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Before you write me an email asking 'what about the middle class,' please understand that I want this comic to still be relevant in 50 years.
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Video game critic at @PasteMagazine. Former @BostonPhoenix games columnist. Keytarist & singer for the @RobotKnights.
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Before you write me an email asking 'what about the middle class,' please understand that I want this comic to still be relevant in 50 years.
New comic!
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The most accurate diagram about class I have seen in recent memory
Portland, OR
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There’s something ironic about the fact that as the deadline for this piece approached, I opened the document and stared blankly at it. Frankly, opening it was progress—I’d been intimidated to come back and make the changes I needed to for days. A piece about imposter syndrome was circulating; it had popped up on my Twitter feed several times. I was afraid to read it. I convinced myself that it explained the points I was making here far more eloquently (and with better graphics!), and no one would need to read my version.
The piece is excellent. I finally read it, and you should read it too. Was it the definitive post on imposter syndrome, such that there never needed to be another one? No. Let alone that it would be impossible (it is a large topic), and that it wasn’t trying to be. I had just convinced myself—irrationally—that an article I hadn’t read meant I had nothing to add to this topic. I was experiencing imposter syndrome… about writing about imposter syndrome.
It’s Environmental
Photo CC-BY garlandcannon, filtered.
This is one manifestation of imposter syndrome—faced with an intimidating task, we fear that we can’t do it. But another, perhaps far more common, manifestation is: faced with a hostile and discriminatory environment, one we are unwelcome in, our perception of our skills, our chances, and our abilities to succeed—change and suffer.
What we call imposter syndrome often reflects the reality of an environment that tells marginalized groups that we shouldn’t be confident, that our skills aren’t enough, that we won’t succeed—and when we do, our accomplishments won’t even be attributed to us. Yet imposter syndrome is treated as a personal problem to be overcome, a distortion in processing rather than a realistic reflection of the hostility, discrimination, and stereotyping that pervades tech culture. The focus on imposter syndrome as a personal problem, as a series of “irrational” beliefs, pathologizes its victims and diverts attention from the problematic environment to the individual: this is classic victim blaming.
The symptoms of what we refer to as “imposter syndrome” were originally defined by Dr. Pauline Rose Clance, in her seminal 1978 paper “The Imposter Phenomenon in High Achieving Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention”. The research was inspired by her experiences in a highly competitive and selective graduate program, from which many of the 25 students enrolled wouldn’t graduate, and her later experiences as an educator and practitioner hearing these same fears from women [covered in Hot Seat].
Whilst imposter phenomenon is about the way that people—in the paper, women—perceive their achievements, it’s created and exacerbated by the environment and the way women are socialized:
“Given the lower expectancies women have for their own (and other women’s) performances, they have apparently internalized into a self-stereotype the societal sex-role stereotype that they are not considered competent (see Broverman, et al., 1972; Rosenkrantz, et al., 1968). Since success for women is contraindicated by societal expectations and their own internalized self-evaluations, it is not surprising that women in our sample need to find explanation for their accomplishments other than their own intelligence—such as fooling other people.”
Despite clear evidence of environmental factors (and the damaging effects of Stereotype Threat), not personal factors, we continue to hear constant refrains about how to overcome as individuals, and how to self-talk and confidence-boost our way into somehow not having it.
Meanwhile: Another depressing day of being ignored in meetings. The end of another long code review in which your every decision was questioned and had to be justified again and again. Another exhausting quarter “leaning in” only to be overlooked for promotion… again. When the HR process ends with a reminder of the enforced silence, and you walk past your harasser in the cafeteria because yes, he still works there—of course he does. A Latina engineer is mistaken for a cafeteria worker. A Black product manager debates whether they should call out another racist microaggression or just let it go. An Asian test engineer sighs as they have to answer the question “No, where are you really from?” one more time. A female interviewer is forced to explain, again, that no, she is not the recruiter.
And all the while, we ignore data on how minorities are perceived when they do “overcome” imposter’s syndrome, and when they are confident… and then punished for it.
