Ep 83: Feeling Fear, Confusion, Exhaustion, & Despair? Time to Resist, Not Regulate

For you, me, and our fellow caregivers, what do we do when we’re experiencing exhaustion, fear, confusion, and despair about the world being on fire? Many of us hunker down to the usual “I do what I gotta do” mode. We put one foot in front of the other. We keep it zipped up. Who can afford to fall apart when you’re juggling work and family; caring for your children and for your elders; surviving and staying true to your values? My dear co-conspirator who can’t afford to fall apart, I made this episode for us. Under fascism, we must go beyond “regulating” our nervous system and interrogate what makes us nervous in the first place. We must also go beyond “regulating” our feelings to stay calm and begin to resist the weaponization of our exhaustion, fear, confusion, and despair. That’s why in this episode, you and I are going to unpack different ways the oppressors use our own feelings to undermine our revolutionary actions. Then, we are going to play with a framework that goes like this: re-center, resist, and re-member as a daily practice to refuse the oppressors’ gaslighting. This episode is inspired by Lara Sheehi’s new book, From the Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures. The oppressors think they are oh-so-smooth making us too tired, afraid, confused, and despairing to organize and advocate for change. Uh-ah, we are caregivers. We are practitioners of abolition, and we are change agents. We know how to be ungovernable. Our tiny change agents teach us that every day. The oppressors got nothing on us. If that sounds generative to you, let’s catch some feelings.

[OPENING]

Sawadee ka, and welcome to the Come Back to Care podcast. A place where we’re re-imagining parenting to be deeply decolonized and intentionally intergenerational. If you’ve been looking for ways to practice social justice in your daily parenting and nurture your child’s development while re-parenting your inner child, I’m so glad you’re here. I am your host, Nat Nadha Vikitsreth, a decolonized and licensed clinical psychotherapist, somatic abolitionist, and founder of Come Back to Care. A dot connector, norm agitator and lover of liberation. In this podcast, we turn down the volume of oppressive social norms and outdated family patterns so that we can hear our inner voice and raise our children by our own values too. We come back home to our body and the goodness within. We come back to our lineages and communities. And we come back to care… together. So come curious and come as you are.

[EPISODE]

Welcome and welcome back to Episode 83 of the Come Back to Care Podcast. My dear co-conspirator, I know that you’re not new to speaking truth to power when people around you choose to look away and stay silent. You’re also not new to feeling the heat and the risk from putting your skin in the game and rising up for what is right. You’ve faced that risk of losing access to food, housing, and healthcare because of your commitment to liberation. You’ve probably been kicked out of a few group chats too. These consequences, as heartbreaking as they can be, are worth all the risks. These consequences are so big and obvious that when they come, we can spot them from miles away, prepare for them, and deal with them. But in this episode I want to talk about something more insidious and harder to detect and therefore harder to deal with. And that is when white, colonial, capitalist patriarchy plays with our feelings through statements like these: “well, if you just tone it down a bit, maybe your message will be more easily received.” Or “well, you might be a little too extreme. Do you need a breathing technique for your anger? It’s unbecoming.” That was a real life example by the way…hmm fun times. Another real life example is this: “well, that’s not realistic. Abolishing policing and prison and wanting liberation? Come on, you’re too smart to be pie in the sky like that. Let’s be practical.” Or “well, does everything have to be about Palestine?” Do any of these resonate with you? These messages don’t just drop gently in our mind and warm our souls. We hear them from our friends, colleagues, and media constantly. They flood our mind and make us feel confused.

I’ll highlight the university students in the US who practiced nonviolent solidarity encampments and anti-war protests back in May 2024. These change agents spoke truth to power and they were punished by the universities via tactics like arrest, eviction, and suspension. While our change agents were being dragged through all of this punishment, policing, surveillance, and humiliation, we know what we witnessed with our own eyes, our bones, and our spirits, right? We were witnessing power-over policing. We were witnessing injustice. But the news headlines and op-ed pieces were all calling the students perpetrators, painting them as the enemies who disrupted the peace of business as usual. And if the students were the enemies disrupting order and peace, they must be punished, policed, and disciplined to restore order…as any commonsense argument goes. This confusion, between what our eyes, our bones, and our spirits knew to be true and what we heard on the news, made us doubt our own beliefs about Palestine and our commitment to loving all children…to the point that we might have frozen in fear. Fear that says “oh I might be wrong. That Op-Ed author is right. Issues around Palestine are so complicated. Maybe I need to read another book to understand it more fully.” We might have withdrawn our actions for a bit and stopped showing up to support the students on campus, when they needed us in solidarity with them the most. And you know this already: not doing what you believe to be right or what you said you were going to do stirs up shame and sinks us deeper into confusion, exhaustion, and despair. And all of this is done deliberately. Whoo, a moment of breath here. Actually, Ep 52: How to Raise Change Agents: Lessons from Gaza Solidarity Encampments is really rich if you’d like to take a listen. I’ll link everything in the episode show notes.

