It’s still trauma, Mary

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I wrote quite a bit about a month ago about my tween’s experience with an abusive teacher at their school. While we finally got their 504 accommodations updated, and I’m guessing that teacher got a talking to, they continue to be unpleasant. They have continued to tell their students that they are emotionally underdeveloped because of their year (ostensibly slacking off and not dealing with any trauma or stress whatsoever with their perfectly stable and unstressed parents) off from in-person school due to Covid.

Recently this teacher decided to ask their students why they thought they were so emotionally impaired. (Who does that?) My kid raised their hand and said, we’re not impaired, we’re traumatized. This gave the teacher momentary pause, but then they responded by saying that all the students can’t be traumatized.

Really, Mary? In pandemonium? In a panorama? Two fucking years into a constantly mutating, killing people every day pandemic from hell? Just the fact that you said that indicates trauma. Our number one defense mechanism is usually denial. We ignore or minimize things that we can’t deal with. It’s the “This is fine” syndrome. And no shade to defense mechanisms — they help us function when everything is weird or horrible. We really do feel like everything is fine — until we don’t. Long-term trauma has long-term effects. We are less resilient. We have memory and sleep issues. If we have diagnoses like depression or anxiety, they can get harder to manage. When we inevitably encounter additional stressors or traumas, we don’t have the bandwidth to deal with them as well as we would during a time of relative peace and calm.

When my husband was hospitalized, people commented on how well I kept my shit together. And I did. Until I didn’t. We get this blast of hormones during emergencies that allow us to dissociate from the immediate horrors that we are dealing with and just function. But this is a temporary fix; afterward, you have to deal with all the emotions that your body helped you stuff down. I had an epic meltdown a few weeks after my husband got out of the hospital that was totally expected, and my resilience is still low while my anxiety is high. This is normal. But if you don’t understand the trajectory of trauma (and compounded trauma) you may think you are functioning because you are a superior life form and everyone else is weak. You are not and they are not.

This applies to EVERYONE. We are all living through collective trauma. Some people have been devastated by the effects of Covid, and some have just been inconvenienced, but nobody can ignore how terrifying and confusing and disruptive it has been.

However, Teacher of the Year, just because you haven’t experienced compounded, impossible-to-deny-trauma, doesn’t mean that your students haven’t. Kids have fewer defense mechanism tools in their psychological toolbox, even though they may seem super cool on the outside. Kids rely on adults for survival, so when we are unstable they often compensate by over-functioning or functioning for us. This does not make them extra great kids or mature beyond their years, or old souls. It makes them traumatized. Kids adapt because they have no choice. Adults have a choice. You can get therapy, scream into a pillow, journal, hike, whatever helps you get back into your body and your feelings, and then just fucking deal with the pain and fear and insecurity that comes up. Or you can blame your middle-schoolers for your own stress and make them feel like shit about themselves. Because apparently, that’s an option.

Once again I find myself saying to adults who parent or teach or take care of other people: unpack your shit. Your kids (and students) are an extremely convenient screen upon which to project your problems, issues, and flaws. Doing so is an abuse of power and you need to stop.

If you want to know more about how trauma passes through generations and how it plays out, I highly recommend learning about Family Systems Theory.

Why is white fragility?

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Book Bans in Texas Suck

My husband and I caught the last segment on This American Life today, titled The Farce Awakens and I highly recommend it. It discusses how a Black children’s author found his books banned from school libraries in Katy, Texas. This horseshit is going on all over Texas and the south and it’s harmful and insane. But today I’m going to address specifically what the “concerned white moms” had to say in this segment because there is only so much I can yell at my radio.

Their argument was that exposing white children to the multitudes of microaggressions that black children face is harmful because it will make them feel guilty. (They also claim that there is no way that Black kids experience this much aggression. They do.) Let’s unpack this.

White guilt, of which I have had a good amount, is when you realize that you have been taking part in or advantage of oppressive social and institutional systems that make things easier for you and harder for Black people. I was raised believing that as a good Californian white liberal, I couldn’t be racist. It just wasn’t in my DNA. So when I said or did incredibly stupid things, I reacted with confusion and dismay. When I was forced to recognize the actual gulf between my experiences and my peers of color, I realized that I was full of shit and that I had no idea what they were going through. It was deeply uncomfortable and I did a lot of bullshit rationalizing of things to make me feel better about myself. Eventually, I realized that my sensitivity to terms like White Fragility WAS ACTUAL WHITE FRAGILITY. That was a start.

Why is this important? Because one of the most basic things you need to help your children learn while they develop is the difference between discomfort and danger. Guilt is uncomfortable, not dangerous. Shame is uncomfortable, not dangerous. Racist systems and racism are physically dangerous to short and long-term health and wellbeing.

So to the white moms in Katy who want to spare their children guilt for oppressions that they didn’t create (but are likely propagating because their parents can’t grow a pair of ovaries and woman up), I say GROW THE FUCK UP. It’s you who can’t deal with your guilt and discomfort. Your kids still have a chance to become more resilient, humble, and compassionate without a fuckton of therapy. You, my ladies, do not. You need to start learning to tolerate uncomfortable feelings and thoughts instead of trying to control everything your little angels come in contact with. Instead of banning books, get you a therapist and work on your shit.

In Transformative Learning Theory, we call this the Disorienting Dilemma. When a learner is faced with new knowledge that calls into question their sense of self or reality, it causes stress and discomfort. As educators, we can help them process it, but we can’t do it for them. Y’all need to take several seats and start thinking about whether or not you want your kids to be as easily disturbed as you are.

I want my kid to be more resilient than me. More ethical. More compassionate. More humble. I want them to outshine me in every way possible, not reflect back my own limited view of the world so I don’t have to have any uncomfortable feelings. I want the same for my students. If you can’t even imagine your child learning to empathize with a Black kid who gets picked on, harassed, and gaslit for being Black (or gay, or trans, or Asian, or Latinx, or Muslim, or disabled…), you are not living in reality and you are doing your children exactly zero favors. Learning to tolerate discomfort like guilt, anxiety, fear, and shame are the building blocks of adulthood and good-personhood. I really want the next generation to be less fucked up than mine, and y’all are not helping. Do better.