The life of a minority in tech is one of a thousand tiny cuts while we’re lectured on “getting over” imposter syndrome. We politely call the environmental causes “unconscious bias,” pretending that it’s no one’s fault because everyone “means well,” like good intentions are magic. And so we whisper amongst ourselves, develop elaborate coping mechanisms, go to therapy, and avoid the guys that everyone whispers about but who are still there—because of course they are. At the end of the day, or late into the night because we’re “leaning in,” we go home and wonder if we can do it again tomorrow.
Is this evidence of imposter syndrome? Or is it an accurate assessment about how unwelcome we are, and how toxic, discriminatory, and abusive our environment really is?
It’s Not About Never Feeling Inadequate
Photo CC-BY Jennifer, filtered.
The other aspect of the imposter syndrome dilemma is that it gets thrown about way more than it should be, used to mean many things beyond what it really does: a catch-all for people—especially women—who have any kind of doubt. But the reality is that technology has an even greater problem than under-confidence: over-confidence. In fact, it seems that the only failure not celebrated in Silicon Valley is the failure of confidence… and so imposter syndrome is treated as something to be avoided at all costs.
What about when, as Lara Hogan put so eloquently, we (or rather other people) call impostor syndrome what is really “having a totally reasonable amount of self-confidence”? Owning what you’re good at—and what you have still to work on? Really, as Christina Xu pointed out, isn’t the problem of over-confidence more prevalent? “Blowhard syndrome” rather than “imposter syndrome”?
If you’ve watched How I Met Your Mother, you’ll be familiar with the Barney Stinson attitude to life.
“You know what Marshall needs to do. He needs to stop being sad. When I get sad, I stop being sad, and be awesome instead. True story.”
On TV, this is comedy. In the tech industry, it’s:
“Sometimes I don’t feel prepared, and so I tell myself that it’s imposter syndrome, and I go do it anyway.”
The existence of imposter syndrome doesn’t mean that no one should ever feel inadequate:
- Just became a manager and worry you aren’t good at it? Maybe it’s not imposter syndrome—maybe you need coaching.
- Just switched to a new platform and worried you don’t know what you’re doing? Maybe it’s not imposter syndrome—maybe you need to read a book or take a class.
- The company you’re running isn’t profitable because your costs are spiralling out of control? Maybe you need to pivot. (And maybe your investors should’ve done better due diligence).
The overconfidence of the industry manifests in widespread dysfunction and failure conditions that affect our employees and our products. The treatment of imposter syndrome as a horrible thing to avoid, a personal flaw, means that sometimes our realistic assessments are misclassified, ignoring their specific context. In fact, the low standards of management in the tech industry suggest that we need more feelings of inadequacy, or at least humility, when it comes to dealing with people. Products that ship without fundamental use cases accounted for (such as Apple Health and its lack of period tracking) suggest that we need more feelings of inadequacy when it comes to “product vision”. Long-delayed projects suggest that we should feel more inadequate about our capabilities when it comes to what we might achieve—or not—in a given time frame. Privacy issues and rampant online harassment suggest that we should feel deeply inadequate about how we’re protecting people’s personal information, and especially that of marginalized people.
In a world where men are judged on potential and women on their past achievements, where the industry is overwhelmingly dominated by privileged white men, the prevalence of over-confidence bordering on Dunning-Kruger is perhaps predictable. We’ve all seen the high-profile failures of cash-flush companies (Color, Google+, Joost) spun as success, of white men who “fail upward,” garnering continued support from VCs even after being forced out of their last company for inappropriate behavior. For white men in tech, the costs of failure are low because they “must have learned,” being so “high potential,” and because, of course, they match the pattern. For those whose failures are lauded and rewarded barely less than their genuine successes, irrational over-confidence starts to seem less bizarre and more like an inevitable outcome. Meanwhile, underrepresented groups are pushed off the glass cliff and told to work on their imposter syndrome.
(Ir)Rational
There are a number of harmful implications to these patterns: the pathologizing of underrepresented minorities, the displacement of responsibility for professional development, and the perpetuation of toxic environments. In the tech community, imposter syndrome is seen as a personal problem of feeling irrationally inadequate—yet continually telling women they are being irrational when they express concerns isn’t helpful. It ignores the culpability of the environment and the processes used to evaluate people within it.
