal. This healing-curing-fixing differential will be developed further in the coming weeks and months.
In order to authentically heal our narratives it’s important that each of us comes to terms with our cultural givens and the extent to which we have accepted, revised, discarded, or developed beyond them. “Cultural givens” refers to the view of the world given to us during our earliest years by family, community, schooling, religion, or lack thereof, and other influences — all within the context of the time and place of our birth. In order to become healthy adults, it’s necessary to question what we’re given as kids, and then choose to accept, revise, or discard those givens based on our own direct experience of the world. We’ll take a deeper dive into cultural givens next week.
Some Tools for the Journey
Such questioning of what we’re given can be exhilarating at best and terrifying at worst. Some of us — even if we’re chronological adults — never do it. Who are we, really, if our cherished, given beliefs are proven false? Paying attention to several qualities, areas of concern, and practices can help us as we question. Briefly:
Skillful means invites the mechanic to tighten the bolt just enough without stripping the threads, and the surgeon to make the incision just deep and long enough (and on the correct patient). It requires us to interact with children in developmentally and chronologically appropriate ways. For healing our narratives, it requires us to care about and reflect on how we are, what and how we see, what we do, and how we do it.
Development, as used here, reminds us that how we view the world impacts what we see, how we see it, and what we can do next. Many research-based models of adult development exist. Here’s a four-level developmental shorthand that we’ll be using: 1) it’s all about me; 2) it’s all about my group(s); 3) it’s all about all of us (humans); 4) it’s all about all that it is (the planet and beyond). To make this even more fun, each of these four ways of seeing can manifest in healthy or unhealthy iterations.2 Each successive view interprets what it encounters from an increasingly inclusive, comprehensive, balanced, and complex perspective: an individual (me) is less inclusive, comprehensive, balanced, and complex than a group (us).
Intentional practice reminds us that habitual thoughts and behaviors impact who and how we are. It makes sense to intentionally practice who and how we want to be. One of my personal biases leads me to seek and take increasingly broader and deeper perspectives (see next bullet). And yes, practice works toward negative, harmful ends as well. Deny evidence-based truth every day and you become very good at it.
Seek the broadest, deepest view available in any given set of circumstances (or at least when it makes sense to do so). Why would you choose to be narrow and shallow in your perspective?3
Honor the power and paradox of silence. Silencing the voices of others is a time-tested tool of oppression; intentionally practicing silence for oneself is often at the heart of insight, growth, and transformation.
Truth, in a given moment, is fact- and evidence-based and different from opinion and interpretations of evidence. In the words of Parker J. Palmer, over time, “Truth is an eternal conversation about things that matter conducted with passion and discipline.”4 This newsletter embraces both of these “truths”.
Love is perhaps the most powerful energy we know. In this newsletter, “love” has at least the following traits: “the joyful acceptance of belonging”; “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth”; and the absence of fear.5
Historical and Current Evidence of Shadow
I’ll provide evidence of America’s Shadow elements through an exploration of a variety of historical and current events, issues, and people. Among them are what I believe are the nation’s three foundational subjugations:
Women
Indigenous Peoples of the Americas — now known as Native Americans
Kidnapped and Enslaved Africans — now known as African Americans
Beyond these foundational three, the Shadow traits of America — ignorance, arrogance, fear, bigotry, violence, greed, excess, bullying, and untrustworthiness — will also be explored through:
The Vietnam War
The post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
Ambivalence about the planet (climate change, species extinction, global warming, etc.)
Our culture of violence
Valuing money, things, and beliefs more than people and other living beings
A lack of health and caring within the insurance-pharmaceutical-medical-government-finance-lobbying complex — also known as for-profit health care
An ongoing othering of humans based on sexual orientation, sexual identity, skin pigmentation, ethnicity, race, religion, and anything else that can be wielded as a weapon
A short-term, oversimplified, narrow, and usually profit-based approach to solving long-term, complex problems — which tends to exacerbate other problems and create new ones, and which is in many ways at the core of where we are
Stuckness in an unhealthy us-centric worldview, which underlies many of the preceding bullets and contributes at scale — with the help of social media and artificial intelligence — to a corrupted information environment, and also prevents otherwise moderately intelligent people from seeing, understanding, and embracing multiple perspectives on complex issues
A gradual, ongoing deterioration of democracy amid the myth of America as a beacon for it (the U.S. House of Representatives in 2023 is one example of such deterioration; other examples include those entities and individuals that generally promote excluding certain Americans rather than including all Americans — in America)
The gift (it’s out in the open) and the threat (millions of Americans embrace it) of Donald Trump’s rise to power, his attempts at authoritarianism, and his embodiment of all nine Shadow elements — about which I’ve already written, in 2016 before he was elected, and in 2018 after he validated the 2016 piece. While my views on this have since expanded, my position has not changed. He is a symptom, a carrier, and not the disease itself.
Amid all of this, we’ll point toward and offer some good news as well and encourage the process of exploring ways out of our current mess. Again, it will be messy and complex, and it comes with neither a guarantee nor a warrantee.
Moving Forward
In summary, in the coming weeks and months, we will explore nine elements of America’s collective Shadow through historical and developmental perspectives on the nation’s 247 years of existence. It is not (obviously) an exhaustive history of the country or a final word on the discrete narratives it explores; it is an evidence-based exposition of America’s competing narratives and collective Shadow and a guidebook for those interested in healing the narratives, integrating Shadow, and, perhaps, moving toward a more perfect union — or extinction — whichever comes first.
It’s definitely not for the closedminded and probably not for the faint (or feint) of heart.
Most weeks I’ll make a Recommendation and offer Something to Consider.
Recommendation: Democracy Awakening (book) and “Letters from an American” by
— of whom many of you undoubtedly already know.Something to Consider: Choose one of the bulleted examples of Shadow above (from Women down to the gift and the threat) and spend some time exploring how it might be resolved, what issue(s) its resolution might exacerbate, and what new issues its resolution might create. Done in good faith, this should be challenging.
Thanks for reading this far.
Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, (Random House, 1988), 689-90.
The “developmental shorthand” (me; my group(s); all of us (humans); and all that it is (the planet and beyond) will be explored more deeply in subsequent posts. Regarding healthy or unhealthy manifestations, none of these views is right or wrong; rather, when healthy, they are increasingly inclusive, balanced, and complex. This four-stage shorthand is both a significant reduction and an accurate summary of what’s available to humans based on more than half a century of longitudinal developmental research.
Also to be further developed and applied in subsequent posts, this broadest, deepest view is based in Ken Wilber’s work (among others’), and includes considering individual values, beliefs, and behaviors; collective (relational/cultural) values and beliefs; and the natural and human-made environments, systems, and infrastructures within which we live and upon which we have impact. Said differently, we’re speaking about 1st, 2nd, and 3rd-person perspectives. Yes, that’s the quadrants, for all you integral geeks out there.
Parker J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life, (Jossey-Bass, 1998), 104.
“the joyful acceptance of belonging,” Br. David Steindl-Rast, Gratefulness: the Heart of Prayer, (Paulist, 1984), 167; “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth,” M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled, (Simon & Schuster, 1978), 81; and “the absence of fear,” paraphrasing Marianne Williamson’s reflections on A Course in Miracles, in her A Return to Love, (HarperPaperbacks, 1993).
Shadow Note: Some folks use the word “shadow” to refer to the negative, dark, or unwanted traits they see in themselves, and that’s fine. It is not how the word is used here. For clarity I use an uppercase “S” Shadow to refer to the word in the Jungian sense.