173. Privileged and Marginalized Identities
Your particular socialization is massively impactful.
It’s possible you’ve been socialized in ways really similar to me. It’s possible you’ve been socialized in totally different ways.
Not just because we’re different people with different lives.
But also because we may belong to different groups that have their own particular forms of socialization.
If you belong to a privileged group, you likely received that group’s socialization.
If you belong to a marginalized group, you likely received that group’s socialization.
You may belong to both privileged groups and marginalized ones and have received multiple sets of socialization, some of which may conflict with each other.
The ways your identities intersect can have unique impacts on you, your reality, and what you believe is available to you.
What you think is expected of you.
What you think is for you (or not for you).
What rules you have to follow.
Digging into the various pieces of socialization can be eye-opening and freeing. It can also be painful and uncomfortable.
But I would argue it’s still worth doing.
Any socialization we’re not aware of has the ability to run our lives without our approval.
I think it works better and makes more sense to figure out what’s in there and make the edits we want to make so that we can live in more alignment and delight.
So join me this week as I guide you through a discussion around privileged and marginalized identities, what I’ve learned on my journey of coming to terms with my identities, and how this process of examination can offer us important information about how we want to move forward in our lives.
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WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
What it means to have a privileged or marginalized identity.
Some ways we can belong to both privileged and marginalized groups.
The difference in our socialization when we belong to privileged versus marginalized identities.
How all of us are a constellation of identities.
The value of examining the programming we’ve received in a privileged identity.
Why it might be more uncomfortable investigating our privileged socialization.
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we’re talking about privileged and marginalized identities.
The Satisfied AF podcast is the place to learn how to create a life and career that’s wildly delicious. Want a steamier sex life? We’ve got you. Want a more satisfying career? We’ll cover that too. And you can be sure we’ll spend lots of time talking about how to build connected, fun relationships that can handle life’s ups and downs. No matter what goals you’re working on, this show will help you create a one of a kind life that is just right for you. Join me, life and career coach Kori Linn and each week I’ll give you lots of practical tips, tools, and proven strategies to help you create all the satisfaction your heart desires.
Hello, hello, hello. Happy Wednesday. It’s a beautiful, sunny day here in Sacramento. And this is exactly the kind of day I moved here for, to be honest. I adore Seattle and I miss it all the time. Honestly, so much. And also Alex and I wanted to live somewhere where we would have more sun on our faces and more blue skies all year round.
Now, let’s be honest, Sacramento doesn’t have only blue skies all year round. We actually do have a lot of cloudy days in the winter, but we also have some days like this where I think the high is like 69 and I’m just vibrating with excitement about how beautiful it is outside.
Okay, without further ado, let’s jump into what we’re talking about today. So I wanted to do this podcast, I’ve actually wanted to talk about this for a long time and I’ve even tried to record the podcast a few times. And each time I did, it came out weird or I didn’t like it and I decided not to do it. And it’s interesting because I do think there can be a magic in beginning and magic in just putting out imperfect products or imperfect ideas or imperfect bids for affection.
And also there can be something to be said for trying to birth something and it doesn’t want to come out and realizing like, maybe this thing’s not ready. I actually read a really interesting post about like, is it procrastination or is the thing just like not ready to come forth yet? And sometimes it might be hard to tell the difference between those two things.
And that’s why I think a really important tool that you can develop is discernment and really coming into an understanding of like, oh, am I avoiding this because I think it’s going to be uncomfortable? Or did I try to do this and it doesn’t seem like either the ideas have fully baked or I have the skills to explain it well.
And honestly, I will probably never have the skills to explain this as well as I would like to be able to be explaining it. But I think I have enough now to take a pass at it. And part of that’s because I was recently recording a podcast episode with Sara Fisk on her podcast, which is called The Ex-Good Girl Podcast. And Sara is amazing, so you go check that podcast out.
