Community Culture vs. Purity Culture
In my last missive I spoke about how feelings are not facts, but instead provide us with information that we need to learn to interpret accurately in the context of other information. In order to do this effectively, as I mentioned in my first post we need to learn to tolerate our uncomfortable emotions.
I believe tolerating our uncomfortable emotions is an essential skill in developing healthy community. Why? Because an essential part of living in community with other humans is being able to accept when we have caused harm. It is impossible to live in community with others without causing harm. All humans are sometimes thoughtless, impulsive, inconsiderate, ignorant etc… We are not perfect creatures so we cannot act perfectly. However, in the climate that we live in, most of us have internalised the narrative that only bad people cause harm. Therefore if we cause harm we are bad people, and that is intolerable to us, no one on earth wants to be a bad person, my friend and frequent collaborator Jessie uses the term purity culture to describe this phenomenon and I love it! Purity culture means that when we are told we have caused harm, we perceive it as an attack, because our brain shortcuts to - I am being told I am bad.
Frequently when we are asked to take responsibility for harm we have caused two pathways open up:
We become defensive in order to protect ourselves from the notion that we are a bad person. This defensiveness can mean we blame the person or group who is asking us to address the harm we have caused. We get angry, we justify our behaviour, we minimise the harm etc..
We internalise the idea that we are a bad person and adopt this as an identity, become wrapped up in the shame and guilt associated with it we do anything we can to ease it. E.g. avoidance strategies, people pleasing etc…
Where we want to land instead is somewhere where we allow ourselves to feel the shame and guilt and all the other unpleasantness that comes with recognising we have caused harm, take responsibility for it, and attempt to repair the ruptures have been caused.
What often make this impossible is that we are insecure in our own humanity. We feel that if we have done wrong, then we are no longer deserving of care, of love, of compassion, of humanity itself. The way dehumanise people who commit crimes, the way processes of colonisation and slavery have dehumanised people of colour, the way in which our movements prioritise categorising people into good and bad based on what they say, all contribute to this internalised narrative. There are so few pathways by which we can be redeemed if we cause harm. Of course there are complexities to this not everyone’s harm is treated equally in society. In the west for example, on a public level, much more attention is paid to the wrongs done by people of colour than the wrongs done to them.
We begin to believe hat to belong to the human race we must never do any harm, and therefore if we do, must do whatever it takes to make that not the reality.
There is a meme that goes around the internet frequently that describes this process perfectly, it’s called The Narcissists Prayer by Dayna Craig, but I think it is actually something most people do some of the time:
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.
Community culture, in opposition to purity culture requires us to recognise that all humans are capable of causing harm. That there is nothing any human can do that allows us to remove their status of humanity and therefore all people are worthy of consideration, care and compassion regardless of what they have done. Once we are secure in this understanding of ourselves, then we are able to look at the pain we have caused, the harm we have done and take responsibility for it. To sit in the messiness and the pain of it and do what it takes to make things right, or to recognise that something can never be made right. We are not bad people if cause harm, but we might become bad people if we never take responsibility for the harm we cause and seek to remedy it.