1.2 Forthright, nurturing relationship conversations
Activism is…
Hard on relationships.
There are so many stressors, like…
Trying to do big things with minimal resources.
Allowing yourself to see just how bad and scary things are and hurting behind that.
Holding your own against adversaries who attack you and want to stop you.
Trying to save the world, while still dealing with the traumas and deficits leftover from your childhood.
And following the Sacrificial-Savior Operating System is a super-stressor because it actively drives relationships into the background. It demands neglect of relationships both at work and at home.
And it makes people scared. They’re scared that if they initiate a relationship conversation, in order to make things better, they might well make things worse because SSOS relationships are fragile and breakable.
So then people don’t rock the boat. They coast. They find some minimal equilibrium in their relationships and stick with that, missing out on the possibility of something so much better.
If we do not attend to our relationships, if we do not actively, purposefully nurture them and deepen them day by day…
We’re putting them in jeopardy.
Unnurtured relationships are so easy to break. I’m sure you’ve seen that in activist organizations and networks…
Jeremy makes a harsh, judgmental comment about Janie on a day when she’s down and vulnerable. She feels so badly hurt she retreats into silence. And he doesn’t know the damage he’s done and no one does anything about it. And the hurt does not get worked through and there’s no apology and no reconciliation. And what was a good working relationship is never the same again.
Tina is dealing with hard stuff at home and takes out her anger on Tim who’s new to the organization, speaking to him with words that are dripping with contempt. And Tim finds this unforgivable. And a nascent, possible friendship gets broken before it even really starts.
What I found most painful during my years of activism is when good people with good hearts, who have signed off on the same principles of unity, turn against each other, split into factions, and treat each other like the enemy.
I remember those battles. I was in them, I hated them but I was in them. I remember the apocalyptic urgency. And I remember the destruction. And all I can say is…
Never again.
I won’t ever do that to myself or anyone else ever again.
And this is why I’m so attached to the Deep-Nurturance Operating System. I don’t think of it as something nice, but as something…
Necessary.
Urgently necessary. I wouldn’t ever do activism without it now.
And what I love best about it is how it puts activists first…
It puts our relationships first.
Not the work, not the mission, not anything else.
And the deeper you go with your activism…
The more deeply resilient you need your relationships with your fellow activists to be.
As activists we’re dealing with big, complex, world-sized problems. So it makes sense to look for big, complex, world-sized solutions.
And there’s nothing wrong with wanting sophisticated, rocket-science solutions. But I don’t believe that’s the place to start.
I believe we need to start…
By going back to the basics.
As humble as they might seem to be.
Years ago when I took West Coast Swing and Salsa lessons, my first teacher said a great dancer always works on her basics, never taking them for granted. No matter how sophisticated she gets in her performances, she continues to work on her basics and deepens her relationship with them. But amateurs are in a rush to leave the basics behind.
In the case of activism, the basics I’m talking about are the basics of nurturance.
After all we’re mammals, and the key feature of mammals is that we nurture our young. And we humans are the extreme of that. Our young need to be nurtured for two decades.
We know that children who are not nurtured, children who are traumatized by abuse or neglect, suffer a multitude of serious problems as teens and on into their adult years.
Human children cannot do without nurturance.
And…
We never outgrow our need for nurturance.
Even though nurturance gets ignored so much in the world of adults. And I wonder why it gets eclipsed. Is it because…
We live in a society that runs on exploitation, and so nurturance which is the adversary of exploitation gets suppressed. It gets relegated to “women’s work” and is thus treated as if it’s only a very secondary thing, when we need it to be primary.
Or because…
Maybe we don’t believe we humans can provide each other the kind of nurturance we need. Maybe we’re in despair about ourselves. About humanness itself.
Nurturance is such a pretty, mild-mannered word. At least that’s the conventional take on it. But taking a stand for putting nurturance first is…
A gutsy thing to do.
I think we not only need to go back to basics, but we need to upgrade our basics.
Which means we need to…
Upgrade human nurturance.
We need to make of nurturance something way better than the default evolution has given us. We need to make it as powerful as we can.
And how’s that for an activist project?
In my book, Asking More of Love Than We’ve Ever Asked of It, my focus is on upgrading human love. That book is the context for this one.
In this book, I’m focusing in on just one thing, the need activists have for nurturance. And specifically the need for forthright conversations that have the power to nurture our relationships with each other and nurture them deeply.
Why forthright?
Because we need to be real with each other to have real relationships.
Why nurturing?
Because getting real without warmth and compassion can hurt a relationship.
It’s simply a fact that great relationships thrive on great relationship conversations, a special kind of conversation…
Both forthright and nurturing in equal measure.
To that end, I’ve included an abundance of dialogues that demonstrate good working relationships.
But let me add a caution. There’s no received wisdom anywhere on this site. So please don’t take anything I say as a prescription, no matter how enthusiastic I might be.
Please use what I have to say as a provocation.
Something to provoke your own thinking about how you might integrate forthright, nurturing relationship conversations into your work life and home life, if you aren’t already doing that.
The dialogues you’ll find here are fairly simple. When I was coaching nonprofit leaders, I worked with them on complex, strategically sophisticated conversations that sometimes took weeks to get to a happy resolution.
I have not included such conversations because they involved so many variables and so many people and personalities, that it could easily take a novella-length treatment to tell a single story.
But please know that deep-nurturance can handle complexity.
And please know that forthright, nurturing relationship conversations can be…
Therapeutic without being actual therapy.
They can help ameliorate trauma, without being actual trauma work, because they can help people find their own inner strength.
They can help people…
Feel for themselves and then fight for themselves.
But also please remember that good intentions are not enough. These conversations are serious business. They take attention, care, and skill.
Mastery asks a lot of us, but it’s worth it, just for the pleasure deepening relationships bring us. But also because…
The deeper our relationships go, the deeper our work can go.
On this site, the stories I tell about myself and the dialogues I’m part of, I’m recounting just as they happened. The ones I tell about others, though, follow a different trajectory.
They started with real people and real events, but as I wrote them out, I changed details, often every single detail—the fiction writer in me took over.
At first this was to protect identities. Because in their communities, the activists I talk about are so much in the spotlight and under the microscope, that they need a special degree of confidentiality.
Then I noticed the freedom to invent was helping me go deeper into what I wanted to show you. You know how fiction sometimes captures the truth better than nonfiction? That’s what I was experiencing so I kept on inventing.
But I want you to know that…
Every story and every dialogue here stays true to the reality of forthright, nurturing relationship conversations.
In a time when the world so badly needs saving, focusing down on our working relationships with each other might seem like a very small thing indeed. But I believe that…
Every time a relationship is in jeopardy and you save it, that matters.
Every day you give your family your best instead of neglecting them, that matters.
Every activist who thrives instead of burning out and dropping out, matters
Every day you grow yourself instead of diminishing yourself, matters.
Every person you can help step into their power, matters.
Every person who can find deep contentment in their activist work, matters.
And…
Becoming a person who is masterful at deep-nurturance, matters.
