Episode 02: Staying Sane in an Insane World

adrienne marie brown

Illustration by Alexander Bustamante

In the second episode of the season, Maytal connects with adrienne maree brown, an activist, doula, and prolific author. In adrienne’s previous publications, like Pleasure Activism and Emergent Strategy, she has explored the healing powers of activism, both on the individual and collective levels. In today’s conversation, adrienne expands upon the powerful lessons embedded within these texts, among others. She also offers her perspective on what it looks like to maintain mental health in a world characterized by the toxicities of white supremacy and consumer capitalism.

TRANSCRIPT:

Maytal: Hi, I'm Maytal and welcome to Heal With It, a podcast about healing and its many, and sometimes unexpected forms. 

(Music Interlude]

Maytal: When I think of activists, I think of collective social healers. When the threads of society become tangled and frayed, activists shine a light on the disarray and fight to weave the strings harmoniously back together. 

Often healing is a really complex process. It can require a difficult uncovering of our negative patterns and habits and beliefs that have become so entrenched within us. Over time, healing often requires us to face head on the darkest parts of ourselves and recognize that we want to be better, that we need to be better. I think activists do this exactly, but on a collective level, they unearth the cracks in our society, in our systems, our collective negative patterns and habits and beliefs, and they motivate us to break past them, to be better than them.

I often wonder who would we be as a society today, if it were not for the activists that have helped us heal across history? 

There's one activist in particular that I've been following for years, her name is adrienne maree brown. Some of you may already know of her, and so it won't come as a surprise to hear me say that this human is absolutely brilliant, but for those who aren't familiar with adrienne, well, you are in for a serious treat today. Beyond her work as an activist, adrian is a doula and a writer. She's authored several books, including Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism. And today I get to ask her all the questions that have been swimming in my mind for years. We talk about learning from nature, the pros and cons of cancel culture, the power of transformative justice and somatic healing as a tool for compassion. Wherever you are out there, listening to this, I hope you enjoy. 

[Music Interlude]

Maytal: Thanks again for being here. I'm so excited to talk to you. I've read all your books. I think you're brilliant. I'm like freaking out that I get to talk about mental health stuff with you and healing stuff with you. I'm just super excited. Um, I'm thinking let's just get into it. My first question’s a big one, but it'll probably take us on a lot of different paths. Okay. So I think, uh, a theme I see throughout a lot of your work is how capitalism white supremacy are at the root of a lot of issues in our society. I think mental health is clearly no exception. So I want to start there. How do you think capitalism and white supremacy impede on our ability to collectively as a society be mentally healthy? 

adrienne maree brown: The main way is like capitalism is structured to function off of a constant sense of need, a constant sense of lack and need. We need to have more, we need to look better. We need to fit into the norm better. We need to be accumulating all the time and we need to constantly be growing something to a larger scale. The mind can only grow and change so fast. And we are constantly changing that the mind, I think, and the body are constantly seeking the opposite of what capitalism seeks. Like we're constantly seeking to just like, land, belong, arrive, have enough to feel satisfied. So I think if you're socialized in that system, and if you don't - especially if you don't have an analysis that helps you to understand like, “Oh, this is what capitalism is trying to do, and this is what I'm trying to do, that they're at odds with each other.”

I think you can really end up in some terrifying spaces inside and in relationship with others where you're constantly comparing yourself and finding yourself coming up short in some way and where you have no sense of what being satisfied is, is like. So you don't even know when it happens to you [laughter]. I feel this often with people where I'm like, “Well, you know, what is it you actually want and are the behaviors or the practices that you're engaging in now going to get you there?” And it blows my mind how often people are like, “Oh no, llike the things that I'm doing, the job that I have, the people that I'm spending my time with, like none of these things that I currently have going are getting the life that I want.” Getting joy, getting happiness, getting contentment. Um, and so then that becomes a starting point for some, some new realm of thought. 

It's just like, okay, then what would need to shift? What would need to change? And when I think of myself being an anticapitalist to me, it's not a commitment to poverty. It's a commitment to landing in myself, finding satisfaction, building relationships around power and resources that feel equitable and honest, transparent fair. And when I see in community, the ways that mental illness breaks us down and keeps us from each other, a huge amount of it is, is like, what I long to offer into most of them is like, oh, you need more space and time to get to be you. And because you're not getting that it's causing a crisis where you think you have to perform something, you have to demand something, you have to tear something down, uh, because you're not just getting that, that sacred space to just be you. And, you know, I think we all need that. We all deserve that. 

