Dialogue Description:

What messages have white supremacy and patriarchy directed at us about emotional labor in interpersonal relationships? Do you feel challenged navigating differences across race and gender where emotional labor is expected or warranted? Do you find yourself struggling to identify and maintain boundaries with colleagues, friends, housemates, community members, partners, or family when it comes to having difficult conversations about race, gender, and other lived experiences? Join us in dialogue as we explore these questions, and others, in an exploration of how race, gender, and emotional labor impact and complicate our lives.

Some suggested readings:

Dialogue Notes:

These are rough, uncut, unfiltered, and anonymous notes taken at the dialogue. We get that these may not be very readable to those who were not in attendance at the dialogue, and, honestly, sometimes even to those of us who were. We still feel it is important to keep them available as part of our accountability process and for archiving and reference purposes.  Some of these notes have been digested/transformed into blogs.

●  Exhaustion at paid work dealing with men who are accustomed to being in homophobic institutions – a ton of work to create boundaries constantly

●  Appreciated article on how not everything that is difficult for you is emotional labor

●  In work and personal life, trying to be aware of race & class privilege and ways that I’m

playing a very gendered role in relationship to people carrying a lot of trauma, not knowing how to navigate, complicated – feel like I’m often doing harm and toll is being taken on me

●  Emotional labor powerful frame for relationships, and understanding femininity – sometimes feel like I’m keeping a tab and worried to ask people to take care of me because I don’t trust them to say no. Still learning the ways I expect things from people.

●  Doing the readings feeling a familiar tension and navigating feelings of resentment in the authors who wrote about the struggle to say no, which has been big for me to find/create a no. At work, I offer active compassionate listening to women of color, which has been a beautiful process, at times I have to grieve later knowing how rough it is at work.

●  As a nurse, I do a lot of emotional labor and labor that makes me feel emotions – interesting distinction to see what is draining to me at work. I work with a lot of older white women and there is a lot of racist things that happen, don’t want to get co-opted as a silent ally

●  Ways emotional labor hooks in with exploitive teaching dynamics

●  This has been a big theme my whole life, a lot of times enjoyed feeling needed or even

applauded this, yet not wanting to reinforce this behavior and these boundaries are

muddy

●  Professionally I sometimes defend it since I may get a better product if I’m emotionally

invested

●  Topic very vivid for me, father currently going through rough times, and often the

feminized role of emo labor I’m in can make me ostracized from my family

●  Diff articles mobilize different definitions of emotional labor. There’s a chain of emotional

labor – reacting to presumed emotions, like if you see I’m sad will act a certain way

●  Trying to figure out how to be present in emotional labor and not undermine my own

needs

●  Work communication environment feels nourishing, actually

●  At times wondering if I am accessing emotions, and whether I’m giving or taking

●  Neighborhood organizing ton of interpersonal work and energy – I’m not as robust

speaking up as I could be, and notice how I rely on elder Black woman to be the

emotional voice around these issues

●  This topic feels overwhelming, and deeply gendered and historical in terms of how my

mom and grandmother operated, realizing my mother’s co-dependency & addiction related to fear of not being accepted/loved if you set boundaries – seeing her 30 years ahead of me.

●  If I don’t show up for friends can hurt the relationship, when I have capacity feels so rewarding, when I don’t I’m shot

●  I notice I feel much more comfortable expressing emotional labor in organizing work

●  It can be a source of joy and love and care to be emotionally present with those we love, yet it becomes labor when something shifts and a boundary is transgressed – how do we

understand where and how they are – when start to feel exploited or resented

●  Fear of asking too much, being too much, existential crisis of being alone – setting a

boundary of being too close

●  Also not everything you want to give can be received

●  Practice at EBMC to not assume I know what you’re thinking – and paying deep attention

●  A lot of fear comes up from assumptions

●  Challenging fear can be an experiment – let’s see

●  Years back I dated someone who was great at communicating with clarity and totally

transformed me – here’s what I want, is that what you want? Oh I don’t want that but you

deserve it

●  In my family If I can’t give you that it’s wrong for you to want it

●  Polyamorous relationships, having to practice different types of boundaries and what I’m

(not) there for

●  What is choice in capitalism, in relation to boss

●  Coercive vs. voluntary

●  Is there anything not coercive in capitalism? There are degrees for sure. Even intimate

relationships

●  Used to things being coercive at work and then bring it home

●  Deep gendered fear and at times not realizing that there is a choice – I’ve been playing in

my life how to create safe no’s, aspiring to be clearer about intentions and needs – when

