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Manic Flight Reaction
Trigger + Shunning
From: Conflict Is Not Abuse
$0.56
This chapter discusses the contemporary concern with “triggers,” i.e., the moment of escalation, especially in sequence with shunning. The author looks at four diverse systems of thought that all recognize the trigger + shunning sequence as the centerpiece of injustice and pain: Traditional Psychoanalysis, Contemporary Psychiatry and its commercial counterpart Pop Psychology, Mindfulness, and Al-Anon, the counterpart to Alcoholics Anonymous focused on partners and families of Alcoholics. The chapter examines how each of these perspectives understand the role of the “bad” group (couple, family, community, friends, religion, nation, peoples) as enforcers of escalation driven by overstated harm, and how these divergent systems of thought unite by offering what Stephen Andrews calls “realignment” from “bad” groups, and centering delay as a method for avoiding unjust escalation.
Contributors
Sarah Schulman
Sarah Schulman is the author of eighteen books: the novels The Cosmopolitans, The Mere Future, The Child, Rat Bohemia, Shimmer, Empathy, After Delores, People In Trouble, Girls Visions and Everything, and The Sophie Horowitz Story, the nonfiction works Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness To a Lost Imagination, Israel/Palestine and the Queer International, Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences, Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS and the Marketing of Gay America and My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan/Bush Years, and the plays Mercy and Carson McCullers. She is co-author with Cheryl Dunye of the movies The Owls and Mommy is Coming, and co-producer with Jim Hubbard of the feature United in Anger: A History of ACT UP. She is co-director of the ACT UP Oral History Project. Her awards include the 2009 Kessler Award for "Sustained Contribution to LGBT Studies" from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and two American Library Association Book Awards, and she was a Finalist for the Prix de Rome. She lives in New York, where she is Distinguished Professor of English at City University of New York (College of Staten Island) and a Fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU.
