For us to get through what needs to happen next, our society and we as individuals need to learn how to accept feedback when our behavior needs change and sit with the discomfort of being wrong. I see over and over again that people are so uncomfortable with this idea that they distance themselves from reality when others make complaints. You see them question if you're sure that is what happened, they make excuses and wonder if you maybe interpreted it wrong, or maybe you invited it all because if YOU did something wrong here then they can distance themselves from the idea that similar abuse might occur to them.
Instead we need to be supporting people who are speaking truth to abusers. We need to not tone police them, gaslight them, or diminish their stories. But this is exactly where people go first because they are so unable to sit with the discomfort of reality. They would rather be in denial that anything happened at all. Then they are safe from it too. The problem is that this mechanism provides cover for abusers and gives them the space to abuse. It discourages people from coming forward.
And if you try to talk to an abuser about their behavior they won't hear it either. There will always be something wrong with how you phrase your complaints - purity tests, gaslighting, and further abuse. But there is a moment between the complaint and the response where a breath can make the difference between denial and transformation. One deep breath and then listen to the person making the complaint. Hear what they are saying. Treat it as though it is a real thing. Be there with them in their discomfort. Don't speak in ways that protect yourself and instead be vulnerable to the change. Realize what needs changing, how you are responsible for it. Increase your emotional literacy. And then a new relationship can form where it is based on mutual respect and shared reality.
It is this one moment from taking in the complaint & reacting that makes all the difference. You can turn away from the discomfort or turn to the discomfort. Turning away is disavowing reality. Turning to is joining reality. And this is where we are as a country today. We are trying to have discourse about the abuses but all we are getting is denial, derailing, purity tests, gaslighting, and more abuse. You can see how each time a person turns away from reality they get further and further from it. Compounding over and over again until the only place it can go is violence. And calls to change are being rejected so violently we now have entire groups of citizens vowing to murder people in the streets and they double down even then saying it is their right to kill, that what they are doing is the best thing they could do. Murder. And they still won't see the abuse.
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