Submitted by TheNerdyAnarchist in Prisons
...or, maybe more accurately, how do you suppress that so-called "lizard brain" reaction that sometimes lingers in the back of your mind that leans toward retribution? When someone wrongs you and/or does something particularly heinous, how do you shut out/rid yourself of the voice in your head that demands payback or punishment?
It's something I continue to struggle with in order to not view myself as being at odds with my abolitionist viewpoint, and I was hoping others could help.
tuesday wrote
(really long comment, so sorry)
i was taking a first aid class when i first learned about the bystander effect (not super related but bear with me). the prof said that the best way to avoid the bystander effect was to recognize what an emergency looks like and decide your course of action before the emergency. this way when you are going through the cognitive process after seeing an emergency your brain already has an answer ready.
a little later i was reading a lot about implicit biases and cognitive biases and enculturation. and then i was thinking about the dbt stuff i did in therapy and a light went off. there was this common theme of following this process through literally everything:
it got me thinking about how many other situations i can make informed decisions about, beforehand, that would help me out of situations where i'm acting on instinct. turns out it's a lot and not only in like bad situations either. like i made a decision to tell my friends i love them when they say or do things that make heart go brrrr and now i tell my friends i love them all the time.
but with regard to your question, i also made the decision that if i had anything stolen from me, unless i needed it for like my ability to live, then i was just going to let it go.
before the start of covid i was setting up a communal house with some local activists and ended up not moving in because i'm immuno-compromised. without getting into boring shit they basically stole like a grand from me. when i recognized what was going on i started to get really mad. that's a lot of money for me. and even if i didn't need it personally i could help a lot of people with a thousand dollars. i have a couple of friends that i help financially when i can because they live in really horrible conditions. that's money that can support them for a couple of months, you know?
but then i remembered that i'd made a decision to let it go. and i had to have a real long conversation with myself about how this money wasn't stolen for funsies, it probably wasn't intentional. like maybe when they got money from me they were in a bind so they used it instead of paying the landlord with every intention of paying that money back and now they're embarrassed and ghosting me because they don't have the money? does it super matter that the money that i don't really need went to people that i didn't agree to help if it helped them anyway?
i'm still annoyed about it, but less about them taking the money and more about them not having faith in me as a comrade and not being upfront at the onset.