Latest / Thinking Out Loud | Kimberly / Are We Afraid of People or Are We Afraid of What We've Been Taught to Fear? | Thinking Out Loud
Transcript
- Kimberly: Are we afraid of people or are we afraid of what we've been taught to fear? I've been thinking about the Cold War lately. I don't think the Cold War ended as neatly as we like to imagine it did. the political conflict ended, the Soviet Union dissolved, the narratives we inherited from the era didn't disappear with it, though. Generations were raised with this idea about Who the enemy was, what they represented, what made them dangerous, and perhaps most importantly, how to recognize the enemy before the enemy could recognize you. I think we underestimate what happens when those narratives become part of culture's DNA. I don't necessarily have to remember where a fear came from to inherit it. You simply have to inherit the story, the belief. Once you've inherited a story, Indoctrinating a new threat can surprisingly become easy. You recognize the villain before you investigate the person. You recognize the pattern before you establish the evidence for the pattern is even there. Suddenly, we're not responding to what someone did. We're responding to what we believe people like them are capable of doing. I see versions of this in the way parents talk about estranged adult children. I don't know who've they become. They've been brainwashed, manipulated. People who abandon their family are dangerous. I see it in the ways teachers can talk about difficult parents and difficult children. I see it in the way parents talk about teachers in schools. I see it in the medicine and therapy where words like manipulation, noncompliance, attention seeking, or even unreliable can sometimes become explanations before they become conclusions. I think television has even helped normalize some of these ideas. Take "HOUSE" for example. Everyone lies is a fantastic premise for a television show. It's entertaining. The drama. Imagine what happens when you take that premise out of a mystery show. And you start applying it to real life, real human beings. If we begin with the assumption that people are lying, exaggerating, manipulating, or hiding something, we stop investigating whether or not they're telling the truth, or even why they're lying, if they are. We have decided what they are. I've noticed something similar With the word extremist, sometimes it's used to describe genuinely dangerous ideas or behaviors, however, sometimes it becomes a way of turning an entire group of people into an enemy without having to explain exactly what they did. That's the question I want to explore today. How do we recognize when legitimate concerns about dangerous behavior has turned into fear of an entire category of people. How do you know when we're responding to what someone did versus what we've been taught people like them are capable of? Perhaps most uncomfortably, how much of our fear have we examined and how much of it did we simply inherit? Welcome back to Thinking Out Loud. Hi, it's me Kimberly. Before we go any further, a quick note this podcast is for reflection and conversation. Not professional advice. Take what resonates and leave the rest. Here we slow down and we explore life's gray areas, especially in relationships and behavior patterns we can observe and reflect on. I am not here to tell you what to think. I am here to offer framework to help you understand your relationships, strengthen your thinking, and hold space for complexity. Let's get to thinking out loud. Reflecting on the Cold War, I've realized when you're trained to find the enemy. That training doesn't necessarily stop once you win. What happens when a culture spends decades being taught that danger might be hiding among us? You start learning to look for signs. Who is loyal? Who isn't? Who can be trusted? Who might be working against us? What happens if we miss them? The last question matters. The Cold War wasn't a geopolitical conflict happening somewhere far away. For Americans, the fear could become deeply personal. There was a very real possibility of nuclear war. Families built or discussed bomb shelters. children practice civil defense drills. People lived with the knowledge that the internal conflict could potentially become an extinctual catastrophe. Then there was another kind of fear. What if the enemy isn't outside of the country? What if they're already here? What if they're your neighbors, your co-worker, your teacher, your friend, your community? During the Red Scare and the McCarthy era, fear of communist infliction became powerful enough that accusations and suspicion could have devastating consequences for people's careers. reputations and lives. I wanna be careful here. the Soviet Union did engage in espionage. The United States did have spies. there were genuine national security concerns. This isn't a story about America inventing a completely imaginary threat. It's about what can happen when a legitimate threat creates a culture that becomes increasingly afraid of missing one. Eventually the question stops being, what did this person do? And it becomes, what if they're the enemy? Once that question becomes frightening enough, suspicion can start to feel like responsibility. You don't have to prove someone is dangerous. You only have to convince yourself that the possibility of