“The Only Way Forward Is Awkward (Bayo Akomolafe)”
Amanda Donald & Linda Thai
Recorded September 11, 2025.
Amanda: How are you today?
Linda: The world's on fire. In some of the groups I’m in, it feels like we’re descending into civil war.
Someone I follow got on Charlie Kirk’s hit-list last year. The amount of phone calls and threats she and the university got, and how little that’s talked about. So many academics have been targeted by his mob.
I’m also listening to the audiobook for Rising Out of Hatred, the young man whose godfather is David Duke. I needed to pause during the book and connect to him because, even though it isn’t hugely graphic, the normalcy of the cultural context is a lot. The people around him were kind and loving, he’s respectful. And he grew up burning crosses.
Amanda: Everybody has a story and a world they live in until they break out of it. Until the story becomes more complex. That was a lesson I had to learn when I moved to Florida.
When I first got here from Toronto I identified as very progressive: boots-on-the-ground activism, protests, eviction defenses, Instagram activism. I had my own story and echo chamber. Friends said, “Why would you move to Florida? I’m not visiting; it isn’t safe.” My queer and trans friends were afraid.
I started group Pilates classes with the same teacher every week. One day it was only me, so we talked. I told her I’d moved from Canada. I’d started noticing how people reacted when I said that, little tells about where they are politically. She asked why I left. I said Florida was tricky because many of my friends were afraid. She said, “Why? Florida is one of the freest places in the country.”
There was no malice. It wasn’t libertarian chest-thumping. It was a woman I liked, someone I was building a relationship with, sharing her world. What is within her world isn’t just Fox News. It’s conversations with loved ones, neighbors, community. Everything that feeds her values and understanding tells one story and omits others. Or omits our perspective on the same things.
If that story is reinforced everywhere, it becomes what you know. I had collapsed “Republican equals racist,” “conservative equals bad.” It’s more nuanced. I had to see people as whole humans and not equate one part with the whole. I still care about what’s going on, but I’m less quick to judge based on political choices. I don’t know that those choices always reflect the full story.
Linda: That’s one of the things I appreciate about you as my manager. You don’t contribute to polarization in how you are with me, and that shows up in the communications that go out through me to my audience. I feel supported to keep reflecting on my own biases and assumptions and to “de-flatten” the narratives we’re fed, especially in an attention economy racing for our brains. It’s easier to reduce others to stereotypes.
In Rising Out of Hatred, Derek Black was born into a context. As a therapist, I help people make sense of their lives: family context, cultural and religious context, socio-historical context. So they can integrate, update, and feel empowered to move forward.
I go back to Thich Nhat Hanh’s poem “Call Me by My True Names.” In the context of that poem, he was inundated with letters from Vietnamese boat people describing harms at the hands of pirates. As a Zen monk, he paused and said, “given those people’s context, I too could have committed the same acts”. In the poem he gives expression to our inescapable interconnectedness and the consequences of our actions, individually and collectively.
Intra-psychically, our conflict comes from the interaction between ourselves and the world around us: many interactions we can’t control until we develop the capacity for small acts of reclaiming power for healing. Not power over, but power with. Until we learn that, we are the oppressor and the oppressed inside ourselves, and we reenact it in the world.
Amanda: As we’re talking about interconnectedness and this moment, how do we reconcile confusing feelings? How do we hold interconnectedness and also rage, and for some, maybe satisfaction, about what’s happened with Charlie Kirk?
Linda: That’s the privilege of the pause, and of community, and of having done enough healing work to pause and recognize: parts of me feel relief that he isn’t spreading values that promote the disproportionate rights of one group over others. A part of me feels righteousness. It’s confusing when I don’t pause long enough to recognize different parts have different feelings. All parts are welcome; all feelings are welcome.
And then we offer that spaciousness to others. There are people who’ve experienced direct harm. There are people who don’t see him the way you and I do, or the way those harmed see him. That brings us back to echo chambers and the stories we live in.
Amanda: My Instagram feed pushes extremes because the algorithm wants the most outrageous thing. The people in between the extremes are not being shown by the algorithm. Or those people don’t feel compelled to post, or those posts don’t get likes.
Linda: Where there is trauma, there’s polarization; where there’s polarization, there’s trauma. People who want to be bridges and weavers need to step outside the algorithm, get off the screen, and connect with human beings. Step outside your echo chamber a little. Step outside the flattening that reduces someone’s entire life to one belief or one reaction to someone’s death. That’s how we build bridges and weave.
My takeaway ten chapters into Eli Saslow’s book is that Derek Black left because people were persistent and consistent in building bridges over many years.
Amanda: I’m thinking about people in such severe trauma responses that exposure to the other side feels like too much. How do we bridge within ourselves enough to become bridges more broadly?
Linda: We leverage our social identities. Derek Black had Muslim, Jewish, and queer friends, and it was his white girlfriend he could take in more from. Because of who she was, he showed her his world; she saw the love there and helped steer him.
