I explore my own stranger within as a way of showing how I have to grapple with not accepting aspects of myself. This can make me more reactive and less respectful of people who are strange to me. I cross link this to cultural/political commentaries from several leaders who speak from different religious and political stances. These leaders provide a vital moral boundary to vitriolic and harmful political and other public statements.

For example, Stan Grant who is a First Nation social commentator and practicing Christian writes that we need to heed the way we talk about human beings. Derogatory language can position people as things/ objects, somehow not fully human and thereby not deserving of respect, protection and human rights.

By welcoming strangers into Australian society – migrants, refugees and asylum seekers - we can provide an active resistance against fear, misinformation, self-centredness and prejudices such Xenophobia. I suggest that recognising and accepting the stranger within is one way to become more compassionate towards other people who embody that stranger in society.

Your view on this topic is welcome and in closing, I wish to acknowledge anyone who feels they are treated disrespectfully because they are a stranger.

The causes of unsustainability and exploitation of the planet are multi-faceted with different levels of responsibility for harm done. The concern about global warming is indicative of the broad impacts of unsustainable use of Nature where human consumption of farmed animals highlights the interconnected issues.

Individuals can experience eco-guilt even though each person has a miniscule impact on the global dimensions of the issue. But the collective of human individuals is having undeniable impacts that threaten the very survival of life on the planet. But not to forget that some businesses, governments and organisations hold a greater level of responsibility for harm done to Nature. There is a link between multi-national mining companies destroying large tracts of forest and waterways to mine bauxite, the raw material for aluminium, and individuals buying cars made of aluminium.

This kind of interlinked awareness is the basis for eco-guilt and can result in individuals feeling a disproportionate amount of responsibility for the collective harm occurring to Nature. I offer a self-audit of how I use Nature in ways that are not sustainable and go on to suggest how guilt implies care and care is the motivating factor in acting in small ways to make amends for harm done to Nature.

This is all about making sure we don’t become overwhelmed and fatalistic and stop caring as the challenges seem so insurmountable. The invitation is to reach out and share our experiences and together to go forward to make a loving contribution to the ecosystems we live in.

I would suggest that eco-anxiety is the proper response to what we see, hear and sometimes directly experience ourselves. However, we can become over-exposed to disasters and suffering such that our bodies become highly sensitised and we may be unable to calm our nervous system and function with some sense of personal control in our lives. Behind the eco-anxiety sits the risk of losing hope that the world will be OK, that nature will recover, that people will recover and that we can still be sure the world will be liveable for us all.

Doing what we can to hold hope for ourselves and sometimes for others, is something we can do on a day by day basis. It is not easy and it is not a skill that is taught. There are though, many ways to foster hope and pay it forward in acts of kindness. For example, keeping our focus on people who are making positive contributions in the world can really help us. Jane Goodall has inspired people all over the world and one of her key messages is that in the face of hopelessness, do something! She says the smallest acts of care and kindness matter. It means we are not giving up in our distress, that we still want to make a contribution in the world. That we know what we do matters.

The podcast shares my thoughts about how to transform deep worry about the world by practising hope each day, in little ways, and noting here that when called upon that we stand up to be counted more substantially.

I dedicate this podcast to the incredible people - volunteers, neighbours, government workers and everyday people who step up - who respond to natural disasters, often putting their own lives at risk, to help others. That we continue to care gives me hope for our world, for to not care means we lose more than we need to.

I outline some of the pros and cons for using AI as a form of self help and self care. Some cons are: it is a pseudo connection, it is not confidential and if distressed a person may not be asking the questions that can elicit the kind of help they need. Some pros are: it’s accessible, relatively cheap, it is non-stigmatising, and the person is proactive in seeking help.

I conclude with some implications for how traditional helping professions can form a partnership with people which embraces the use of AI in ways that serve them and give them the best of both ways of seeking help - both the human and non-human.

You can support my work by following me on Substack, or on TikTok or Instagram. My book - Broken-heartedness: Towards love in professional practice - provides more in depth analysis of what helps and why so much helping is harmful, as well as ways to address this issue. You can email me on dyann@dyannross.com if you would like to create a podcast around today’s topic or other topics offered in this podcast series.

While the Grid describes workers’ behaviours and characteristics it is important to note that the issue of bullying is about power and abuse of power by the person who is acting in bullying ways or failing to stop it occurring. The Grid does not show the characteristics and behaviours of people who bully as it deserves its own attention. At the same time I would suggest that a focus on individuals’ behaviours can belie how authoritarian management and toxic workplace cultures are not only about individuals. The Target Threat/Desirability Grid is best considered a partial explanation of the reasons why bullying happens. In short, the Claras, Veras, Cathys and Sams of the workplace are not the reasons why bullying happens. But to the extent that their experiences holds a mirror to the causes, the Grid has some value.