danger is enough to justify your actions. this is where I've started noticing something interesting happening psychologically. If I falsely accuse you, I might have hurt you. if I don't accuse you and you were really dangerous, then I might have failed to protect everyone else. The consequences don't feel equal. Being wrong about you feels uncomfortable. Being wrong about you and discovering later that you were dangerous, whew, that can feel catastrophic. Even when the imagined consequences is catastrophic enough, people can begin to believe it's better to be wrong about people than risk being wrong about the threat. That mentality has consequences. Now an apology can become complicated. If I hurt you Because I suspected you were dangerous, admitting that I was wrong can feel like I'm admitting that I failed to protect a community. Instead of I was wrong, I'm sorry, we start hearing I was only trying to keep people safe. I tried my best. Sometimes that is true. Sometimes people Genuinely are trying to keep people safe. Good intentions don't erase harm. It doesn't erase the impact that person was put through from that suspicion. Protecting a community cannot become a moral blank check that allows us to destroy someone's reputation, dignity, or relationship without evidence, let alone repairing when we did do wrong and what we could do next time. That's the part I think we often miss. Like, oops, my mistake, not how can we not accuse innocent people? How could we have handled this differently? Nope, we're not self-reflecting like that. At least not as fast as I think we should. I think this is part of what I mean when I say the enemy within can become a culture reflex. if someone isn't obviously with us, we start wondering whether they're against us. This is where I want to separate something that I think we often collapse. Being cautious is not the same thing as being suspicious of everyone. Recognizing danger is not the same thing as categorizing people as dangerous. Being imperfect at detecting threats does not mean we have to become perfect at detecting them. There's a contradiction I've noticed. We say I'm only human, I am not perfect. I agree. We don't have to be perfect. When fear gets involved, suddenly we behave as though we cannot afford to make a mistake. We become desperate not to be fooled, not to be manipulated, not to be scammed, not to miss the narcissist, the abuser, the predator, the extremist, not to trust the wrong person. Somewhere underneath all of that, I think is much bigger fear. What if I don't recognize a danger until it's too late? If we aren't careful, that fear can change that question we're asking. Instead of what is this person doing? We start asking, what does this person believe? What group are they a part of? What kind of person are they? Are they one of us? Are they one of them? Now we're no longer investigating behavior. We're trying to identify the enemy. That distinction matters. the moment someone's category becomes more important than their behavior, we are capable of treating them as dangerous before they've done anything dangerous. I think that's one of the most complicated legacies of an air defined By existential fear. The Soviet government also used surveillance, suspicion, repression and accusations internal enemies against its own population. I'm focusing on the American experience because that's a culture I grew up inside of, and that's the culture I can speak about most honestly. What's interesting to me isn't simply what happened during the Cold War, it's what happened when the emotional logic of the Cold War survives the Cold War itself. When you're raised to believe that danger can be hidden, that the enemy might be inside, that failing to identify them could put everyone at risk. You may eventually learn a very strange lesson. You don't have to be right. You simply can't be wrong. When the cost of being wrong is imagined as catastrophic, almost any accusation can start to feel like self-defense. That is where I think we need to slow down. There is a difference between I don't know whether this person is safe and I need to treat this person as dangerous until they're proven otherwise. Those are not the same things. One leaves room for uncertainty. The other can turn uncertainty itself into evidence. Children should be taught that some behaviors are dangerous. The problem isn't learning discernment. The problem is when discernment becomes categorization. Being naive isn't helpful either. Guilty as charged, I was taught to be naive or they're my enemy. I don't want children walking through the world believing everyone is their friend and no one would ever hurt them. that's not reality. People can hurt you. Adults can hurt children, children can hurt other children, people can manipulate you, people can lie to you. Children need the language and skills to recognize those things. I also don't want to teach a child everyone is dangerous, that you can't trust anyone. People are always trying to take advantage of you. That's not discernment either. That's fear. Somewhere between everyone is your friend and no one can be trusted is where I think the healthy education lives. That education has To account for development. Children aren't miniature adults. They don't have the same ability to understand manipulation, long-term consequences, political dynamics, or