Dancing with ‘Monsters’…
‘Monsters ‘— any pervasive emotional…contextual…historically rooted obstacles…blockages that create…exacerbate…feed systemic problems…preventing resolution…impeding life affirming conditions…pathways…
While many monsterly barriers are a tangled mess of inherited systemic legacies that we didn’t create, we often (unconsciously) play roles in feeding them. Sometimes (unavoidably) trapped into maintaining those roles…
We are not separate from the systems that affect us.
Observing pervasive overlapping crises, barriers and dilemmas that cannot be well understood or addressed in reductionist Industrial Age patterned ways — we might whimsically call these monsters.
As we consider the complexity of people, the layered, living contexts of problems faced and the entangled factors that contribute — the monster metaphor seems somehow appropriate…
Monsters are a timeless metaphor for imagined and well-founded fears, for storifying troubles shrouded in the darkness of uncertainty. Anybody can relate.
As children, we learned to fear, play with, and conjure up those larger-than-life mythical monsters. As adults we become adept — to varying degrees — at ignoring…avoiding…creating…fighting…hating…fearing…bonding with…protecting…all kinds of monstrous stuff — problems.
We might recognize our own monsters in the midst…when we’re fearful or enraged…when our own powerful spiral of feelings drive us in ways that have unintended problematic and compounding consequences — for us or others.
When we feel stuck…it may be also be an indicator that metaphorical monsters are lurking…are at work…
Some of the monsters are coping mechanisms, created to deal with other troublesome monsters. In fact, our way of dealing — our own shadow sides — often become monsters, in and of themselves. Pushing down our feelings or projecting in ways whereby we don’t acknowledge what’s really going on inside — denial — can unleash all kinds of monsters.
None of us are exempt.
We are all messy humans — an affectionate shorthand way of understanding and accepting our inherent existential humanness.
In the face of uncertainty, we sometimes (often?) hold on to the illusion of control — a monster that can create more trouble for us, than the very things we dislike, fear or avoid.
Fighting monsters, can also take us down some slippery slopes.
We can (inadvertently) reinforce the story of separation — othering and labelling — blind to the monsters within and the ways we are (all at times) complicit. Our own frustration, disappointment, anger and righteousness can fuel the fires that perpetuate limiting binary patterns and dysfunctional polarization.
Some monsters, paradoxically, are potentially good. They can help us break with patterns that don’t serve. Reframing the situation, we might understand their purpose, discover hidden wisdom and access sources of mobilizing energy. Sometimes we can neutralize or better manage the darker consequences…
When we learn to recognize, accept and…yes, even love…some of the monsters inside us and others — we can potentially fare better. Channelled wisely they can provide spirited energy and passion. They can also provide important information…some guiding navigational clues. When we accept and befriend them, they can sometimes become allies. They can help us get clear about our boundaries or red lines — a moral compass — and fortify us with the courage to take on difficult challenges and make tough decisions as we face turbulent times.
At times, though less often…monsters can be sources of fun and even joyfulness. We can laugh at ourselves or the situation, finding humour, sardonic wit and playfulness along the way.
We can potentially channel some of those monsters in creative ways.
All significant breakthroughs are break -“withs” old ways of thinking. ~ Thomas Kuhn
Shedding knee-jerk maladaptive coping mechanisms — responding, discovering and choosing adaptive pathways towards more life-affirming patterns — goes way beyond one’s personal journey.
Everything is interconnected…
Many (of our most) troubling dysfunctional monsters persist because people lack the personal and collective agency to effectively, proactively influence the contexts or circumstances that shape or affect their lives/work.
Injustices that marginalize and victimize, deny and block the (sense of) agency and real empowerment needed to address and overcome monsters — to influence or effect systemic change.
Most societal and institutional issues are not single and isolated. They’re usually layered and interconnected with other problems.
Systemic and living…
These clusters of monsters tend to commingle…working together…kinda like tag teams. They may be colluding with wilful intent. They may be unconsciously keeping the status quo humming along. The disconnectedness of silos, disciplines, organizations and sectors often keep us blind to their machinations.