The Iceberg Model: What it isn’t

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One of the great mysteries of the social sciences isn’t the way we share, borrow, and reinterpret great theories, it’s why we dumb them down.

In my studies of organizational development at the masters level, we learned about the iceberg theory:

So clean. So fresh.

The image above looks a lot like the one I studied during my degree. Policy and organization on top, behavior (and occasionally *gasp* emotion) on the bottom. All cultures, including organizational ones, have norms that are picked up and spread without being written down. However, this is a very sanitized version of the original, by none other than Papa Freud himself:

Freud did not fuck around.

Freud says that the stuff below the water’s surface consists of repressed trauma, early childhood experiences we can’t remember, disowned personality traits, and repressed impulses like competition, rage, lust, territoriality, fear, etc. All of that stuff does not magically disappear and turn into “behavior and engagement” when we go to work in the morning. The basic law of human psychology is that what doesn’t get expressed comes out in some other, usually unintentional, (and potentially harmful) way. People continue to be people, and the more we pretend otherwise, the murkier that water gets.

Another prominent example that I won’t go into in this article (because it deserves its own) is the coopting of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (a developmental theory) for capitalistic ends. There has also been recent criticism of how Emotional Intelligence theories are used in repressive ways. The linked article is highly recommended.

Unfortunately, much of organizational development literature tends to be self-justifying. It does not delve deeply into the historic and often inhumane reasons behind gender and racial wage gaps, the confluence of power around white men, or the exploitative nature of capitalism. Much of it is still of some value, and a few prominent theorists do, in fact, look at organizations more thoroughly and don’t engage in the circular reasoning of much of the literature. Largely, however, capitalism, and by extension organizational development theories, are self-justifying and lack vital critical perspectives that could improve working life for many people.

In my classes on career development and ethics, I have often likened corporate culture to the upper crust characters on the popular show Downton Abbey. They are masters of understatement (I mean…) and substitute cutting wit for frank conversations (or visible emotion). Unfortunately, undergrads don’t watch Masterpiece Theater so the metaphor is usually lost. Nonetheless, the writers of the show masterfully demonstrate how the characters reinforce cultural (and gendered, and racial) norms through subtle barbs and jabs, or well-placed silences, rather than oh, I don’t know, actually talking directly about whatever the hell they are feeling.

Unfortunately, organizational culture, in general, follows this pattern, and the fact that it can’t recognize its own repressiveness is just further evidence of the same. Attempts to frankly discuss any number of elephants trundling around the room usually result in accusations of overstatement or drama, while vague, ambiguous language is much safer when dealing with conflict. Long live passive voice!

Conflict resolution in the therapeutic context usually involves clearly stating your own feelings and experiences in a way that does not blame, nor excuses, other people involved. If my husband and I are fighting over the dishes, a therapist would encourage me to say, “I feel hurt when I cook dinner and you leave the dishes on the table.” My husband might say, “I feel frustrated when you use so many utensils to cook with and don’t clean as you go. I feel taken for granted when I clean up after you.” In corporate-ese, this conversation would be closer to (and over group email), “I’m confused why there are so many dirty dishes in the sink! Did I miss something?😺 “Oh, I didn’t know that cleaning other people’s dishes was my job! I’m sorry, can show me where it says that in my job description?😉” Translation: “Wash the damn dishes, Mary!” “That’s not my job, Karen!” <resentment grows> And, scene.

I find it particularly bizarre that in academia, where our work and writing is often judged on our ability to clearly and accurately state the reasons for and results of our research, we suffer from the same problem. Three years into a pandemic I still get astonished reactions (as do the select colleagues who are also fed up with artifice) when I point out that shoving unvaccinated, tightly-packed, unmasked students into lecture halls will result in deaths, and that the safety of students and the community at large should maybe be a high priority of an R1 institution whose reputation is built on scientific rigor. The audacity!

Another thing I tell my students is that the difference between the dynamics of school and the dynamics of the workplace boils down to one thing: survival instinct. Our work pays us the money that allows us to eat, pay for shelter, and meet the basic conditions for life. Our hindbrains and those of our colleagues are easily activated when we feel our income and by extension, survival is at risk. At the same time, organizational culture encourages us to suppress or hide emotions like fear, anxiety, sadness, and insecurity. You know, feminine emotions. 🙄 Nonetheless, these emotions exist in abundance for most of us, especially during times of social and economic upheaval. So I warn students they may see some really weird behavior in the workplace, and subsequently feel like they are taking crazy pills because everyone else is ignoring, minimizing, or justifying it.

Many things in organizational culture have changed over the last decade, but this; not so much. This recent case at Netflix shows how much power rests in the hands of those least able to perspective-take, and consequently affects what issues are discussable, conscious, and able to change. All of Netflix’s work on affinity groups, trans visibility, and representation amounted to shit when the CEO decided that he hadn’t done anything wrong.

In conclusion, if you are married to a particular organizational development or industrial psych text, please do check the references and learn about the theories from which it is derived (or in some cases, stolen). We cannot break out of exploitative, toxic, and repressive norms at work without a clear-eyed look at what we are leaving out of the picture, or what lies below the surface of the water.

Out of bounds: The myth of the skinny anorexic

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I am a fat anorexic.

I was put on my first diet by my parent when I was 11 years old. I hit puberty early and started my period that same year. I was not fat, but as any parent knows, the medical system starts tracking kids’ height-weight ratios super early, and even in the early 80s, that meant being constantly scrutinized for a body that might someday be out of bounds. (I think my kid’s pediatrician started tracking their BMI at about 5. Just think about that for a sec.)

Our bodies need EVERYTHING when we are growing. The last thing we should do is put developing kids and adolescents on diets, but this seems to be the time when adults are most likely to start monitoring and depriving kids of nutrition.