Even if it were possible to trade imposter phenomenon for megalomania (which it isn’t), it would only move us further away from the humility and empathy the leadership and product failures of the tech industry tell us we desperately need. What room does the vast application of imposter syndrome leave for self-doubt or self-awareness? Assuming that it’s just irrational self-doubt denies potentially useful support or training. Most of all, chalking up myriad factors to such an umbrella term belies the need to explore where these concerns arise from and how they can be addressed or mitigated. Subtle or not-so-subtle undermining behavior by colleagues? Gendered feedback? Lack of support or mentorship?
And so tech culture doles out imposter syndrome on one side, hubris on the other. We pretend imposter syndrome is some kind of personal failing of marginalized groups, rather than an inevitability and a reflection of a broken and discriminatory tech culture. On the other side, we pretend that any feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt are something to be avoided at all cost, and that destructive overconfidence is the norm, even the ideal for tech workers—the white male ones, anyways.
Thanks to Ashley, Julia, Martin and Renee for reviewing and giving feedback.
In a recent Playstation television ad, we see some of Sony's most popular heroes—Solid Snake, Nathan Drake and Kratos—gathered at a bar, telling war stories about a man they call only Michael. They name him the hero and savior of their greatest battles, and raise their glasses to his portrait: an image of a young white man, holding a Playstation controller.
The camera hangs reverently on Michael's face, before panning out to reveal a sea of other gamer portraits. But Michael is presented to us as the prototypical "gamer," the accepted idea of what a person who plays video games looks like, at least in the world of mainstream games. "You belong," this ad is saying, to people who look like Michael. "This community is yours. Here, you make the rules."
For decades now, companies have been selling the idea that playing video games places you in a special fraternity of people with similar interests, goals and values, even if those values are as small as "enjoys video games." Ads like this are designed to make Sony's customers feel like a chosen, special people, to generate a fiction of belonging that trumps everything else. In his book Imagined Communities, professor and author Benedict Anderson described this kind of broad, horizontal camaraderie as the source of nationalistic fervor, the sort of thing that makes people want to "die for such limited imaginings."
Gatekeeping is not a new trend in games, and much of it revolves around this imagined community of players—what we think a someone who plays video games does or does not look like, and whose pictures belong on the wall. When Anna Anthropy released Dys4ia in 2013, the conversation centered around whether or not it was really "a game" at all. Maddy Myers, the assistant games editor for Paste, had a colleague refer to her work as "gender stuff". Less than a month ago, the Hearthstone community was wrapped up in an "investigation" of whether or not the player MagicAmy has a man play for her.
For many of the people policing the imagined community of games, the influx of new voices is misperceived as sort of "digital colonialism," where some people are "natives" of the internet and gaming culture, while others are invaders, unwelcome interlopers and newbies. Now that marginalized people are more present and visible in spaces like eSports, journalism or online discussion, many of the Michaels of gaming culture believe that they're witnessing a seizure of resources, or an attempt by outsiders to co-opt their culture or hold it captive.
I spoke with a professor of postcolonial literature—my mother—about the definition of colonialism, which is very particular and specific: It means the seizure of land, then its resources, and then the co-opting of those resources to the captive market of the colonizer.
It may be tempting to make a metaphor about this process when one sees one's subculture changing. It's easy to imagine a newfound influx of women, people of color, and queer people in a space that has been narrativized as belonging to the straight white male as a "seizure of land."
On the phone, though, my mom was fascinated by what I'd asked her: Are there "natives" to non-physical spaces? Are there natives to fandoms, and is there a cultural space at stake when those niche cultures expand? Firstly, she told me, physical space is finite. The British quest for empire involved claiming land and either eliminating or subjugating their native peoples.
On the internet, of course, people in fandoms can literally just go somewhere else. The internet is infinite, as are the communities that spring up around gaming; there's enough for everyone, and as games diversify, it's easy to imagine that soon there will be a game for everyone, too. From a purely capitalist perspective, creating a product that appeals to as many markets as possible has a good thing. The market isn't shrinking, changing focus or expelling anyone—it's growing.
