Does Your Mind Need to be Decolonized?

Colonization goes deep.

Colonization, decolonization. The terms are increasingly bandied about. The concrete definition of colonization involves outside empires moving in and taking over the land and governance of a people. You’ve heard decolonization being described as the withdrawal of a colonial government from its former colonized locale, giving back the power of self-governance. That’s the concrete aspect. But there is also a non-concrete aspect, that which is carried forward by changed practices, for example, in the school systems the colonizers set up, helping foster future local leaders trained in the colonizer’s view of the world (Elkins, 2022). It also continues in the destruction and revisions of habitats and lifeways of human and nonhumans.

But there is another insidious aspect of colonization, something that is globally pervasive.

Recall how Australia, Canada, and the USA broke Indigenous/First Nation communities? Frustrated with the non-assimilation of Native Peoples in the lands their forebears grabbed, these government took up actions rooted in the worldview and practices of their ‘parent,’ the British Empire, which was notoriously genocidal toward Native Peoples (ibid). These practices included treating children as property—which appalled Native Peoples (McPherson & Rabb, 2011). Europeans and their migrating settlers had little empathy for children (DeMause, 1995) who often were considered contaminated with original sin and re           quired a strong hand to learn to be a productive member of society. This contrasted greatly with traditional communities around the world who consider children coming from the gods and even carrying the spirit of an ancestor (Sahlins, 2008).

The understanding of child and human nature development was long distorted over millennia as humans took up dominator rather than partnership roles with one another and the rest of Nature. As John Zerzan points out, domestication/civilization is a matter of separating humanity from Nature, assisting in the birth of the individual—of individualism, characterized by a repressive stance against nature generally. Such colonization starts in babyhood.

Dominator cultures believe that adults should forcibly shape children. So, for the unassimilatable Natives, that was the place to aim. The logic was that if you change childhoods with punishment and forced labor instead of ungoverned freedom, assimilation will naturally take place in the communities. ‘Kill the Indian and save the man.’ So, governments kidnapped the children, putting them in residential schools, where many were abused or died, or adopted them out to White families (Adams, 2020; Trafzer et al., 2006). The effects of this culture-cide are still reverberating throughout Native communities today.

Interestingly, deciders and perpetrators in the efforts to forcibly assimilate Native children, like many people still today, were unable to see that they themselves had been colonized (though in a less extreme manner). They and their ancestors were forced away from their own ancient Nature-centric cultures. Growing up, they likely were treated like property or commodities to be used for family gain through labor or marriage. In babyhood, they were likely treated as nuisances or burdens, which still continues today.

In a postscript for a later edition, Ashis Nandy (1983) described the content of his book, The Intimate Enemy, the crippling of the colonizing nations themselves:

“The Intimate Enemy audits some of the costs the dominant have paid—a crippling fear of the feminine and the frozen gender hierarchies that have maimed masculinity, loss of childhood and its re-emergence as only a preparatory stage of adulthood and a target of pedagogy, the desacralization of the living cosmos through absolutized, secular ideas of progress and productivity, and a cramped self that cannot easily host radical diversity and plural visions of the futures.” (pp. 123-124)

The trauma that patriarchal, hierarchical civilization typically causes has been passed down for generations, over thousands of years, impairing the psyche (Narvaez & Tarsha, 2021). It is so commonplace that people don’t realize their imprisonment. In effect, the colonizers’ enterprise colonized their own people’s psyches. Like soldiers who are not restored or renested in the community after war experience, colonizers carry back to their families and communities the dominator role they’ve adopted, passing on to the children the wounding that they themselves experienced (Fanon, 1961).

This means that you too are colonized.

We’ve all been psychologically invaded by colonization to one degree or another, shaping the way we think and react. The colonized mind is established in early life when brain/mind is forming itself based on experience. What are some of the characteristics that can adhere to minds colonized from unnestedness?

ATTITUDES TOWARDS SELF

Self-doubt. This is a common experience among USians, remarked upon by the Dalai Lama (‘what’s wrong with everyone?). Instead of following one’s inner compass, colonized psyches look outside themselves for direction.

Feelings of sinfulness. “Something is wrong with me” thinks the undercared for child. Author Shalom Auslander (2024) is deftly describes this sinfulness feeling in himself garnered from growing up in an extremely orthodox Jewish household with abusive parents.

‘I’m not enough.’ The constant toxic stress of not getting needs met through our evolved nest signals that the child is never good enough. Many of us have lurking shame and a type of imposter syndrome (‘if people really knew me!’).

Self-suppression. Without support, oppression of the self leads to self-suppression. ‘You are not welcome here’ becomes ‘I can’t be myself.’  This feature can be so strong in some people that they don’t sense self-doubt but act it.

