THE POSSIBILITY OF SOMETHING NEW: THOUGHTS ON THE LIFE OF JEAN BAKER MILLER

A sermon offered by Dr. Maureen Walker, Guest Speaker
Sunday, January 13, 2008 • Unitarian Universalist Church of Reading

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About Our Special Guest Speaker: Dr. Maureen Walker is a psychologist with a practice in psychotherapy and antiracism consultation. Her clinical practice and research projects involve developing links between racial identity development and relational theories to support the growth potential of persons who experience disconnections stemming from marginalization and devaluation within the dominant society.  She works at Harvard Business School and is on the faculty of the Jean Baker Miller Training Institute.

Good morning. I am deeply honored by this very special invitation to share and reflect with you this morning.  What makes this invitation special is that it was extended by a friend – I am grateful for his confidence and his generosity in sharing this place of community and sanctuary with me.

To Tim, Jim, and all of you gathered here, I say thank you.
When people gather to reflect on the legacy of Jean Baker Miller, the word that most often and most automatically comes to mind is connection: growth in connection – courage in connection – how connections heal.  So when I considered how we might begin today’s reflection, I was strangely drawn to a poem by Alice Walker.  It goes like this:

i love the way Janie Crawford
left her husbands    the one who wanted
to change her into a mule
and the other who tried to interest her
in being a queen
a woman unless she submits is neither a mule
nor a queen
though like a mule she may suffer
and like a queen pace
the floor

I admit that it may seem somewhat unusual to enter a reflection on connection by talking about disconnection. It may even seem somewhat strange to situate the legacy of the real woman Jean Baker Miller alongside that of a fictional protagonist. The contrasts are certainly apparent: one an esteemed intellectual and healer, white, urbane and socially privileged; the other poor, black, and unlettered – relegated to the so-called underclass of rural society.  For all of their apparent differences, what they share in common is a prophetic voice – a voice that proclaims good news by saying that maybe what we think is most real and most true and most normal is simply not so. They share a voice that contradicts the lies that predicate power upon oppression: the lies that divide and rank order human worth into categories of unquestionably better than and unalterably less than. These are the lies that propose that the safety and survival of one group must be accomplished through the subjugation and extrusion of another.  Such lies diminish the whole of humanity. The prophetic legacy of Jean Baker Miller (and I daresay that of her fictional counterpart Janie Crawford) is a vision of an alternative narrative – one in which marginalized voices become the authors and authorizers of their own stories – and in so doing participate in the construction of liberating possibilities for us all.

Before Jean Baker Miller published her small but mighty book in 1976, many stories were being written about women’s experience. I often quote one of my favorite theologians Walter Bruggemann who says “it is important to notice who is telling the story – and whose interest the telling serves”. 

Before Jean published Toward A New Psychology of Women, most of the stories were told by people who were systematically advantaged by some combination of race, gender, and / or class privilege.  Many if not most of those stories exhorted women to overcome their presumably innate deficiencies – such as being too dependent and needy or overly emotional or irrational. Other versions of the story simply chided women for caring too much – or outright blamed women for erecting the stumbling blocks to their own success. In fact, some of the storytellers would offer so-called scientific proof that women were afraid to be successful.  They tended all to be variations on a rather shaming theme: smart women who do dumb stuff.  They were stories that taught us to be afraid of our mothers (being like mother was a fate to be avoided); mistrustful of our sisters, and ashamed of our selves.

I should say that these stories (for the most part) were not wholesale fabrications by writers intent on maligning women.  Instead, they were grounded in a cultural ethos that over-values autonomy, promotes hyper-individualism, and glorifies conquest and control.  They reflected the moral and philosophical constraints of a psychology that identifies separation and independence as markers of mental health and maturity. The great lie of those stories is that no one is self-sufficient or self-made; no one is truly autonomous; no one would ever rise and stand if his (or her) only leverage were his own bootstraps. It’s mechanically impossible; it’s metaphorically ludicrous.  In fact, the only people who can appear to be autonomous are those whose networks of support (those people on whom they depend) are so extensively and deeply entrenched that they are rendered invisible.   The myth of the autonomous self is in reality a story about perversions of power… a perversion in which subjugated/ marginalized people are forced to inhabit the stories that protect the interests, the privileges, and the power of the dominant group.  In this season of new beginnings, the prophetic legacy of Jean Baker Miller and Janie Crawford invites us to participate in an expanded narrative with radically new propositions about what constitutes healing, how we create hope, how we inhabit power, and how we become who we truly are.

Sometimes when I would travel with Jean, I would witness women from all walks of life approaching her with a simple message: your book that changed my life. I am convinced that she changed women’s lives because she listened and encouraged women to construct new narratives of power and possibility…to move toward narratives that resonated with their own yearnings for authentic connection rather than adapt to the distortions that would preserve a culture of disconnection. Like all great prophets, she offered an invitation to move out of shame and fear. Let me give an example. My first “aha!”encounter with what we’ve come to call the Relational Cultural model was in a graduate school seminar – where one of my supervisors demonstrated her work with a woman who was living in a (debilitating) relationship. These were the days of smart women, foolish choices – when a common sub-text of any so-called therapeutic encounter was the message that being in a hurtful relationship was symptomatic of the most damning of all social diseases: low self-esteem. In other words, asking for help could subject a woman to intense shaming. What I witnessed in this demonstration, however, was radical empathy with the woman’s desire for relationship. While she was ultimately encouraged to find and speak more of her voice – and ultimately to leave that relationship, her desire for connection was not pathologized; she was not shamed for being needy and dependent – or being too much like her mother -  her yearning was met with trust and respect. It was then that I understood the fundamental proposition of the Relational- Cultural model which is simply this: all growth happens in connection for the purpose of connection.   The prevailing cultural idea at the time was that we human beings needed good early relationships so that we could grow up to be independent; as if somehow when we become adults we can put away childish things. But the relational-Cultural model insists that All growth happens in connection for the purpose of connection.   We grow through connection in order to experience more of our own becoming, to be more authentic and real, more responsive and capable in relationship… not separated or independent of relationship. We grow through relationship in order to enhance our capacity to both change and to be changed by another.
In our work, we often use words like empathy, authenticity and mutuality. We use these words because we believe these are the processes - the energies that enable true connection.

