Certainty Is Not Synonymous With Truth.

​Illustration by ​ Dominic McKenzie

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​This morning a woman* on the tills suddenly dived into a monologue: “There’s no good news, I just wish Brexit would be over, we’ll wake up one morning and it’ll be done and we won’t notice any difference. We’ve got to stop all these foreigners from coming in and using our health service and being on benefits, we just can’t afford them any more.”

Part of a therapists training is to learn to hold a neutral face and non-confrontational eye contact and I was glad I had been using these skills just minutes before because I was amazed and then curious: what was going on for this woman? How far would she go? For how long?
 
She had quite a way to go. She was livid that her vote – the only vote she’d ever cast – 'was being ignored.' I learned about her family and how confident they were that we’d be just fine after Brexit because of our existing trade deals and because of the high status Britain has in the world.
 
I stopped the interaction at that point - smiling and behaving like a customer - for a couple of reasons. The person working beside this woman was black. For all I know he too may have voted to leave Europe, he might be in complete agreement about ‘foreigners,’ he might have been stone deaf, but for me the use of the word ‘foreigners’ was so powerful that I was no longer comfortable with how it might be impacting him. Secondly, the woman was beginning to move in an increasingly agitated way. There’s a way of being as a therapist that gives space which often fills with powerful feelings, feelings that we know to be only part of reality, and in the confidentiality of a boundaried space those feelings and words can be aired, held without judgement and examined. A shop queue is not that space.
 
The encounter troubled me deeply. What should I do? I could accept this woman’s monologue for what it was - unbearable distress - knowing that it was possible that the woman would be shocked at herself and not repeat it or, more likely, that someone would make a complaint about her. Where do my responsibilities to this woman, to the social contract and to my own conscience lie? Do I let her take enough rope to hang herself? Isn’t that how this works, that we push boundaries until someone pushes back?
 
I don’t know what the right thing to do might have been but this is what I did. I spoke quietly and without heat to another member of staff at the customer service desk. He took me seriously and although he apologised he knew I wasn’t looking for that. I didn’t identify the woman and emphasised how distressed she seemed, that I wasn’t making a complaint and that I didn’t want anyone punished. He said, “It sounds like she’s on the edge. If she’s feeling like that lots more people probably are,” and I relaxed. That took 5 minutes of my time and I was able to hand over my own anxiety to someone who was in a position to deal with the situation more meaningfully than I.
 
However we voted or didn’t vote in the referendum, whatever the rights and wrongs of it all, we are living through volatility unseen for generations and it’s exhausting. We are treating each other in hateful ways and there is very little that anyone can do about it because we seldom get the opportunity. And sometimes there’s an opportunity where we might not recognise it.
 
We don’t have to take refugees into our own home but we can understand that brown and black mothers love their children as much as we love ours, and imagine what it would take for us to put our baby into an overcrowded boat knowing that in the next few minutes they may drown. We don’t have to give all our possessions to homeless people but we can understand that homelessness, addiction and mental illness cost the public purse vastly more than social housing, and remember that social housing was originally for everyone, whatever their income, because that’s what a vast majority (the military more than any other section of society) voted for.
 
We can ignore racism, or confront it face to face, or make an entirely justified complaint. Or we can attempt to address the situation without aiming to make anyone’s life a misery. We can feel contempt for the 1 in 12 people who are holocaust deniers, and despair or  understand that this was a poll of just 2000 people, and that it speaks to a need for much greater social mixing, every day, forever. We can clutch our pearls at the video that’s doing the rounds again of a 4 year old and his granny yelling “Millwall, fuck ‘em all, fucking black cunt,” for the camera and demand someone saves us from them. Or we can understand that this attitude is very far from unusual, that it’s held by people who are charming, polite, solid churchgoing members of rural communities who would not dream of uttering such profanities, and that this family are very likely to be the epitome of the much admired Hard Working Tax Payer.
 
Complexity is gruelling. There are seldom straightforward answers to anything. If concepts like “keep an open heart” help then use them but what you may actually be doing is approaching a problem logically and strategically, for the best possible, most sustainable outcome. It’s not as satisfying as knowing that the person causing you grief is a dangerous animal or an elitist libtard pervert but at the very least it keeps your options open. At best, it makes you a wiser, more rounded person.

Even if you get it wrong.
 
 
 
 
*I’ve aimed to fictionalise events sufficiently so that the people involved would not recognise themselves.