As a sociology/psychology scholar, I know a lot of backstory to this that as an 11-year old, I did not have access to. Womens’ hard-won rights to autonomy over their reproductive systems did not include the right to present however we wanted to — we were still supposed to be slim, tall, white, and full of hard angles (but have really big boobs and hair). The early 80s was the domain of Phyllis Schlafly and a regressive backlash against feminism that taught me and my peers that everything was fine and that we didn’t need to be loud like our moms, those obnoxious women’s libbers. The pop culture of the era celebrated women’s newfound agency over their sexuality by constantly separating women into sluts — those who invite rape, and virgins — those who deserved to be loved and protected. Anyone who didn’t meet the physical requirements of beauty was a punchline or a token (or often both). Nobody I knew questioned diet culture or even identified it as a thing.

I don’t remember having food issues until about age 7 when my parents started criticizing how and what I ate. This was after my male pediatrician warned my mother that I might, someday, be fat. We now know most of the research on what constitutes fatness is deeply flawed, and I was never a fat kid, but it didn’t matter. I internalized the idea that I was by the time I was 10 and experienced increasing body dysmorphia as I grew towards adulthood.

Even before that, as early as I can remember, my mom would go on diets and cruelly critique her own body. She had a lifelong membership with Weight Watchers and would eat weird snacks like buttermilk blended with frozen strawberries. I didn’t understand why the person I loved most was so mean to herself, but in my young mind, I must have absorbed that there was something virtuous about it. My mom would talk about how she went on Weight Watchers after she had my brother and reached her goal weight of 98 pounds. When I was later diagnosed with an eating disorder (anorexia), it may have been this claim that kept her from accepting that I had a dangerous problem. If I was 117 pounds compared to her 98, I couldn’t possibly be anorexic. The toxic diet culture of that era told us all that we were fundamentally flawed, and self-starvation was the only way to compensate for it.

Eventually (meaning by age 11), the monitoring became intense, specific critiques of my body and body parts that seemed to go on for hours. If I protested that I liked my body and didn’t want to change it, I was told I was deluded. I was an embarrassment. I wouldn’t find love. Nobody would hire me. I was also accused of gaining weight to “protect myself” from others. This is not so fun when you are 11, or 13, or 15…My body was small, but I had curves that did not fit the ideal of the 80s. Short legs, small waist, round hips and butt… ironically the kind of body that women get injections to create now, I was made to believe was out of bounds. It took up space it wasn’t entitled to, and that — that was dangerous and immoral. This message wasn’t just from my parents, it was all around me — in media, in the women and men in my extended family, and don’t get me started on dating culture in the 80s.

I started putting myself on restrictive diets in high school, culminating in a Slim-Fast regimen that was about 800 calories a day and consisted of two meal replacement shakes and a low-calorie frozen meal. I also went on Weight Watchers with my mother at least twice (once after the anorexia diagnosis).

I graduated from high school early and spent a year at a community college getting some credits. When I was barely 17, I moved to San Francisco to go to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. I lived in an apartment with two roommates who also attended school there (there were no dorms). I was alone and scared and determined to be as skinny as possible. I got a lot of attention from men at my school that reinforced my need to be as physically perfect as possible. I directed a lot of my fear and anxiety about living in a new city and starting college into fear of gaining weight. By this point I was suffering from extreme body dysmorphia; I saw my increasingly tiny body as huge and ungainly. By the middle of my first semester, I was eating an apple for lunch and feeling panicky if I ate anything else except meal replacement shakes. I started having dizzy spells and seeing bright spots in the periphery of my vision when I stood up.

I took myself to a walk-in clinic. They asked me what drugs I was doing and why they were cocaine several hundred times. Since I wasn’t doing drugs, they eventually turned me over to a nutritionist who asked me how much I ate per day. When I told her my limit was 800 calories, she explained that I didn’t have any body fat and I needed more food than that to live. She also told me I could still “tone up” if I wanted to. (Ugh.) I didn’t believe her, because my maximum weight for my short body, as prescribed by Weight Watchers, was 113 lbs. I was 117. Therefore, I was still unacceptably fat.

I never saw her again. She tried to call me and even sent me a letter stating her concern, but I blew her off. I did start eating more normally and started gaining weight. What I didn’t know, for a long, long time, was that the weight cycling I had done in my early through late adolescence had convinced my body that I was in real danger of starvation (because I was), so losing weight became much harder, and gaining it became easier. (This is widely known scientifically now, but health care providers still prescribe weight loss instead of diagnosis and treatment of patient symptoms, which has resulted in the untimely deaths of people who weren’t diagnosed with things like cancer until it was too late.)

The culture in which I grew up taught me several totally false things about food and eating:

  1. Hunger is weakness
  2. Vanquishing hunger is strength
  3. Weight gain is weakness
  4. Weight loss is strength
  5. Eating until you are full is gluttonous
  6. Staying slightly hungry all the time is healthy
  7. My body is too weak to know what it needs and doesn’t need
  8. My mind is too weak to control my errant body
  9. Only skinny people are anorexic.

I continued to struggle with body dysmorphia through my 20s. I gained weight steadily, punctuated by bouts of weight loss from restriction. I never thought that I might still be anorexic because I didn’t look like an anorexic anymore. I realized that I had been dangerously thin at 17, but none of that applied to me now because I wasn’t thin. But my body knew the truth; it knew that I was always a step away from self-imposed starvation. My body wanted me to live more than I wanted to starve it to death.

In my late 20s, I decided that diets could get fucked and I was going to stop yearning for a body I didn’t have. I found a gym and a trainer and started to learn what healthy, gradual exercise felt like. I think it was the first time I really started to inhabit my body. I bought cute plus-sized clothes and dumped my fatphobic boyfriend (and my fatphobic career).