And when we were recording the podcast, we were talking about imposter syndrome. And I was specifically talking about imposter syndrome in relation to having marginalized identities. And so we kind of got into like, what does it mean to have a marginalized identity?
And having that conversation with her, I was like, oh, I think I’m actually able to talk about this much more articulately than last time I tried to record a podcast on it. So maybe it’s time to go do an episode for my podcast as well.
So, basically, privilege and marginalization in the way that I understand them, and I’m not an expert. But I’ve learned a lot about them both through my life and my own knowledge journey, especially in coming to understand white supremacy as a white person. But also in my coach training because I have a secondary certification, which is an advanced certification in intersectional feminism. And we do dig into things like what’s the dominant culture and what are the marginalized identities in that as well. But I’m sure there’s a lot I don’t know too.
But I think the really basic way to understand it is that in our culture, the culture is designed for dominant groups. And then there are other people who live in the culture who don’t belong to those dominant groups, right? So we live in a patriarchy and a patriarchy is designed for men. The dominant group in patriarchy is men, and women are the marginalized group.
But people have a lot of different identities, and so sometimes you can have like a handful of marginalized identities and a handful of privileged identities or places where you belong to the dominant group. American culture is a culture based on white supremacy. And so I am a woman, so I belong to the non-dominant group in that way. But I’m white, so I belong to the dominant group in that way.
I used to identify as straight, heterosexual. So that was belonging to the dominant group. Now I identify as queer, that’s not the dominant group. Then there’s like are you neurotypical or are you neurodiverse? Are you able-bodied or do you have a disability? There’s also citizenship, right? Like I’m a citizen of the United States, there’s a lot of privilege in that. It’s not that there’s just necessarily one country, there’s a lot of different countries, I think, where having citizenship can be a big privilege. And that can shift as like how the countries are relating to each other.
But for example, having US citizenship means that there are a lot of places in the world I can go without having to get special permission or without having to get a visa. And there are other people from other countries who don’t have that benefit. They have to jump through more hoops or get more paperwork done ahead of time to be able to enter certain countries.
Like when I was really young, right out of college, I lived in France. And so that was an example. I did have to get a visa because I was going to be working there, but I wouldn’t have had to have a visa just to enter or leave the country. And if I wanted to leave the country when I had breaks from school, I was able to leave and come back.
But I knew someone else there who was from a different country and he couldn’t leave France. If he left, they weren’t going to let him back in. So he had to stay in the country for the length of his contract. And I didn’t have to do that. And there was nothing special about me. I was not better behaved. I didn’t have a better career history at that time to earn that privilege. That was just a privilege given to me because of the citizenship of the country that I belong to.
So when people talk about privilege and unearned privilege, I think a lot of times it can get people’s hackles up, but I’ve heard it explained a few times in different trainings so beautifully. It’s like having privilege doesn’t actually mean everything’s easy for you. It just means there are certain difficulties that you don’t face.
And then again, as we’re like these constellations of identities, like you may have privilege, so there’s difficulties you don’t face. And then you may belong to a marginalized group where there are other difficulties you do face. You may belong to multiple marginalized groups where there may be multiple difficulties you face that are exponential or cumulative to each other.
And then you can belong to some marginalized identities, but belong to some privileged groups that are so privileged that sometimes it can be difficult to realize how much privilege you have because you also don’t have all of it, right?
So I think it’s very interesting and very complex. And primarily what I want to bring it up for is because there’s socialization when you have an identity of privilege and there’s socialization when you have an identity of marginalization. And a lot of times the socialization when you’re in a marginalized identity is like, don’t take up too much space. Don’t ask for too much. You have to be better than the average person in order to be safe and be okay and survive.
So it’s about being small and fitting in and being non-threatening and being exceptionally good. And so that can be really interesting. Like when you come to coaching sometimes we have that kind of socialization that we’ve internalized. And then it’s really hard for us to live lives and go out in the world and do things that feel really good to us because we’re still enacting that socialization that we got.