My mother also told me that that the most significant difference between colonialism in history and colonialism as it's described here is race. My mother and father were both bodily displaced by colonialism, my grandfather born under British rule. Is anyone, least of all white men, actively being displaced in fandom or in online communities? Is there a white male diaspora of gaming culture on the internet, are they creating actual microcultures in foreign lands as their own is taken away from them?
Obviously not—the historical precedent of colonialism feels like a good metaphor, but colonialism's lasting effects on society at large mean more than just, "The thing I like no longer feels like it is mine." It was always yours. It was always everyone's. It's just that now more of the 'everyones' are claiming their seat at the table.
Colonialism historically removed power from minority groups, stripping them of their homes and cultures. But no matter how many thinkpieces on gender and race and sexuality in games get written, there will be a new Call of Duty every year. For every Twine game, there are thousands of bros who will buy the next hot AAA release without reading a single review.
This is all true of broader media as well. Black Cinema in the '90s didn't kill Hollywood, and if it had, this Oscars season might have looked significantly different, and Spike Lee wouldn't have to fund his films through Kickstarter. In the '90s renaissance of black sitcoms, did Friends or Seinfeld go away?
Way back in 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne described the growing number of female authors as "a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public is occupied with their trash… Generally, women write like emasculated men, and are only to be distinguished from male authors by greater feebleness and folly."
Despite Hawthorne's opinions, women continued to write. The novel as an artform didn't die—and we all still read his work, too. When marginalized voices come to take their seat at the table, there will always be an outcry that they are invaders, colonists, inferior versions of their straight, white male counterparts. But rather than killing artforms, the addition of marginalized voices often helps ensure that they stay alive.
Journals like the Arcade Review, writers like Austin Walker, game developers like Alpha Six Productions are not asking to displace the games communities that exist, but to converse with them and to keep them from stagnating. If minority voices do not participate in an artform, where, exactly will that artform go? How will it be challenged and provoked if there are no workers to do the challenging and provoking?
Where would avant-garde cinema be without Maya Deren, whose authorship of her own work was challenged—as women's authorship is almost always challenged? If the current Fine Arts climate can support both Kara Walker and Ryder Ripps, I am sure gaming can handle both Merrit Kopas's Hugpunx and EA's Battlefield: Hardline. The same corporations that sell us the idea of gamers as an imagined nation are experiencing a wave of diminishing returns on their franchises. What we see in gaming right now is not colonialism, but evolution: the changes that need to take place for the art form to survive and thrive. Rather than imagining games as a community of chosen people whose integrity must be protected, everyone must take a broader view of the form and the multitudes it already contains.
Boston, MA
Before I start, let me get some things straight: I’m a queer feminist. I think society is pretty damn sexist, and that video gaming is one area where it’s particularly obvious. I think the treatment of Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian and a bunch of other people these last few weeks is despicable. I think being angry and defensive when you’re being harassed for your gender or for how much sex you’ve had is a totally valid thing to be.
But I’m so sick and tired of how some people I otherwise respect and agree with keep responding to those who disagree with them.
This isn’t tone policing, this is asking you to stop using words and concepts that exclude people.
You can’t build an inclusive, friendly place on exclusionary, insulting language.
There’s a bunch of things that have been bothering me – not just in the recent “GamerGate” things, but in the “Women Against Feminism” debates before that, and a whole bunch of stuff before that too. So here’s a few things we need to stop doing if we want to build the inclusive society we claim to.
‘You just can’t get laid’ – ‘Hah, they’re all virgins’ – (See also: my earlier blog on this).
I’ve written about this in more detail at the link above, but basically: not having had sex is not a bad thing. It should not be used as an insult. A feminist calling someone misogynistic a virgin as an insult is upholding the societal standard of compulsory sexuality just as much (if not more, since people may think feminists have more ‘progressive’ views on sex!) as anyone else. Plenty of people don’t have sex – I’m asexual, and many asexual people don’t. Referring to a lack of sex as a negative thing just shows me that you don’t care about people like me in your supposedly inclusive end-state.