My 30s were the years of the good fatty, a trope that body liberation people are intimately familiar with. I was okay because I was a good fat person — I exercised, I dressed cute, I presented as feminine, and I was healthy (whatever that means). I was what we now call a “small fat” — a person who can shop at mainstream plus-sized stores and some stores with extended sizing. I didn’t have many role models, and I certainly wasn’t ready to confront my own fatphobia, but I wasn’t actively starving myself either. My weight stabilized, mainly because I was hyper-fixated on it being stable. I used exercise mainly to control weight gain, but I still restricted periodically; it was just “lifestyle change” instead of diets. (Yeah, right.) Still, I was happier and far more confident than I had been in my pre-teens, teens, and 20s. I had a career, I dated a lot, met my now-husband, changed careers, and towards the end of my 30s, had a baby.

I kept a blog during my pregnancy, a time when I felt particularly liberated from body dysmorphia. Ironically, when I reread the blog, just about every entry has something in it about my weight. No, not weight-obsessed at all. I didn’t gain body fat during my pregnancy, and I lost a lot after it. My body used up a chunk of its reserves for baby building, nursing, and pumping. I felt great (other than the PPD and constant exhaustion), and dare I say, virtuous. I could eat like a horse and still lose weight. BECAUSE I HAD JUST MADE AND WAS FEEDING A BABY WITH MY BODY. It wasn’t virtue, it was continuation of the species, Mary.

So when I weaned and started to gain back the weight I’d lost, it sucked. Still, I had become more aware of the body positive movement and its early leaders. However, it wasn’t until well into my 40s that I realized that I had never stopped restricting. Ever. The BOPO movement became more intersectional and more critical of the good fatty trope, which was also very white, feminine, and heteronormative. I was by that time working on my PhD and becoming more aware of critical theories. I also started following some people on social media who were at the intersection of the eating disorder recovery community and the body positive community, and the intersectional and Black feminist community.

That was a rude ass awakening. I realized I had far more in common with the ED recovery community than I had ever considered. Fat women, particularly queer or black or other combinations of intersectional oppressions were treated like shit and assumed to be secretly binging instead of engaging in obsessive restriction. Skinny=anorexic. Fat=binge eating. Fat women were denied medical tests and medical care because all their problems were blamed on fatness and its falsely-associated lack of self-care and self-control. I’ve been on the receiving end of some of this bullshit, but not too frequently because I have the privilege to choose my providers and I also avoid going to the doctor like the plague because I don’t want to be harassed or shamed.

I have never been a binge eater. The further I got away from diets, the less I overate at all. As I started to read about Health at Every Size approaches and Intuitive Eating, I realized that I had been sold a whole ass bill of goods about the value and strength of my own body. And that the very diets that I forced myself on over and over until my 30s were responsible for my easy weight gain. Not only that, but I realized that I often revert to restricting behaviors when I am stressed or feeling out of control. I would skip meals and then wonder why I was gaining weight? The answer; my body wanted me to live more than I wanted to starve it. It still does.

I’m now 50. I’ve realized that food restriction has permeated most of my life, and I’m still prone to it if I’m not careful. Even working from home for the last two years, it’s still too easy to drink coffee instead of eating lunch, and then wonder why I feel like shit in the evening. When I signed up for a grocery delivery service, I realized that this low-level anxiety I always have had about food scarcity started to go away. I could always find something in my fridge to eat that would taste good and make my body feel good.

I have internalized so many negative, false narratives about how my body works. I’ve gained weight during the pandemic. I’m 50, perimenopausal, and it’s harder to exercise regularly. But for the first time in my life, I haven’t completely freaked the fuck out about it. I have bad days, but mostly I’m okay. I’m not a small fat anymore. I can still find clothes that fit me and look cute. I’m white, present as feminine, and therefore have a lot of unearned privilege, so I have an unfair advantage over the people struggling with an abusive system that marginalizes them from multiple directions. And I still hate living in a fatphobic society that believes in a set of pernicious lies about fat people.

  1. We are not lazy or weak.
  2. We are not dumb.
  3. We are not more or less healthy, as a population than anyone else (in fact research shows we live longer).
  4. We are discriminated against persistently for no reason other than bigotry and peoples’ own internalized fatphobia and projected existential fears (see my dissertation).
  5. We are loveable and attractive.

All the horrors I was told about how my life would turn out were straight-up bullshit. If I died tomorrow, I could say that I had lived a meaningful, love-filled life.

When Tess Holiday came out publically as having anorexia, more puzzle pieces clicked into place. So many of us are fat because our body-mind relationships were damaged at a really young age, and our bodies compensated by gaining weight to counteract our habitual starvation. Some of us would be fat anyway because fat bodies are part of the normal range of human bodies. But many of us damaged this vital link so young we will never know what our bodies would have been like without episodic starvation paired with deep self-loathing. However, regardless of what my body looked like, it still would have been monitored, critiqued, and judged based on things I have no control over and have nothing do to with my health, attractiveness, or value as a human.

Between our parents, grandparents, society, and the media, there was no way to learn to see fatness as part of the normal range of human bodies. The constant monitoring of bodies, particularly female-presenting bodies, is insidious and incredibly damaging. I had so many random adults “warn” me about my body before it was fat, or when I just wasn’t skinny. My high school choir director. Almost all of my voice teachers (fatphobia was one of the reasons I left opera). Some random dude at my conservatory seemed personally offended when I wasn’t anorexic-thin anymore. Another who I did an opera scene with who was supposed to lift me up and was disgusted that I, a human woman, weighed 150lbs. Many doctors, in spite of the fact that intentional weight loss has been proven to be 1) almost universally unsustainable, and 2) Not particularly conducive to better health, other than it may reduce medical discrimination and mistreatment. (It does nothing to reduce medical racism, transphobia, or healthism).

One light at the end of this tunnel of crap is that younger people are figuring it out way sooner than I did. Skinny and fat, black, white, brown, queer and disabled — we are all recognizing that our culture’s obsession with our appearance is just thinly veiled social control. We don’t need it.

The craziest thing I’ve learned is that having an abundance of nourishing, tasty food available is the best antidote to my anorexic restricting behaviors and their effects. The less I skip meals, the happier and safer I feel. The more excited I am to move — to walk or dance or stretch. The oppressive weight of other people’s perceptions doesn’t do nearly as much to my psyche when it and — my body — feels safe and loved.

