Grey Walking

Grey Walking; The Shadow Work of a Harmed Soul

Everyone with a harmed soul who is alive and whole is holding a scalpel they had to learn to use in the dark.

The Lie

Like everyone with trauma, I learned abuse. We forget that with victims. We think of victims as static, unmoving, clear-cut. Over time, this is rarely completely true. Each ‘victim’ learns the skills used to dismantle their autonomy. We learn the truly dark art of controlling the behavior and moods of others.

We call it empathy when it's used for good, psychological abuse when it's used for bad. The skill set remains the same.

What we ignore is the grey—the amorphous status of the victim to predator, back to victim. Victim is a vague word. Society does not want the details. It does not want to know how we decide to move forward after the events, what it looks like in our homes nine months later, sitting completely still and alone in the dark.

The Shadow

The shadow cast by abuse becomes internalized. When we internalize abuse, we internalize the predator and their skills. That which we internalize, we can become. What we can become must be addressed in plain words. Hence, the frenetic and urgent treatment of the traumatized.

Not treating trauma is a promise.

A promise for endless solitude. A promise to never feel whole. A promise to keep life small, manageable, and black and white.

It is also a promise for transmission.

Untreated trauma will create trauma for others—a parasitic infection of the spirit, passed from one to another.

Grey Walking

Shadow work is where I prefer to focus. I call it Grey Walking, though I’m sure there is an academic word for it.

• Harm reduction comes from Grey Walking.

• Internal Family Systems (IFS) comes from Grey Walking.

• Every LCSW I’ve ever met is a Grey Walker that can cut straight to the bone

The Scalpel

The abuser and the abused can become one and the same. As a society, we want to bring a hammer to conversations of abuse.

Grey Walking requires precision.

What we need, to save the most people, is a scalpel.

It is not satisfying.

The Lie

Discernment development in trauma recovery is essential.

• Where exactly does the behavioral issue appear?

• Where exactly is the lie in an abuser?

• And why is it always where they store the memories of their own abuse and victimhood?

Recovering from trauma—truly recovering—we must look at our own belief system:

• The one we were raised in.

• The belief system we choose for our children.

Is the structural development of a belief system coherent? Does it have structural integrity, reliability, replicability?

If not, trauma is usually in the room.

With great discernment and great humility, one can do this work with a scalpel. The truth can be retrieved.

The Truth

Recovering from trauma is not about social justice in the personal sense. It is about finding, naming, and extracting the lies we told ourselves to survive.

When hating an abuser, one can miss that this can’t truly be resolved with justice. Because it’s unbearable.

Abuse happens within an intricate web.

Layers and layers.

Concealing the roles everyone plays.

But even more than that, concealing the why.

• Why do we choose the roles?

• Why do we stay?

• How do we lay the survival ground plan for our children instead of removing the abuse from their lives? How do we get through that part as safely and quickly as possible?

• How do we pass it to the young and our partners, and by what method?

Believing a victim is in a static and near-holy state, we ignore a documented fact of abuse— that a measurable number of victims become abusers intermittently through life.

As abusers learn us, we do learn them back.

We remember their every move. We know why they are doing it, even when they don’t. We know it’s coming, even when they don’t.

We believe we could never do it.

That is not true for large swaths of us.

Whether we ever act out our abuse responses or not, whether we let it slip from our mouths, the psychological abuse is always available. ‘Good people’ use it against themselves. ‘Bad people’ project it onto others.

The abused are natural profilers. We are the best at predator identification.

That level of understanding of human behavior can be weaponized.

The Switch

I have done it myself.

There are red lines in my mind.

If the right one is crossed by the right person at the wrong moment, I shift immediately into a different existential belief system.

You can dismantle a person with the precision of a surgeon when you understand the underlying belief structures of an nprocessed identity. They are unbalanced, and don’t know it. We do. It’s a power dynamic. Survivors hold the real cards.

An identity can be peeled out of us by someone who stops you dead in your tracks with a weapons grade question that cuts directly to the core of our sense of self.

I can explain in an easily identifiable and common intersection most will recognize

• What it means about a man when he finds casual misogyny funny.

• How unstable the identity structure is.

• Being abusive to (or speaking contemptuously about) women is how young men make friends. • How empty that connection is, and what it says about them that they think this is how you bond. How does that play out in his daughter’s eyes.

• How incredibly alone they are.

• That seeking control is a fear response, that grasping for status is a sign of self doubt.

• That they reek of fear whenever a conversation makes it clear they’ve never really thought about the true impacts of their choices. Because they don’t have to(that’s where the envy comes in, and with it, an unplanned ruthless response can spill from my mouth).

That skill can be used for good.

And I have consciously chosen to use it for bad.

The rage in me when someone doesn’t see the truth of abuse happening everywhere around them creates an envy that morphs into intentional harm.

I insert the truth of the lives of the women around them via blunt force verbal trauma.

Women don’t need to yell because they can speak. Men yell because they can’t.

The quieter I speak, the more afraid they become.

My response to that fear is predatory.

It feels like oxygen. Watching the reality of them surface in their own eyes. That’s not a flex.

It’s a confession.

The Amoral Clarity of a Very Bright Light

• Leash your temper.

• Take a scalpel.

• Separate the layers between how he wants to see himself and who he actually is.

• Shine a very bright light on it.

No rage. No violence. No volume.

Just a very, very bright light.

Understanding this possibility requires radical transparency.

A commitment—or a vow of sorts—to tell the truth as quickly as we know it.

Don’t hide the fact you thought about harming someone yesterday.

Tell someone trustworthy, quickly and with transparency, not self-judgment. Choose this person carefully, and make it mutual.

As much as I despise the truth of it, when I pan out all the way I can’t deny that passing on trauma is the amoral result of an equation we refuse to acknowledge we understand as a species.

Because it is insidious and terrifying. Because it comes with a shame that frequently proves terminal.

The only ethical way to learn this skill is to first take that scalpel to the lies that you told yourself to survive. Start gently. You will do the least harm, and the well of persistent self loathing will alchemize into compassion, whether you will it or not. That will guide your conscience going forward.

What We Owe to The People Who Aren’t Here Yet

Trauma recovery is a duty, not a luxury.

It is not fair. But it’s true.

Until society reflects this with adequate and accessible mental healthcare, we must fill the gaps for one another as expediently as possible.

This requires a near-religious commitment to de-shamifying what is true.

I would say this is the warm, beating heart of Grey Walking.

And I have never seen the method fail to catch the ear of a person on the cliff.

At minimum, it buys time.