Year of Discovery (Week 9: Colors of Our Humanity; Exposure Therapy)

What a dynamic week it’s been. Last week, I shared that I’m starting to move from conversations and general ideation to true prototyping, because I was starting to hit a wall in conversations and knew that I needed to embed myself more into the environments where I could understand my learning questions better. The conversations I’ve had over the last 8 weeks have been truly enlightening and served the purpose of refining my learning questions and assumptions as I think more broadly about what I’m curious about and how the world is changing. While I wasn’t keen on taking on work for the first two months of my YoD, the prototyping stage I’m moving into means getting my hands dirty and contributing to work, organizations and environments that will help me get even more clarity on my learning questions.

Since last week, interesting opportunities for prototyping have emerged. As I looked at the different opportunities that have come up, I scored them against these criteria: 1) What learning question(s) this work will help answer + potential pathways after 2) # of days per week 3) What skills I will acquire 4) What output I will produce with each one 5) What decision-making influence I will have 6) Who I’d be working with and how 7) Flexibility on location. I created my criteria to allow for my continued discovery both within and outside of the short-term work.

The Colors of Our Humanity

The world is truly a fascinating place and the more time I spend learning about subjects, people and events, the more I solidify that there is no true ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and ‘black’ or ‘white’. The labeling we put on different people and events encourages simplicity and strips away the nuance and color of the constantly evolving nature each of us is going through daily. While beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so is every other label —ugliness, good, bad, inspiring, horrendous, etc — and ultimately, everything is a perception and reflection of our own minds. In a world that prioritizes speed and efficiency, which focuses on simple, flashy headlines and quick summaries, we often forget to slow down and instead, overlook the complexity that may show us the truth about ourselves and the world. Complexity and holding onto the duality that we can be both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is both uncomfortable and reassuring.

The different books and pieces I’ve been reading lately have only helped to illustrate that labeling someone as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is the easy way out, instead of practicing true empathy and compassion for the suffering people have and choosing to see everyone around us as evolving humans. In Ashley C. Ford’s striking memoir Somebody’s Daughter, she writes openly about her fractured childhood. In a podcast I listened to this week about her book, she shares her hope that readers don’t experience the various characters in her childhood life as ‘good’ or ‘evil’ but rather encourages the reader to empathize with the true human-ness of each one of them. It’s not about looking at her parents as evil but rather being able to empathize with how and why they made certain decisions and chose certain actions. In Maya Angelou’s All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, she writes about her time in Ghana and the anxiety, the anger, the frustration she felt throughout different events that happened. Maya Angelou illustrates herself and her processing from a truly authentic perspective and forces the reader to grapple with both the positive and negative characteristics she had and our perceptions of it.

Reading these pieces shows me that the depth of emotions and thoughts (especially around the tension we each hold around different dualities) aren’t just for the ‘great thinkers’ among us; we are all ‘great thinkers’ in that way. But the ‘great thinkers’ are those who are willing to be vulnerable, show and unveil their inner world in a way that allows people to see their own humanity within it.

• Who do you read that opens your eyes up to the humanness of each of us?
• How do you stay grounded in periods of suffering, frustration and anger and remember that everyone around you has or is experiencing the same thing?
• How do you share your experience vulnerably and who do you share it with?

As I connect with more people and see their true humanness, I’m always reminded that the braver and kinder I am about sharing my story and my dualities (not to take up space, but rather to connect and build a safe space), the more we are able to shed our labels and engage with each new person as another fabric in the quilted universe that we’re all part of. Like most other people, I experience anger, jealousy and frustration. I also experience compassion, peace and kindness. None of these fleeting emotions make me good or bad; just a human that is working towards more peace.

Exposure Therapy

This week, I’ve also been reading more about exposure therapy, which is used to treat anxiety, phobias or fears. It’s a technique in behavior therapy that involves exposing the target patient to the anxiety source or its context without the intention to cause any danger.

There are three types:

Vivo (“in life”) exposure therapy: when a person gradually exposes themselves to anxiety-provoking situations in real life in an effort to desensitize themselves from these experiences.

Imaginal exposure therapy: when a person participates in a guided imagery session that has them imagine themselves being exposed to triggers for their anxiety. In doing so, the person is able to start to identify what they would need to do to overcome their fears.

Flooding exposure therapy: when a person is exposed to the most anxiety provoking situation they can identify right away instead of building up to it like in vivo and imaginal exposure therapy do. Eventually the person becomes exhausted by the situation and their anxiety begins to decrease.

As children, our parents raised us with a form of exposure therapy by opening up our eyes to experiences we may fear (losing a sports match, performing in a recital, petting a ‘strange’ animal, being put in social situations when we’re uncomfortable) or helping to expose us to what we don’t know that we don’t know (new places, people, events, ideas). Understandably from our childhood through our adolescence and into the ever-changing 20s, people may experience more change than in later parts of their life.

Learning about exposure therapy has made me reflect that this is something that the brave among us do as adults as well. We can choose 1) to acknowledge the fears that we have 2) expose ourselves to uncomfortable situations that make us confront those fears and 3) see how our anxiety decreases around those fears. To reflect on:

• What areas in your life can you apply some form of exposure therapy to? What are you afraid of?
• What is your preferred method of exposure therapy? Do you need a shock to confront your fears or can you gradually confront the fears?
• What other methods of confronting your fears have you found to work for you?

An idea to leave you with this week: Revolutions without propaganda are atrocities.