Lara Sheehi, whose work is deeply inspired by Franz Fanoon, explains that white, colonial, capitalist patriarchy deliberately engineers fear, exhaustion, confusion, and despair for a single purpose quote: “to derail us from the political commitments needed to sustain revolutionary fervor.” End quote.

Now that we know the oppressors’ tactics of weaponizing our feelings against collective liberation, regulating our feelings just enough to go back to work or go back to business as usual is simply not enough. Because we’d only be naming our feelings just to stay calm enough to keep coping with oppression. Or, we’d be regulating our stress and our rage just enough to better adapt to fascism instead of fighting to dismantle the conditions that make us suffer in the first place. I don’t know about you but I don’t want to be more resilient so I can take on more bullying; I want to get rid of the bullying, period.

Psychic Militancy

That’s why I want to invite you to beat the oppressors at their own game. They want us to catch feelings, get lost in the sauce, and get derailed from organizing with our co-conspirators to demand change. They’re weaponizing our exhaustion, confusion, fear, and despair against us. To stop the exploitation and gaslighting by these oppressors, Lara Sheehi invites us to practice what’s called psychic militancy which is a daily practice of willfully refusing to be knocked off course by all of this psychological manipulation. We catch the emotional gaslighting and exploitation in real time, name it for what it is, and refuse to play along. We refuse to conform to and comply with the “common sense” that the student protestors must be disciplined to restore peace and order. We reject the “common sense” that illegal immigrants must be surveilled and separated from their families to keep the country safe. We recognize the nonsense in this so-called common sense. We refuse to be derailed from taking collective action that’s aligned with our liberatory values. This willful refusal is daily practice and daily commitment.

Of course, I love anything and everything that gets us to practice resistance and liberation over and over and over again. It’s what the Raising Change Agents book is all about.

And I know us: we’re walking around tired and triggered while trying to take care of our families and communities. We can’t afford to fall apart. And this daily willful refusal or psychic militancy requires a lot of energy and intentionality that you and I might not have on most days. So, I need to start with grace for ourselves. We’re going to practice this willful refusal, most of the time (because perfection isn’t real). And we’re going to make this resistance practical by practicing it in three parts: re-center, resist, and re-member. Are you still with me?

Re-Center

Okay, re-center means when you feel feelings, instead of getting knocked over left and right, you find your center and root in your power. You’re not letting the engineered exhaustion, fear, confusion, and despair knock your balance off. Some people call it mindfulness. Others call it emotional regulation. I choose to call it re-centering because regulating our feelings, our rage, and our grief has this connotation of policing where we must not be angry about oppression. By that logic, we must regulate our feelings to stay in control, stay in line, stay in our lane; maintain order and peace, maintain our composure, and maintain the status quo. Not my ministry at all. I’m going to stick with re-centering so that we can keep resisting and re-membering, all of which completes the picture of how we’re going to keep the emotional exploitation at bay.

In the first chapter of the Raising Change Agents book, you’ll find different ways to re-center yourself instead of losing your cool and screaming at your kids. These re-centering strategies help you take a beat before reacting. They range from self-talk to body-based somatic exercises. If you like movement exercises, you can also find some examples and play with them in episode 54: Using Household Chores to Ground Yourself & Demand a Gaza Ceasefire and episode 42: Somatic Warm-Ups Before You Demand a Gaza Ceasefire . These ways to re-center yourself aren’t just for when your kids push your buttons – you can also use them when the oppressors are trying to push you off the track of revolutionary commitments.

While most people would stop here and go back to work or whatever they need to do to survive the Hunger Games of Capitalism, not us! Under fascism, we’re no longer mindful and demure. We’re going to be militant and sassy. We’re going to re-center to resist which is our second piece.

Resist

We resist being gaslit, manipulated, and exploited emotionally by the oppressors by recognizing the tactics they use to derail us and keep us from taking liberatory actions with our co-conspirators.

White, colonial, capitalist patriarchy- with the help of mental health professionals- expertly weaponize exhaustion, confusion, fear, and despair against us. Let’s see what tactics they have before resisting them together.