And I will also say that, you know, I dabble with this, but I don't really trust people who've never had like a good breakdown. You know, I don't really trust people who are like that have never had any kind of struggle with their mental health in this world. And I think it's been said in many times, in many ways that like, if you're not crazy in this world, then you might not be paying attention. If you're not angry and not paying attention. Like if you're not dysfunctional, you know, in some ways as sometimes you might not be paying attention. And the pandemic, I think really unveiled that to me, that I'm like, all right, are we, we're just going to act like we can go on and have regular schedules and lives and stuff while everyone is dying in our families. And while nobody has a clear sense of where their income or anything's going to come from, like, what is this [laughter], what are we talking about? And it just shows us like, if the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, capitalism is peak and sanity. 

Maytal: So perfectly said, it's interesting because as a psychologist, part of my job is giving someone a diagnosis. But when I think of diagnoses like depression or anxiety or trauma, I actually think of them as manifestations of us coping with a broken sick world. Like it's not the people who are broken, it's the world around them. And it's just like you said, how can you live in this world and not feel crazy or not struggle? It actually makes me think about the concept of interdependence, which you discuss in your book, Emergent Strategy. So maybe let's go there. What is interdependence? 

amb: Emergent Strategy is all based on learning from the natural world. And one of the things that the natural world shows us very clearly is that nothing exists in a vacuum that everything exists in these relationships of care and exchange and resource, and sometimes symbiosis, but needing things from each other, providing things from each other and even predator, prey relationships, right? Everything is in a relationship. One of the ways that humans try to function is pretending we're not in those relationships, but that we can somehow survive independently. So one of the practices of emergent strategy is first to acknowledge that none of us are alone. None of us are actually truly individuals who can live in a vacuum without others, even if the others are natural, right? Even if it's like, I live at a cabin in the woods and I hunt everything and I cut cheese for fire, and I go to the river. You know, in an indigenous worldview, those are also relationships where you're going, and you are in relationship with the water in relationship with the trees and relationship with the creatures who sacrificed their lives for your own. So you're never actually alone. And if, once you recognize that, then you can turn and be like, “Well, what are the right relationships? Like how, how can I be in right relationship with all that is around me that I depend on?” So interdependence is one model where it's like, you don't want to be dependent where you cannot function without, and you don't have your own body and your own skin with your own mind and your own responsibilities. Right? So if you're dependent, right, you can't actually move with what is yours to hold. Try to either hold someone else's or make them hold yours. If you're interdependent, everyone is holding theirs and able to hold some of each other's. And that, that changes. 

It's a very dynamic relationship. And again, the pandemic has been an incredible case study of this, of seeing how some people had more resources. Some had less. I keep pitching this book by Dean Spade called Mutual Aid, which I think is a really important text that came out of this time. Cecause so many people are going like, “Oh, I have abundance. I can share, I have a skill I can offer from making masks.” Right? People made each other masks when we were like, we can't, there's not a mask. You know? Well, here's how you make hand sanitizer and here. And just like, watch - those are all acts of interdependence. We all need to be in this practice together, “Here's what I can offer to that.” And de-centralization feels tied to it because it's another way of talking about right. Relationship at scale. So decentralization is this idea that no single person has the vision for everything and no single person can do all the work or hold all the work. And when I look at this, historically, I point to the civil rights movement is where I feel like I learned this from, uh, looking at how individual leaders were uplifted above the mass and that those individual leaders were assassinated and the impact that that had on the movement moment and on the larger population who was turning to that movement for leadership. So one of the things I'm always pushing for is leaderful movements and the idea of decentralizing vision to me, a vision becomes palpable and attainable when it’s held by so many people that you couldn't possibly take it out by killing one or five or twenty. I think of the Palestinian vision of right to return. And I'm like, it's shared by so many people, right. But so many people hold that, that it, that it's like, oh, you can take out this person to that person, but there's no single person that you could take out that would take away that vision. I think of the Zapatista vision of a world where many worlds fit and how they went door to door over the course of 10 years, having small conversations to grow and nourish that vision. And those are the models. Those are the kinds of things I point to, and I think about the kind of movement building we're doing right now, right now we're spreading a vision that black lives matter. We're spreading a vision of defunding the police. We're spreading a vision of black and Asian solidarity. We're spreading these visions that help us to both center ourselves and where it is we're trying to get to and understand what we have to practice now to get there. 