Creative holistic alternatives remain stubbornly elusive and inaccessible as clusters of monsters grow deeper systemic roots.
At various times, any of us can find ourselves caught between-rocks-and-hard-places… some harder than others…and some of us harder hit…
Double binds — psychologically complex conflicts — warrant focused attention:
…”the essence of a double bind is two conflicting demands, each on a different logical level, neither of which can be ignored or escaped. This leaves the subject torn both ways, so that whichever demand they try to meet, the other demand cannot be met. “I must do it, but I can’t do it,” is a typical description of the double-bind experience.”…
Double binds can inflict an ongoing baseline of numbing conflict and anxiety…
They often lead to more devastating consequences…
Navigating the labyrinth of double binds, whereby ongoing dilemmas become normalized, is damaging to wellbeing at individual, inter-relational and societal levels.
Some of these binds are compounded — tripping off higher order binds — the domino or multiplier effects of many people caught inside contexts…systems …organizations — trapped and perpetuating a culture of double binds.
People working inside organizations and institutions are often faced with (ongoing) conflict — trapped by explicit or tacit expectations to abide policies or norms that create or exacerbate social and/or environmental harms or externalities. These may be conditions of employment, rewards and recognition and/or social acceptance — a felt sense of belonging.
Beneath every shade of X___washing, we might find signs of double binds that reinforce duplicitous or misleading practices and behaviour — reinforced by engrained social or cultural norms, as the accepted way we do things around here.
Double binds that set up recurring chains of events, routinely placing people in conflicting situations, are symptomatic of widespread trauma-inducing systemic problems.
Surfacing and exploring pervasive underlying issues, can make them more recognizable…potentially less isolating, stigmatizing and crazy-making. These are first key steps toward reducing ever-widening dissonance, incongruent behaviour, soul-destroying choices and tragic, wasteful consequences or casualties.
When dysfunctional auto pilot or malevolent patterns that routinely allow life, lives, aliveness or living beings to fall-through-the-cracks — are normalized — systemic monsters are running amok…
Steffi Bednarek, a climate psychologist, focuses on these kinds of socio-psychological issues in her new book: Climate, Psychology and Change: Reimagining Psychotherapy in an Era of Global Disruption and Climate Anxiety
Living in the world…being human…none of us are altogether exempt from double binds.
Not easy!
We are impacted by the engrained dysfunctional patterns and multipolar traps we’re uncovering— the very patterns we’re diligently working to shift in a variety of big and everyday ways.
This calls upon more of us working at all levels, layers and edges of society to collaborate — helping one another and activating leverage points.
In this article, Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System, Donella Meadows delayered complex system patterns and proposed ways to recognize and intervene with the greatest potential leverage to effect systemic shifts. Donella, renown for Dancing with Systems, had accumulated much wisdom dancing with clusters of monsters.
And here we are, fifty years since the Limits to Growth work identified monsterly systemic patterns that imperil humanity and the living planet we call home.
The roots and tentacles of the meta-poly-perma crises — monsters — that grip society today, inflicting harm on people and planet, can be traced back historically, sociologically, geopolitically etc. to multiple sources and their perpetuation.
In this May 2024 deep dive Before Skool 3+-hour video/podcast: Game Theory, False Narratives, Survival, Life Advice, Daniel Schmachtenberger cogently articulates and unpacks (more comprehensively than most) the meta crises — clusters of monsters wreaking havoc — the entangled multipolar traps that keep people, systems and society stuck on a degenerative spiral of human civilization decline.
In this June 2024 presentation, created for 10,000 Canadian college and university educators and relevant for us all — Nate Hagens comprehensively brings together many elements, with excellent visuals, toward understanding overarching interconnected global crises. Sharing some wisdom, he also conveys how the western Industrial Age influenced human civilization, the unfolding meta crises and those clusters of monsters we all face.
Listening to both Daniel and Nate …we recognize the underlying issues and themes — moreover the questions — that many of us are increasingly exploring as we wrestle with ways to navigate mindfully — dancing with monsters.
It seems that the hairiest monsters actively undermining humanity’s ability to navigate wisely and well — are fuelled by psychosocial forces of domination.