First, exhaustion. Exhaustion from editing ourselves and our tone to be softer, more polite, and more civil so that we can be more appealing to those in power. It’s exhausting to watch how we talk, how we look, what words to use that will get to the point but which aren’t so strong that people in power will drown in their discomfort. And the way this exhaustion is weaponized against us and engineered to derail our collective action is that we become too busy editing ourselves to see the actual threat in front of us which is white, colonial, capitalist patriarchy. We’re too distracted editing our radical stance down to neutrality and respectability politics to re-imagine a liberatory future free from cops, corps, and cages. We’re too busy thinking “maybe if I just replace the exclamation point with a full stop, maybe the State Representative will agree with me that the detention center that’s holding human beings has got to go,” or “if I just bring another punchy research study to the meeting, my colleagues will definitely be convinced that eugenic practices that harm disabled people still exist.” Or, if I tame and reduce my rage to something respectable, I’ll get my point across more effectively. This self-editing, self-policing, and convincing the opposition pull us away from effective strategies like direct action or bringing groceries to our neighbors who can’t go outside due to state sanctioned kidnapping by ICE agents. Then, all the wellness gurus come in and tell us to rest and do a sheet mask self-care aka unplugging from movement work all together. Don’t get me started. All in all, it leaves us too exhausted, broken, and docile to organize and get in formations with our co-conspirators.

The second tactic is confusion. This confusion comes wrapped in a package that says “be realistic, be practical, be reasonable. We can’t just overthrow the whole system. We need to make compromises and demand incremental changes instead.” It’s giving reform vs. abolish. This overreliance on pragmatism keeps many of us confused and stuck in this moderate, centrist, incrementalist position where we’re expected to be okay with crumbs or tiny changes in the system because it’s reasonable. It’s confusing because we see with our eyes, our bones, and our spirits that the system that’s designed to build on our backs to benefit the ruling class needs a radical change. None of us wants our children to grow up playing the same Hunger Games of Capitalism, right? And yet we’re being told again and again that it’s not reasonable or realistic. This confusion leads to self-doubt. Self-doubt leads to silence which cause us to as Sheehi wrote quote “question our political positions or how well we understood our politics” end quote. Derailing from our commitment to liberation then leads to shame. Very sneaky indeed!

It’s so helpful for me to understand these tactics so I can feel my exhaustion and my confusion. Then, re-center myself and resist being emotionally exploited because now I know that the oppressors want me to be consumed by exhaustion and confusion instead of struggling with my co-conspirator towards liberation. You’ll have your own go-to way to resist. Today, I’ll share mine with you. I would say to myself “uh, uh, uh, not today, oppressors.” And it’s enough to help me stay rooted in my dignity. It’s inspired by all of my spirited change agents who wanted to keep poking their baby fingers into electric sockets or putting an unidentified object from the floor straight to their mouths and their caregivers went “uh uh uh.”

Please let me know what your favorite ways to say to yourself, move your body, and pray to your ancestors are so you can re-center and resist.

Alright, let’s move on to our final piece: re-member.

Re-Member

Remember means remembering that you’re not feeling this confusion and exhaustion alone. The tactics are designed to be so sneaky that we don’t catch it. It’s advertised and sold to us as commonsense. Fanon wrote quote “the colonized subject is at constant risk of being disarmed.” End quote.

To close out this practice of daily willful refusal, I invite you to text your co-conspirator or drop in the group chat you trust and share the nonsense in the commonsense you just caught. Sharing the exploitative tactic you noticed and the way you willfully refused to be played by the oppressors with those you trust strengthens your psychic militancy practice. That’s hard work and your sassy self needs to be witnessed by those who have earned the right to love you. It can be as simple as “Hey friends, something wild just happened. Do you have the bandwidth for me to share? I just want to be witnessed. So and so just said so and so to me. And I had to do so and so to re-center and resist to stay true to my commitment to liberation. Anyway have a wonderful day.”

And there we have it: re-center, resist, and re-member. “uh, uh, uh, not today, colonizers.”

[CLOSING]

My dear co-conspirator, please feel your feelings. They are sacred, too sacred to be manipulated and exploited by the oppressors. I hope that psychic militancy is one way for us to transform fragility to fortitude…the fortitude we will need to stay in the struggle for liberation in the long haul. Fascism is going to get much worse. Thank you for staying ready so we don’t have to get ready together.

Cheers to us for being unapologetically untamed, ungovernable, unyielding, unbending, unrelenting, unwavering, uncompromising, unashamed, and unruly…while looking cute too.

Please consider supporting my work by joining our Come Back to Care Patreon or buying copies of Raising Change Agents everywhere you buy books…if you have the financial resources. Or, share this episode with someone you love, leave a rating and review on Apple Podcast if you have the time and energy to help me keep this political and parenting education going.

As always, in solidarity and sass. Until next time, please take care.