Maytal: So beautifully said. We are all interconnected, and when we acknowledge this, when it becomes less about one person or one leader, we grow more powerful. It kind of makes me sad though, because that notion, that truth you're talking about can feel so far away in the system of capitalism. And instead of celebrating interdependence, I feel like what tends to be celebrated instead is independence, competition, or, you know, winning out on this illusion of scarcity. And it just kind of drives me crazy. Like how did we get here? 

amb: Octavia Butler talks about this in Lilith’s Brood, that the fundamental flaw that humans have is that we have a combination of hierarchy and intelligence. And basically we are always using our intelligence to enact hierarchy over each other, power over each other, supremacy over each other. And so I think if you look back throughout our history, you have a worldview that was not like that, that many indigenous cultures around the world, of practicing of being with each other and with the land. And then you have the emergence of this other worldview that is all about dominance, a singular God who is dominant and punitive, and that that singular dominant punitive God is then giving the people who believe in him - always a him -permission to dominate others. And I think there's some trauma at the root of that, right? Like I of course don't know what it is. I think it's buried in the folds of history because history is written by those who are in it thinking they're victorious. But I think there's trauma in the root system of that, that led to that emergent belief system. People feeling like I have to create something that, that no one can challenge, that no one can come against and that I can relinquish some responsibility too. So I'm like, that's a lot of trauma to want to relinquish. 

Like, you know, I know in the moments in my life where I'm like, “oh, I can't handle this - I got to give it over to something other than myself,” it's usually in the moments of the greatest trauma. And then it's like, well, let me create a God to turn to [laughter], to put this on. 

And I think that there's also something about God, about those forces of the world that are divine, that can overwhelm our human systems, and so then we try to make them fit into what we understand. And I think then we end up with these power dynamics that are like, oh, this massive all-seeing omnipotent force. And then we try to recreate those as humans. So we end up with one president, one pope, one person who is responsible for the lives of more people than they can ever know or ever truly take responsibility for. And so I think those systems, like watching that develop throughout history, is how we got here and it's one of the main reasons why in my work of how do we change, how do we develop a new vision, I'm like, I think the domino that we need to address is supremacy. Where in ourselves do we think we are superior to anyone else because of where we were born, because it's nation because of religion, because of race, because of gender, because of sexuality, because of ability? Where do we find ourselves in, in the false mythological belief that we are superior and how do we heal from that belief and the harm that we've caused based on that belief? Conversely, where do we feel like we are inferior? Where have we bought in to the idea that the only power we can have as a power under, a power of making demands from those who have, rather than sharing power and co-creating what we want. So it's a lot of healing that has to happen at the, at the level of like how we see the world. 

Maytal: Absolutely. What you're saying is reminding me a lot of your recent publication, We Will Not Cancel Us. It was so powerful when you were speaking your thoughts on cancel culture and when you specifically said, “These are my unthinkable thoughts.” I'm wondering if you could take us through the journey of what led you to write that publication and what some of its main messaging was for those listening, who haven't had a chance yet to read it? 

amb: You know, I had stepped away. I was on sabbatical, which, you know, I had stepped away, I was like, I've done a ton of work. Pleasure Activism had come out the year before and then I had been getting the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute off the ground. So I'd been traveling and with others in go, go, go mode. And then I stepped away. I was on sabbatical and I was really reflecting a lot on movement and reflecting on, on what I've been a part of building. And then I came back and it was like call outs central, cancel central. Like every message I felt like I was getting was, was telling me how someone else was so bad. What they had done was so bad that they deserved to be publicly shamed, humiliated, and cut off. And, you know, it guided me into this idea of when I feel that in myself, as an individual, and I'm like, “adrienne, you're so bad. You deserve to be punished. There's something so wrong with you that you don't deserve to belong.” When I feel that in myself, I know that it's a depression. I know that I am out of alignment with my destiny, out of alignment with like myself, my purpose. And so, I was like, I think maybe that's what's happening on a large scale. And, you know, I have a history of, you know, at periods of my life not wanting to be alive. And I know what it feels like to be pushed into that place by oppression. And so my first question, my first unthinkable at was like, is that what's happening to us? Are we losing hope in some way? And so, even as we're fighting, we're also attacking the self, of movement - like attacking our home - because it's like, we don't even believe we can take down these huge systems that have us turning against each other. 