A draft mud map of the Grid:

Do let me know what you think.

I explore the issue of workplace violence on TikTok and Instagram and expand on it and the need for a love ethic informed approach in my book - Broken-heartedness: Towards love in professional practice published by Revolutionaries.

The podcast refers to relevant parts of Biestek’s book which provides a still useful definition and some insights into why it matters and how it is similar to acceptance. Interestingly, he defines acceptance in turn as a ‘special kind of love’ and thereby makes the link for me between the non-judgmental attitude and acceptance as love informed skills. I outline some ways to practice from a non-judging approach such as non-judgmental listening; self and societal awareness to ensure biases and prejudices don’t unwittingly seep into our interactions, and; understanding the socio-political and economic factors. These factors can create circumstances not of a person’s choosing and not under their full control to change. Thus, to judge the person by blaming or shaming them can cause a lot of harm and detract from our intentions of helping.

Many new subscribers have come to this podcast on the recommendation of The BTS Theorist. So it seems timely to make the links more explicit and perhaps to inspire some of my longer term subscribers to check out BTS - especially their music from the ‘love yourself era’.

We discuss social work and BTS, and explain how BTS showed me how to speak up about the importance of love in social work in ways I had previously been reluctant to do. A big shout out to all ARMY’s today as it is ARMY day - BTS is lucky to have you all as their fans!

You can find Wallea’s essays and other posts by googling The BTS Theorist, or accessing it via Substack, and by following her on Instagram. Thank you so much Wallea for your time and ideas today!!

I detail the main points of the article and share how a systematic literature review was undertaken to find 16 articles in social work journals that explored love in practice and in theory development. Dilip and I wanted to know what the current state of argument and research is on love in social work and whether it could inform an anti-oppressive (pro-justice) ethical positionality. While it is an emerging field of scholarship, the selected articles show how important love was in their work. In one article, their country’s government (Norway) has legislated for love to be used in working with young vulnerable people. In another, it was found that the young research participants were asking for love from the social workers as they had so little experience of it in their lives. Cautions were also offered regarding the risk of an overly emotional interpretation of love devoid of its broader promise of enabling a power analysis underpinning discrimination and oppression.

We argue that with all the viewpoints considered it could be useful to think of love as an ethic, in the tradition of bell hooks’s seminal writing, providing a guide for further dialogue and scholarship.

If you would like to access a copy of the published article, please use this link:

https://academic.oup.com/bjsw/advance-article/doi/10.1093/bjsw/bcaf113/8166617

Let us know what you think or drop us a note if you have questions or would like me to elaborate more on any points or the overall research project.

Thank you for your time and interest.

Failures of responsibility create a cascading series of losses and harms down the hierarchy such that people can be situated as the weakest link and the problem. I’m using the words ‘weakest link’ from Sandra Bloom’s important writing on trauma-causing workplaces, and here caution us not to interpret it as us being weak. Rather it is a systemic manifestation of problems largely beyond our control. The weakest link can get located in our person because we might be least desirable to the powers that be, or the least important, or the least agreeable, one way or another we will be at the bottom of the pecking order, where it is ultra hard to be safe and to be heard.

The podcast outlines a number of ways to resist burnout in these kinds of workplaces. For example - get support; monitor your self talk; support others (behind the scenes); stand your ground; trust your senses; recognise patterns in the workplace and be cautious in trusting smiling faces. All these resistance strategies have some cautionary notes so do check out the podcast for more details.

Burnout is experienced personally but it is in a workplace which makes it professional ie work related, legal, organisational ie occupational health and safety, and ultimately a societal issue.

You can read more about organisational violence and other issues that can cause us to feel burnout and morally injured in my book - Broken-heartedness: Towards love in professional practice. Available form the publisher - https://www.revolutionaries.com.au/books/p/bh

And by following me on TikTok and Instagram.

Thank you for your support and interest.

In this podcast I suggest that by recognising several key feelings, namely, anguish, hopelessness, despair and shame that we can then trace the source of those exhausting and confidence depleting experiences. Drawing on Brene Brown’s idea of institutional betrayal, I suggest our heart-of-heart feelings are warning signs that the workplace is hurting us by unfair and unkind actions, perhaps also sometimes by failures to act to show care and regard for us. Our values can be betrayed when we can’t act to uphold them due to workplace toxicity or extreme demands. There can also be a betrayal in not recognising our effort and contribution. And the betrayal of the broken promise that our caring work of others would be held, supported and honored.