‘I’m sick of these lunatics’ – ‘These deranged people’ – ‘These people are crazy’
Seriously, just stop with this. Mental illness is stigmatised enough. People who are sexist (or racist, or homophobic) are not crazy, or mad, or deranged, or nutcases or any of these numerous phrases I’ve seen thrown around this week. Just because you disagree with someone, find their morals reprehensible, or because they’re harassing you does not mean that you should call them anything referring to mental illness. I mean, way to show those who are on your side that you just don’t care about excluding them, right?
On another note, this kind of discourse is actively harmful to reducing sexism (and racism, and homophobia, and so on). Treating people who hold these kind of opinions as separate – as the other, as an almost monster-type figure (and don’t even get me started on how equating mad to monster-like is terrible!) stops us discussing how normal these views are. And by normal, I don’t mean acceptable, I mean common. Almost everyone has at some point held views like this, no matter how inclusive you think you are now. I know I did. Teenage me used to think femininity meant weakness. I have relatives who still think the Jennifer Lawerance nude photo thing was a little bit her fault – despite also thinking the people sharing them are awful and sexist. If we start to view the people with these opinions as extremes, as the other, we stop being able to see it in our friends, family and co-workers. How can you challenge something that you can’t even recognise in yourself and others because you’ve othered it so much?
‘Pink curly handwriting hurts my brain’
So this one is from a response to the women against feminism campaign, but it’s relevant to other things. Stop devaluing femininity in your responses to people! What does it matter if someone writes their opinion down in a pink curly font? Stop assuming that women who wear make-up are somehow less feminist than you are – stop assuming that wearing dresses or actually conciously choosing for your own reasons, not those of society, to be a housewife makes you less valid as a woman. The whole point of feminism is choice. Other ways people are guilty of this are calling men who disagree with them ‘whiny girls’ or implying ‘I’m more of a man than you are’, or suggesting that complaining is a feminine trait. Just think about what you’re implying when you choose to devalue things like pink, or emphasise masculinity as something you have and then men you’re arguing don’t.
Also, don’t patronise women who differ in opinion from you. Let’s look at that some more, shall we?
‘Women against feminism are…’ – (See also: this twitter feed)
The response to the women against feminism campaign has almost always been one I can’t get behind. As the above account – which I’ve seen retweeted by many women I otherwise respect and agree with – shows, the response is to call women who disagree stupid, ill-informed or ridiculous. Even if we ignore the fact that there are good reasons some people might not agree with feminism or choose not to call themselves feminists – there’s a reason womanism is a thing, after all, this response is exclusionary and unhelpful.
Women who don’t necessarily agree with or identify as feminists aren’t stupid. Sometimes they might misunderstand what feminism is, sometimes they might be actively rejecting it because the feminism they’ve encountered is anti-femme, anti-trans or otherwise holds views they reject. My mother, for instance, avoided the term feminist because all she’d encountered of it were people telling her she was wrong for giving up a career for her children. She’s not stupid, or ridiculous. She had a valid complaint, and chose to avoid the movement. Since then, she’s seen that was just one face of feminism, and there are others she agrees with. How? Through showing her those, instead of insulting her choice. When did feminism become about insulting the intellect of women whose opinions differ? When did it become about being patronising, positioning ourselves as an authority and intellectual superior who is willing to graciously offer “a place at our table for you whenever you’re ready. You can even bring your pink pens.”
Another thing about the whole intellectual superiority thing? It’s incredibly elitist. Yes, maybe you’re up to date on the latest academic feminist theory, and you know all about the definitions of words like intersectionality, privilege and the nuances that you might find in discussions of sex-positivity. That doesn’t make you better than people who don’t. Not everyone has the time, money or even ability to entrench themselves in academia in the same way. That doesn’t make them less than you or make their opinions intrinsically less valid. There’s a huge difference between willful ignorance and a simple lack of knowledge about a subject. Being up to date on the latest theories isn’t everything. Intelligence comes in many different ways, and being aware of a hundred years of feminist history isn’t the only one.