I find it it feels super liberating

●  In work dynamic where I and a male co-worker are both triggering each other and

overreacting/disproportionate response, yet I am the one doing so much work internally

to keep the relationship alive

●  Different frameworks of communication come into contract/clash with each other

●  I do a lot in an exhausting way all the time to navigate other’s triggers, yet could not

assume someone to do that for me

●  Living in a multigenerational queer co-op, a housemate uses fragility as a term all the

time, being mean and then calling people fragile who can’t handle it

●  When carrying own and another’s emotions

●  Reciprocity – female friends I’m in awe, honoring deep skill and the magic work &

training. Feel regular challenge with cismale friends who feel decades behind in terms of

how to show up

●  Doesn’t always have be transactional

●  Seeing and realize being gifted, not just invisible and assumed

●  Disabled people have tremendous skills that are often not seen as skill

●  Beauty in recognizing skill set, and realizing can train, can get better at these

●  Introducing notion of consent in emotional labor

●  I don’t know how to say no when someone asks for help

●  The responsibility when a part of causing harm and needing to repair

●  When interacting with larger harms – form of reparations

  • ●  When it is primarily about a racial dynamic, I just do the work

    ●  When to say I’m not available for this right now – do I get to choose, in six months?

    ●  In movement spaces all the time, holding space for healing historic wounds – where is

    the pushback asking people to hold their own selves, where do you ask people to hold

    themselves and where just take it in structural oppression?

    ●  How to name this and get consent together

    ●  Some relationships a lot of grief about where we are and our intersecting mess

    ●  Emotional labor that we ask kids to do, to make adults feel alright

    ●  Role of capacity, thinking of article “We Are All Anxious” about eras of capitalism and

    anxiety dominant emotion of our era

    ●  Outsourcing of emotional labor and neoliberalism

    ●  Worry that emo labor discourse may capitalize and economize it, where everything sits

    on a balance sheet – when/how is it empowering to name it and how turn it into

    transaction

    ●  Can take mystery and beauty out of it

    ●  Sometimes naming it helps me get going and get unstuck

    ●  Not asking people to do what they can’t/aren’t ready to, so frustrating and can be too

    much to expect when someone can’t get there – and, you don’t get to not grow, let’s

    speed up the process

    ●  Notion of femmes paying three times, doing the work, the harm and the teaching

    ●  How we articulate our edge – where we want to grow and edge and where we ant to set

    a boundary

    ●  Comes back to capacity

    ●  Grounding exercises vital to come back to

    ●  Role of community accountability, where no one is getting drained and isolated –

    network, different people taking on

    ●  What are ways we can share practices, to care for nervous systems and

    regulation/management – how to support each other with these skills?

    ●  Distinction of nice vs. kind

    ●  Kindness — still feel connected to the person, whereas kind is more about reacting to

    the fear

    ●  Men not being able to do emotional work: understanding male socialization as a

    profound series of harms that need healing, need femme labor to heal and to learn to do it; as a white person, I need the instruction and care of people of color to learn to be outside of whiteness as much as is possible; raises questions — how does reciprocity come in to this?

    ●  Thank God that there are people who are willing to put in work for each other, the hope of our humanity rests on the excess that we still have to give to one another

    ●  Seeing it is a valuable thing and something you want to learn helps contribute to it not feeling so extractive, framework of being a student in learning

    ●  Technology and communication styles — new norms can suck; old school etiquette of just saying please and thank you

    ●  Entitlement can feel overwhelming

    ●  Needing to heal every day

    ●  Who has access to my emotional labor and how does that exist in relation to the trust we

    do or don’t have; what are ways of developing other avenues to grant access to the emotional labor I have to give, how can I make it more accessible in a way that respects my capacity?

    ●  Big and overwhelming

    ●  Feels like it touches on a deep root system

    ●  What practices can I integrate to deeply heal the areas that are taxed, exhausted and

    bitter?

    ●  Heal to be present with others, and so that my yesses and nos are trustworthy

    ●  Just building awareness that it is happening — that I’m getting triggered around doing

    emotional labor

    ●  How to give myself space with kindness

    ●  Boundaries vs. growth edge; boundaries being moment to moment, fluid and changing

    ●  Naming what isn’t right even if you don’t have the ability to shift it

    ●  Very few people in the world seem to be getting enough of what they need

    ●  Where can we see that we have enough to give, and where can we give ourselves

    permission to ask for what we need in consensual ways

    ●  Refreshing to realize that this is hard and complicated; that it isn’t obvious and that we

    are going to be in process about it

    ●  How messy and hard and heartbreaking this all is, feels important to have healing

    community