When institutional betrayal is rampant, this is not about individual failings to do our job well or to cope better, this is about a culture of complicity and shame (Brown 2021). The purpose, whether intentional or not, is to control workers through fear and undermining through blaming people for workplace short-comings. Burnout is experienced in our bodies and is thus very personal. Burnout is not a personal experience only though as it occurs through relationships and the patterns inherent in the workplace culture. It is an act of strength to survive or flourish in workplaces when feeling burnout and being impacted daily by betrayals.

Thank you for listening to my podcast and for supporting my work. You can follow me on TikTok and Instagram. You might find my book - Broken-heartedness: Towards love in professional practice - interesting for ideas and skills to resist harmful people and places, by being guided by the love ethic. Available at https://www.revolutionaries.com.au/books/p/bh

Cited reference:

Brown, B. (2021). Atlas of the heart. London: Penguin Random House.

Do feel free to drop me a comment here or I can be contacted directly at dyann@dyannross.com

Brandon is a social worker and a practising Zen Buddhist monk. He explores the nature of helping from both these viewpoints and in so doing gives us an appreciation of what the idea of Zen - about nowness (and more) - can bring to our practice and lives. This podcast belongs in my set of podcasts in this collection of From my bookshelf, where I read excerpts from the book and make some additional comments of relevance to me and hopefully you, the listener.

I find the idea of Zen - the presence that is shared between people who are of equal intrinsic worth - as being about love, really interesting. I hadn’t made that connection in my earlier re-readings of Brandon’s book. The place of compassion is an integral dimension of love in this Zen space and is where healing and connection can happen. Much of Brandon’s book recounts what gets in the way of helping that really helps. In particular, he uses his own experiences to caution about our own internal motivations, judgements, biases and vulnerabilities that can undermine the best of intentions. I also appreciate that he recognises the societal factors that make it so hard to really help another person.

From this reading, I now aim to include the idea of Zen into my theory of love with its call to be aware, to be willing to keep learning, especially with and from the person we might be seeking to help. And to also always be alert to power inequalities both interpersonally in our work and home places … and to act to cause no harm arises due to these inequalities.

Drop me a note in comments and tell me what you think.

Thanks for your support.

Information about the source book for this podcast:

Brandon, D. (1976). Zen in the art of helping. England: Arkana Penguin Books.

My theory of love is presented in my book:

Ross, D. (2023). Broken-heartedness: Towards love in professional practice. Brisbane: Revolutionaries.

Contact me:

dyann@dyannross.com

In this podcast I share some examples of Brown’s work about emotions and focus on several that are directly related to broken-heartedness - such as anguish, betrayal and hopelessness. In so doing I am beginning the task of placing our emotions at the centre of my theory of love instead of our emotional internal world being largely absent.

Do let me know what you think! Thanks for listening!

You can support my work by grabbing a copy of Broken-heartedness: Towards love in professional practice via the publisher’s website - https://www.revolutionaries.com.au/books

You can also follow me on Instagram or TikTok.

If you would like to be interviewed for a podcast on what love means to you, please reach out to me on dyannross@dyannross.com

I share some of my emotional intensity and challenges as an example of what I have not communicated yet to anyone, in the days after the cyclone reaching landfall. Not to take away from many people wishing me safety during this time. That matters but it is probably the case that thousands if not millions of people are still grappling with the trauma, if not from their own circumstances, then because of what we have witnessed happening to others.

Disaster upon disaster can take its toll and erode our resilience. Enquiring how others are and being willing to acknowledge the depth and severity of their experience is something we can all do going forward.

You can support my work by following me on TikTok and Instagram and my book, Broken-heartedness, gives other examples of harm and trauma that causes our hearts to break, and what we can do about this.

This podcast introduces empathy, suggests when to use it and not to use it, and outlines what makes it hard and what makes it easy to empathise. I then extend on the idea of empathy to encompass Jan Fook’s (1993) idea of social empathy. The issue of empathy deficit is identified (Bradley Nelson, 2019) and the vision of an Empathy Charter is outlined (Bazalgette, 2017).

Email me on dyann@dyannross.com if you would like any of the cited authors’ details.

You can support my work by following me on TikTok or instagram and can purchase my books from Revolutionaries - see the link on my webpage dyannross.com

Thank you and do let me know what you think!