And just what is connection? Connection is such a comfortable and cozy word but it is not necessarily a comfortable and cozy experience. In fact, to say that connection is a source of growth and healing is to also recognize its function as a portal to conflict.  I used to be baffled (maybe slightly amused) by couples, partners, friends, who would boast that over a period of “x” number of years they had never had an argument. Now I feel a bit sad – maybe even somewhat wary when people in presumably intimate relationship do not have conflict, because it means that someone for whatever reason and by whatever means has disappeared from the relationship.  When people in presumably intimate relationship do not have conflict, it signals a relational agenda driven by shame and fear – where the chosen option is to settle for the illusion of connection. To settle for the illusion of connection is to protect the narrative of the status quo, the existing power arrangements,  and to forfeit the growth-enhancing possibilities of good conflict. 

Let me tell a brief story to illustrate.  For over sixty- of her eighty-four years, my mother worked as a domestic and cook in home of a white family. In the racial apartheid culture of 1950’s Augusta, GA, she was a person without social status – she was a person whose value was measured by the extent to which she satisfied the demands not only of her particular employers, but by the extent to which she validated a culture that defined poor, black females as unworthy of respect and devoid of human dignity.   On a particular day, her employer – a woman of her approximate age -walked into the kitchen and announced: Mary, you need to wear a uniform. My mother hated uniforms.  So she simply responded, “Do I?” and continued her work. Sometime later her employer walked in and presented my mother with a uniform – informing her that she would only buy one and that my mother would have to buy the next one. The next day my mother came into work and changed into her uniform – and she washed it and wore it and washed and wore it and washed it and wore it until the uniform was in tatters. At some point, her employer noticed and said to her, “Mary, you need a new uniform. “  To which my mother responded: “No, I think you need me to have a new uniform. “ And she continued to do her work for another fifty/ sixty years or so, and there were no more discussions about uniforms. I call my mother’s response radical empathy – responding to what is and respecting the full context of her engagement with her employer. Her employer really believed she need in a black maid in a uniform so that she could feel more like a proper White Southern lady. It was a perverted narrative of power handed to both women by the racial apartheid culture. I call my mother’s authentic responsiveness – taking the risk of showing up in relationship and offering her honest experience to whatever possibilities or outcomes might emerge in relationship. I also call it deep mutuality because over the course of what became a treasured friendship, both women changed and were changed by each other.
Jean Baker Miller often said that a growth-fostering relationship is one in which all participants have an opportunity to grow.   When she wrote Toward A New Psychology of Women she did so with the recognition that all of our stories are ultimately connected.  How gratifying it is now in 2008 that neuroscience has finally caught up to the prophecy. We now have neural imaging research that shows we are connected in ways previously unimaginable.  Our connection is what is most real.

When Jean wrote Toward a New Psychology of Women, her goal was to honor the connection - not simply to re-populate the old power paradigm with women on top and men on the bottom, but to offer an alternative vision… to suggest expanded pathways on this shared journey toward new possibilities. And sometimes that means walking toward conflict.

Sometimes it means walking away – like Janie Crawford - not walking away from the desire for relationship, but letting go of the fear and shame that bind us to relationships that inhibit fuller expressions of our humanity. 

It means letting go of the illusory promises of protection and permanence gained by submission to a perverted paradigm of power. Maybe Roberta Flack said it best. Instead of singing “Go Down, Moses and tell Pharaoh to oppressed people go – she sang Go Up, Moses… tell oppressed people to let Pharaoh go. Let go of let go of the mystifications of reality – let go of the numbness of heart and the paralysis of spirit- let go of the great lie that without Pharaoh you don’t exist. Lay claim on the powerful recognition that without you, there is no Pharaoh.

I just love the way Janie Crawford left her husbands, not because she left a man, but because she embraced a prophetic possibility. Embracing the possibility of something new is not about producing a pre-determined and predictable outcome.  It may be, and it is as likely not.  Let all people who stand in a prophetic tradition, Jean Baker Miller knew growing in relationship requires letting go of the illusion of certainty. Growing in relationship requires that we  enter into the complex and fluid vulnerabilities of community.

I love the way Janie Crawford left her husbands because her story helped me understand the prophecy of Jean Baker Miller and the prophecy of Jean Baker Miller helped me understand the words of Bernice Johnson Reagon.

In describing her art, Ms. Reagon states:

“I’m a song leader, not a soloist. Song leaders start songs, but you can’t finish them without some help. So singing does not make sense to me without the congregation. The song is not a product.  The song is a way to get to the singing.  And the singing is not a product. The singing exists to get to community, and there isn’t any thing higher that I have experienced.”

I love the way Janie Crawford left her husbands to embrace the possibility of something new – a story not yet told.  From Janie to Jean to Bernice to you and to me:  there is a story emerging – not yet told.  The truth of it is that we are here for the telling: we become who we can be through each other. It is our connection that is most real.  We were made for each other. And there isn’t any higher possibility that I can think of.

 

©Copyright 2008 Dr. Maureen Walker
All rights reserved.