My kid, bless them, can spot fatphobia from a mile away. They know that judging people based on how they look is something to work through and release, not justify and cling to. Fun fact: I’ve never put my kid on any kind of diet, or critiqued their body or their food. Their diet may look nuts to broccoli-obsessed parents, but my kid does what I never had a chance to do: just listen to their body and not judge it for what it wants. We don’t force food. My husband and I eat a really wide variety of food, and slowly but surely, the kid is integrating more stuff into their own nutrition. They have an unbroken relationship between their hunger, eating, and how their body feels.

If I can raise just one person who isn’t weight-obsessed and fatphobic, I will have done a damn fine thing. I know other parents like me who are jettisoning diets and weight monitoring for their kids, the way many of us are also jettisoning oppressive falsehoods about gender and sexuality. Some of these kids are going to be unbelievable badasses. Hopefully, they will help the kids whose parents haven’t unpacked all the bullshit and are continuing to pass this generational abuse on to their kids. My kid witnesses casual fatphobia at their middle school all the time — from 11-year-old girls to 60 something-year-old teachers. But at least they recognize it for what it is, rather than internalizing it as some kind of valor.

I’ve had decades of therapy but I am still pretty fragile when it comes to pervasive fatphobia. While I haven’t “dieted” in many years, I slip into restriction without realizing it, though I recover more quickly than before. Luckily, (and deliberately) I have surrounded myself with people who also recognize how damaging diet culture and fatphobia are and don’t trigger my shit. There’s no way to escape it completely, but the saner the people around you, the more obvious the crazy is when you encounter it.

Undereating is not a virtue. Eating is not a sin. Feed your body.

Learn more:
The Body is Not an Apology by Sonia Rene Taylor
Fearing the Black Body by Sabrina Strings
Health at Every Size by Lindo Bacon
Podcast: Maintenance Phase
What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon

Trauma Informed Pedagogy and Whiteness in the Classroom

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Over the past few years, but particularly near the 2020 US Presidential election, I have gotten subtle, and not-so-subtle messages that being too political can be dangerous as a professor. Particularly because I am not protected by tenure, student feedback that labels me as biased can harm my job security.

This isn’t easy to navigate at the best of times. I teach ethics, leadership, developmental psychology, and sociology of the family. I can’t ignore the developmental harm caused by separating children from parents. To do so would be unethical. I can’t ignore the trauma and harm my students, and their families experience at the hands of ICE, racists, homophobes, Islamophobes, police violence, and a harmful justice system. Again, to do so would be unethical. The issues that have become front-page news directly affect many of my students. They tell me about them. I have heard many first person accounts of traumas that I will likely never face. While I have experienced this era’s stress, it hasn’t really affected me directly, mainly because of my whiteness. I did not earn whiteness, yet I get all the unearned privilege that comes with it. Most of my students do not and face dangers I cannot imagine.

I integrate current event discussions into all my classes because I believe it is irresponsible not to. In the process, I learn about the worlds in which my students live, about how campus policies and local politics and national policies affect them, about what they care about, what makes them happy, and what keeps them up at night.

I don’t consider a discussion of current events to be more political than any other aspect of public life. It’s just that, as has been said by women wiser than me, the personal is political. My students’ lives are deeply affected by the community, university, and country’s cultural and political climate. To ignore this fact erases them, causing further harm. It also disengages them from the learning process.

When the Black Lives Matter protests happened this summer, my institution listened to students and faculty and did some promising introspection. I hoped that this constant, low-level pressure would lessen. However, we were instructed to be as apolitical as possible in the wake of the presidential election.

This made me deeply uncomfortable, as I have witnessed the direct harm the current political and social climate has caused to my most vulnerable students.

Almost 95% of my students are women, and about 60% of them are non-white. They are the ones who have been most endangered by the policies and climate of the last four years (and the last 400).

Many of my students are or have been in crisis this year. I try to create a space in my classroom where they can relax a little. Where they can talk about their lived experiences if they want to. And where we all listen, and laugh a little, and think about the world from each other’s perspectives. Most are juniors and seniors worried about the future, worried about choosing a different path than their parents envisioned for them, and right now, worried about social violence and COVID. That is a lot to carry.

Yes, my few conservative white students are probably feeling pretty freaked out right now, much as I was four years ago. But I was never going to be the victim of increased social tolerance for white supremacy (because I’m white), Islamophobia (because I’m white), and the demonization of brown-skinned immigrants (because I’m white).

Part of engaging in Trauma-Informed Pedagogy entails knowing your own issues and dealing with them appropriately. The rules of processing trauma dictate that we take our trauma to someone who is 1) emotionally available, 2) has consented to hold our feelings with us (like a therapist or close friend), and 3) is not experiencing worse trauma than we are. Cognitive dissonance, like I experienced in 2016, and my conservative white students may be experiencing now, is very uncomfortable. It is not, however, life-threatening. I try to listen deeply to my students when they talk about trauma and not impose my own schemas on theirs in an attempt to relate.

I am not a therapist. But I am older, more financially and emotionally stable, and more experienced than my students, so I consent to hold space for them within the classroom boundaries and the teacher-student relationship while referring them to more qualified resources as needed. This is Trauma-Informed Pedagogy.

The mythology of false equivalency created over the last few years and further reinforced by social and mainstream media shows up like this:

Worrying about your Black child being killed by the police during protests is proportionate to feeling angry that a Black man was president.

Avoiding taking your kids to the doctor because ICE has been raiding your neighborhood and has put your uncle in detention is proportionate to being upset that gay people can get married.

Being verbally or physically attacked because you wear the hijab is proportionate to being upset that you are required to wear a face mask.

Physical danger and emotional discomfort are not proportionate.

False equivalency seems to be a pervasive byproduct of an era with continually mainstreamed racism, xenophobia, homophobia and transphobia, ableism, and misogyny. Feeling uncomfortable is not the same thing as being in physical danger. Moreover, being in constant danger due to increased tolerance for hate crimes and discrimination has far-reaching negative effects on mental and physical health.

