Difference-ophobia and how to cure it

Building resilience, the fear of exile and not looking at the comments. Plus some upcoming speaking events.

Bataille de Lens by Pierre Franc

I have been thinking about how we navigate difference and disagreement for a long time. I launched The Sacred in 2017, back when podcasts were a niche thing, as a response to the wave of polarisation of 2016. My obsession is relationships and how we have healthy ones. Not just romantic, all of them. I believe we are irreconcilably interdependent. Made by each other, made for each other. I can also see all too clearly how hard it is to be with each other, to resist the temptation to withdraw into ever smaller clusters of people like ourselves.

In Fully Alive I unpacked the deep psychological processes that drive our divisions. I write, speak and teach on the interaction of homophily (People Like Me syndrome) and fight-flight-freeze, and how the non-violent tradition grounded in the New Testament offers us postures and practices to choose a different way. But I’m still learning and in recent weeks, a new insight has been helping me.

We recently released this episode of The Sacred with Jon Yates, who coined the term People Like Me syndrome, and we discussed what we could do differently when we feel triggered into hostility by disagreement or difference. I spoke about my experience of building my resilience like a muscle, and my hunch that that the more we are in conversation and even community with people not like us, the easier it gets. We learn difference is not, fundamentally, a threat. Conversely, the more we allow ourselves to be sorted into filter bubbles and purity tribes because difference is uncomfortable, the scarier the other guys seem. Afterwards, a listener called Grant Morgan sent me this helpful email:

I wanted to reach out to you because I had a realization while listening to the recent Jon Yates episode: you were essentially discussing a really interesting form of psychotherapy called "Exposure and Response Prevention" (ERP) without using the term! The nerdy part of my brain lit up when I realized this because as someone who has long experienced Obsessive Compulsive Disorder I was familiar with the therapy because it is the first-line treatment for OCD. As someone who has seen major benefits from practicing ERP in recent years, I have started utilizing it as a framework in my professional life…to talk to students about resilience in the face of discomfort and anxiety. I have also recently realized that the practice of ERP has a LOT in common with the psychology that underpins the success of the recovery movement in Alcoholics Anonymous and programs of the like…you may even have an unknown audience in the OCD recovery community of people who resonate with your message about consciously choosing discomfort for the sake of resilience and Fully-Aliveness.

You can read more about ERP here, but it tallies very closely with what I’d been learning about the treatment of phobias.

My understanding (and I am not a mental health professional) is that when we encounter something that seems dangerous, we get a threat response, a spike of fight-flight-freeze. You could just say anxiety. If we then remove ourselves from that situation (run away from the spider, stay away from heights, attack or run away from someone who disagrees with us) we confirm our body’s hunch that it is dangerous. We basically say, yes, anxiety is the correct response. We can come to believe that it is avoidance that is keeping us safe, so we encode that reaction ever deeper.

If you want to build resilience around something that provokes anxiety, you have to stay in the situation until your threat response begins to ebb. You have to let the anxiety pass. In so doing, you are essentially telling your body you are safe. The thing that is triggering you is not actually dangerous. In many cases, you only need to do this a handful of times to see massive improvements. Your body gets the message and stops having anxiety spikes every time. You can change the script.

You can see how useful this bit of theory is. Rather than moving from the discomfort we inevitably feel around difference or disagreement straight to either blame and disdain (fight) or shutting down and returning to the safety of our tribes (flight), we can choose to do something different. This is how I apply Jesus command to “turn the other cheek”. Stay. If it’s actually safe to do so (rather than feeling safe to do so), keep listening. Look the spider in the eye. Expect to feel tense or even terrified, but remember it will pass. Instinctively, without really understanding the theoretical psychology, this is what I have been doing. Brené Brown calls it staying in the trouble. It has expanded my horizons, deepened my understanding and left me with a bunch of unlikely new friends (the recent Christmas party at our community house was hilarious partly because of watching people have conversations with those they would never have otherwise met. And enjoy them).

As I wrote about in Against a Frictionless Life, we live in a culture which discourages us from tolerating discomfort. Someone will try and sell you a product or an app to smooth the whole thing out. I am consciously trying to build my resilience with discomfort (mainly emotional discomfort, tbh, I still like really nice sheets) because I am convinced that otherwise my life will shrink. I will shrink. All the good stuff lies on the other side of discomfort. Everything vocationally important is scary. Every new relationship is vulnerable. Getting honest about my mistakes, my unlovely tendencies (my sins, if you can tolerate the word) and bringing them into the light of Love is something I’d rather avoid. Being actually honest rather than socially pliable builds better relationships but it’s also super awkward at times. All this is ok.

Ok, here is where it gets personal. I have been having to remind myself of my commitment to tolerating discomfort a lot this last week or so. The footage of a debate event I did was released on YouTube, the one I had written about in a post called Just Call me Token Woman. The experience itself was a bit complex for a range of reasons I laid out. One of the key ones was knowing I was likely speaking into a tribe most of whom are different from me and would be primed to disagree with me. It has now been watched 400,000 times across various channels. There are a lot of comments. I made the mistake of glancing at them while checking something in the show notes. It turns out that in that post I had accurately predicted some of the bile that would come my way. There are (I gather) some nice ones too, but I know the nasty ones keep coming because people keep messaging to tell me.