I find these ideas help me understand why some types of loss - eg. where there has been unfairness and/or violence - cause deep wounds in our hearts. Further, our personal experiences of unfairness and how we try to grieve and address that treatment can be compounded by our awareness of, or direct involvement in, social issues and events where there is unfairness and violence. For individuals, whole groups and communities where injustice is rife, there can be a collapse of ability to make meaning of what is happening, sufficient to maintain hope and a sense of fairness being possible. An implication is that seeking to understand the meaning people attribute to their experience can help us be more relevant in how we might seek to support them. Additionally, where people are experiencing compounding loss and change their grief is likely to be complex and deepen into broken-heartedness.

Thank you for your interest, do let me know what you think of this post.

You can follow me on instagram - @drdyannross - and TikTok - @drdyannross. My book, Broken-heartedness, provides more details on the causes of broken-heartedness and how love practices can be drawn upon to address lovelessness.

The collection of love stories from people from all walks of life is inspiring and sometimes heart breaking. Dalton shows how listening and being with a stranger is an opportunity to give love and he notes that the passer by usually gives far more love to him than he offers in return.

I read just one chapter, “Buried treasure”, to convey the beauty of peoples’ stories or in one instance - Crew cut man (they didn’t get to exchange names) - his not following through with a threat to smash Trent’s head into the concrete.

It is not a theory of love that matters most. It is each person’s way of expressing love and making sense of their lives in terms of what it says about love, that matters always. At the same time Dalton’s book reminds me of how we are all theorists of love.

Full details of the book are:

Dalton, T. (2021). Love stories. Sydney: Fourth Estate.

Do share your thoughts in the comments section. It would be good to hear from you.

You can follow me on TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@drdyannross

and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/drdyannross

I conducted a systematic literature review with Dilip Karki, a colleague of mine, to ascertain if other social workers were researching and writing about love in social work. We found 16 articles met the search criteria of English language, using the words love and social work that were published in the last ten years. I provide a summary of many of these articles to show the diversity of ways love is thought about and practiced. For example, in Norway, the national government has passed legislation whereby social workers need to use love in how they engage with young people. A Catholic University mandates that all its programs are premised on caritas which is the Latin word for love. This article explores how students in a Master of Social Work program understand caritas in a case study as part of their assessment. Articles by social work educators, a social work student, community development practitioners, child safety workers, criminal justice lived experience co-researchers provide just some of the diversity of ways love is used in social work.

Potential challenges in adopting love are identified such as the risk of blurring professional boundaries, the extra pressure on already over stretched practitioners and the potential for misunderstanding of how to practice with love in unequal relationships.

If you are interested in any of the mentioned articles, please drop me a note in comments and include a contact email address.

You can follow me on Tik Tok @drdyannross and Instagram @drdyannross

By recognising this issue we can be proactive to avoid actions and words that add to the problem. Further, we can enable collective, team efforts to understand the underlying factors creating these unsafe work conditions. Part of this involves identifying who is responsible for occupational health and safety matters, down the hierarchy of roles and responsibilities. Failures of responsibility can be spread across many workers and lead to a compounding lack of actions to ensure the workplace is safe and any issues are addressed respectfully and adequately.

Once we understand the nature of our workplace culture we can find positive ways to contribute to any needed changes. This culture building work must not just be left to the person being bullied, it needs to be a shared and a team effort to be most effective.

My web site is

https://www.dyannross.com/

You can also follow me on instagram - @drdyannross and Tik Tok - @dr.dyann.ross

The podcast brings a lens as well to myself, and you the listener, and asks us to carefully reflect on whether we are complicit in these micro aggressions against another colleague. Good people can bully and be bullied - which is not to say that bullying is ever ok even if you think you are a good person - and this complexity can be further compounded by an unsafe workplace culture. It can be unsafe to call out the back-biting in such situations. A negative halo is created not only around the target of the back-biting, but also around the person doing it. Our professional integrity can be seriously compromised by how we act and also by the reality of having to work in a workplace that is not proactively addressing the issue. Getting safe, preferably external, supervision and in its absence, keeping our own counsel if we need to support others are two ways to begin to resist the harm caused by back-biting.

The YouTube videos I refer to are:

Jordan Petersen (2023) The power of gossip and the cost of reputational damage;

Galen Emannele (2022) How to shut down toxic talk and gossip at work; and

Glenn Rolfsen (2016) How to start changing an unhealthy work environment.

You can follow me on instagram - https://www.instagram.com/drdyannross

and TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@dr.dyann.ross

My book Broken-heartedness: Towards love in professional practice (2023) provides more details on how love and nonviolence can be practised in unsafe contexts and places.

