Exploring our discomfort: what to do when the ground shifts and changes around us?
The pandemic has created uncertain times and the past 18 months has thrown up a lot of grief and discomfort. This has been highlighted in the birth world in recent weeks, with conversations becoming increasingly polarised and sometimes distressing to witness or engage in. Why is it that at times of crisis and change we begin to fight? In this blog, we use a trauma-informed approach to consider why this is happening and consider what we can do to tolerate this discomfort and distress.
As human beings we don’t like uncertainty. These have been such uncertain times and, here in England, as we are encouraged to celebrate our ‘freedom’ whilst thousands of people are told to self-isolate, the ground can feel quite shaky beneath our feet.
Add to that, we are experiencing collective trauma. It’s not just that things feel uncertain, it’s also that we have been living with change and loss for many months and our sense of safety in the world has been shaken.
Uncertainty creates anxiety
What do we do, when we are uncertain? Uncertainty creates anxiety. So, we find ways to create certainty. We cast our minds ahead, sometimes to the worst possible outcome, but even planning for catastrophe brings a sense of short term relief. At least we know what we’re dealing with.
Add on to that - what do we do when we are living with trauma? We can easily lose our capacity to rationalise and reason – we look for perceived threats and we react as strongly as we can because we need to fight back, or run away, or shut down until it’s all over. And the longer we live in a frightened state, the harder it is to shift out of it.
“We wanted to create a space where all voices were welcome”
The Make Birth Better position
We’ve been discussing these two questions a lot at Make Birth Better over the past weeks, but also over the whole of the past year – how do we manage uncertainty, and how do we hold on to reason when everything around us feels so unreasonable. One of the strengths of our organisation is that we try to hold middle grounds. We started the organisation for this very reason – because we were tired of the mudslinging that so often went on in the birth world and we wanted to create a space where all voices were welcome. So we often find ourselves in the position of telling each other to pause. To open out a dialogue that has become stuck. To look for nuance within a position, but also to expand our gaze to consider issues we hadn’t considered before.
Embracing mistakes and making progress
In two of the most currently polarising areas in the so-called ‘birth world’- inclusivity and representation for people of colour and for those who give birth but do not identify with the terms ‘women’ and ‘mother’- this was often because things were pointed out to us by others. This is built into our culture. That we exist as flawed humans in a flawed world, and that when mistakes are pointed out to us our response is to acknowledge, remain curious, and consider how we grow.
At our inception, we were told we were ‘a bit snowy white peaks’ so we thought through who we were representing and how – and we continue to have these conversations and work to make changes. We do this slowly, so that our change is meaningful and long lasting. Someone gently reminded us on a post that not all those who give birth are mothers, and we spoke to colleagues and each other to agree on the language that we would be using (our conclusion, like others, was that ‘women and birthing people’ was the most inclusive). There have been many other examples of this – from captioning on videos, to educating ourselves on birth injury policy, to exploring the invisibility of disabled parents, to highlighting the impact of the pandemic on staff as well as parents. We don’t see these as separate events but part of our progress towards an intersectional way of thinking, able to hold in mind multiple perspectives and consider the cumulative impact on multiply marginalised groups. We often find ourselves feeling pulled in different directions and work as a team to hold our position, to learn together… and to remind each other when we’re being a bit adrenaline-led (it helps when your CEO is also a mindfulness teacher).
“‘Hurt people hurt people’ and – at this stage of the pandemic – we are seeing this everywhere”
‘Us and them’ narratives
The past year has thrown up a lot of pain in the birth world. The impact of the Black Lives Matter protests last June, in addition to the stats from the MBRRACE report, and in the last couple of weeks the NICE guidance on induction – all threw a much needed light on structural racism but caused such distress for many black and brown people and left others feeling ‘shocked’ and, often, defensive. Since last June and JK Rowling’s essay on sex and gender issues, and then the past weeks with Milli Hill’s writings on her experiences of bullying and her views on inclusive language in maternity – there has been increasing fervour around arguments about the rights of trans, non-binary and non-gender conforming people. These have been posited frequently as running counter to ‘Women’s Rights’ and complex information about biology, gender, sexuality and safety are presented in increasingly reductive and hurtful ways.
