Hello, Dyann here, Dr. Dyann Ross, I’m the love theorist!
It's good to have you with me. I'm talking today on love and nonviolence as part of the bigger project that I'm engaged in, with this podcast series, of building a theory of love for us all. The first set of podcasts involves me talking in relation to some of my favorite authors who have deeply influenced my thinking about love so far. Going forward I will actually have some conversations with people as well, which I'm really looking forward to, as part of co-creating a theory of love.
For the first step, and today, we're looking to talk about love and nonviolence. And as part of my focus, I’m drawing on Mahatma Gandhi’s work and writings, and also Sandra Bloom, very different people, very different situations. I'm mostly talking about Gandhi’s ideas of love as closely related to nonviolence, specifically his idea of Satyagraha or truth force, and then introducing Sandra Bloom’s idea of trauma, and how violence causes a range of different types of unsafety. This links back to the idea of broken-heartedness caused by violence and lovelessness.
A brief note about violent communication
First, to make a comment on the idea of violence. A significant writer in the area of nonviolent communication is Marshall Rosenberg (2015) who explains what violence can look like in our interactions with others –
“If violent means acting in ways that result in hurt or harm, then much of how we communicate is violent, for example – judging others, bullying, having racial bias, blaming, finger pointing, discriminating, speaking without listening, criticising others or ourselves, name-calling, reacting when angry …”
This list of violent actions is perhaps challenging to listen to as we might find behaviours we undertake included here. If we let this sit as a brief introduction to defining violence in interpersonal communication, and going forward I will craft it further to include other aspects.
Love as nonviolence
Gandhi developed his ideas during the decades of India’s nonviolent independence struggle from British occupation. India gained independence in 1947. What I really like about Gandhi’s work, is that he tried to live what he believed, he tried to model his belief in nonviolence as a means of struggle against what he saw as the oppressive forces of the British Empire. He drew on the Buddhist concept of “Ahimsa”, meaning love and “Satyagraha” meaning nonviolence. He saw love as a way of life, that we consciously practice at every opportunity and nonviolence as a method of struggle (R. Gandhi, 2013). Mahatma Gandhi (1928) explained that ‘satya’ means truth and ‘agraha’ means polite insistence or holding firmly to, this being referred to as “truth force”.
In 1909 Gandhi is quoted as saying that his imprisonment as a young man in South Africa during uprisings against apartheid, was “the gateway to the ‘garden of God’ where the ‘flowers of self-restraint and gentleness’ grew ‘beneath the feet of those who accept but refuse to impose suffering” (R. Gandhi, 2013, p. 116). Here is the key principle of meeting violence with nonviolent resistance and self-discipline, and refusing to resort to violence.
Gandhi was clear that violence leads to violence and wrote at the time:
“War demoralises those who are trained for it, it brutalises [people] of naturally gentle character. It outrages every beautiful canon of morality. It's path of glory is foul with the passions of lust and red with the blood of murder. This is not the pathway to our goal” (R. Gandhi, 2013, p. 117).
He said there could be no love if compassion, forgiveness and equality were absent.
When Gandhi was questioned about why isn't love more appropriate than the concept of nonviolence, he replied he realised that there needed to be a struggle for justice for love to be experienced for people. He wrote a little later:
“In spite of the negative particle ‘non’, nonviolence is no negative power. [We] are surrounded in life by strife and bloodshed, life living upon life. But it's not through strife and violence, but through nonviolence that [people] can fulfil [their] destiny” (cited in R. Gandhi, 2013, p. 116). Therefore, we need love, Ahimsa plus nonviolence, Satyagraha.
Nonviolence, as I understand it, and drawing upon Gandhi, refers to the peaceful, respectful and tactical use of power and influence to pressure high power individuals and groups to uphold protesters’ justice claims. It can include a broad range of nonviolent direct action (NVDA) strategies such as street marches, media campaigns, petitions, sit-ins, and of course, civil disobedience (see Sharp’s 1973 list of NVDA strategies). Chenoweth (2021) looked at all the major uprisings and revolutions of recent history, and she found that the most successful, the ones that could endure through all sorts of challenges to achieve the public's claims for justice, were ones that were not violent. So I think that's really interesting and gives us hope that we can trust in the power of nonviolence.
