Deep Truths
In case you feel grief and you feel free and you don't feel “allowed” to feel both
I usually don’t reach for my phone when I can’t sleep, but these are not usual times, so at 2 in the morning, I doomscrolled for a while. Then, to wean myself off the phone and back to bed, I switched to Gmail and came across a message from Krista Tippett. She hosts “On Being,” a podcast centered on spiritual inquiry.
Subject: The News That Is ‘Breaking’ Is Never Seeing Things Whole
Krista started by talking about
“the notion of Deep Truth, a core premise of physics first introduced to me by the wise and wonderful Nobel physicist Frank Wilczek. Deep truths are not surface truths that can be reduced to mere fact, proven or unproven.”
Or, to quote Wilzcek directly from the podcast episode which I listened to the next day,
“You can recognize a Deep Truth by the feature that its opposite is also a Deep Truth.”
On the podcast, Wilczek starts with an example from physics: is light a particle or a wave? It’s both. Wilczek says,
“Sometimes it’s useful to think of it one way. Sometimes it’s useful to think of it another way. Both can be informative in different circumstances. But it’s impossible to apply them both at once.” (emphasis mine).
He’s accounting for not just the contradiction, but the limitations of our perspective. What we can see from one point of view, we cannot see from another, and vice versa. Put another way,
“You have to view the world in different ways to do it justice.”
For our purposes, why is this useful?
When I listened to the Frank Wilczek podcast episode, my thoughts drifted to Krispin Mayfield.
In my interview with the therapist and writer Krispin Mayfield, he talked about struggling to make peace with his decision to cut contact with his parents. But then, he had a thought:
“‘This cutoff might not be forever. We haven’t worked it out, and every time I try, it has a big negative impact on me. But maybe later on in my life, something will change.’ That helped me to calm the obsessive thinking.”
Why did this thought calm him? Because it made space for a contradiction without a neat resolution. He allowed him to live with the fact that two things could be true:
His parents and he both wished to reconcile.
His parents and he could not reconcile.
So much recent writing about estrangement does not know how to account for Deep Truths like this.
When it comes to telling the story of estrangement, many writers have wanted to “boil it down” to a Bad Guy (the abusive parents) and a Good Guy (the adult child who finally gets away). Or a Bad Guy (an entitled adult child who quits on the relationship for trivial reasons!) and a Good Guy (the pitiable, aging parents left bewildered.)
But DeepTruths (what Wilczek also calls “complementarity”) teach us that, in some cases, neither of these narratives are actually robust enough to encompass the ways our relationships continue to evolve after estrangement.
I hope it’s obvious, but in case it’s not: my considering Deep Truth complexity is not the same thing as me letting people off the hook, or pretending that they didn’t do the bad things they did.
A part of me even feels that I’m being too prescriptive by writing this essay. That I’m saying: THIS is how you should think about your estrangement!
But I’m not. Because I’m not telling you that you have to see both sides or all sides. I’m not telling you that you have to do anything.
Rather, I’m writing this in case you feel grief and you feel free and you don’t feel “allowed” to feel both.
Or you believe there’s no path to repair and also that there is a potential future for the relationship. Or you feel grateful for what your parents gave you, and angry that they will never admit they abused you.
As Wilczek says, Deep Truths “are different ways of organizing our experience of the world. Each one tells us different things. Each one can be very useful in certain applications, but they’re very difficult to apply simultaneously because they’re just from different worlds.”
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If this resonated with you, you may also want to watch this spoken word/song piece by Karine Polwart, especially if you need more ways of seeing our current reality.
Other links:
Maggie
PS: I hope you enjoyed the essays and interviews I’ve shared with you over the past month that featured other creators. If you’d like to contribute to Estranged either with a guest essay (which is a paid opportunity!) or in an interview (which is not), email me: maggie at maggiefrankhsu dot com.
I've been exploring this in therapy a lot of late and I think many of us lean into 'bad versus good' narratives because they allow us to break free from the trauma bonds that have often held many of us captive for much of our lives. The guilt of the parentified child who feels responsible for their parent's wellbeing; the self doubt and comparing our trauma to others to be undermine our intuition that our experience was awful and unsafe.
I'm learning that I can allow myself to feel the duality of my experience of my abusive parent. That they weren't all bad. That they can be worthy of my compassion for their trauma. AND that they're still not, and never will be, a safe person for me. It just hurts more to think of things this way than to put them in the Bad Box.