And then there was just a lot of questions around why it feels the way it does inside of movement. Why it feels violent, why it feels like people can't speak up, why it feels like you can't make a mistake in public. You know, I wrote the initial essay, not expecting it to blow up the way that it did, for sure. It was long. You know, I was just like, this is the kind of thing that a lot of people are gonna read. But I think that if people in movement, you know, who I respect can read it. I want us to be in this conversation together. And what I learned in the responses to it was like, I need to be very clear about my stance on survivors, which is, I don't believe that survivors are the ones who need to be responsible for the healing journeys of those who caused them harm or those who have abused them. And so, I was able to get clear about that. I was able to get clear about the language, the precision of the language that I wanted to use and, you know, but I still really wanted to hold a stance that was like, I don't think that this method, which is mostly being done in a really - it's really, it feels like public public punishment, you know? And it feels like gleeful, public punishment. Like people are really getting a joy out of being like, “look how bad this person is,” and spreading the word about that. 

And, you know, I, one of the things I talk about in the book - and I deeply believe - is that there are power dynamics in which that is the only move. There are times when that is the only move. Black and Brown people created the strategy because we needed a way to speak across the huge chasms of power that exists. And so I'm not, it's not a thing to be like, we shouldn't do that. We shouldn't call out R Kelly. We shouldn't call out Harvey Weinstein. I'm like, no, no, no - there are times when that is the move. That is the only way to create the intervention we need to create. My interrogation is why are we using that strategy on people who we could reach in a phone call or who we could do a mediation with or who we could be in a community accountability process with? And I think it's because we're really scared of that direct conflict. And I think it's because we're at the edge of our learning with transformative justice that we need to actually have a lot more people skill up in how we hold transfer to justice in our communities. And because we don't have that, we end up saying, well, we'll at least do this public campaign because for right now we, we have to do something. 

So the book is a call for a new practice. It's a call for new conversations. And there's a resource section in the book. The thing that excites me right now is that we have more resources than we have ever had in my lifetime around abolition, transforming justice to help us ground ourselves in this ideology, because I'm like, I can't speak to the general population, but I can speak to those of us who are calling ourselves abolitionists. You know, I'm like we say, we want to end the prison, industrial complex and policing. So we have to practice doing them with ourselves and each other. And we have resources we have Beyond Survival, which came out from Ejeris and Leah, we have, Will We Do this Till We Free Us, now, which just came out from Mariame Kaba, which is already on the New York Times Bestseller List. 

Mariame and Shira put out a workbook, Fumbling Towards Repair. We have Ruthie Wilson Gilmore. There's a new book coming out from Patrisse Cullors, An Abolitionists Handbook. Andrea Ritchie is putting out a book on emergent strategy and abolition. Like this is a really rich time and abundant time for this conversation. And I think the reason so many people - in particular so many Black women and women of color - are looking at this, is we all see, like there's something in this that is again, like a domino. Like if we could figure this out, if we can let go of this addiction we have to punishing each other we can start to understand that we all experience harm and we all cause harm and we need to create justice structures that account for us returning to our humanity. 

Maytal: Thanks so much for sharing all those resources, which I imagine people are going to be looking into,

amb: I hope so! Buy all those books!

Maytal: Um, something else I actually wanted to ask you about today also is about Generative Somatics. So I see that it's something you talk a lot about in your books and it's this thing you kind of repeatedly point to as a key to unlocking healing. So I was wondering if you could just share with us how you conceptualize Generative Somatics and why you think it's such a transformational practice. 

amb: Yeah. So, you know, somatics is the study of the body in its wholeness. So thinking about the body, the body is where the mind is. The body is where the heart is. The body is where the gut is. You know, whatever experience we have of ourselves as spirit or energy or whatever it is, it's all in and through the body that we feel our lives and trauma gets held in the body. So when we are trying to be with each other as human bodies, we are these super complex beings that are holding our trauma, moving through the world. And in Generative Somatics, there was this real connection that social justice movements are made up of people who are really trying to stop patterns of trauma in the world, and yet holding those patterns of trauma within ourselves. And so that community comes together from a place of how do we actually engage our healing modalities with each other collectively? And how do we start to take responsibility for the idea of building a collective center, a place that is “in violet,” as Maya Angelou said, a place that we can return to when harm happens or under pressure?  And, you know, Generative Somatics has been a growing experiment in how do we build the bridge between the worlds of sort of somatics and healing and the practitioning of healing. And those of us who are doing social justice, social justice, movement work. There's been great lessons from it, there's been great challenges in it, but I'm really proud that, that I was a student there and really got to learn a lot there. And right now I think there's this kind of unfolding happening, where a lot of people are, a lot of people aren't bringing the work into the world, like figuring out like, okay, what does it look like to bring what we've learned into the world in different ways?