Martin Luther King Jr’s philosophy of civil disobedience was very strongly influenced by Gandhi’s ideas on love as nonviolence. Martin Luther King often said, and I'm now quoting from The King Centre web page, that he got his inspiration from Jesus Christ and his techniques from Gandhi. And by way of introduction some of the principles are:
Nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people;
It seeks to win friendship and understanding;
Nonviolence chooses love instead of hate;
And nonviolence believes that the universe is on the side of justice.
There's a lot in these principles, and I mention them briefly so we have a bit of a working sense of nonviolence where love is about reaching for the highest good, as the hooks says, in ourselves and the other person, and linked to this, nonviolence are ways of struggling for justice, and good in the world, without doing harm, or resorting violence.
Violence causes unsafety and trauma
Okay, so, if we could accept that's our working definition of nonviolence, then I want to come to the idea of trauma, because what we've been saying so far, basically is the absence of love, can often be experienced as trauma in our bodies, in landscapes and animals, and our relationships between who we all are on the planet. And what we're interested in is how love can make the difference, and how love can be the guiding ethic and force in our daily lives in the tradition of Gandhi to bring about a more peaceful, loving world.
I think the idea of trauma helps us to translate into multiple situations what the experience of violence can look and feel like. My other podcast refers to broken-heartedness where the emotional aspect of our heart has become deeply harmed by violence or unfairness done to us, or that we're witnessing done to others, including animals and mother nature. Thus, violence is a really important organising concern as the opposite to love, and to summarise, violence includes all forms of oppression, types of injustice and harm.
What I want to do now is come to Sandra Bloom’s (2017) idea of trauma, because I think what's really helpful in how she thinks about trauma is that it fits with our experiences in our bodies, and how that then can affect our hearts and our ability to love and our ability to flourish in the world. So, Sandra Bloom has done a lot of writing in this space, including about trauma-organised or trauma causing workplaces, which we'll talk about another time. Her background was as a practitioner in the mental health space, and also as a person with lived experience of mental health. She's trying to understand the parallels that can happen in systems of care for people who are receiving mental health treatment, and what's been happening in the individual person's life.
One of her most important ideas used for unpacking what trauma looks like, is how it involves the lack of safety being experienced by the person where unsafety becomes a potential indicator of harm, and possibly trauma. We're interested in particular types of trauma, where there has been an injustice or harm done to somebody. Bloom identifies four types of safety that we need for trauma-informed responses with people we may have contact with and for responding to our own trauma. The four types of safety are:
Physical safety
Psychological safety
Social safety
Moral safety.
She says we need to cultivate a sense of physical safety in ourselves, so that we feel secure, not only in our bodies, but financial security, and that we're free from all types of violence, including self-destructive behaviour, that is being violent toward ourselves. So that's the first of the types of safety that Bloom would say is needed for people to recover from trauma. Psychological safety is the second type of safety, which refers to being able to undertake self-care, self-discipline, fostering your own self-esteem, and the ability to live in a self-reflective way in a healthy, productive life. Social safety is the third type of safety that Bloom says is really important for avoiding trauma or knowing how to start to recover from it. This refers to the ability to interact with others without being compromised, or harmed, or without harming others. This idea of social safety, links to the fourth type of safety, moral safety, which refers to all the people in a situation following a set of values and commitments that are consistent with treating people respectfully. Moral safety involves being able to act according to our values.
I find these four types of safety to be really helpful, because we, each of us could perhaps identify ways when we don't feel safe. Basically, what I'm saying here is that violence can be understood as a threat, or experience of unsafety in one or more of these ways, and it can be not only for an individual, but a whole group of people, or a whole landscape.