And then there’s also the other hand of sometimes when we were socialized with privilege, we may feel entitled to things. We may feel entitled to things being easy. We may feel entitled to things being a certain way. And we might not even have the awareness that we have that socialization.
I know I had a lot of this. Like I remember when I was younger I was really mad about my student loans. I was doing a coaching activity that I think I learned about from like Martha Beck. And I was digging into the feelings and what I realized was I was so angry about having my student loans because I felt entitled to have free higher education. And it was super interesting for me because once I realized I was so angry because I felt entitled, like everything shifted.
And on the one hand, I do think higher education should be either free or significantly less expensive than it is in the United States. There’s a lot of other countries in the world where higher education isn’t like it is here. I mean, I don’t even think I had particularly high student loans and between undergrad and grad school I think I had at least 40 or 50 K.
I mean, in some parts of the country, that could be a house. In other parts of the country that could be a down payment on a house. It’s an extraordinarily large amount of money, especially when, again, I lived in France right after undergrad and taught English there. And one of my friends from the United States had chosen to go to grad school in France because it was so much cheaper, just extraordinarily less expensive.
But all that being said, when I saw that part of my anger was entitlement, that really clicked something for me like, oh, maybe I don’t want to feel entitled to things in that way. First of all, feeling entitled to things didn’t necessarily even get me the things, but it did make me really angry about the world that it was.
And sometimes being really angry about the world as it is, I think, is really important and spicy information about how we want to move forward. But sometimes it also reveals like, oh, I’m angry because I feel entitled. Do I want to keep feeling entitled? Or maybe is there something else I would like to replace that with?
I’ve never seen actual data on this, but I read online one time anecdotally that when women go to therapy, a lot of the times in therapy they learn to set boundaries. They learn to take up space. They learn to center their own desires.
And when men go to therapy, they’re not working on the same things. They’re working on participating more in their relationships or like having less expectations of others, kind of. Like not expecting other people to take care of everything for them or learning how to engage with a world where maybe they were raised to believe that everything should always go their way and it’s not.
And again, I don’t know if that’s true. I haven’t seen data on that. I haven’t talked to any therapists about that pattern, but I do think there’s a seed of truth in that for me. And what I’ve seen of the pieces of socialization where we’re socialized in the dominant culture about what should be available for us and what is expected of us and the pieces where we’re socialized in a marginalized group.
And it’s interesting too, because there’s a lot of identities where you always have them and they’re kind of obvious, right? But there’s other identities, like being someone who used to identify as straight and now identifies as queer, like that was a very interesting transition of it feels a lot harder to me in a lot of ways to identify as queer.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I love being queer. I adore my queer identity. I would choose it again and again, even though it’s not a choice. I love it. And I love being out. I love that part of my life. And also I distinctly remember like the year that I really was like, oh, I’m not straight. I’m queer and I’m going to partner, I’m going to go on dates with women. And then I partnered with a woman who I’m still partnered with, it’s Alex. And kind of having this fear of like, oh, I have skin in the game in a different way.
Like it’s one thing to go to a party and have someone say some fucked up thing and you be like, that’s not cool, because you’re an ally. It’s a very different thing to go somewhere and have someone say a fucked up thing and you’re in that group. And I didn’t know that before I had that experience.
So I think that’s just something interesting to think about, right? What do we think is expected of us? What do we think is for us? What do we think our role is in the world based on that constellation of identities that we have? And some of that is our own experience. And some of it’s like, who were we raised by? If we were raised by people with certain marginalized identities, they may pass on learnings.
And especially if they went through really hard things in their youth or a different period of time or when they lived in a different country, they might pass those on explicitly and implicitly and really inform our experience of what we think the world is going to be like and what we think we’re allowed to do and what we think we’re not allowed to do and what we think other people should or shouldn’t do.
