On this page I’ll tell you who I am…
By telling you the five things that matter most to me.
1. My life’s mission: to upgrade love
As a kid I was taught by my church and my family that I was unlovable. There was nothing I believed more deeply than this, but nothing troubled me more.
So I became obsessed with love, and kept trying to find a kind of love that might include me. I went to therapy, I read dozens of how–to books. Still, by midlife I had failed. I hadn’t been able to make an intimate relationship work, so I was deep in despair about myself.
But then I got surprised.
I was reading my fourth book in a row about human evolution, when I had this thought: Since we humans are developmental beings that means human love is developmental.
Which means we can upgrade it.
We don’t have to settle for conventional love. We get to make of love something way better than the default evolution gave us.
And this question came to me, this ambition…
“What if we ask more of love than we’ve ever asked of it?”
And now I had a mission. A life mission. And it was more me than anything else had ever been.
This mission has guided me ever since. It motivated me to do some very hard work on myself, which turned me into who I’ve become. For which I’m so thankful. Because now in my old age, I can say I love myself. Not as an aspirational wish, but as a matter of fact.
Of course I don’t feel this love all day every day, but I have my moments. And this is a very long way to come from that little boy who was taught to despise himself, and that’s enough for me.
2. Writing about love and politics.
After a silent childhood, it means a lot to me to be visible and vulnerable through my writing and my message about love.
I can say I love writing. Except I have days when it’s not going well, and I get frustrated, and the love fades into the background.
But I’ve come to understand that on my “bad” days, my unconscious is still cooking. It’s engaged. It’s working away. It’s making progress. And in a day or a week or a month, that work will surface and I’ll write it out and feel a sweet sense of deep contentment.
3. Helping people feel for themselves and fight for themselves.
On my websites, I call the work I do with people coaching because that’s a familiar term.
But when I’m talking with myself, I never use that word. I don’t think of myself as a coach because the work I do is much more intense than typical coaching. It asks more of you. And of me, too.
4. In-depth conversations with new people.
I was a shy kid, but I’m not shy anymore. I like meeting people and I have no trouble initiating conversations with strangers.
However, I’m very much an introvert. So I prefer talking with one person at a time, or with a small group of two or three. And my favorite conversations are the ones that have the potential to go deep, and then do.
5. Mutual advocacy with friends.
I love when we’re there for each other, really there, championing each other, making life better and sweeter.
If you want to know more about me, check out my books below, because…
Who I am in my writing is very much who I am in real life.
Except for one thing…
In person I’m a lot more playful.
And let me recommend the first chapter of my Asking book. I’ve been telling you about myself as I am now, but if you want to know how I got here, that chapter has the story.
The mission to upgrade our love is as big a challenge as we humans have ever taken on. Personally, I’m crazy about it. It’s given me what I needed, it’s pulled my life together, it’s brought me to a kind of self–love I never experienced before. It means the world to me, but…
That’s me and it might not be you.
So let me give you a warning. This is not an easy–step project. Not even close. It’s gutsy. And it’s got a dark side.
To upgrade love we have to get behind the scenes of conventional love. We have to go down to the bottom of the human operating system. And when we do, we come face to face with the source of human evil. And this can shake you to your core.
I’m sorry, but I don’t know any way around this. There are so many blessings that come with the upgrade mission, and this book is filled with them. But we don’t get them for free. Yet in the darkest place we find the deepest compassion. For ourselves and for each other.
Where does this compassion come from? It comes from the fact that we didn’t ask to be made as we are. We didn’t ask for evil to be so easy and love to be so hard.
When we understand this, we get to feel for ourselves more deeply than we ever have, and then fight for ourselves like never before.
Maybe you’ve heard pundits and activists decry tribalism because it’s making a disaster of our politics. Some see it as a defect that’s corrupted human behavior.
But tribalism is not like that. It’s been our way of life for most of the time our species has existed. Our ability to work together in harmony in small groups has been our primary survival strategy. It’s why we’ve done so well for ourselves. It’s why we’ve been able to take dominion over the earth.
Our tribal nature is not just one more feature on the long list of what’s special about us humans. It’s right at the heart of our underlying operating system. It’s the deep source of so much of human behavior.
For millennia, tribalism has been the secret to our success. But now it’s become trouble. Big trouble. The biggest.
What made us is now breaking us.
What we thought was a blessing has turned against us. If we want to save ourselves, we need to transform into a coherent global team. We need work together in deep cooperation. But that’s not what we’re doing, not most of us. As a species we remain stubbornly tribal. We remain compulsively divisive.
Tribal Trouble is a sequel to my book, Asking More of Love. In that book you can find more on human evolution and the role tribalism has played in our history. Much of that history is dark and depressing.
But that’s not what this site is about. Here you’ll find a series of articles that are short and practical. I’ve written them especially for activists to help you make sense of political behaviors that don’t otherwise make sense.
This site is about doing judo with tribalism. Like pulling the rug out from under it, breaking its spell, and then surprising dedicated tribalists with unexpected moves.
I remember back in the days when I was a sacrificial–savior activist, people would give me a pat on the back and thank me for the work I was doing. But almost no one wanted to live like me.
Activists are known for being dragged–down burnouts. Not very appealing.
But if we were going to have any chance to save the world, we’d need the great majority of people, masses of people, to be attracted to activism. We’d need them to look at us activists and be jealous of how we live, not be repelled.
We’d want them to see activists as people with deep, rewarding relationships, both with colleagues at work and with their loved ones at home.
So in this book, I focus on activists treating themselves and each other way better than what’s typical. I talk about replacing the Sacrificial–Savior Operating System with the much kinder and much more powerful Deep Nurturance Operating System.
Instead of just giving you bullet–point lists of how–tos, I give you detailed dialogues so you can see the principles of nurturance in action in relationships.
Most of the dialogues in this book, even though they deal with very serious issues, are upbeat, and sometimes even fun.
This is a very short book designed to help writers play their way into a deeper love of writing.
What inspired me was reading stories about kids in play therapy. I love these stories. I just love them.
I’m not talking about the kind of therapy that stays on the surface. What inspires me is the deep kind play therapy, the kind where the therapist uses play to help kids deal with the trauma of abuse and neglect and the daily struggles of living in a dysfunctional family.
Because it goes deep, because it takes on the toughest issues, I call this primal–play therapy.
And I found it to be contagious. Primal play started showing up in my writing, like a puppy who wouldn’t leave me alone, “Come on, let’s have some fun.”
This was my first book and I’m still very fond of it. It cost me the most to write both in terms of time it took and in terms of the personal changes I had to go through to be able to write it.
My Asking book is the sequel to this one. I brought over whole passages and then added a lot of new material. But the most important difference between the two is perspective…
In my Love book, I started with the death of hope and then showed how upgrading love is the best way to respond to that death and defend ourselves against despair.
In my Asking book, I start with upgrading love for its own sake, the power of it, the blessings that come with it. Then secondarily I talk about how the human operating system has turned against us and is killing our hopes for a future as it marches us down the road to extinction.
I’m hoping that my Asking book makes the mission to upgrade love more accessible.
Let's talk
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a free hour of in–depth conversation with me.
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Coaching
In the coaching I do, you get to
feel for yourself then fight for yourself.
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Contact and comments
I’d love to hear from you. I really would.
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