“Resilience isn’t just about buildings and flood plans, it’s about people who know how to support each other.” – Carlos Menchaca
“If we don’t equip people to meet challenging times with psychological maturity, we risk facing a mental health crisis at global scale at a time when we need clear thinking more than ever.” – Steffi Bednarek, Gaslighting Democracy and the Double Binds of Truth
These times of many crises at once are more than any one of us can take in and fully process. I hear this when people say — “I just can’t read the news anymore, it’s too much.”
Bednarek writes that denial is a defense when the psyche is faced with more than it can psychologically metabolize. “What we can’t metabolise we have to reject in order to function psychologically. These defences can be as crude as denial, when there is no support to metabolise the magnitude of a situation or more subtle and hidden, like in the case of disavowal, when there is insufficient support.
Disavowal is a psychological term that describes the emotional disconnect or splitting off from what we intellectually know to be true.”
I can see the wisdom of a defense mechanism that “allows a person, a company or a government to split off uncomfortable truths so that they don’t interfere with familiar plans, actions and habits. In this way emotional equilibrium can be maintained.”
Then you add into that this proliferation of lies and disinformation from the highest reaches of government. These create a reinforcing loop, as she writes: “the more reality is systematically distorted or avoided in this way, the more anxiety builds up unconsciously and the need for further disavowal increases.”
Transforming the Overwhelm Cycle towards Cycles of Strength and Clarity
So how to break this cycle? A definition of trauma is “overwhelm that a person is not resourced to deal with.” The answer lies in how we resource each other. Instead of avoiding the truth, we can create spaces where we seek out the truth together. In my work as a facilitator and community builder, I’ve been exploring how a group can be a resource, to help an individual work with a complex challenge or time of change and sense the right path.
Instead of one nervous system holding it by themselves, you can have 15 people’s nervous 
systems holding the situation. The challenge is held in a much larger container of people listening and sensing dynamics of the situation. The coherence of a trusting, caring group itself can calm and settle everyone’s systems.
This allows the tangle of emotions, thoughts, worries, and layers of complexities to be pulled apart. Instead of denying or avoiding reality, together we do the hard thing of facing it and helping a person work with it.
Groups have a relational intelligence and metabolizing power. Our individualistic culture often overlooks this, orienting us to self-care and self-knowing. While self-care is important, interactions of authentic connection and kinship hold a rich resource we can be tapping. Thought it takes some skill-building for a group to hold this quality of listening presence.
The listening and sense-making activities and approaches I use with groups are easy to learn. It’s remarkable what a different quality of human connection and support can be generated in a few hours.
If you’d like to experience this, I’m offering the Relational Intelligence workshop on October 16th in Eliot, Maine. Click here to register. Or join my newsletter.