So for the purposes of this podcast and the purposes of you creating a satisfying life and a delicious career and wonderful relationships and something that’s uniquely designed for you, I think looking at this can help you kind of understand like what’s the programming I received? A lot of times on the podcast we’re talking about the programming you received in or for a marginalized identity. But I think it can also be really valuable to look at what’s the programming I received in or for a privileged identity if I have one?
And because people are constellations, a lot of people do have some of each. And just like, what do I think is for me? What do I think is available? And do I want to keep the socialization that I was raised with? Like for me personally, as a white person, it’s been years and decades of unlearning sometimes very clear racism and sometimes very subtle racism. Like there’s so much of white culture that centers whiteness, right?
There’s so much white supremacy throughout, I think, Western and American culture. And first you see like the big chunks and then you’re like, oh, but that doesn’t apply to me. And then like for me and my experience, it’s been years of being like, oh, actually I grew up in this culture and so my brain does have some of these white supremacist ideas and I want to weed those out. I don’t want those in there for me.
So that’s me not just seeing my marginalized socialization and pushing back against that. It’s me seeing my privileged socialization and going, hmm, yikes, I don’t think that’s who I want to be in the world. And I don’t think that’s what I want to stand for.
And then I think really coming into like, oh, here are my values and ideas about the world and here are some pieces of my socialization that conflict with that. And I’d rather change the socialization. I’d rather bring those patterns that I learned to the surface and edit them so they can come more into alignment with what kind of person I want to be in the world.
And I’m going to tell y’all the truth, this can be really uncomfortable. It can be massively uncomfortable. In some ways, I think it’s more uncomfortable often to look at the privileged socialization we got than it is to look at the marginalized socialization. But they can both be hard in their own way, but it can be really disconcerting.
Like if you think of yourself as like a loving person, a good person, to realize like, oh, but I also have these other seeds that were sewn into me and I don’t want them there, but it can feel really yucky to discover them. I’ve coached people before, people who identify as queer or people who are trans or people who are non-binary, and they’re kind of like discovering some internalized heteronormativity or internalized homophobia that can feel just really yucky.
And then it can also sometimes sort of interfere with their ability to connect with their queer identity or their trans identity or their non-binary identity. And it’s like discovering pieces of my socialization as a white person that really conflict with who I want to be on purpose as a white person and realizing I may have to clean those out.
The awareness isn’t always enough to change it. And my brain, because brains are pattern making and pattern recognizing machines, my brain may still try to step into that old pattern. Just like my brain may have self-criticism for me, even if I’ve been working on that pattern, my brain may have something racist to say. And then it’s my job to notice and be like, oh, an old pattern. That’s not who we’re choosing to be in the world. But thanks for showing me, brain, that that pattern was still in there.
And again, I think this can be really hard. It can be really scary. It can be really delicate work to recognize the patterns in your own mind that conflict with who you want to be in the world and conflict with how you want to show up and then sit with them and realize they’re there and then move forward.
I think when I was younger it would have been too hard and too painful. And probably people tried to point out patterns that I had that were not useful. But I think especially when my self-confidence was more fragile, it would have been really hard to have that awareness of like, oh, this pattern actually goes against everything I stand for. Can I examine it, unpack it?
And I think there’s a metaphor that really helps for this, which I also talked about on Sara Fisk’s podcast. And the metaphor is that of a sponge. Like we’re all sponges that have been soaking up whatever liquid that we were in, right? And the liquid is the socialization, right?
So your sponge may have absorbed all this stuff. It’s like, if you spilled orange juice on the counter and wiped it up with a sponge, the sponge is going to be full of orange juice, right? But you can run the sponge under warm water. You can wash the sponge with soap. And that’s what we’re like too.
If you grew up in a culture with problematic ideas, and you probably did if you grew up in a human culture. Whether that’s like your family of origin or a larger community you belong to, or the books you read or the other media you consumed or the peers you had, you probably absorbed some stuff that isn’t actually who you want to be. And I think what coaching actually is, is cleaning that sponge out.
