I shared this to Instagram in the wake of Charlie Kirk:
Am I disgusted? Yes. Am I surprised? No. Look around, people are filled with hate. Political violence must stop - yes. But nothing changes unless hearts change. Civility starts with empathy.
I shared more, but I’m not sure that we need any more hot takes.
I think what we need is love. To understand that it is love, and not hate, that is the nature of who we are. All of us.
And that we are so, so far from who we could be.
Calmness, curiosity, clarity, confidence, courage, creativity, connectedness.
These are the 8 C’s of of self-energy, core qualities within each of us that Richard C. Schwartz, creator of the Internal Family Systems therapy model, identifies in book No Bad Parts, which I am currently reading and highly recommend.
I grew in the Christian baptist church where we learned we are born sinners, in need of a savior. All that belief did was make me feel unworthy, unresourced, and uninspired about my potential and about my life.
The idea we are born sinners never felt true.
Babies don’t come out spewing hate, shooting people.
They come out good, pure. Don’t they? And then the world gets in.
What does feel true to me is that we are good and that goodness is our true nature. Even on the heels of Charlie Kirk, I chose to believe in our goodness.
I chose to believe that calmness, curiosity, clarity, confidence, courage, creativity, connectedness are not only available to us, they are intrinsic in us, our birthright. That is to say, these 8 c’s are who we are.
Are there other parts to us? Of course. Trauma parts. Hating parts. Parts that, despite their best efforts, fail us.
When these bad parts take over, what we get is what we saw this past week: hate, division and ugly, ugly violence.
We have to choose something else, chose to believe something else.
We have to chose to believe that love is who we are. And that love is bigger than all this bullshit.
It’s the only way anything changes.