competing motivations that adults do. Some children will naturally be more cautious around people. Some will run up to strangers and tell their entire life story. Some will assume everyone is safe. Some will assume everyone is dangerous. Some children will need much more explicit teaching and support around recognizing boundaries and unsafe behavior. The goal must become learn how to recognize what safe and unsafe behavior looks like. That requires something we don't always give children time. You cannot rush depth. You cannot rush trust. You cannot manufacture genuine loyalty through repeated chaos and then mistake that intensity of that experience for connection. Damn, Kimberly, that's some advice I wish I knew in my twenties. We know now. A person being there for you during a crisis doesn't automatically mean they are safe. Being afraid together doesn't automatically make people trustworthy. Surviving something together can create an incredible powerful bond. Intensity is not the same thing as intimacy. That's something I think we need to teach children, and honestly, a lot of adults too. Healthy connection does not require us to constantly be in survival mode. Healthy connection can be boring. It can be predictable, it can be ordinary, it can be someone respecting your no. It can be someone disagreeing without threatening to abandon you. It can be someone letting you change your mind. It can be someone apologizing when they hurt you. It can be someone allowing you to have a relationship they don't control. It can be someone who doesn't need you to prove your loyalty every five minutes. That brings all of this back to autonomy. I think healthy education isn't simply teaching children who to trust. It's teaching them what autonomy looks like. the freedom to make choices that are appropriate for their age, the freedom to ask questions, the freedom to say no. The freedom to have privacy as developmentally appropriate. The freedom to have their own thoughts and opinions. Freedom to disagree. Freedom to have friendships that aren't controlled by someone else. Freedom to explore interests. Freedom to develop their own identity. Freedom of consensus. Freedom of religion or freedom not to practice a religion. The freedom to learn, the freedom to make mistakes and repair them. the freedom to change their mind. Eventually the freedom to decide what kind of adult they want to become. Autonomy teaches something incredibly important. Other people are allowed to be people too. They're not extensions of us. They aren't loyalty tests. There aren't characters in our personal stories. They have their own minds, their own boundaries, beliefs, and choices. And I think that connection is important when we talk about fear. I keep coming back to this question, why do we need chaos to create connection? Why does someone have to be in a crisis before we feel close to them? Why does someone have to need us before we feel needed? Why does disagreements have to become betrayal? Why does uncertainty have to become dangerous? Why does someone have to prove their loyalty ambiguously before we allow ourselves To trust them. I think one of the answers is that we inherit these patterns from our parents, religion, politics, schools, media. Television are communities, personal experiences, historical traumas, culture narratives and we don't only inherit beliefs. Sometimes we inherit threat maps. we inherit ideas about who is safe, who is suspicious. What ideas are dangerous before we even understand a concept? You just need the word. Like who deserves loyalty? Who deserves protection? And who deserves punishment? Those maps are incredibly difficult to question because they were often created for a reason. maybe your grandparents survived something. Maybe our parents were betrayed. Maybe communities experienced genuine persecution. maybe someone we loved was harmed by a particular person or institution. The warnings get passed down. somewhere along the way, the warnings can lose its specificity. Sometimes the warning can lose its message behind the behavior. Instead of this person hurt us, it becomes people like this hurt people. this institution harmed my family becomes this institution cannot be trusted. This belief was used to hurt me becomes anyone who believes this is dangerous. My parent was abusive becomes parents are narcissists. Suddenly the things we inherit isn't simply a lesson about behavior. It's a category. A category we are taught to recognize, a category we are taught to fear, a category we're taught to protect ourselves from. in religion. A child might learn people outside of our faith are dangerous, or people who leave our faith have become deceived. Questioning the community means you're questioning God. It can happen in the opposite direction too. Someone who is harmed by religious communities might even learn religious people cannot be trusted. The specific experience becomes a category. Politics do this too. Instead of I disagree with this policy, we get people who believe this are evil. Jeez Louise. Instead of examining someone's argument, we're trying to determine which team we belong to. Teen Jacob or Team Edward. Neither. are they one of us or are they one of them? once we've decided they're one of them, everything they do can be interpreted through that identity. Schools do this too. A child becomes a difficult