It’s running that sponge under warm, soapy water. And it’s lovingly helping the sponge become more of what it wants to be. And teaching the sponge, it’s not bad just because it absorbed these things that were around it, because that’s literally what human brains do, they just absorb and reenact patterns. And brains evolved to keep you alive, not to keep you happy and also not to keep you in alignment with your values, but that’s what coaching can help you do.
Okay, so I hope that this conversation has been illuminating for you. And if you would like to take this work deeper, as ever, I’m available to coach you through a transformation or through a revelation or in any other way to help you live more in alignment with who you want to be and be living in patterns that feel really good to you and create amazing results. So come have a conversation with me if you are interested in working together, and I will talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for joining me for this week’s episode of Satisfied AF. If you are ready to create a wildly delicious life and have way more fun than you ever thought possible, visit www.korilinn.com to see how I can help. See you next week.
The Satisfied AF podcast is the place to learn how to create a life and career that’s wildly delicious. Want a steamier sex life? We’ve got you. Want a more satisfying career? We’ll cover that too. And you can be sure we’ll spend lots of time talking about how to build connected, fun relationships that can handle life’s ups and downs. No matter what goals you’re working on, this show will help you create a one of a kind life that is just right for you. Join me, life and career coach Kori Linn and each week I’ll give you lots of practical tips, tools, and proven strategies to help you create all the satisfaction your heart desires.
Hello, hello, hello. Happy Wednesday. It’s a beautiful, sunny day here in Sacramento. And this is exactly the kind of day I moved here for, to be honest. I adore Seattle and I miss it all the time. Honestly, so much. And also Alex and I wanted to live somewhere where we would have more sun on our faces and more blue skies all year round.
Now, let’s be honest, Sacramento doesn’t have only blue skies all year round. We actually do have a lot of cloudy days in the winter, but we also have some days like this where I think the high is like 69 and I’m just vibrating with excitement about how beautiful it is outside.
Okay, without further ado, let’s jump into what we’re talking about today. So I wanted to do this podcast, I’ve actually wanted to talk about this for a long time and I’ve even tried to record the podcast a few times. And each time I did, it came out weird or I didn’t like it and I decided not to do it. And it’s interesting because I do think there can be a magic in beginning and magic in just putting out imperfect products or imperfect ideas or imperfect bids for affection.
And also there can be something to be said for trying to birth something and it doesn’t want to come out and realizing like, maybe this thing’s not ready. I actually read a really interesting post about like, is it procrastination or is the thing just like not ready to come forth yet? And sometimes it might be hard to tell the difference between those two things.
And that’s why I think a really important tool that you can develop is discernment and really coming into an understanding of like, oh, am I avoiding this because I think it’s going to be uncomfortable? Or did I try to do this and it doesn’t seem like either the ideas have fully baked or I have the skills to explain it well.
And honestly, I will probably never have the skills to explain this as well as I would like to be able to be explaining it. But I think I have enough now to take a pass at it. And part of that’s because I was recently recording a podcast episode with Sara Fisk on her podcast, which is called The Ex-Good Girl Podcast. And Sara is amazing, so you go check that podcast out.
And when we were recording the podcast, we were talking about imposter syndrome. And I was specifically talking about imposter syndrome in relation to having marginalized identities. And so we kind of got into like, what does it mean to have a marginalized identity?
And having that conversation with her, I was like, oh, I think I’m actually able to talk about this much more articulately than last time I tried to record a podcast on it. So maybe it’s time to go do an episode for my podcast as well.
So, basically, privilege and marginalization in the way that I understand them, and I’m not an expert. But I’ve learned a lot about them both through my life and my own knowledge journey, especially in coming to understand white supremacy as a white person. But also in my coach training because I have a secondary certification, which is an advanced certification in intersectional feminism. And we do dig into things like what’s the dominant culture and what are the marginalized identities in that as well. But I’m sure there’s a lot I don’t know too.