So many of these monsters are born from dysfunctional patterns that became normalized — feeding and fuelling layers of trauma, as poignantly described by Dr Gabor Maté — Is Society Making us Sick? The Myth of Normal.
Gabor, who survived the holocaust, deeply understands the human implications of dancing with monsters.
Hearing Gabor articulate truths about trauma, we realize that living in society means none of us are immune. That’s not a cop out. It’s an invitation to take back, (re)connect and restore our lives and livingness through a personal and collective process of recovery… re-formation…(r)evolution — fuelled by passion, a reframed sense of belonging and healthy responsibility.
“I’ve experienced my own healing to a significant degree, and I believe what’s possible for individual human beings is also possible for aggregations of human beings, including society as a whole. It takes a lot of courage and a lot of willingness to get through the illusions. But human society — and human history — is a record of not just all kinds of crimes and misdemeanours but also a lot of transformations.” ~ Gabor Maté
And so — we dance with paradox, traversing the blurred edges…accepting our inherent messy humanness as we work to understand those monsters that lurk and loom in many forms, within and around us.
Riane Eisler, also a survivor of the holocaust, has dedicated her life to social, biological and neuroscience research that sheds light on a wide-angled retrospective view of human civilization history. Societies can value and reflect a healthy partnering balance, as documented in the latest 2022 edition of her timeless book, The Chalice and the Blade.
Riane points us to natural partnership ways of being — life-affirming choices we can make at every stage. Her work affirms the research of others and reflects the experience of many cultures.
This is pivotal!
Some of those human patterned monsters that we often accept as normal and inevitable, are perpetuated by our own (limited) lived experience and the pervasive domination-oppression of western Industrial Age modernity that has crowded out and oppressed our natural more balanced Indigenous ways of being and knowing.
In this podcast, Nora Bateson peels back more layers, speaking to rich transcontextual ecologies of living, relationship and communication. Reading from her book Combining:
“Lurking Monster expresses how the ghosts of industrialization lurk in our speech and pervade our lifeworlds, entrapping us in cultural patterns of repetition.”
This article, Left…Right…Whole — a whole lotta ways toward wholeness, drills down further. It draws from Dr Iain McGilchrist’s brain research, and references Riane’s and Nora’s work as well as that of Darcia Narvaez and Vanessa Andreotti and colleagues: Gesturing towards Decolonial Futures.
Understanding the underlying roots that feed monsterly patterns and how to dance with monsters is layered and multi-pronged. Coming to terms with our own messy humanness, can help us make conscious (strategic) choices.
How can we become more mindful and adept — observing, addressing, overcoming, minimizing or simply working with the monsters — being and living the full ecologies of life, (re-)contextualizing the complex challenges we face?
The ongoing research of evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, Prosocial World, also points to more encouraging natural potential for human civilization to evolve in prosocial ways that can safeguard the wellbeing of the whole:
“Despite being a wonderfully social species, we often face contexts in which acting for the benefit of others is at the expense of our own individual interests. It may be that a context rewards individual success rather than group success. Or it may be that acting prosocially leaves us vulnerable to those who can take advantage of our efforts.
The science of ProSocial is focused on understanding and fostering social contexts in which individual and group interests are aligned, such that cooperative behaviors are reinforced more than selfish behaviors. These prosocial groups act more like a single organism, rather than a collection of individuals.”
When we reflect on and combine all the longstanding, ongoing differentiated and overlapping research and stories across contexts, cultures and time — we can recognize and embrace a compelling life affirming future story that is not compelled by monsterly domination-oppression!
And so — we are wise to continuously learn how to dance with those monsters. Understanding, facing and dealing with various monsters might be viewed as a healthy part of our human evolutionary maturation. Viewed this way, can perhaps guide us — whereby we are neither limited by a dystopian mental model of the future, nor by denial of the real dangers of dysfunctional monsters that lurk. We are potentially better able to navigate wisely and well in prosocial futures literate ways.
In this series of short video clips, Bayo Akomolafe speaks to the timelessness of monsters…their presence in Indigenous folklore…the essential role of cracks… “the emergence of the monstrous during times of crisis”… “because it’s only the monstrous that can invite transformation.”