EMOTIONAL TENDENCIES

Anxiety. D.W. Winnicott pointed out that the intelligent baby figures out how to dissociate from a mother who is inattentive. He suggested that the very active world changemakers are working from this anxiety, putting it into busyness and being controlling.

Dissociation. The normative experiences of physical abuse (spanking) and neglect (of emotions, of affection, of welcoming) force the child into dissociation to avoid the pain. It can become a habit under stress.

Avoidance of vulnerability. Reactive protectionism is the combative approach to the world that some people (e.g., former President Trump) use to keep from feeling softer feelings, which would lead to recall of the pains of the past. Good therapy helps the individual reach these feelings and resolve them so that they no longer haunt the individual.

ATTITUDES TOWARDS THE WORLD

Extrinsic focus and motivation. Without co-regulating calming care in babyhood, you have not learned to feel safe in yourself. You were taught not to trust or develop your inner guidance systems, but to listen to the warnings of your parents. In fact, you could be punished if you did not.

Disconnection from (the rest of) Nature. Nature? Scary! Dangerous! Eradicate it.

Disconnection from others. You can’t really trust people, you learned early on. They tell you one thing and do another. They don’t listen. They laugh at you. Be on guard.

There is not enough. There is a sort of inner desperation for something that you are missing. You feel that there is something out there that will fulfill you, if you could only find it or do it.

Exclusivism. Some people are more valuable than others and you want to be in that group, doing whatever it takes. To ease guilt of aggression, others are dehumanized and treated as dumb, dangerous, subhuman animals. (Just like women and children have been treated by the dominator culture.)

Act Strong. As a reaction formation to the sense of inner vulnerability one has from early unnestedness, one must look and act strong. You learned early on that having needs is a weakness and determined it was a bad thing. Weakness = badness.

There is potentially a lot to decolonize, to heal, depending on our unique experiences. And this is a short list. Remember, above, Nandy (1983) added more, including the maiming of masculinity. In sum:

·       Fear of the feminine

·       Frozen gender hierarchies

·       Maimed masculinity

·       Loss of childhood

·       Desacralization of the living cosmos

·       Absolutized notions of progress and productivity

·       Cramped self

This is what unnestedness brings about. Nestedness centralizes child raising and empowering mothers and allies to provide for infant and child basic needs. The erosion of humanity’s evolved nest undermined human development, human nature, and human capacities—e.g., impairing intuition, perceptual and receptive intelligence to the rest of Nature, self-regulation of one kind or another (Narvaez, 2024).

Re-nesting ourselves counters the colonization of our psyches. Decolonization in individuals usually happens slowly, in moments of insight and restoration, moments that eventually hang together through the process of self-actualization. The Worldview Literacy Project is one place to start. As one gets reconnected to Nature, returns to feeling embraced by Earth and her entities. One realizes that one is precious, that one has gifts to share, that the inner compass can be awakened through contemplation and other practices. Each of us can take the steps towards self-actualization and become wise elders who provide the nest to others. Then we can bring others together for communal self-actualization, like our deep ancestors. Let’s go!

REFERENCES

Adams, D.W. (2020). Education for extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928, 2^nd ed. University Press of Kansas.

Auslander, S. (2024). Feh: A memoir. Riverhead.

deMause, L. (1995). The history of childhood.: The untold story of child abuse New York, NY: Psychohistory Press.

Elkins, C. (2022). Legacy of violence: A history of the British empire. Knopf.

Fanon, F. (1961/2021). The wretched of the earth. Grove Press.:

McPherson, D.H., & Rabb, J.D. (2011). Indian from the inside: Native American philosophy and cultural renewal, 2^nd ed. Jefferson, NC: MacFarland & Co.

Nandy, A. (1983). The intimate enemy: Loss and recovery of self under colonialism. Oxford.

Narvaez, D. (2024). Returning to evolved nestedness, wellbeing, and mature human nature, an ecological imperative. Review of General Psychology, 28(2), 83-105. https://doi.org/10.1177/1089268023122403

Narvaez, D., & Tarsha, M. (2021). The missing mind: Contrasting civilization with non-civilization development and functioning. In T. Henley & M. Rossano (Eds.), Psychology and cognitive archaeology: An Interdisciplinary approach to the study of the human mind (pp. 55-69). London: Routledge.

Sahlins, M. (2008). The Western illusion of human nature with reflections on the long history of hierarchy, equality and the sublimation of anarchy in the west, and comparative notes on other conceptions of the human condition. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Trafzer, C.E., Keller, J.A., & Sisquoc, L. (Eds.) (2006). Boarding school blues: Revisiting American Indian educational experiences. University of Nebraska Press.

Winnicott, D.W. (1990). Home is where we start from: Essays by a psychoanalyst (compiled and Ed. by C. Winnicott, R. Shepherd, M. Davis). New York: W.W. Norton & Co.