And this year more than ever, we notice increasingly polarised, often indignant, accounts containing more and more ‘us and them’ narratives which (sometimes unconsciously) reveal embedded discrimination. We read about ‘cults’ and ‘battles’. Whole, complex people are reduced to acronyms. We lose completely the middle ground which, in this case, are the things which connect us and the common objectives we hold.
Of course, there are fundamental differences in people’s experiences and there is a need to be heard for those who are hurt. But, as the old saying goes, ‘hurt people hurt people’ and – at this stage of the pandemic – we are seeing this everywhere. In our uncertainty, exhaustion, pain, anxiety, our vision becomes laser focused and our priority is survival. Whatever that means. Intellectually, physically, existentially.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that, 18 months into a global pandemic and with trust in government and authorities at an all-time low, we begin to fight each other. We take our powerlessness and we turn it on our neighbours.
Changing our position
Witnessing – and experiencing – this, we at MBB have changed our position a little bit. In some cases – where we feel harm is being caused – we now hold a stronger stance. Usually we do this quietly, rarely publicly because we believe in people’s capacity to grow and this becomes less likely when shame is felt, and we do this focusing on that person’s actions rather than their whole selves because we believe in the essential goodness of people. We are here to represent everyone and we have a priority to highlight voices that have historically been marginalised. We learned from the Black Lives Matter protests that inaction is not a passive choice, and that in some areas it’s crucial to challenge especially in order to protect people from further harm or lack of psychological safety. We don’t always get this right, of course, and rely on the inspirational community we are part of to correct our mistakes. We’re aware that we often hold more power than we realise.
“Maybe at times of progress there is always friction. But what comes next could create new ground for us all”
Finding new ground
But we also loosened our position in other ways. Not just to looking at middle grounds but broadening out our gaze to the wider landscape we hadn’t seen yet. Looking not at heated threads on social media, but perhaps wondering where this fits in the whole UK ‘culture wars’ thing we keep hearing about - and when we include that broader perspective we find that – surprise, the majority of British people are not reluctant to share their views on controversial issues such as racism or trans rights. Widening our horizons by exploring the roots of structural racism, and considering how we contribute to this ourselves. Reading about the history of biological sex and, even, its patriarchal roots. Exploring family-first services and questioning what this means for the role of ‘mother’.
And, as we broaden our gaze to new ground – we find yet more ground to uncover. We even begin to feel a sense of adventure about our new explorations.
Exploring our discomfort
When times are uncertain, we turn to certainty. We don’t like cognitive dissonance, when new information which contradicts our beliefs causes us to question the bedrock which underpins our view of the world. So perhaps sometimes it’s hard to find common ground, or change minds.
But what we can do is explore our discomfort, and figure out ways to tolerate it while the ground shifts and changes around us. Holding on to that which feels safe and stable to us and preventing our discomfort from exploding on to those around us. And maybe that doesn’t involve very much at all, except listening, and trying to remain curious (when we have the energy to do so), and resting, and sometimes stepping away to allow the ground to settle again.
Maybe at times of progress there is always friction. But what comes next could create new ground for us all. To the point where perhaps we have to leave the old ground behind and start exploring uncharted territories.
References
Anderson EC, Carleton RN, Diefenbach M and Han PKJ (2019) The Relationship Between Uncertainty and Affect. Front. Psychol. 10:2504
Zoe Darwin & Mari Greenfield (2019) Mothers and others: The invisibility of LGBTQ people in reproductive and infant psychology, Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology, 37:4, 341-343,
Juno Dawson (July 2020) ‘Fears About Transgender People Are a Distraction From the Real Struggles All Women Face’. Time Magazine
Katrina Karkazis (2019) The misuses of “biological sex”, The Lancet, Volume 394, Issue 10212
Kings College Policy Institute ‘Culture Wars in the UK’
Krieger N (2021) Structural Racism, Health Inequities, and the Two-Edged Sword of Data: Structural Problems Require Structural Solutions. Front. Public Health 9:655447
Amali Lokugamage & Alice Meredith (March, 2020) Women from ethnic minorities face endemic structural racism when seeking and accessing healthcare. BMJ Blog
Hannah Summers (April 2021) ‘I felt humiliated’: parents respond to NHS maternity care racial bias inquiry. The Guardian