The Mean Turn

There are times when I might unknow­ing­ly fright­en or intim­i­date anoth­er per­son. And there are times when anoth­er per­son might also unknow­ing­ly fright­en or intim­i­date me. This aware­ness caus­es me to think about human discon­nec­tions, how they arise and how we must address them, for all too often, unad­dressed, they move us back­wards towards becom­ing strangers to one anoth­er. If the first stage of a rela­tion­ship is to be far from one oth­er and then get to know each oth­er and become clos­er, lat­er stages may show us falling away until we are estranged.

Often we don’t know what is behind these move­ments from far to near and near to far, but I sus­pect there are tiny sig­nals in our every­day com­mu­ni­ca­tions which we are always in the process of inter­pret­ing — and, some­times, maybe all too often, mis­in­ter­pret­ing. We can become so intol­er­ant of not know­ing what’s going on with one anoth­er that we are apt to make up all kinds of sto­ries, espe­cial­ly when those slip­pery things called motive or inten­tion or agen­da are involved. I think I know you but do I? Per­haps this is one of the rea­sons in work­places, where pow­er dif­fer­en­tials and orga­ni­za­tion­al silos ampli­fy our need to under­stand the sig­nals, a para­noid tilt can so eas­i­ly set in.

The won­der­ing, the pro­jec­tion, the process of assump­tion and belief and bias that we bring to such sit­u­a­tions leads us in two direc­tions. One is toward the com­fort of cer­tain­ty, even if it is a neg­a­tive cer­tain­ty. The oth­er is a desire to tran­scend the fear, to change or rebuild things even as lit­tle sparks of fear keep fly­ing. We bat­tle with­in our­selves about which is the bet­ter course.

When I’ve been in the hon­ored place of facil­i­tat­ing as two peo­ple try to tell one anoth­er the truth in order to over­come an estrange­ment of some kind, it is always about these lit­tle sparks. “When you chal­lenged me about whether I made the right deci­sion…” “When you hur­ried from the restau­rant so that we did­n’t walk back to the office togeth­er…” and so on. And then the expla­na­tions, human and some­times even endear­ing: “When I chal­lenged you, it was a bad way of say­ing I was feel­ing inse­cure …” “I hur­ried back because I felt embar­rassed about what I’d said ear­li­er.…” The mis­un­der­stand­ings, elu­ci­dat­ed, return the sense of safe­ty by active­ly explain­ing the sparks. The expla­na­tions help remind us we are still decent peo­ple and have a vul­ner­a­ble, human side in common.

Hav­ing got­ten one’s truth into the open, a par­tic­i­pant might then sug­gest, “Oh, I see, so that’s what’s been going on!” even if it’s just through the vis­i­ble relax­ation of his face or the word­less look of relief in her eyes.

Per­haps the larg­er canyons of dif­fer­ence, between polit­i­cal par­ti­sans, mem­bers of dif­fer­ent racial groups, dif­fer­ent reli­gions — per­haps some­thing struc­tural­ly sim­i­lar is going on but we have lit­tle actu­al expe­ri­ence and no actu­al knowl­edge. We may not be ready to solve even the small­est dif­fer­ences between us, and so we need prac­tice — we need it very badly. 

We can­not know exact­ly where anoth­er’s expe­ri­ence of fear might be and how it feels. When I feel it myself, it seems to be the flick­er of a moment when I no longer exist — there’s just ter­ri­fy­ing void. The brief and instan­ta­neous blot­ting out of self — the shock — and my quick desire to cov­er it up is often fol­lowed by recrim­i­na­tions, humil­i­a­tion, the desire to find and expose the neg­a­tive motives and incom­pe­tence of oth­ers. How quick­ly I grab for the blan­ket of the injured! It is what might be called the mean turn, giv­en that mean­ness by all accounts is an out­come of intra-per­son­al fear. We are afraid of the noth­ing­ness and the ter­ri­fy­ing things that might emerge.

It’s plain then why peo­ple often don’t want to address their con­flicts. And, yet, this is also most often a mixed feel­ing. We are pulled to find and meet each oth­er, even as an estrange­ment con­tin­ues. Ulti­mate­ly, this pull is why there is hope. The ground beneath us may be our only com­mon­al­i­ty, yet we do want to get over it, to meet again, to expe­ri­ence anoth­er kind of human redemp­tion instead of run­ning away.

This is why per­son­al­ly, when I’ve suf­fered the mean turn, by my own or some­one else’s hand, I like to go back to the gar­den to fig­ure out what yet I can do, find­ing the place where I can come back to myself, where the beau­ty of the flow­ers remains unscathed and a qui­et stream still flows gen­tly from its source.

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