I did indeed get a massive anxiety spike from that five seconds of watching anonymous commentators call me stupid and vacuous. I understand part of what is going on with this sensation, and refuse to feel embarrassed about it. The work of

Clementine Morrigan

on cancel culture helped me name the root. Social censure taps into a deep terror, not because we are shallow people pleasers, but precisely because we are social creatures. Hyper-social in fact. You can explain this in theological , trinitarian anthropology terms (people are made in the image of a God who is already relationship) or evolutionary ones (we are pack animals, dependent on each other, born vulnerable and still in need of each other.) Either way, it comes down to this: we are each other’s safety. Or we are meant to be. Clementine talks about how being shunned by your group or being the target of a mass online pile-on can actually feel, probably only semi-consciously, like a survival issue.

I hesitate to add this because I am wary of the overuse of group generalisations. We are all primarily people, persons-in-relationships with unique stories and temperaments. Our various overlapping identities are only part of our patchwork selves. However, I do think there is a gender element here (essentially the epigenetics of centuries of sexual violence) which means my guess is this generally hits harder for women. Also other groups with a long history of being primarily recipients not perpetrators of violence. It is not that long ago (and not that far away) that for some people disagreement or difference actually was a safety issue. The body keeps the score, and our bodies are interconnected too. I also think on average it is more difficult for younger people many of whose baseline of resilience is lower. This is not because they are feeble snowflakes who are worthy of disdain, but as

Freya India

is helpfully arguing, because they are the recipients of a frictionless culture older people have allowed to emerge thorough chasing ever more comfort, convenience, status and stuff rather than character.

The key fact to bear in mind is that it isn’t a survival issue in the kind of contexts I’m describing. Resilience to this stuff might come easier for some people than others (and there will be older white men who find it hard and young queer black women who find it easy) but we can all grow in it. What I need to keep front and centre is that hateful YouTube comments cannot physically hurt me. I am embedded in a community. Real people, in real life, who know and love me want to be my safety, as I want to be theirs. The threat of exile my body is communicating can be tended to with love. I am delighted to discover that encountering even toxic and ugly disagreement and riding the threat response like a surfer works for this too. I can ignore these voices. Staying in the trouble in this context doesn’t mean engaging with anonymous trolls. It means knowing it’s going on and getting on with my life, and continuing to speak in public, as myself. Even as the token woman. It means teaching my body that I am safe by neither lashing back nor running away.

All of this needs caveating, or course. You will know what your triggers are, who and what it is that you find unbearable. We will all have different baseline anxiety, different experiences of trauma. We will need to be self-aware and proceed with caution. I am not suggesting that flooding your body with threat response is always productive. Survivors of sexual violence should not have to learn to tolerate known predators, nor people of colour racists. Of course they shouldn’t. There will always be examples where this kind of exposure and response prevention is not the right approach, when your body is sending you the message you absolutely need to hear and act on. Fight and flight is there for a good reason. I just think that the number of those instances are quite small. Because our culture is actively undermining our resilience around difference and disagreement, more and more people and perspectives are ending up in the mental category of dangerous, hateful or worthy of contempt. We can choose a different formation, a wider-horizoned adventure, if we want it.

Building resilience around difference and disagreement also makes strategic sense. You don’t have to think that all opinions are equally valid, or give up your principles to grow in this. As I laid out in Friendship is my Theory of Change as

Sarah

Stein Lubrano says: “It is people who change one’s…views, and for the most part, it is specifically the people we like, respect, and even love.” Actual progress can only happen when some people are prepared to tolerate the discomfort, resist contempt and stick around. Without resilient people building bridges and relationships with their bodies, we will continue to get further and further apart.

This practice also doesn’t mean being uncritically tolerant of bad behaviour. This week I am annoyed that this kind of nonsense is still happening, angry we have built digital spaces which actively encourage it, but these feel appropriate, healthy, productive reactions. What I no longer feel is afraid. And an unafraid woman might just be a force to be reckoned with.

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What else I’ve been up to and speaking events

• This is the debate, which was itself rich and interesting and worth a watch (Rowan Williams!). It is also here and here.

• I was on Free Thinking on BBC Radio 4 discussing the philosopy of gift and gratitude.

• I’ll be at the Oundle Festival of Literature on 30th January

• And speaking in Winchester Cathedral for the Festival of Faith and Literature on Friday 28th February chaired by Cathy Rentszenbrink who is one of my writing heroes.

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Housekeeping: This is my last post for the year. I’ve committed to writing fortnightly, one paid and one free post, and have been over delivering on that. I’ll be taking a couple of weeks off and if I need longer, I will pause paid subscriptions. An enormous thank you to all of you who read, share and financially support my work. I don’t take the gift of your attention for granted. This is one of my favourite advent songs. May it be mournful and meaningful for you who celebrate, and Christmas joyful when it comes.