Another related idea that I find kind of helpful, which was written about in terms of humans, but I think it really fits for animals and landscapes as well. This is the idea of autonomy infringement by Hem and colleagues (2018). They say that unsafety can occur if the person feels some sort of infringement, an unwelcome infringement, on their sense of self and their autonomy in the world. It could involve coercion and all types of violence and is quite a complicated area in some aspects, but just as a general ethical statement, I want to hold that there are types of violence that cause autonomy infringement against the person.
Linking back to Bloom, she writes, that trauma involves moral injuries, and this is about that fourth type of safety - moral injury. I really like this quote, where she says
“Moral injury is where a sense of a just world which is a critical component of healing is absent. And moral injury starts with any action or failure to act that devalues an individual, usually by someone or an entity who holds power over them” (quoted in Ross, 2020, p. 47).
So trauma exists on a continuum of harm and experience of unsafety and can get laid down in a person's body and can be quite complex trauma and also intergenerational trauma.
Many of the helping professions talk about the concept of non-maleficence which means doing no harm, as distinct from beneficence of doing good and helping people. And I really like that concept of non-maleficence. I think it's another way of thinking about nonviolence, with the intention of consciously aiming to be of value and do good with people, especially in formal professional helping relationships, but also more generally in our personal lives.
A note re: more than human trauma
What I also want to make a comment on here is when we talk about violence and harm, we do tend to mostly think about violence and harm in relation to people. And unfortunately, people tend to harm people, other people, when they've already been harmed, often been harmed themselves. This is one of Bloom’s ideas of hurt people hurting people. But what I want to talk about is how there's quite a human bias to this discussion about violence, and unsafety as indicators of violence, and how this often leads to the experience of trauma, which can also be intergenerational, and very complex and sits within certain social disadvantage social groups.
I just want to make quite brief comment as a flag, on the idea of anthropocentric harm. This where we have a human focus or bias on causes of harm, and in so doing, we are not giving sufficient regard to violence done toward other animals, our Kin, and also the landscape. This is a concept from Eaglehawk (2020). I think it's really an important one to recognise the equal intrinsic worth of all beings, of all sentient beings and, all material entities on the planet. I think we have an industrialised and globalised approach to the farming of some animal species for human consumption - this is Kristy Alga’s (2020) idea, and she's written about this in her book Five, essays for freedom, which I think is a really important book for our times. Alger says it's a whole industrial kind of business dimension that normalises the use of animals on a scale that is mind boggling - millions and millions of animals, chickens, cows, pigs, fish, are killed for human consumption - and it goes on across the planet everyday. Certain people, business owners, make money on a scale that is also gobsmacking. We don't give sufficient credence to the harm and suffering for the animals and the trauma they experience in all of this. And of course, as part of this, just to say, I don't believe that you can have humane killing on that kind of scale. I think that is commercialised killing for human gain. Complex I know. I am very, very concerned about the scale of violence toward certain groups of animals and believe that peace won't be known on the planet while we continue to kill and use animals in these ways.
An example of moral unsafety and untold harm to others
I want to give you an example from my professional practice of the consequences of acting against my value of nonviolence in ways that caused moral injury to me but more importantly, caused untold harm to service users. As Bloom explains, when people are not able to live according to the values that are important to them, there is a deep moral harm that is done that is not always recognised. This can be the case alongside being regarded as an ethical and competent professional. Any injustice can cause a fracture in a person's sense of what is right and what is wrong in the world, and what is okay to happen to them and what's not okay to happen to them. This has bigger and more harmful consequences for people who are service users and who are subjected to failures of helping professionals to find less restrictive responses to risk and duty of care obligations. As a social worker of many decades now, the number of times I've been in situations where I have acted in a way that is inconsistent with my values, is just such a large area of moral injury. I carry these failures to act according to my values as part of the colour and pain of my own broken-heartedness. It's very hard to even find a single example of it. But perhaps the most concerning example would be when I have worked in the mental health system, as a clinical social worker. With the authority of the Mental Health Act, I had the power, the legal power, along with others, to force some people to have a mental health assessment, and sometimes I was part of decisions where treatment was enforced against their wishes. This is the most troubling and disturbing experience of my life. The ability to keep living with a sense of integrity, when we are party to behaviours that put us out of step with our deep values is not something that has a quick or satisfactory answer.