Cognitive dissonance is the feeling that the world is not as it should be. We may experience it when someone says something in public we believe is false — when someone describes reality in a way we don’t experience. We feel it as tension in our bodies and perhaps as a flood of thoughts trying to defend or justify our position. It doesn’t indicate the rightness or wrongness of our position; it just is. We may also experience it as a symptom of intellectual and psychological growth. In Transformative Learning, a theory that underlies my pedagogy it is referred to as the disorienting dilemma. This happens when a learner is confronted with a viewpoint of the world, or perhaps themselves, which is new and uncomfortable. They must grapple with this discomfort as they test and then integrate the new knowledge into their world and self-view.

I experience cognitive dissonance when a Black activist criticizes white liberals on an issue I haven’t confronted yet. Over time, I have learned to lean into this discomfort, wait for it to pass, and then look at the issue without the need to rationalize my feelings immediately. Often, this causes me to grow just a little bit and to integrate some new knowledge into my world view. When I learned to do this, I stopped being as defensive when my demographic, white women, was criticized and learned to listen more deeply. This makes me a better person, a better ally, and a better citizen. Not perfect — not even close — but a little bit better.

I try to model this in the classroom by remaining receptive to criticism of what material I cover and how I teach it. If a student expresses concern that I am marginalizing a group or leaving out an important perspective, I will discuss it with the class, apologize if necessary, and adjust my approach. It’s not the responsibility of my students to fix my issues — I continue to engage in learning about systemic inequality and improving my practice — but when it happens, it allows me to model humility and flexibility to other privileged people and show that you can screw up and make amends and you will be okay. I try to show privileged students that discomfort is okay; marginalization is not.

Here is an example. I was teaching a class on families’ socioeconomics, and we were discussing current events, which included a wave of performative white supremacy online. A Black woman mentioned that some white people were posting videos of themselves drinking gallons of milk because they claimed that the ability to process lactose as an adult is a sign of racial superiority (rather than a random mutation). I laughed it off as too absurd to be real. Then I googled it when I got home. Yup. It was totally real. So in the next class, I publicly apologized for disbelieving my student and promised to do better. I ate some crow because 1) I totally deserved it, 2) I owed her an apology, and 3) other people need to know that admitting you are wrong won’t actually kill you.

The point of this story is not that I am a super woke white lady. Obviously, I’m not. It’s that I believe that teachers must model ethical, mature behavior, which includes owning our mistakes. (Note: ethics are messy) My Black and Brown students should not have such low expectations of white teachers that I am the best they can hope for. My conservative students should not be so brittle that they can’t handle some alternate perspectives. If I keep trying to be better, then maybe my minority students will expect more from me and my white students will expect more from themselves.

Cognitive dissonance is not life-threatening.

Racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and ableism threaten students’ health and projected lifespan. They affect my students’ likelihood of experiencing violence, the quality of medical care they receive, their job and financial stability, and their access to housing, all during a pandemic that endangers our species. So I cannot in good faith pretend that white students’ discomfort is equivalent to marginalized students’ lack of safety. They are not. I try to center the experiences, critiques, and stories of my non-white students because I believe it is unethical not to. Marginalizing at-risk students isn’t just unethical; it’s dangerous.

Trauma-Informed Pedagogy is not trauma-informed if we do not consider the ways that our social, financial, and political system does disproportionate harm to non-white people. In the aftermath of a contentious election and in the middle of a global pandemic, I cannot ignore this fact at the expense of my ethics, teaching, and, most importantly, my students.

It’s not developmental delay, it’s trauma

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There has been a disturbing trend at my kid’s mostly amazing middle school. One teacher started telling my kid’s class (they are in the 6th grade and in person for the first time since spring of 4th grade) that they were underdeveloped and behaving like 4th graders. She told them she had discussed this with other teachers who agreed.

This is problematic, to say the least. Stigmatizing and shaming a group of kids is just stupid, stupid pedagogy. Shame and fear shut down the higher functions of the brain. Learning becomes close to impossible. It certainly does nothing to endear these students to this teacher or create a safe container for learning.

Later that week the teacher stressed my kid out and they started crying. The teacher took them into the hallway and tried to force them to calm down, while my kid begged for a little time by themselves to self-soothe. The teacher ended up sending my kid to the counselor’s office, who called me while I was teaching a class. This shitshow was entirely avoidable.

Some of the reasons my kid is struggling in this class, much more than their other classes, are they are dyslexic and the philosophy of this teacher seems to be “more is better” and “peer pressure makes better performance.” None of this tracks with kids with neurodiversity, so I do not know what her deal is. We’ve asked to have my kid transferred to another teacher’s class for this subject.

I talked to the counselor about my concerns and contacted my kid’s 504 coordinator. My kid has had very few issues with their other teachers and is doing pretty well for a dyslexic kid newly in middle school. Imagine my surprise when the principal sent out his weekly newsletter, usually a mildly interesting mix of updates and recommendations, and instead echoed what my kid’s less-than-stellar teacher had been saying. They are having discipline issues and it’s because kids are emotionally delayed due to quarantine.

I have been beating the drum of Trauma-Informed Pedagogy for a while now, but this was special. How the fuck do we get from almost two years of uncontrolled sickness, death, and job loss to “emotionally underdeveloped” and just whiz past trauma? More than 50% of the school population in Austin is Hispanic. The Hispanic community has been hammered by COVID. My college students of color are much, much more deeply impacted by the pandemic than my white students, me, and my contemporaries.

At the beginning of the last school year, I published a screed about forcing elementary school kids to be on camera all day for zoom school, because you don’t know what kind of shit they are dealing with. The same applies here. How many relatives have they lost? Have their parents lost jobs? Are they homeless? Are family members experiencing mental health or addiction issues? Have they been deprived of social interaction beyond computer screens because their parents have to work and don’t have time to provide them with stimulation? Can they even access the internet for what little social interaction is available? HAVE YOU ASKED YOURSELF ANY OF THESE QUESTIONS WHITE PRINCIPAL DUDE? Our kids still can’t get vaccinated, are trying to acclimate to an unrecognizable world where a deadly virus is still killing hundreds of people a day in our state, and you are acting like our kids took a fucking vacation for a year.