And a couple more minor ones…
‘You’re just a fat, ugly neckbeard’
I really shouldn’t need to explain why emphasising looks as a response to people is bad, right? But in case I do: stop using fat as an insult. People far better at explaining it than I have discussed this. It’s the same with ugly. How can we say we want a world where people are judged on their looks or weight when we’re doing the exact same thing? There are far worse things in the world than being fat or ugly. People are cruel, spiteful or mean. Hell, people are arseholes, shitheads – there’s a whole world of profanity out there that’s insulting without relying on equating fat or ugliness with bad. (Note: I’m not commenting on whether I think insulting people is appropriate as that’s a whole other topic).
I’ve been gaming longer than you
For all we like to talk about how it doesn’t matter how new to being a geek someone is – how it doesn’t matter if they only got into Marvel originally because Iron Man was hot or how not knowing the backstory of all your favourite characters doesn’t invalidate you, we sure like to use it to defend ourselves. You can’t tell people not to call us fake geek girls, to say that knowledge/backstory/time in a fandom is irrelevant and then respond by saying ‘I’m a better geek than you’. Seriously. That just validates the whole damn idea of geekdom being something that you have to fulfil certain qualifications for!
There’s almost certainly more that I’ve missed because I’ve either not seen them or thought about them. If you’ve got something to add, please do add it below!
But we can’t get to our ideal end-state of a society that is inclusive and caring and safe for everyone by using language that excludes and divides like this. I know I’ve held opinions and used terms I now know better about. I probably still do. I’d like to get better at that, because I know it’s against my ultimate goal.
We need to be better than this.
Urgh! The whole reason I came up with the word "misogynerd" three years ago was so that we wouldn't have to use words like "neckbeard"!
Santa Cruz, CA
“When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don’t blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce. Yet if we have problems with our friends or family, we blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like the lettuce. Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and argument. That is my experience. No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding. If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change.”
I work as a therapist. I work as a consultant. I work as an executive coach. And I have heard this question hundreds, if not thousands of times over the course of my career. "Can people really change?" And behind that question is actually the statement, "I mean, he’s always going to be that way right? I mean, there’s no point in even getting him help, if he can’t change.”
The psychologist Gordon Allport once said that the definition of personality was essentially that you know who you are when you wake up tomorrow. So yes, there is something enduring about each of us. Some thread that runs through all of our years and make each of us who we are—so there is something in us that feels unchangeable. And indeed when those things do change—typically because of brain injury or memory loss—then we know longer feel like ourselves and people feel like they lost ‘us.’
So what do we mean when we talk about change? We don’t question whether babies and children can change. We pray that our teenagers will change. But somehow when we get to adulthood we believe in a fixed notion of a person. That they will essentially be who they are. So why bother with change—either my own or supporting someone else.
One of the problems is that change is a big topic. I can change my behavior: I can stop smoking or start exercising. I can shift my mindset and way of making meaning in the world: I can start taking another person’s perspective in a new way, or see a situation from multiple viewpoints—which I might call growth, but growth is change. I might use a behavior change to trigger growth: I might use behavioral change to stop interrupting people so that I am a better listener and with this change I can better understand other people’s perspectives.
Neuroscience, as I wrote about in the Norman Doidge book review, states unequivocally that our brains can, and do, change. Brains are designed with neuroplasticity—and our brains will change based on what we do: they will shift to match their use. So at the neural level the answer is OF COURSE PEOPLE CAN CHANGE.
But all of us, every single one of us also knows that, it can be really difficult to make change. It is difficult to shift something, to learn something new. This is why we find ourselves doing that same, frustrating thing, over and over again.
The question about whether people can change does make you want to take out the old joke about the light bulb. You know the one: How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb? Just one, but the light bulb has to really want to change. And our motivation for change, our readiness for change and how change is connected to what matters to us most all impacts our capacity for change.
But today I want to highlight the way we support ourselves and the way we think about change at all.
