F*ck These Times: On Being a Human in an Unpredictable Election
What do we do when we can’t control what happens to us?
The Purpose
In 2016, it was shock, disbelief, and anger. In 2020, it was dread, anxiety, and - ultimately - relief. Now it’s 2024 and trickles of those familiar feelings are already here.
Often, we (therapists, and the rest of the human species) want to “fix” these feelings. We want to find the intervention, the reframe, the cognitive distortion that will alleviate the challenges we feel.
We might say…. “This has been going on for quite some time, do you need more people to talk to?”
We might ask… “How have you dealt with this in the past?”
We might think… “It’s only 4 more years. I can get through it and so can this client.”
And with the best of intentions, we try to fix when our bodies need to feel.
This experience aimed to empower therapists to know what to do with their (and their clients) emotions by inviting their big feelings about the 2024 election and creating opportunity to be in those emotions, to tolerate them, and to express them somatically.
In doing so, we embody the breadth of our emotional landscape.
We feel. Not fix.
I created this video in its entirety as a preview to the experience and to scaffold in audiovisual form the See, Hold, Express framework that we developed..
The Organizing Principle
By seeing, holding, and expressing our emotions, we can be in and tolerate - and help our clients be in and tolerate - big, valid, and human emotions.
The Experience
Drawing on elements of immersive theater, installation art, and experimental media, the intent of the experience was to create an experiential context that guided participants through the three essential somatic stages of an emotional response:
See: In seeing our emotions, we acknowledge them and give them space to be.
Hold: In holding our emotions, we affirm our emotional response is valid and we remind ourselves that we can be in it.
Express: In expressing our emotions, we activate the mind-body connection by completing the neurobiological circuit of emotion. We give an outlet to the emotional energy in our body, allowing the full wave of our emotional response to crest and bring our body and mind back to baseline.
To activate these somatic-emotional states, I created a series of experiential contexts designed to tickle participants’ neurobiological pathways that house their emotions about the election.
An Election Experience: An opportunity to explore your feelings about the election. This experience featured large-scale installation walls covered with newspaper clippings and political yard signs, audio-visual elements, and an embodied “voting” experience.
Expressing: A series of embodied expressions that work to finish the emotional neural circuit. As participants expressed, continued audio played to maintain the emotional intensity activated in the previous experience.
Facilitated Discussion: To explore the See, Held, Expressed framework.
Role Play + Discussion: An improv’ed client-therapist scenario with experimental media that offered insight into the internal monologue of the therapist. Breakout groups offered participants an opportunity to experiment with the See, Held, Expressed framework and to connect with and support other participants.
Conclusion + Wrap-up: An intentional moment to close the space and the experience that we shared as humans in community with each other.
If you’d like a deeper dive into each of these experiences, please reach out.