As a woman of color, I can work with Vietnamese elders who endured communist trauma, fled Vietnam, and are now often Trump supporters. I see something similar among Cuban elders. The anti-communism is so strong that one strongman gets replaced by another, and they don’t see that this “freedom” is authoritarianism.
Where I’m focused is access and relationship. I can be a bridge because I have relationships others may not. It’s about trustworthiness, showing up over and over, consistency, and de-flattening stereotypes. I can be offended if someone says, “You’re not like the other immigrants”, that’s racist in its way. And I can also leverage the moment: I’ve stepped outside their stereotype. Rather than code-switching into whiteness to appease, I can let the difference expand their concept of “immigrant” over time.
Amanda: When we de-flatten, we restore humanity. That’s something we’ve talked about since we started working together: bringing in history, anthropology, sociology, systems, so we understand people and cultures and behavior more holistically.
Linda: Yes. People might say [being a bridge] places the emotional burden on women, people of color, trans and queer folks.
Amanda: Yes, and. The interaction is relational. It isn’t one person single-handedly changing minds. The receiver has to participate, be curious, leave a doorway open. That doorway is built through common humanity.
Linda: It’s too easy to label people sadistic, sociopathic, psychopathic, narcissistic, and then close off their humanity. There’s always a crack somewhere that can be built through relationship.
Amanda: “There’s a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.”
Linda: When I think of times I’ve been miserable, angry, defiant, with no room for hope, optimism, or care, those are nervous system states many people are in right now. The attention economy fuels polarization, isolation, loneliness, anger, righteousness, and division.
Amanda: How do we crawl out of that?
Linda: Individually and collectively. To help someone out of an echo chamber, you need repeated individuals over time. The people who befriended Derek Black kept inviting him to Shabbat dinner. They knew how hard it is to shift out of an entrenched echo chamber. They were lovingly persistent.
Amanda: It sounds like an interesting approach to exposure therapy.
Linda: Yes, with genuine love and care that’s reciprocal. “I’m here,” with authentic curiosity and a desire to know the context of someone’s world.
Amanda: I keep feeling the solution is people. The problems we have with each other are solved by each other: by working together, not isolating. There’s a stream of mental health and trauma healing, and a stream of social justice, activism, and organizing. What’s the right mix? It feels like a chicken-egg situation. Do we regulate first, then organize, or organize and then regulate?
Linda: Both/and. You can only move at the speed of trust and at the pace of the nervous system. We’re impatient with ourselves and each other around change. When I’m sick, I’m “not healing fast enough.” That impatience is human. If I go faster than the speed of trust with clients, or parts of myself, I slip into power-over. I’ve been sitting with the idea of expanding integrative capacity: intrapsychic capacity, organizational capacity, systems and infrastructure capacity. Pause long enough to let ourselves catch up; to let all parts be heard; to engage relationally.
Amanda: Do we expand capacity by building it out or by slowing what we take in?
Linda: Both. Outward: skills, infrastructure, support. Inward: non-negotiable self-care, pausing for pleasure, joy, rest, micro-moments of nourishment. Many of us run on “go, go, go” to stay ahead of emotions we don’t have support to process. Grief is the big one: “If I start crying, I don’t know if I’ll stop.” We keep going because people rely on us. It builds up over generations.
Amanda: I relate. The culture is fast, instant, excessive. We use busyness to respond to injury, leaning into the rat race and the things we can control rather than the moment that feels out of control.
Linda: We’re at a confluence. Personal, collective, ancestral; proactive and reactive survival strategies. What we use to avoid pain becomes the source of pain. Strategies that help us survive prevent us from living. All of it can be true at the same time. Striving to get away from pain causes more pain.
Amanda: There’s a thin line between extremes. The thing that causes pain is often what makes us feel alive. Go far enough in one direction and you loop around. Circle. Spiral. Fractal. Everything feeds into everything.
Linda: Yes. The center point gets smaller; the spinning top’s still point holds more centrifugal force.
Amanda: That’s why so many answers are “both/and.” Self-care and community care. Some people say “you can’t take care of others until you’ve taken care of yourself” and others say “you don’t need to wait until you’re healed to help heal others”. But it has to be both/and, because when are we ever “done” healing?
Linda: Exactly. Come back to foundations: acknowledge lack of resources without collapsing into scarcity. Growth mindset over fixed mindset. Both/and.
Spiritual principles: all life is suffering; I will get sick, grow old, die; life will have ups and downs. Radical acceptance isn’t detachment from life; it’s non-attachment to my suffering. Where there is love, there is grief. Where there is great hope, there is great disappointment. To play all-in is to be non-attached to whether the goal eventuates, without abdicating responsibility for impact. That lets me love life itself.
Amanda: I love life. I have “love life” tattooed on my fingers. And, I know I can love it and not be attached to it.
Linda: And I’m sure you didn’t always feel that way. None of us do, consistently. When things aren’t going well we attach to suffering; joy feels impermanent.