child, a parent becomes a difficult parent. A teacher becomes unreasonable Once the label sticks, behaviors start being interpreted as evidence of the label. Media does it, television does it. Television might actually be one of the most interesting places to examine this because television teaches us narrative shortcuts. We know who the villain is, We know who the good guy is. We know the suspicious character is going to turn out to be hiding something. We know the person. Who doesn't fit in is probably important, and we know the person who seems too nice probably has secrets. Those are fantastic storytelling devices. Real life, though, isn't in television. Real people don't come with foreshadowing. Our communities can do the same things. Someone has a reputation, someone's family has a reputation. Someone's child has a reputation, someone's political affiliation becomes known, someone's religion becomes known, someone has history, and suddenly people have to interact with people more. They can interact with a story about the person. Personal experiences make this even harder. If you have personally been harmed by someone, your nervous system has learned something real. This can happen. That acknowledgement can be protective. There is a difference between I know this can happen and I know this will happen again. Historical trauma complicates this even further. communities that have genuinely experienced persecutions may develop strong protection instincts for very understandable reasons. Even protective instincts can eventually become rigid. A warning designed to keep future generations safe can become A worldview that teaches them everyone outside of the group is potentially a threat. culture narratives can preserve those ideas long after the original circumstances have changed. This is why I don't think the answer is to tell people stop being afraid. Fear has a purpose. The question is, what is your fear asking you to do? Is it asking you to slow down, gather information, create boundaries, leave a dangerous situation, ask for help, or is it asking you to identify an enemy? And those are very different responses. This is where I think you're either with us or against us, becomes dangerous. Once loyalty becomes the primary measure of safety, disagreements look like betrayal. Betrayal starts looking like danger. Danger can start feeling like justification. They're my enemy. I need to be wary of them. Then somehow, without us noticing the exact moment it happened, I'm justified in harming them. That's the line I want us to pay attention to. When you're constantly trained to be a warrior, eventually you forget what you're fighting for. You become so committed. Protecting the garden that you destroy the very garden you hope to have for yourself. You wanted safety, you wanted connection, you wanted community, you wanted loyalty, you wanted a place where your children could thrive. if every disagreement is betrayal, if every mistake is evidence of danger, and if every relationship has to be forged through crisis, then eventually there may not be a garden left. Only the battlefield. And I don't think children need to be raised believing the world is a battlefield. I think they need to be raised with something much harder. The ability to recognize danger without turning everyone into a threat. This is where my connection with estrangement comes in. Because sometimes estranged children are being manipulated. Sometimes parents are being abusive. Sometimes people genuinely are dangerous. Maybe together, maybe one sided. I don't want to erase any of that. I wonder if the need to have a villain doesn't simply follow us out of childhood. Sometimes it gets carried into a way we parent our own children. What happens when we grow up learning how to survive an enemy? Yet no one taught you how to recognize when the enemy is no longer there. what happens when you're raised in a home where certain behaviors were taught to be dangerous. Yelling meant danger, crying meant danger, disobedience was dangerous. Questioning an adult was dangerous. Being abandoned was dangerous. Then you become a parent and suddenly you have a tiny person who cries, who screams, who tells you I hate you, who calls you mean, who refuses to listen, who hits you, who tells you. They don't want to go to church, who question something you taught them, who grows up and develops political beliefs you don't understand, who chooses a partner you don't like, who decides they don't want the life you imagined for them, who eventually says, I don't want a relationship with you right now. If nobody taught you how to separate the present conflict from past danger, your nervous system may not experience those moments as ordinary parts of having children. It may experience them as an attack. Your child cries and suddenly you're back in the room where crying got you yelled at. Your child hits you and suddenly your body remembers what it felt like to be hit. Your child calls you a name and suddenly you're eight years old again, standing in front of an adult who used words to make you feel powerless. Your child refuses to listen. Instead of hearing my child is having a difficult moment, my brain hears I'm losing control. Your child disagrees with you, and instead of experiencing disagreement as a normal part of another person's autonomy, You experience as