Do You Still Talk to Grandma? Workbook

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Moving Beyond Heroes and Villains

None of us are strangers to binary thinking. It has filled every corner of our understanding of the world since we were babies. I can tell you every Disney movie I saw and their heroes and villains. The Lion King was the first movie I ever saw at the drive-in movie theater, and I’ll never forget when Scar came on-screen; I immediately knew he was the villain. The way he walked, the way he looked—my little mind had already been trained to look for the villain, identify the problem, the bad guy, and then, of course, to find the hero, support them, cheer for them, root them on in their journey of overcoming the villain.

You know the feeling, right? There are Disney heroes and Disney villains.

Let’s take a closer look at a few. Write down your favorites in the columns below:

Disney Heroes

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Disney Villains

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OK, now that we’ve got our brains warmed up on some good ol’ Disney characters, let’s do the same activity but this time with historical figures. Write down absolutely anyone from history you think would fall into the hero or villain category:

Historical Heroes

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Historical Villains

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How did that feel? Was it difficult? Was it easy? I would wager that for most of us, unless you’ve never seen a Disney movie, in which case this was probably very difficult, both of these lists were fairly easy to populate. We know the heroes and villains of the stories we watched growing up, and we know the heroes and villains of our history. Our brains already know how to split and divide people into one of two very clean and tidy categories. But what happens when we live in a world where the lines and categories aren’t that clean or tidy?

Part of us can’t help but make these lines and distinctions. We desire and tend toward binary thinking and polarization because of a psychological experience known as “splitting.”

Psychoanalyst Melanie Klein defined this form of psychic functioning—splitting the world into good or bad, friends or foes, “like” and “do not like”—as the “paranoid-schizoid position.” We can fall into this position in times of stress, and it explains our tendency to consider differences not simply as variations but as opposites.

In what ways does this feel relatable? When was a time you were so stressed that you just needed something to make sense?

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When was a time you were so stressed that you saw differences as opposite—that you saw variation as a threat?

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Let’s take a further look at this. I want you to think back to 2020 (I know, trauma). That year was a time of massive collective stress.

What variation did you see in 2020 that you felt was an opposing side?

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I’ll give you an example from my own experience.

Armed with the most minimal amount of information early in the pandemic, everyone was wearing all sorts of different types of masks. I remember at one point I was walking around with a headband that I had filled with a coffee filter. It was chaos. But eventually, people started selling masks and making more masks, and soon after that, in my heightened stress, I started making a lot of judgments about people who simply tied bandanas around their mouths. This felt like more than a variation; this was an opposition. My brain was in peak splitting mode, and anytime I saw someone with a bandana mask, I felt, “They don’t care about people, they don’t care about me, I bet I know who they voted for, they are a villain.”

You see how that works? What could be seen as a variation was now seen as opposition because my brain was stressed.

Where did your brain go in 2020? What binary lines did you draw? Who were your 2020 villains?

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The problem with binary thinking, aside from the way it can cause us to treat people, is the reality that it’s just not factually true. I had no idea why any of those people had bandana masks. Maybe they didn’t have access to buy other masks; maybe they were running out of the house and that was the only one they could find; maybe they were on their way to buy a new mask; maybe they had a coffee filter in it (literally like me the week before); maybe they were actually mean and hated people and didn’t care. But whatever the case, there was nuance, and that nuance is important.

In Do You Still Talk to Grandma? I tell the story of the Good Samaritan. A man was beaten down in the road, and two people simply passed him by until a third man stopped to help him. Moral of the story? Be the third guy, right? Well, I think the point of the story is that we will at some time find ourselves as every character of the story. And if we can begin to hold that nuance for ourselves, we can hold it for the world around us.

So let’s give this a try together.

I invite you to think about your own life and write about these moments—and really sit with these and remember how each one felt.

A time you were heartbroken:

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A time you broke a heart:

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A time you helped someone in need:

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A time you did nothing:

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A time you felt proud:

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A moment you regret:

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Thank you for your honesty.

Now, we could go on and on, right? We look at our lives and we see mountains and valleys. We see roses and thorns, moments where we play the hero, and moments where we play the villain, and they’re all wrapped into one whole person. So what does that mean? Which is it? Are we good or bad? Hero or villain? Or are we invited to a life of holding all of the nuance of our experience that shapes who we are and how we move through the world?

Now go deeper: Why did you do the thing you regret? What reason did you have for breaking someone’s heart? What was happening in you that spilled out into the people around you?

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Now let’s take it even further.

Which of your regrets or times you broke someone’s heart outweigh the times you showed up? Stepped up?

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Let’s get personal. I want you to think of someone in your life that you have put in a binary, or a person that you have a hard time finding nuance for. In Do You Still Talk to Grandma? I use a fairly common example of my gay friend and his homophobic grandma.

Who is your person and what did they do that made you put them in a binary role?

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List all the things that you love about them:

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What is your favorite memory with them?

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