There’s neurophysiology behind that: the brain’s timekeeper goes offline; now feels like forever. “This too shall pass.” But when individual, collective, and ancestral trauma are co-influencing, it’s annihilation energy, the ticking bomb we inherit. The wound can become a weapon. It’s taken me decades to reconcile that energy in me. Not nihilism but annihilation: emptiness. The implosion–explosion that creates emptiness, yearns for it, and fears it.
Amanda: Does becoming non-attached to suffering help reconcile that annihilation energy?
Linda: Compassionate non-attachment creates space for discernment, a skillful relationship with the dynamism of emptiness. Survivors of war, genocide, terrible interpersonal trauma—personally or ancestrally—often carry a thin spider-thread through the body; when touched, it vibrates and can’t stop. It’s always there. I didn’t know what to do with the energy, so I created chaos around me to mirror it, while longing for stillness and fearing it.
Through yoga, breath, meditation, I practice dynamic stillness. Stillness in safety, not terror. I’ve yearned for emptiness and not known what to do with it. The desire to “throw bombs” to create stillness, and realizing I am the bomb. Operation Rolling Thunder in Vietnam, pirates attacking the boat I was on as a two-year-old: ancestral annihilation is in me. My recent work is with that energy. I see it in the world: the silent bombs in our nervous systems. The far left and far right meet at the nervous system level.
Amanda: If only we could read everyone’s nervous system from the jump: “Nice to meet you; show me your nervous system”, we’d know how to proceed.
Linda: Tell me what you’re hiding underneath. Our political beliefs, front stories, they are cover stories. Trailheads in IFS language.
Amanda: Does it come down to survival? Are our stories tied to safety and control?
Linda: Yes. Which, in the extremes, becomes annihilating the other. When someone acts violently out of rage, it’s about reinstating safety through control, or the expression of pent-up survival energy. Anger can be fear. It can be shame. Shame-based triggers are common. Some anger is a calculated show; that’s different from annihilation-energy anger.
Amanda: So how do we solve the problems of polarization, extremism, and create bridges?
Linda: I think of something Bayo Akomolafe says: “The only way forward is awkward.” When times are urgent, slow down. Some of us don’t have fight-flight-freeze; we have fight-flight-freeze-fix. Fixing helped us survive, turned us into problem-solvers. But it can harm relationality. Honest answer: I don’t know. We’re creating a world that doesn’t yet exist. That’s why we must safeguard, and create space for creativity, imagination, possibility, and dreams. Dreams aren’t created alone; they happen with and through others not yet known. We are seeing a world that does not yet exist.
My teacher said, “The prison is the temple.” Real things are happening to real people and ecosystems. And I feel the answers are spiritual, mythological, deeply cultural. A return to earth-based reverence, surrender with devotion to the Great Mystery. Not bypassing. Additive. Giving us discernment, non-attachment, ways to move through life. We don’t do it alone.
We can’t exile parts of ourselves; what we exile becomes shadow and returns. Pause to integrate and metabolize. Metabolism is an alchemical process that turns what’s hard into nourishment for growth. The universe is deeply metabolistic. We’ve moved away from metabolistic living: flushing away what we don’t want to face; shoving homeless people aside; sending elders away so we don’t have to look; calling people “addicts” instead of people struggling with addictive cycles.
We need to equalize the metabolism of a community, a population, across people.
Amanda: We’re so individualistic we can’t co-regulate at scale.
Linda: Trauma makes us confuse individualism with individuation. Individuation is being loved into becoming. When family and culture aren’t supportive, we seek individualism to separate. That “freedom” is fueled by trauma and disrupted attachment, and our culture sells hyper-individualism.
To return to individuation, to be loved into becoming, is part of the task. In the meantime, we’ll find people and groups who collude with our own immaturation until we have enough capacity to engage the discomfort of personal healing and collective liberation. They go hand in hand and require capacity for discomfort, inconvenience, and uncertainty.
Coming back to me and you: there needs to be more voice for people who can bridge the individual and the collective, the historical and the current, the deeply mythic anthropo-cultural and the modern psyche. I don’t know how to do that by myself, and I’m grateful you want to do it with me. You have a different skill set. We’ll go further together than alone.
Amanda: A task like that isn’t meant to be done alone. It isn’t possible.
Linda: Not possible. There’s no way to learn and live all that in one lifetime. I need collaborators who are wildly different. Skills, trainings, perspectives. That means leaving my silo and practicing trust, reciprocity, interdependence, and the discomfort and uncertainty they bring. It’s scary, and liberating. Some of my limiting beliefs are trauma- and shame-driven, and embedded in white supremacy. Collaboration helps undo them.
Amanda: I don’t have limiting beliefs about you.
Linda: And I don’t about you. That’s how we co-regulate into becoming, into something we don’t yet know.
Amanda: That’s loving life.
Linda: Yes.
Amanda: Hell yeah. Thank you for supporting me and for being so gracious and willing and full of nuggets of wisdom. I learn from you every time we talk.
Linda: Same. I believe in you. I believe in us. I believe in the collective us, because I have no other choice. I can have all my feelings about that and still surrender with devotion. I have to believe in us.
Amanda: Same.
Linda: At the feet of the Great Mystery, I bow.