rejection, betrayal, disrespect, Or danger. This is where I think adulthood powerlessness can become incredible. Complicated in adulthood. Sometimes a child who grew up powerless becomes the adult who is terrified of ever feeling powerless again. Fear can show up in parenting. You may have spent your childhood being controlled. Now you might become extremely controlling because you never want to feel that helpless again. You might have been ignored growing up, and now when your child builds independence, it feels like abandonment. You may have been abandoned, so when your child creates distance, you experience my child is abandoning me. And I'm not saying these feelings aren't real. Pain is real, grief is real, rejection can feel real. a feeling can be real without a story we attach to that feeling being completely accurate. Your child growing up is not necessarily your child abandoning you. Your child becoming independent is not necessarily your child rejecting you. Your child setting a boundary is not necessarily your child attacking you. Your child disagreeing with you is not necessarily your child being disrespectful. Your child needing DISTANCE is not necessarily your child declaring you their enemy. Sometimes it is. Sometimes there is genuine abuse. Sometimes someone is being manipulated, and Sometimes there is an unsafe parent who needs to take responsibility. Sometimes what we're looking at is something much more ordinary and much more painful. A person who never learn that someone can love them and still have autonomy to separate from them I think this is part of why I struggle so much with categorizing good and evil. I rarely use them when I'm talking about individual people. Not because I don't believe evil exists. there are things human beings have done to one another that I consider genuinely evil. The atrocities committed during World War Two are an example. There were acts of cruelty, experimentation, torture, dehumanization where humans were treated as objects rather than people. Some of that wasn't a simple fear response. Some people were harmed because someone believed they had the right to do whatever they wanted to them because they could, because they had power, because other people's humanity no longer mattered. That matters to me because I don't want nuance to become a moral relativism. I don't want understanding why someone behaved this way to become therefore what they did doesn't matter. those are not the same thing I can understand you and still say you hurt someone, the behavior was unacceptable. You are responsible for what you did. I don't have to give you access to me. I don't need to decide whether you are fundamentally a good or evil person to establish a boundary. That's where my understanding of good starts to become simpler. For me, good is not perfection. It's not about agreeing with me. it's not about following my religion. It's not about dressing the way I think you should dress. Honestly, I find it more interesting when people address the way they want. It's not about choices that make me comfortable. I think a large part of goodness is respecting another person's personhood and autonomy when exercising that autonomy doesn't require violating someone else's personhood. you can wear a top that makes you feel beautiful. Someone can think it's inappropriate. your confidence isn't an attack on them. You can practice your religion. Someone else can choose not to. Their belief isn't automatically an attack on your faith. You can love someone. They can decide they don't want a relationship with you. That does hurt. Their boundary isn't automatically an act of violence against you. You can raise your children with certain values. Eventually that child grow up. And decide which of those values they want to keep. that isn't necessarily betrayal. Sometimes it's development. This is where I think autonomy becomes important. If I believe your autonomy is only valid when your choices agree with me, then I don't actually believe in autonomy. I believe in obedience. Those are very different things. Children don't exist to prove that their parents were right. An adult doesn't exist to validate the life their parent lived. A parent doesn't exist to endlessly be available to their child either. We're all people, we have boundaries, people change, make mistakes, hurt each other, repair. People sometimes decide they cannot continue a relationship. None of that immediately requires us to decide who is the good guy. Who is the bad guy? Who is the victim? Who is the villain? Sometimes the more useful question is what actually happened? What did they do? What did I do? What did they assume? What was the impact? What can be repaired? What cannot be repaired? What boundary is necessary now? If all I've ever been taught is how to identify the enemy, then every conflict starts presenting me with the same question. Which one of us is the enemy? That question can destroy relationships. a child can become the enemy because they cry. A teenager becomes the enemy because they challenged you. An adult child can become the enemy because they set a boundary. A parent can become the enemy because they made a mistake. A sibling can become an enemy because they disagreed. A therapist can become the enemy because they said something they didn't want to hear. a school can become the enemy because they handled something