White Principal Dude, you have trauma. My kid’s abusive teacher has trauma. I have trauma, and so does my kid. We are all just trying to roll with the continuing punches and function as best we can.

Trauma-Informed Pegagogy means we take stock of and honor all trauma, including our own. And as trauma-informed teachers, leaders, counselors, and parents, we do our absolute best to not make our trauma the problem of people with less power than us. EVER. If you are assuming that everyone has a problem but you, you need to take several seats.

My kid got COVID from their school last week and my husband and I have breakthrough cases. As older, higher risk-people, this has not been a cakewalk. but our main fear has been for our kid, who is unvaccinated. Our kid is struggling with guilt for making us sick, despite our assurances that it is not their fault. We are angry at the school for crappy contact tracing. THIS IS ALL TRAUMA. It does not disappear because we don’t want to deal with it. Our tendency to blame, mine included, is a way to avoid the helplessness we feel in the face of this invisible, deadly virus.

Schools, teachers, and administration need to stop putting all the responsibility and blame for COVID onto those with the least power and start dealing with everyone’s actual trauma. Blame is avoidance, which only gets you so far. Our kids need boundaries, yes, but they also need compassionate, healthy teachers, who in turn need emotional, psychological, and financial support to weather this continuing shitstorm. We must do better.

A Tale of Two Governors

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Texas and Florida are the epicenters of the Delta strain Covid outbreak right now. Both governors have outlawed mask and vaccine requirements for publically funded institutions, which includes K-12 schools and public universities. I teach at one such institution.

My university does important research on Covid, yet the leadership refuses to protect students, employees, and staff from possible infection, disability, and death. We have been told that we must return to campus and teach in crowded classrooms, even if we live with unvaccinated children or immunocompromised family members. Students want online classes. Teachers want online classes. Staff wants flexible work arrangements for safety. No one cares. The university has not polled or requested any information from any of the affected stakeholders, and the president, most recently known for keeping a sports song that originated in minstrel shows and booting band members who don’t want to play it (against the recommendation of pretty much everyone) has decided that our fates are unimportant in the greater scheme of things. The greater scheme of things is, apparently, not pissing off our genocidal governor and making more money off the backs of students and underpaid workers, regardless of risk.

One of my students committed suicide last semester. While the university doesn’t publically share the number of suicides, I know anecdotally that many more students took their own lives. Many students lost family and friends to Covid, experienced deep personal trauma, and had severe mental health crises. Mental health resources in Austin have been maxed out for over a year. I spent a lot of time last year compiling mental health resources for students and sharing them widely, for what little good it did. Through all of this instructors and TAs also experienced trauma and loss while trying to adapt to student needs and university demands.

The current situation is untenable and deeply unethical. I know we are not the only university experiencing this; many of my colleagues around the country have been talking about similar situations with their work. So just for the record:

Our lives are not expendable. Our work is not expendable. Our students’ lives are not expendable. Grow a backbone and follow the science you make so much goddamn money off of and protect us from unethical laws instead of pretending that the inevitable illness, disability, and death is acceptable. It is not.

Why we teach.

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My teaching philosophy boils down to this: Don’t be an asshole. Give your students the benefit of the doubt.

College students are young adults or old adolescents, depending on who you ask. They go through a lot of brain and personality development during the four-ish years they spend in college. A few of them are entitled, or sociopathic, or just jerks who make your life harder. The vast majority are not. They are just young people who are trying to figure their shit out and get a degree.

When I talk to professors about the stuff I’m passionate about (Trauma Informed Pedagogy, Intersectionality, Critical Pedagogy) they are usually interested. But when I talk about my policies, or how I deal with students who are experiencing trauma, some get uncomfortable. “I don’t want students to come talk to me about their lives.” “What if they are taking advantage of you?” Some are openly adversarial and hostile towards students, though I don’t hang out with them much. Shocker.

If you want to see yourself as a nice person or a good teacher, ask yourself this:

  • What do you have to lose by giving students the benefit of the doubt?
  • What do you lose by being friendly and approachable?
  • And more importantly, what do you gain by being suspicious and judgemental?
  • Who are you helping?
  • Is your work more fulfilling when students are afraid of you?
  • Is it healthy or realistic to assume students are lying or manipulating you?

I’ve had some shitty teachers because I’ve had a whole lot of school. One yelled at the class and told us our ideas were “pablum” because we didn’t mimic his conclusions. He was special. One, a terrible writer, tried to convince me that accessible writing was bad writing. My sixth grade teacher hated smart kids and bullied and intimidated them in front of the class. They were all either adversarial towards students or easily threatened. They lacked ego strength. They were bullies who got off on the power distance between themselves and their students.

The thing that ties together the best of my teachers and professors is this: Grace. Assuming the best, but being able to critique in a concise but kind way. Having clear boundaries but being willing to hear critical feedback. Having compassion for students and genuinely liking or loving teaching. Having ego strength and being willing to deal with setbacks and failure as steps on the path towards being better rather than blaming students. They had humility and compassion mixed with a goodly amount of confidence in their own abilities and a willingness to learn and improve.

The last year, and particularly the last semester, has just absolutely sucked for students. It’s sucked for teachers too, but it’s REALLY sucked for college students. My students have had issues with housing, anxiety, depression, relapse, and the suicides of their classmates. Lots got COVID because they live together and they can’t control the practices of their roommates. Many are working full time to lessen financial strain on families hurt by the pandemic and our inability to provide anything like a social safety net for our population. They’ve lost friends and relatives to COVID, mental health issues, and other stuff worsened by the social upheaval and ongoing racism in our society. They are tired, stressed, and some are past their limits.