And he dives in further, exploring the role of monsters in this provocative piece: “Release the Kraken! Why we need monsters in these times of crises”
Dancing with monsters is a natural part of unstitutional evolutionary navigation work. While (observed/recurring) patterns are often anticipated…the many manifestations of monsters, the varied forms they take and the timing — often surprising and unpredictable.
Dancing with monsters might involve acknowledging and making space for important things that are (routinely) avoided, denied, obscured or submerged. Sometimes what was unseen and unheard can become (more) visible and detectable. Sometimes that involves the metaphorical:
🐲 Naming of elephants-in-the-room — what most recognize, but often are complicit downplaying or pretending don’t exist for any number of reasons
🐲 Exposing of naked emperors — blatantly evident (hard) truths
🐲 Recognizing the Abilene Paradox — akin to groupthink, when people agree to go along with something that they truly don’t support or value
Sometimes opening the space and expecting the unexpected, enables the seemingly unimpossible to become possible.
Navigating wisely and well, especially dealing sensitively and effectively with the deep-rooted drivers (like fear) that often underlie dysfunctional patterns — is not easy. Like most layered complex issues — there’s no one-size-fits-all linear step-by-step approach.
Dancing with monsters usually calls for some variable combinations of thoughtful strategy, radical transparency and candour, authentic care and a big dose of humility. No recipe. The precise combinations unpremeditated …Creative choreography takes us out of our comfort zones…
We work together to discern ways to disarm, replace, or sometimes even play with alternatives that might make (some of) the monsters obsolete — whereby people can (increasingly) let go, productively move forward and live into healthier workable patterns.
🐲 Discerning when and how to disarm the monsters with compassion and (tough) love — not easy.
🐲 Eyes wide, not naive, not blindly hopeful and not embittered — not easy.
🐲 Legitimizing and dealing with layers of trauma and grief, forgivingness and healing — not easy.
🐲 Facing the shadow monsters within — a mix of courage and self love — not easy.
🐲 Mindfully and heartfully activating — being strategic, seeking points of leverage, present-centred, facing forward — not easy.
None of this is easy. In fact, it’s often really, really hard. If dancing with all those monsters was easy, we wouldn’t find ourselves — and so many of us — stuck between those rocks and hard places, so often, for so long…
How to shift the trajectory to life-affirming patterns — a dance of emergence and strategy — accepting that none of us are masters of this beautiful omniverse — we choose to live into the better future we hold in our hearts, heads and hands.
Roughly, rightfully, truthfully…what could possibly be more important?
Whoever and wherever we are, as we work together in collaborative communities, initiatives and coalitions, we raise awareness about monsters in all their manifestations and forms — real, mythological and metaphorical. Collectively, we seek and find alternatives to being driven by fear. We become better equipped and able to consciously decide and choose love — more often.
Doing what we can to make peace with paradox and our messy humanness, bridging divides, making space for possibilities, celebrating our interconnectedness — there are so many different ways to dance with monsters.
Bringing them out of the shadows is a good start. Regularly zooming in (intrapersonal) and zooming out (inter-relational) as a natural matter of course — is an ongoing humbling living-learning journey for us all.
…“From the cracks and chasms, from the blurred edges, often hard to see — tender, fragile shoots are springing up. Some of these are creeping gradually into a wider social consciousness, as people increasingly recognize that the current trajectory is nonviable for a future civilization and living planet.
Our thoughts…our words…and the ways we string them together…often leave wide chasms of interpretation. Those chasms can widen gaping holes in our understanding. They can create harms…
Those chasms can also open possibilities for deeper exploration — opportunities to engage, learn, and appreciate what was unclear and obscure.