But I think the really basic way to understand it is that in our culture, the culture is designed for dominant groups. And then there are other people who live in the culture who don’t belong to those dominant groups, right? So we live in a patriarchy and a patriarchy is designed for men. The dominant group in patriarchy is men, and women are the marginalized group.
But people have a lot of different identities, and so sometimes you can have like a handful of marginalized identities and a handful of privileged identities or places where you belong to the dominant group. American culture is a culture based on white supremacy. And so I am a woman, so I belong to the non-dominant group in that way. But I’m white, so I belong to the dominant group in that way.
I used to identify as straight, heterosexual. So that was belonging to the dominant group. Now I identify as queer, that’s not the dominant group. Then there’s like are you neurotypical or are you neurodiverse? Are you able-bodied or do you have a disability? There’s also citizenship, right? Like I’m a citizen of the United States, there’s a lot of privilege in that. It’s not that there’s just necessarily one country, there’s a lot of different countries, I think, where having citizenship can be a big privilege. And that can shift as like how the countries are relating to each other.
But for example, having US citizenship means that there are a lot of places in the world I can go without having to get special permission or without having to get a visa. And there are other people from other countries who don’t have that benefit. They have to jump through more hoops or get more paperwork done ahead of time to be able to enter certain countries.
Like when I was really young, right out of college, I lived in France. And so that was an example. I did have to get a visa because I was going to be working there, but I wouldn’t have had to have a visa just to enter or leave the country. And if I wanted to leave the country when I had breaks from school, I was able to leave and come back.
But I knew someone else there who was from a different country and he couldn’t leave France. If he left, they weren’t going to let him back in. So he had to stay in the country for the length of his contract. And I didn’t have to do that. And there was nothing special about me. I was not better behaved. I didn’t have a better career history at that time to earn that privilege. That was just a privilege given to me because of the citizenship of the country that I belong to.
So when people talk about privilege and unearned privilege, I think a lot of times it can get people’s hackles up, but I’ve heard it explained a few times in different trainings so beautifully. It’s like having privilege doesn’t actually mean everything’s easy for you. It just means there are certain difficulties that you don’t face.
And then again, as we’re like these constellations of identities, like you may have privilege, so there’s difficulties you don’t face. And then you may belong to a marginalized group where there are other difficulties you do face. You may belong to multiple marginalized groups where there may be multiple difficulties you face that are exponential or cumulative to each other.
And then you can belong to some marginalized identities, but belong to some privileged groups that are so privileged that sometimes it can be difficult to realize how much privilege you have because you also don’t have all of it, right?
So I think it’s very interesting and very complex. And primarily what I want to bring it up for is because there’s socialization when you have an identity of privilege and there’s socialization when you have an identity of marginalization. And a lot of times the socialization when you’re in a marginalized identity is like, don’t take up too much space. Don’t ask for too much. You have to be better than the average person in order to be safe and be okay and survive.
So it’s about being small and fitting in and being non-threatening and being exceptionally good. And so that can be really interesting. Like when you come to coaching sometimes we have that kind of socialization that we’ve internalized. And then it’s really hard for us to live lives and go out in the world and do things that feel really good to us because we’re still enacting that socialization that we got.
And then there’s also the other hand of sometimes when we were socialized with privilege, we may feel entitled to things. We may feel entitled to things being easy. We may feel entitled to things being a certain way. And we might not even have the awareness that we have that socialization.
I know I had a lot of this. Like I remember when I was younger I was really mad about my student loans. I was doing a coaching activity that I think I learned about from like Martha Beck. And I was digging into the feelings and what I realized was I was so angry about having my student loans because I felt entitled to have free higher education. And it was super interesting for me because once I realized I was so angry because I felt entitled, like everything shifted.
And on the one hand, I do think higher education should be either free or significantly less expensive than it is in the United States. There’s a lot of other countries in the world where higher education isn’t like it is here. I mean, I don’t even think I had particularly high student loans and between undergrad and grad school I think I had at least 40 or 50 K.
