What does real leadership look like in an age of Kyle Rittenhouses?
On leadership as a skill of helping others to regulate their nervous system
Friends, after Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted last week by pleading fear — even though others around him were also afraid -and- he willingly entered the chaos of a turbulent situation — I can’t help but weep. I love America. And yet, I’m grief stricken by the country’s youthful indisposition to hold its inner contradictions. This is an open letter to America, and reflects on what freedom and transformative leadership looks like in these turbulent times. As always, I love hearing your reactions. Happy Thanksgiving, M.
My dearest Americans,
You so desperately want to be good — to stand for freedom, to be strong. You want to stand in the light. But the longer you strain to stand in the light, the longer your shadow grows.
The truth? Your hidden fear is tyrannizing us all.
Righteous anger — which some have branded as real masculinity and patriotism — you say, fuels the strength needed to power and preserve order in the face of chaos; and that toughness is the only thing that will hold this country together.
But that anger is masking fear, particularly the fear of being powerless.
In these turbulent times, I see how overwhelming — traumatic even — it is to try to absorb the change washing over our shores. Reliable old dominions — over nature, power structures, and even once seemingly immutable binaries like gender — are crumbling.
The turbulence challenges your basic sense of security, and perhaps even your sense of home. So when feeling under siege, the primal energy of self-preservation — fight-flight-freeze — revs into overdrive, seeking safety in the ambiguity of the unknown.
But what you don’t realize (and that no one really teaches in schools) is that once mobilized, that raw survival energy needs to be expressed. The stress cycle needs a vehicle for resolution. Otherwise, without a place to go, stress hormones continue to course through your veins unmetabolized, and your body gets stuck in a state of constant (dis)stress. From this place, it doesn’t take much to fly into reactivity (the hyper-vigilance of fight-flight), or crash in collapse (the numbness, disassociation, or incapacitation of freeze).
Once a few bodies get stuck in dysregulation, like a contagion, mirror neurons make it easy to recruit other nervous systems to join you. The neural mirroring can feel like the security of community; but it’s belonging contingent on dysregulation.
And once stuck in fear, it’s hard to see the world as anything other than threatening. The color of life gets drained, and everything turns into black or white: the ‘with us’ or ‘against us’ of unyielding polarization.
In fact, under the trance of fear, it justifies why 17 year olds like Kyle Rittenhouse can carry illegally obtained firearms as patriotic vigilantes and take lives, but later plead fear. (Similarly, it can make it feel righteous to cry “Drill, baby drill!” and to repeal abortion rights because it reaffirms dominance over what you believe should remain submissive — land and women.)
It may seem like you’re fighting for freedom. But in this dis-united state of overwhelm, it’s easy to confuse threats to actual physical survival with threats to your identity (which the ego as a matter of course confuses as life or death).
The real (in)civil war we’re already fighting is against disowned fear without a home. Without a refuge — a place where the door is open to grapple with this source of inner turbulence — our borders will always feel insecure, our walls never tall enough.
So reclaiming America’s soul isn’t merely about politics or policies. It’s also about daring to welcome the huddled masses of inner refugees waiting at the border of our awareness.
Because, as poet David Whyte writes:
“Vulnerability is not a weakness, …or something we can arrange to do without, vulnerability is not a choice, vulnerability is the underlying, ever present and abiding undercurrent of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature, the attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to become something we are not.”
“To have a temporary, isolated sense of power… is a lovely illusionary privilege and perhaps the …most beautifully constructed conceit of being human and especially of being youthfully human, but it is a privilege that must be surrendered with that same youth.”
“The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability.”
Freedom in the face of tidal change lies not in reflexively exiling our fears, but in creating spaces where our fears and inner contradictions can come to be held in the wider, more generous space of whole-hearted belonging.
Real resilience requires developing the awareness to recognize when our bodies have mobilized beyond the true needs of the situation. Real sovereignty begins when we have the skills to regulate our nervous system. And a key component of real leadership under turbulence looks like being a trusted presence whose settled nervous system helps other nervous systems ground and settle into a state of relaxed aliveness.
This is the real foundation of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And in these bewildering times, this is perhaps our only reliable way to find safe passage out of this harrowing middle passage.
With love for you America,
Melissa
If you’d like to go deeper…
Collective trauma expert Thomas Hubl … on what to do when overwhelmed (5 min intro to the practice of regulation), and on what leadership through co-regulation looks like (2 min).
And in case you missed it… On the hidden dynamics of anger. (5 min)
This is one of my favorite pieces that I wrote last year: What my illegal immigrant grandfather taught me about white nationalism
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