When we choose to dance with monsters…we can find a creative playspace, treating those chasms as fertile ground for something that might yet come to life …
These articles also uncover and explore some of the systemic patterns — clusters of monsters — that manifest in a variety of ways, keeping people and systems stuck. They also suggest some choices, contexts, strategies and pathways to help get unstuck:
🐲 Navigating Through Deep ShfT
🐲 Musing on Mariana Mazzucato’s Challenge to Consultants, Governments and Business
🐲 Rebooting Society’s Operating System
🐲 Being ‘Roughly Right’ is ‘Always’ and is ‘Never’… ‘Good Enough’
Perhaps developing and testing more context-based, place-sourced prosocial regenerative initiatives, wellbeing economic models, governing frameworks, and (new forms of) organization(s) — working from the common(s) space between — can also help to break some of the entangled co-optive cycles and shift dysfunctional systemic patterns as we live into ways of being more whole.
Phew…another mouthful…
With the growing gulf of precarity, is an ever-deepening dawning that we — integrally connected to the web of life — aren’t alone on a quest to widen the sense making portals and multitudes of ways for people to engage generatively, within and across contexts.
As we dance with monsters of all kinds, a recurring theme is the need to gain wisdom. Psychosocial forces of domination can and do manifest at all levels. As we widen our lens, we realize that they are not preordained as driving human characteristics and destiny. Some of those layers of wisdom, as we zoom in and zoom out, might best be derived by humbly accepting our shadows and the inherent ‘I and we don’t knowness’ — as we navigate, guided by what is most precious about life — in all its wondrous forms.
A life-affirming civilization and the living planet we call home…hangs in the balance.
Reminded yet again…
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” ~Jiddu Krishnamurti
The reflections and references included here convey a need to widen our contextual lens — to access and combine our senses and sense-making capacities. In essence we’re challenged to reframe what we mean by intelligence beyond component parts — to embody co-intelligence, as an ongoing unfolding.
Tom Atlee’s new book, Co-intelligence: The Applied Wisdom of Wholeness, Interconnectedness, and Co-Creativity, invites us to co-discover ways to enrich our ongoing learning journey toward interbecoming wiser and a whole lot more humble — living into an unknowable future as we endeavour to shape life-affirming patterns and pathways. This compendium, synthesizing decades of research and work, builds from the wise democracy pattern language. In ongoing conversations with Tom, we’ve been exploring how to nurture wiser co-intelligence patterns, and extend the horizons of possibilities that can make this work, in its multiple forms, more widely accessible.
As we learn how to dance with monsters, we can expand our relational and sense making capacity, co-activating co-intelligence as engaged participants and care holders in our wiser human evolution — within the contexts of ongoing every day work and life!
Dancing with monsters is not an abdication to fate. We are accepting responsibility for life-affirming choices and mindful navigation. We are accepting that we aren’t masters or centres of the universe, that there are forces outside of our (direct) control. We are accepting the inherent messiness…laws of nature and the randomness of some events and circumstances that happen, regardless of our best efforts and interventions. We are accepting the unknowability of some downstream consequences — the nonlinear chain-of-events set in motion by our actions, inactions and multiple variables over which we cannot control.
No doubt, you have encountered and observed many similar monsters, as well as those that lurk deep within — creating difficulties and challenges at various times along the way…
How do you dance with those monsters?
Looking forward to exchanging, making and living more stories that help us all understand, get unstuck and move beyond the dysfunctional soul-crushing monsters that don’t serve a healthful functional purpose for people and planet.
Let’s dance!
*This article was updated again June 2024, reflecting additional perspectives, resources and ongoing action research, as we continue to observe, listen, adapt and dance — a paradoxically humbling journey for us all.
Unstitution was birthed as a collaborative creative commons and nested ecosystem. We (co-)catalyze and support a wide range of context, place and theme-based initiatives where people from across sectors, disciplines, cultures, generations and walks-of-life work together on mission critical issues. From readiness through to regenerative progress — moving beyond polarization — is how we roll. The links embedded throughout our articles are a warm invitation to go a bit deeper, at any time. For more insights reflecting our ongoing journey, our suite of Unstitution articles are published on Medium. They portray a small sample of the ways we are adapting and contributing among ever-expanding commons-based communities and initiatives inspired and fuelled by citizens — perhaps better described as denizens — anywhere in the world — living into the principles and spirit that govern our collaborative work.
You can follow Unstitution and engage with us on LinkedIn. Many of our posts and perspectives also pop up under hashtags #messyhumanness and #wisdomwithteeth.
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