When I think about change I always start with the gurus of change: children. Why? Because in the right environment children grow beautifully, on their own trajectory. Even kids who have some big struggles, if you get any of the obstacles even slightly out of their way, they shoot forward, back on track. I have to say that the human brain and spirit loves to grow. I have witnessed it over and over and it has made me a devout believer in growth. Thich Nhat Hanh described it perfectly. We don’t blame the lettuce for not growing. We much look at the conditions we are asking the lettuce to grow in.
And this is where I think we are terrible about growth in adulthood. In the best of circumstances children live in a world where they can safely lean on the adults around them—where the ‘soil’ of their lives is safe enough that they can spend their energy growing. The ‘dependence’ and security of their lives doesn’t make them helpless, it provides a safe platform from which to launch.
In psychological terms we call this safe platform a ‘secure base’ and it provides external stability and an internal sturdiness to weather the turmoil of growth and change. This is what change requires. A secure base—something that feels solid enough to lean on and leap from.
And my observations is that adults get all confused about needing support or stability. Either they get fixated on the idea of stability and security as the goal itself, and forget to let go and trust the internal sturdiness. Or, they are so frightened of leaning on anyone or anything else that they never feel safe enough to let go and try something new because they have to use all of their energy staying put and holding themselves together.
So much of the work I do isn’t getting people to change or making people change: it is getting them to create an environment that would allow them to grow or heal or change. My experience is that adults want to grow too. That just like the kids I have worked with, when you can clear obstacles they often shoot forward on their own power. So in many ways change is complicated for adults because they are both the creators of the soil of their garden, and the seeds they would plant.
For children, change is the constant. They are used to feeling off balance a lot, which explains a lot of the meltdowns we help them through. They use up a lot of energy managing the ups and downs of change and growth—and they often long for something familiar and stable. Which is why they always want to hear the same story over and over, or watch the same movie over and over.
Adults often notice that they go through big changes when life throws them a curve ball: when there is a death, or divorce, or a birth, or a change of job. It seems that adults often have to be thrown overboard from life in order to get back into the ocean of growth. So it seems so important to help people understand that the goal of stability in adulthood isn’t stillness or "having arrived." The purpose of stability is to create a springboard. If we thought of our ability to use our relationships, and supports and strengths less as a “safe house to live in” and more like ‘fixed ropes’ to climb with—we would have a different experience of adulthood and growth. Growth is the very definition of disequilibrium. And when we think of adulthood as this ‘solid, stable platform’ then when we feel off-balance, we think we are doing something wrong. But if we thought of adulthood as ‘great climbing gear’ then we would know that the experience of feeling off balance here and there was simply the experience of moving forward.
So this week—rather than thinking about what you want to change. Ask yourself what you can do to create better conditions in your life for growth and change. What can you do to make the ‘soil’ of your life better for your own growth? And ask yourself what your attitude about change is. How do you understand the days you are off balance? When your foot is on one ledge and your hand is reaching up toward a handhold? How can you help yourself enjoy the feeling of shifting from one spot to another?
© 2015 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD
When people ask me why I'm moving from Boston to Portland I wish I could just send them this blog post.
Portland, OR
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After reading about gender-bias and conversation dominance in the classroom, I asked for a peer to observe a physics class I was teaching and keep track of the discussion time I was giving to various students along with their race and gender. In this exercise, I knew I was being observed and I was trying to be extra careful to equally represent all students―but I STILL gave a disproportionate amount of discussion time to the white male students in my classroom (controlling for the overall distribution of genders and races in the class). I was shocked. It felt like I was giving a disproportionate amount of time to my white female and non-white students.
Even when I was explicitly trying, I still failed to have the discussion participants fairly represent the population of the students in my classroom.
This is a well-studied phenomena and it’s called listener bias. We are socialized to think women talk more than they actually do. Listener bias results in most people thinking that women are ‘hogging the floor’ even when men are dominating.
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Stop interrupting me: gender, conversation dominance and listener bias, by Jessica Kirkpatrick from Women In Astronomy
Implicit bias is a thing, just like privilege. Calling it out isn’t meant to shame anyone, but to alert us to step it up and improve ourselves so everyone can have a voice. Be conscious of what you and others are saying, and know when not to speak.
(via scientific-women)
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