And I want to point right now to Prentis Hemphill, who is a beloved friend of mine who has just started something called the Embodiment Institute. And they just did their first Black embodiment of course. And you know, Prentis, I think is one of our great teachers for this time. And I think we'll be taking this very far, that that's a little bit about what it is. And you know, one of the other ways that people can access somatic healing, which I highly recommend is finding somatic practitioners or therapists who have a somatic lens to their work. Because like in session, what it can look like is that you say something and your emotion shows, and then you have someone who's like, where do you feel that in the body? And can actually be like, “Oh, that happened when I was three and it was never completed. It was never healed. And it continues to shape my life every day and I'm 42.” And then you get to sit and be like, how do we unwind that trauma? How do we complete that trauma? How do we honor the actual emotion in there, so that you don't have to keep reliving those patterns because there's new patterns, you know, there's new shapes. Yeah.

Maytal: Yeah. That stuff is super powerful. It's the work I do as a therapist with my clients and the work I do as a client with my therapist. It's just incredible. It's so powerful.

amb: It’s so powerful. It's so powerful. And I love it both individually. And I've also been in rooms where 40, 50 people are all healing at the same time. And yeah, there's just, there's nothing like it. Like, I really, it's something I'm really thinking about. Like how do we make that kind of healing more accessible to more people? 

Maytal: Totally. I also think what can be so powerful about somatic practices, especially in the context of groups of people or within relationships is that I feel like it allows for conflict to be worked out in a way that for me, allows so much more safety and self awareness. Like if I'm in touch with what's going on in my body, when I feel triggered, for example, I can then communicate, “Hey, when you do this, this is what my body feels. My chest tightens. My palms are sweating. My throat feels constricted.” And to me that just feels so much more inviting and fostering of safety than just saying, “Hey, I think you're wrong.”

amb: Yeah. You can be self responsive. And again, this always ties back to Octavia Butler for me, that her belief was God is change. And once you understand that, you don't have to be a victim of God. You don't have to be a victim of change. You don't have to be a victim of your life. You can shape it. You can start to take responsibility for it. And I will say it takes a long time, you know, like a lot of practice, many, many reps, like I've started to feel now, you know, when I have a feeling that feels out of control, I now have the capacity to pause and to look at it and be like, what is that feeling? What is it rooted in? Like, even as I'm feeling it, I can be like, that person wants me to feel like I'm not a good person. Do I believe that? Why do I believe that? What is that rooted in? And you just can recenter. What do I believe about myself? What do I know to be true in my life? Even if I'm a horrible person - I'm not dead yet. What do I need to learn from this? How can I grow? There's just so much more compassion and spaciousness and wisdom in the body and then in our minds really [laughter]. So, yeah, absolutely. 

Maytal: So one of my last questions for you is what do you do to heal yourself on your hardest days and the most difficult moments hours? What do you do to heal? 

amb: Right now I have two practices that are really helpful for me outside of just writing, which is like my practice and my calling and my destiny and everything else. So if I'm really in it, writing will get me out. But the other things that go in tandem with that are working with water. So if I'm in a place where I can fully immerse myself in water, I do that, but a bath or a shower, like when I've got an overwhelming emotion, just getting myself into the water, letting the water run through, remembering that I am made of water. And that this is an element of this earth that I am, and that I can partner with right now to help me carry this back out of myself, take it back to the ocean, which is big enough to hold all of the things. 

And that practice has been really, really useful during this pandemic where I'm like, okay, I can't go on a journey. I can't get away, but I can go get in the bath. And by the end of the bath, I will feel different. I will have shifted my state. And then I'm doing a ton of ancestor work right now. So I have a very active poppin’ ancestor altar. I visit with my ancestors every day, multiple times a day. I bring them water. I bring them food. And I have a tarot deck that sits on my ancestor altar, and I talked to it and I asked them for guidance. And I asked them to help me see what I can't see. I asked them for protection. You know, like when I feel energy coming at me, then I'm like, you know, I'm learning what I can learn here, but, but a lot of this isn't about me. I will go and just ask those ancestors, like in circle may help you learn what I need to learn and help me hold a boundary so that I can keep doing what I'm here to do. And they got me. 

Maytal: Thank you so much for being here today. It was a dream come true  to talk to you for real. 

amb: Thanks you so much for having me. 

Maytal: I appreciate your time so much.

adrienne: You too, love.