Counseling My White Son on Oppressor Distress
I am a mixed-heritage mom with white skin, and I‘ve had to handle my older son’s oppressor distress.
I find myself thinking (oppressively) that he should understand things he doesn’t, talk less and listen more (like me), and be better at “reading” people and sensing what would make things go well.
My children were raised in RC and have benefited from its resources. They don’t seem to feel compelled to make everything go well the way I did or to alter who they are to please other parents or fit in with a different culture.
I have had to discharge a lot on their distresses. I also try to give them a hand [help them]. When I do this, my older son often feels criticized. He feels that I am irritating and that I don’t like him.
Today he was complaining about how our dearest friends (who are People of the Global Majority) get uptight [tense] when our dog plays with their cat. He told them that if they did some research, they would understand what was okay in a dog-and-cat relationship. Our friends do sometimes get scared when our pets are together and respond with a stubbornness that they also show at other times.
My son (and this must be related to my lack of patience with his distress) tries to push people in ways that can leave them feeling irritated. Today as he was complaining, I said, “But it’s their cat,” and repeated it a few times in a relaxed way. I didn’t feel desperate to make him understand; I just wanted him to know that he had missed something.
He screamed at me and stalked away as I fought to stay close. Then he yelled about how annoying I was and went into his room and slammed the door. I used my body weight against the door to open it, which made it possible for him to slam it on me over and over again. At one point, he asked me to explain my thinking. I said that the way he’d expressed his opinion about our friends’ cat would probably feel racist to them. Then he shouted that their stubbornness felt to him like young people’s oppression and screamed and screamed about that.
I acknowledged that when other people insist on their opinions, it can come in as young people’s oppression. But I reminded him that it was their cat and that insisting on the correctness of his point of view could feel like racism to them. He yelled about what a stupid world we live in where you can’t just say what you think and not worry about how it will sound or feel to other people. I apologized for the world and acknowledged that it can be hard to be a white boy. I said it several times, as he screamed about not being able to organize our friends around his thinking and how much that felt like young people’s oppression.
Then he asked me how I get people to see things differently when I disagree with them. I had to be careful, because I thought he was still trying to get things to go his way. I explained that I ask questions to help them consider things they haven’t thought about before and that I have to be liking them and willing to consider that they may know things I don’t. I said that people making choices that differ from his is not, in itself, young people’s oppression.
He got mad again and said that he felt like I thought he was stupid. I continued to like and be pleased with him while he yelled at me. We talked about knowing people and considering how something will impact them rather than just saying what we feel like saying. At one point I had to remind him not to hit me, as he would lose his counselor.
He cried hard about the complexity of the world and how challenging it is to be with people. He asked me who invented racism and why we had to contend with it. He kept crying while I kept acknowledging that it was hard to be who he is and navigate racism, sexism, and so on.
Later on he had lovely attention. At one point he was making jokes about his uncle, and I mentioned that he had a tendency to zero in [focus] on places where people had lots of feelings and push. He asked me if I was complimenting or criticizing him. I suggested that he be careful not to push people in hard places and then be hurt or surprised when they got angry with him. That seemed to make sense to him.
It was clear that the earlier session had given him some space to consider, in a new way, how others might feel.
Brooklyn, New York, USA
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion lists for parents and for RC Community members
(Present Time 201, October 2020)