differently than you would have. Once someone becomes the enemy, their behavior gets interpreted completely different. Their tears become manipulative, their boundaries become punishment, their disagreement becomes disrespect, their independence become abandonment, their fear becomes weakness, their anger becomes proof that they're dangerous. Now, we've come full circle. We were taught to find the enemy. Nobody taught us what to Do when the person standing in front of us isn't actually our enemy. Maybe they're a flawed person, a person who is hurting, a person who was wronged, a person who is wrong, a person who is scared, a person who has harmed someone, a person who needs a boundary, a person who needs accountability, a person who needs to change, a person who needs to leave, and a Person who needs to be left alone, a person who needs help, and sometimes, yes, a person who is genuinely dangerous. we cannot know which one we're dealing with if we've already decided that a category comes before the behavior. Maybe that's the question I keep coming back to. When we stop looking for the enemy long enough to start and see the person in front of us back to the question Are we afraid of people or are we afraid what we've been taught to fear? I think the honest answer is sometimes both. People can genuinely be dangerous. People can lie, people manipulate people who abuse, people who exploit, people who intentionally hurt others, I don't think acknowledging that makes us paranoid. Sometimes fear is information. Sometimes a boundary is necessary. Sometimes leaving is necessary. And sometimes protecting yourself of something else is necessary. I also think we have to be honest about something else. Our fear does not come from nowhere. We learn what danger looks like from somewhere. Our parents teach us communities, religion, politics, experience, history, media. They all teach us. sometimes those lessons protect us, and sometimes they leave us with a threat map that we never stop to examine. We learn who is supposed to be dangerous, who is supposed to be trustworthy, who is one of us, and who is one of them. Eventually, We become so focused on identifying an enemy that we stop asking what the person in front of us has done. That distinction I keep coming back to. Discernment asks, what happened? What did that person do? What pattern am I seeing? What boundaries do I see? Categorization asks, what kind of person are they? Are they one of us? Are they one of them? Can people like that be trusted? When we move from behavior to identity, We start punishing people for what we believe they might do instead of responding to what they have actually done. We can mistake disagreements for danger, independence for abandonment, boundaries for betrayal. Differences for disrespect. Sometimes we can mistake our own history for evidence about a person standing in front of us. Sometimes we're not responding to our child. We're responding to the parent who raised us. Sometimes we're not responding to our partner. We're responding to the person who hurt us before them. Sometimes we're not responding to the community in front of us. We're responding to the community that hurt us before. Sometimes we're not even protecting the garden we say we want. We're protecting ourselves from the possibility that someone might destroy it. We become warriors. we become vigilant, we become suspicious, we search for signs, we look for enemies. Eventually we can destroy the very thing we're trying to protect. The family, the community, the relationship, the trust, the garden. That's the part I want to leave with. You don't have to stop being discerning. You don't have to become naive. You don't have to trust everyone. You don't have to ignore your instincts. You can believe that not everyone's your best friend. I had to learn that lesson at thirty. Maybe you can become more curious about where some instincts came from. Maybe we can ask, is this fear coming from what is happening right now or from what happened to me before? Am I responding to someone's behavior or to the category I place them in? What evidence do I have? Am I protecting myself or am I trying to eliminate uncertainty? maybe it's If I didn't have to identify a villain, what would I be seeing differently? Perhaps the goal isn't to become fearless. Perhaps the goal is to become discerning enough to recognize danger without needing everyone to make us uncomfortable to become the enemy. By asking yourself, what did this person do? And what am I assuming they're capable of doing? Am I responding to the person in front of me or to someone from my past? Where did I learn that people like this are dangerous? Am I protecting myself from the real pattern or from the possibility of being wrong? Maybe most importantly, if I stopped looking for an enemy, what would I finally be able to see? whether you leave a comment, send me a message, Or simply sit with this question yourself. I hope this conversation stays with you. Thank you for slowing down and thinking out loud with me. Until next time, take care of yourself. And remember, You can protect yourself without turning everyone else into a threat. you can recognize harmful behavior without reducing a person to their worst moment. You don't have to inherit someone's fear in order to take your own safety seriously. I'll see you the next episode.