I mean, in some parts of the country, that could be a house. In other parts of the country that could be a down payment on a house. It’s an extraordinarily large amount of money, especially when, again, I lived in France right after undergrad and taught English there. And one of my friends from the United States had chosen to go to grad school in France because it was so much cheaper, just extraordinarily less expensive.
But all that being said, when I saw that part of my anger was entitlement, that really clicked something for me like, oh, maybe I don’t want to feel entitled to things in that way. First of all, feeling entitled to things didn’t necessarily even get me the things, but it did make me really angry about the world that it was.
And sometimes being really angry about the world as it is, I think, is really important and spicy information about how we want to move forward. But sometimes it also reveals like, oh, I’m angry because I feel entitled. Do I want to keep feeling entitled? Or maybe is there something else I would like to replace that with?
I’ve never seen actual data on this, but I read online one time anecdotally that when women go to therapy, a lot of the times in therapy they learn to set boundaries. They learn to take up space. They learn to center their own desires.
And when men go to therapy, they’re not working on the same things. They’re working on participating more in their relationships or like having less expectations of others, kind of. Like not expecting other people to take care of everything for them or learning how to engage with a world where maybe they were raised to believe that everything should always go their way and it’s not.
And again, I don’t know if that’s true. I haven’t seen data on that. I haven’t talked to any therapists about that pattern, but I do think there’s a seed of truth in that for me. And what I’ve seen of the pieces of socialization where we’re socialized in the dominant culture about what should be available for us and what is expected of us and the pieces where we’re socialized in a marginalized group.
And it’s interesting too, because there’s a lot of identities where you always have them and they’re kind of obvious, right? But there’s other identities, like being someone who used to identify as straight and now identifies as queer, like that was a very interesting transition of it feels a lot harder to me in a lot of ways to identify as queer.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I love being queer. I adore my queer identity. I would choose it again and again, even though it’s not a choice. I love it. And I love being out. I love that part of my life. And also I distinctly remember like the year that I really was like, oh, I’m not straight. I’m queer and I’m going to partner, I’m going to go on dates with women. And then I partnered with a woman who I’m still partnered with, it’s Alex. And kind of having this fear of like, oh, I have skin in the game in a different way.
Like it’s one thing to go to a party and have someone say some fucked up thing and you be like, that’s not cool, because you’re an ally. It’s a very different thing to go somewhere and have someone say a fucked up thing and you’re in that group. And I didn’t know that before I had that experience.
So I think that’s just something interesting to think about, right? What do we think is expected of us? What do we think is for us? What do we think our role is in the world based on that constellation of identities that we have? And some of that is our own experience. And some of it’s like, who were we raised by? If we were raised by people with certain marginalized identities, they may pass on learnings.
And especially if they went through really hard things in their youth or a different period of time or when they lived in a different country, they might pass those on explicitly and implicitly and really inform our experience of what we think the world is going to be like and what we think we’re allowed to do and what we think we’re not allowed to do and what we think other people should or shouldn’t do.
So for the purposes of this podcast and the purposes of you creating a satisfying life and a delicious career and wonderful relationships and something that’s uniquely designed for you, I think looking at this can help you kind of understand like what’s the programming I received? A lot of times on the podcast we’re talking about the programming you received in or for a marginalized identity. But I think it can also be really valuable to look at what’s the programming I received in or for a privileged identity if I have one?
And because people are constellations, a lot of people do have some of each. And just like, what do I think is for me? What do I think is available? And do I want to keep the socialization that I was raised with? Like for me personally, as a white person, it’s been years and decades of unlearning sometimes very clear racism and sometimes very subtle racism. Like there’s so much of white culture that centers whiteness, right?
There’s so much white supremacy throughout, I think, Western and American culture. And first you see like the big chunks and then you’re like, oh, but that doesn’t apply to me. And then like for me and my experience, it’s been years of being like, oh, actually I grew up in this culture and so my brain does have some of these white supremacist ideas and I want to weed those out. I don’t want those in there for me.
