Not Consuming Other People's Waste Energy

Not Consuming Other People's Waste Energy

You don't have to eat that shit sandwich.

There’s an old joke about a bear and a rabbit crapping in the woods. The bear turns to the rabbit and says, “Pardon me, brother rabbit. But when you shit, does it stick to your fur?” The rabbit says, “Why no, brother bear.” So the bear wipes his ass with the rabbit.

I’ve been studying this joke for twenty years. It seems that the modern world likes to use us as rabbits. This happens in grand structural ways, and it happens in intimate inter-personal ways. Systems, and relationships often conspire to make us eat shit.

I know this is a vivid and disgusting visual. I’m using it on purpose. We are sometimes asked to swallow down things that are disgusting, toxic, and poisonous. These things are often handed to us, and we are told that they belong to us. Do they?

If someone hands me a toxic sandwich, do I have to eat it? Or can I set it down? How, if I wished to do that, would I go about doing it?

One of the more significant breakthroughs we have come across, in the treatment of a range of conditions that include migraine, fibromyalgia, auto-immune disorders, cancer, and complex chronic illness, is the degree to which these seem to be the result of a pattern (an energetic habit) of being asked to metabolize other people’s waste energy.

This could be the anger, anxiety, rage, terror, or unpredictability of those around us. It could be their prejudice, bias, or mistreatment. Often, in our research, it becomes clear that these emotions being handed to us by those we grew up with, or are a result of normalized structural oppressions in society-at-large.

We could say, speaking broadly, that modernity is a domination paradigm, and in this search to dominate it conspires to rob of of our sovereignty.

At a physiological level, and particularly when we are small, and more energetically porous (the fontanelles don’t close fully until 18 months of age), our ability to serve as capacitors (energy buffers) in family systems means that often if we are being raised by adults who are not able to fully metabolize their own emotions, they will make use of us for that purpose. (We become the rabbit used by the much larger bear.)

One of our clinical partners works with patients with complex chronic illness. In that patient population, over half grew up with a parent with a personality disorder. Personality disorders, broadly defined, are diseases of relating. When a parent has a personality disorder, many of which are characterized by unstable and intense relationships, the child is forced to adapt to this unpredictability, and often becomes a reservoir for emotions that the parent is unable to metabolize for themselves. Said in plain language: we grow up eating other people’s shit in order to survive. As a child, the cost of not doing this would be too great. Without our family, we would not survive. And so we are forced into this dilemma, which is very costly to our wellbeing.

A similar, albeit sociological rather than familial pattern is where we grow up in a society as a marginalized group, where the society at large makes us eat other people’s shit. This is not abstract or theoretical. Humans are animal. We have an acute sense of power and in this modern society of heirarchy, and thus how we (often unconsciously) take up physical and energetic space, and how we feel entitled to it (or not). Our society allocates (apportions) space differentially. We have words to describe this, such as manspreading, which refers to men’s unconscious expansion both physically and energetically. Women, in modern culture are often socialized to be more attentive to the needs of those around them, while men are often socialized to prioritize their own needs. And so the archetypal image of manspreading is a man sitting on a crowded subway with his legs spread wide, while the women around him are compressed together tightly. If there is a finite amount of any resource, be it time, space, or energy–the way it is distributed among people, particularly when this distribution is inequitable, is registered at the level of feeling. If there is only so much space, and someone takes up more of, I receive less.

And so we, to the extent that we are not dissociated, we have felt contact with the intrusion, the impingement of other people’s stuff, on our felt experience, on our interior.

The first step in addressing these dynamics is to become more conscious of them. We can’t change a pattern we don’t perceive clearly.

The next step is learning what to do with this energy that does not belong to us. It is learning how not internalize that energy, how not to archive it in our own bodies and minds. Because the repeated cost of archiving it is in fact crystal clear. It makes us ill in very predictable ways.