My university is usually pretty hands off when it comes to how we run our classrooms as long as we are in compliance with the law, and those of use who have been sounding the alarm on student mental health are often ignored. But this semester the shit really hit the fan in the form of Snowvid – the mass power, gas, and water outages in Texas due to a snowstorm and prolonged freeze. We were all affected, me included. It sucked. The university urged us to give students extra grace: time on assignments, absences, etc. Most of us did. Some didn’t. Too many of my students told me about teachers holding Zoom classes on days the university was closed due to the freeze (after explicitly telling faculty not to hold classes or give tests).

I got the highest student feedback scores ever this semester, and they are always pretty high. Here’s why: I didn’t assume students were trying to take advantage of me, BECAUSE I DON’T CARE. I am worried about students dying, not whether or not I’m a sucker. If I catch a student blatantly lying or cheating I will take action because it’s irresponsible to let them think it’s okay, and they may do much worse harm in the future if someone doesn’t hold them responsible. But beyond that I do not fucking care if a student asks for an extension for a hangover or a hospitalization. I really don’t. I still failed students this semester, despite a super lenient policy about late work and willingness to be flexible on attendance. If you don’t do the work, you don’t pass. That’s part of my job. But I do not regret helping the students who were able to pull their shit together at the last minute pass my classes. I don’t regret making accommodations for students who were having issues with depression but hadn’t gotten a letter from the disability office yet. I don’t regret letting students who were doing full time child care for bereaved relatives have a pass on Zoom.

If your main joy in teaching is really schadenfreude and you relish the power you have to make your students lives suck, please find another profession. If you are more concerned about being hoodwinked than you are about your students learning, why are you teaching? It can’t be the money.

Stressed out students don’t learn well. (Stressed out teachers have issues too – believe me. My memory this year has been shit.) Further stressing them out unnecessarily when you could extend them some grace is just sadistic bullshit. I am so tired of hearing about “weed-out” classes that result in students dropping out of school. The students who really don’t want to be there will leave, believe me. You should not have a free pass to be an asshole because you teach a difficult course.

If the culture of your department or school is adversarial towards students, say something. Do something. You CAN influence culture change over time. Showing students that they can expect compassion and humanity from teachers empowers them to make change. Giving students a place where they can be authentic has the advantage of making me a better teacher. When students trust me enough to tell me I fucked something up, I can fix it (or myself). You can effectively wield authority while still being a decent human being who treats students like decent human beings. I promise. I could post a ton of research from different fields on the minutiae of why trauma informed, growth mindset, inclusive, experiential, reflective teaching is better teaching, but it really boils down to this. Don’t be an asshole to your students.

Teachers are not collateral damage.

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I’ve read and listened to some utterly infuriating commentary this week from reputable media on sending kids back to physical classrooms. Here are some of the reasons:

  1. Kids are unlikely to get seriously ill.
  2. Rates of infection are not currently higher in school populations than the population at large.
  3. Screens are ruining their brains.
  4. Remote learning is imperfect.
  5. Kids are getting behind in their education.
  6. Kids need normalcy.

I will now call bullshit on these points.

  1. Yes, kids are less likely to get seriously ill with COVID but there are several things missing from this picture. Their teachers can get it and die or be permanently disabled. Several children have died. We don’t know how long (if at all) people are immune after recovery or what the long term effects are, including on kids. School staff can be in high risk categories and will be put at unacceptable risk. Kids can be silent spreaders. They can bring it home to you, and you can spread it to others before you become symptomatic. Dead or hospitalized parents are more traumatic that Zoom. Accidentally killing your grandparents–also more traumatic than Zoom school. Permanently destroying the health of their teachers and other school staff – No. Just no. They signed up to educate you kids, not die for your denial soaked facsimile of normalcy.
  2. When you talk about rates of infection you are essentially talking about acceptable losses. We do not have acceptable losses in the US. We have unacceptable, preventable losses. We have no plan, no tracking, no tracing. Very little testing for screening. What is an acceptable loss? A parent? A kindergarten teacher? A janitor? The principal? 4% of janitors? 20% of teachers? This is not a fucking land war. It’s a fast-spreading, unpredictable, and sometimes fatal or disabling disease that nobody should have to expose themselves to so we can all fake that everything is fine.
  3. Screens are not ruining kids brains. They never have. Kids are creative and social, and the internet provides myriad was for your kids to be creative and social that is developmentally appropriate for their age. Is it better than playing with kids outside? That’s an apples and oranges question. Would I love for my daughter to have a sleepover with her best friends who she hasn’t seen in more than half a year? Hell, yes. But not at the expense of lives of permanent lung or heart damage. Seriously. Get over the screen thing and educate yourself about age-appropriate games, education, and social media. Oh, and there is no diagnosis for game or screen addiction in non-adults. It’s a myth. Make some clear rules and stick to them. Don’t hobble what entertainment and social contact your kid has because you read the internet was going to rot their brains. It’s not. There are tons of websites for evaluating games and platforms for kids.
  4. Yes. Yes it is. Online learning has been a hot fucking mess for my daughter. It is not perfect. It is not normal. You know what else isn’t normal? A GLOBAL FUCKING PANDEMIC. Get the fuck over it. Zoom may not be your or your kid’s favorite thing but neither is killing Grandma. Just get the fuck over yourselves.
  5. Kids have amazing neuroplasticity. And you know what they can learn about right now, even if they are behind in useless standardized testing? The world around them. Social justice. The environment. Cooking. Art. Music. Programming. They will continue to grow and develop and learn when you stop freaking out about whether or not they will get into Harvard and just let them be kids.
  6. Kids need honesty way more than they need normalcy. They soak up stress and sense lies. There is no normalcy available to provide them with. They know stuff is weird and stressful and they pick up WAY MORE than you think they do. Talk to them about why everything is weird in a developmentally appropriate way. You can shelter them from the worst of the trash fire that is our country right now, but you can’t hide it. Be a grownup and figure out what you kids need to feel empowered and knowledgeable. They will surprise you.

Thus ends my current rage list. In summary STOP PRETENDING LIKE EVERYTHING IS FINE. EVERYTHING IS NOT FINE. Deal with reality as it is, not how you would like it to be, and show your kids the respect of valuing their lives and the lives of their teachers over your need to convince yourself that normal is just around the corner. It’s not.