So that’s me not just seeing my marginalized socialization and pushing back against that. It’s me seeing my privileged socialization and going, hmm, yikes, I don’t think that’s who I want to be in the world. And I don’t think that’s what I want to stand for.
And then I think really coming into like, oh, here are my values and ideas about the world and here are some pieces of my socialization that conflict with that. And I’d rather change the socialization. I’d rather bring those patterns that I learned to the surface and edit them so they can come more into alignment with what kind of person I want to be in the world.
And I’m going to tell y’all the truth, this can be really uncomfortable. It can be massively uncomfortable. In some ways, I think it’s more uncomfortable often to look at the privileged socialization we got than it is to look at the marginalized socialization. But they can both be hard in their own way, but it can be really disconcerting.
Like if you think of yourself as like a loving person, a good person, to realize like, oh, but I also have these other seeds that were sewn into me and I don’t want them there, but it can feel really yucky to discover them. I’ve coached people before, people who identify as queer or people who are trans or people who are non-binary, and they’re kind of like discovering some internalized heteronormativity or internalized homophobia that can feel just really yucky.
And then it can also sometimes sort of interfere with their ability to connect with their queer identity or their trans identity or their non-binary identity. And it’s like discovering pieces of my socialization as a white person that really conflict with who I want to be on purpose as a white person and realizing I may have to clean those out.
The awareness isn’t always enough to change it. And my brain, because brains are pattern making and pattern recognizing machines, my brain may still try to step into that old pattern. Just like my brain may have self-criticism for me, even if I’ve been working on that pattern, my brain may have something racist to say. And then it’s my job to notice and be like, oh, an old pattern. That’s not who we’re choosing to be in the world. But thanks for showing me, brain, that that pattern was still in there.
And again, I think this can be really hard. It can be really scary. It can be really delicate work to recognize the patterns in your own mind that conflict with who you want to be in the world and conflict with how you want to show up and then sit with them and realize they’re there and then move forward.
I think when I was younger it would have been too hard and too painful. And probably people tried to point out patterns that I had that were not useful. But I think especially when my self-confidence was more fragile, it would have been really hard to have that awareness of like, oh, this pattern actually goes against everything I stand for. Can I examine it, unpack it?
And I think there’s a metaphor that really helps for this, which I also talked about on Sara Fisk’s podcast. And the metaphor is that of a sponge. Like we’re all sponges that have been soaking up whatever liquid that we were in, right? And the liquid is the socialization, right?
So your sponge may have absorbed all this stuff. It’s like, if you spilled orange juice on the counter and wiped it up with a sponge, the sponge is going to be full of orange juice, right? But you can run the sponge under warm water. You can wash the sponge with soap. And that’s what we’re like too.
If you grew up in a culture with problematic ideas, and you probably did if you grew up in a human culture. Whether that’s like your family of origin or a larger community you belong to, or the books you read or the other media you consumed or the peers you had, you probably absorbed some stuff that isn’t actually who you want to be. And I think what coaching actually is, is cleaning that sponge out.
It’s running that sponge under warm, soapy water. And it’s lovingly helping the sponge become more of what it wants to be. And teaching the sponge, it’s not bad just because it absorbed these things that were around it, because that’s literally what human brains do, they just absorb and reenact patterns. And brains evolved to keep you alive, not to keep you happy and also not to keep you in alignment with your values, but that’s what coaching can help you do.
Okay, so I hope that this conversation has been illuminating for you. And if you would like to take this work deeper, as ever, I’m available to coach you through a transformation or through a revelation or in any other way to help you live more in alignment with who you want to be and be living in patterns that feel really good to you and create amazing results. So come have a conversation with me if you are interested in working together, and I will talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for joining me for this week’s episode of Satisfied AF. If you are ready to create a wildly delicious life and have way more fun than you ever thought possible, visit www.korilinn.com to see how I can help. See you next week.
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