Fierce empathy can light the darkness of this moment in American history
This moment in our nation’s history can be overwhelming. Even as we struggle under daily pressures, historic long-term challenges with no clear solution loom ever larger. We flip between fear, aggression and courage, quicker to battle with our loved ones, friends, coworkers, even people we don’t know.
Until recently, mainstream Americans have been largely shielded from this deep uncertainty and volatility. These sensations are well-known in vulnerable populations, but recently they have gone mainstream.
This moment may be frightening, but as a front-line family services and youth corrections practitioner who has stood shoulder-to-shoulder with those fighting these battles for over thirty years, I know that this moment is filled with hope, power, and possibility.
What I am seeing across America is a scaled-up version of every violent home, neighborhood, and youth treatment facility I’ve ever worked in. I recognize behaviors like aggression, posturing, threats, anger, and divisiveness. I’ve seen this before and I know what to do.
America is titrating. “Titration” is a term I use to describe what happens when the human body has experienced too many threats to its survival. You’ve had enough stress, enough conversations. It is the body’s way of saying ‘I can’t take any more, I need relief now’. Titration indicates unmet survival needs, for predictable food, safety, shelter, belonging, and self-agency.
But titration is not something to fear, it is something to focus and channel. Titration holds the determination and energy that has propelled humanity forward throughout history. The angst and passion across Colorado’s District 3 and America is a signal — we are ready to face the challenges of this moment head-on.
The central obstacle we face is no longer a lion in the field, it is the myth that food and housing are scarce, that thriving is only for the few; that we must sacrifice days away from our children, and force our aching backs and hands to work another shift, another decade, without even owning the roof over our head.
The truth is that there are enough resources to keep us all safe and healthy, but we are too fearful, angry and isolated to see what is possible.
Titration cannot be shifted through thinking and conversations. You can’t explain someone into a sensation of safety. They must experience it.
Titration can be shifted with fierce empathy. Fierce empathy lights the darkness of isolation, helplessness, and division, with courage, companionship, and potential. In venue after venue, I’ve seen fierce empathy turn violent and dangerous communities around by channeling titration into regeneration.
Fierce empathy is having the courage to look beyond our individual need for relief, to reach out to others and meet that need together. It means saying “Look me in the eye, without you I won’t make it, and without me you won’t. Will you do this with me?”
I’ve learned this courage from masters — children whose hands I held as we walked into youth treatment facilities, what we used to call orphanages. I have felt them steel their tiny shaking bodies to the reality that they are not going home. Their strength has given me an inexorable resolve.
Theirs is the courage we need now. We must steel ourselves against the fear, uncertainty, anger and division that turn us inward and tear us apart. Even as we grieve what should have been but is not, we must turn outward, reach for one another, and move forward together with purpose. I know us, I have seen us, individuals, families, and communities. I trust this moment, tumultuous as it may be, because I know what it means. Peace, cooperation, and thriving are within reach.
The anger and aggression in America right now is the fuel for the change that we’ve waited for for generations. If we do this right, we can use the fire in our bellies to turn the corner, and rebuild the American promise of safety and self-agency for all of its people.
To do this, we need trauma-informed policy capable of meeting the needs of the moment, that prioritizes access to predictable survival resources for all Americans. We need to hold corruption and greed accountable, and we need leaders with the courage to break the cycle of fear and division.
Our next step matters — not just to us, but for future generations. We have the chance now to get it right.
Turning the corner will take a community commitment to fierce empathy.
I am grateful to Ariel Wootan-Merkling, Carly Bertolozzi, Max Henning, and Aisland Rhodes for their expertise and wisdom in helping me craft this article.