Nonviolence is my number one value and yet I was complicit with what is legal violence, what I believe is unethical violence toward others. That is, even if my actions are seen to be necessary at that point in time, for example, to keep the person safe, it becomes a very morally troubling circumstance to say the least. There have been strong critiques of mental health practitioners by activists in the mental health lived experience movement, which I am not immune to. A valuable book in this regard is Searching for a rose garden: Challenging psychiatry, fostering mad studies, edited by Russo and Sweeney (2016).
Drawing some threads together
In summary, what we're doing here is getting hold of some ideas that help us think more deeply about the idea of love to give us guidance on how to practice love, not only think about it. We got to the idea of violence and all the forms of oppression that go with that as really threatening the love needed for justice struggles, and the ability for people to experience love. I have built on the idea of broken-heartedness by considering the trauma that gets experienced through all sorts of unsafety, namely psychological, social, emotional, and moral unsafety. The fostering of safety are ways to practice nonviolence in our relationships with others and with ourselves. This is also where I see justice work becomes hard to undertake because of the impact of broken-heartedness on the very people who are experiencing injustice and trauma, who are often the very same people who need to stand up and be at the front of justice struggles.
The ability to act with moral safety and congruence when in a position with legal authority over others is a major challenge in contemporary human services. We shall return to this confounding ethical challenge in a future podcast. For now to note that there is a quite troubling politics that comes with a commitment to be loving and nonviolent in contexts that are often loveless and violent.
Thank you for your interest and if you would like to leave me a comment please do so. Also if you wish to share any useful books or resources, please contact me.
Until next time, my best love
Dyann
References
Kirsty Alger (2020). Five essays for freedom: A political primer for animal advocates. Revolutionaries.
Sandra Bloom (2017). “The sanctuary model: Through the lens of moral safety”. In S. Gold (Ed.). APA handbook of trauma psychology: Trauma practice (pp. 499–513). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000020-024
Brene Brown (2010). The power of vulnerability. https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_the_power_of_vulnerability?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare
Centre for Nonviolent Change (2022). Six principles of nonviolence. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/sites/mlk/files/lesson-activities/six_principles_of_nonviolence.pdf
Erica Chenoweth (2021). Civil resistance: What everyone needs to know. Oxford University Press.
Wallea Eaglehawk (2020). “Species justice is for everybody”. In D. Ross, M. Brueckner, M. Palmer, & W. Eaglehawk (Eds.). Eco-activism and social work: New directions in leadership and group work. Routledge.
Mahatma Gandhi (1928/1968). Satyagraha in South Africa. Jitendra T. Desai Navajivan Publishing House. https://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/satyagraha_in_south_africa.pdf
Rajmohan Gandhi (2013). “Gandhi’s journey to Ahimsa”. In T. Sethia & A. Narayan (Eds.). The living Gandhi: Lessons of our times. Penguin.
Marshall Rosenberg (2015). Nonviolent communication: A language of life. Puddle Dancer Press.
Dyann Ross (2020). The revolutionary social worker: The love ethic model. Revolutionaries.
Jasna Russo and Angela Sweeney (Eds.). (2016). Searching for a rose garden: Challenging psychiatry, fostering mad studies. PCCS Book Ltd.
Gene Sharpe (1973). 198 methods of nonviolent direct action. https://www.brandeis.edu/peace-conflict/pdfs/198-methods-non-violent-action.pdf
The King Centre (2022). Dr King’s fundamental philosophy of nonviolence.https://thekingcenter.org/about-tkc/the-king-philosophy/
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