What I'm particularly interested in discussing with you is if social workers actually experience lovelessness in the workplace, where we're treated unfairly, where we're not recognised and affirmed and properly supported to do the important work we're doing. This deep heart wounding once recognised can be cared for by pivoting on the pain, drawing on the power of love. This pivoting begins the transformation of the pain into heart warming healing. When we refuse to react from our pain by harming others and pay forward with love, this is what mends broken-hearts. The symptoms of burnout ease and our wellbeing improves each time we act drawing on the power of love.

The useful videos on burnout that I mention are by Psych2Go, one example is called “6 signs you’re burnout, not lazy”.

The podcast builds on these other resources to locate the issue of burnout in workplace violence and other factors often beyond the direct responsibility of the practitioner. Self care is important but not always enough to mend broken-heartedness.

In this podcast I show how love can be expressed in social work practice with examples such as the ability to be present and show empathy to the other person. This interlinks with the ability to listen deeply which comes from really caring about what the person is saying and what is important to them. Closely related is the ability to stand with people who have been harmed, treated unfairly and are discriminated against. Love for people means justice for them really matters. This commitment to enabling social justice is the other key ethic of social work. It involves knowing how to understand what causes injustice and how to partner with people to address the harm and unfairness. Holding hope when a person lacks hope and supporting a person’s dignity in dehumanising situations are needed for love to be experienced.

I hope you find my ideas useful in validating what you already do to practice love at work.

My most recent book - Broken-heartedness: Towards love in professional practice, published by Revolutionaries - details more examples of love practices for social work and other helping professions. It can be purchased at https://www.revolutionaries.com.au/books/p/bh

You can follow me on instagram https://www.instagram.com/drdyannross

This podcast is also available on You Tube by searching for the video with the same title.

Specifically, broken-heartedness is a socio-emotional phenomenon that goes beyond the medical diagnosis of ‘broken-hearted syndrome’. In medical terms this syndrome is occurring when extreme stress damages the muscles of the heart. It can lead to heart disease and heart attacks. The purpose for social workers is not to diagnose or to impose the label of broken-heartedness on people we work with. Rather, the aim is to sensitise us to the social, political and economic factors that can directly impact peoples’ well-being and can lead to broken-heartedness. As such it can guide social workers in responding with deep empathy, in listening to peoples’ stories and in recognising how violence and injustice can cause broken-heartedness.

Issues that comprise matters of eco injustice are very troubling and do not have immediate solutions. The circumstances for millions of farmed animals across the planet are dire and show the devastating underbelly of economies which rely on mass scale slaughter of defenceless animals. Humans love other animals, and it is important to us that they do not experience cruelty. Humans do not need to eat other animals to access protein and other nutrients. Yet there is a moral amnesia due to the animal industrial complex operated by wealthy private businesses that normalises the meat industry. The wealthy are typically financially subsidised by governments which sanction the use of some animals for human consumption.

A societal level ethical re-set which equally values all our Kin is needed for personal and world peace. It begins with a loving regard for other animals of all kinds.

You can purchase a copy of my book at

https://revoltbooks.com/

If you are interested in buying a copy of my book it can be purchased here

https://revoltbooks.com/

Listen to my podcast to hear how I have come to this view and of how this equal moral worth principle along with an unshakeable belief in love and the power of nonviolence underpins all types of justice work at this time on the planet. When justice is experienced by the most harmed beings, there will be no broken-heartedness. Mercy will be shown.

You can buy this book and my two other books - The revolutionary social worker: The love ethic model and The revolutionary social worker: Love ethic companion - published by Revolutionaries at https://revoltbooks.com/

My book is available at https://revoltbooks.com/products/broken-heartedness

The podcast is dedicated to two women - Courtney Morison and Miriam Merten - who have died as a result of lovelessness in the public mental health systems in Queensland and NSW respectively. I found Courtney’s story in the print media as I was writing the book. She died by suicide in 2022 soon after telling her family the system did not care for her. I was previously aware of Miriam’s death after being secluded and multiple falls in a mental health facility due to a media release about the subsequent coronial inquiry in 2017.

In both instances it was heart-breaking to me for the terrible loss of life and for the people who loved the women and the people who tried to be caring in the system. It showed me that there is an unmet need for loving places and professionals. I believe that “we need to make the place that is meant to be caring to actually be caring when a person’s life is on the line”. When professional carers are broken-hearted from the distress they witness and unsupportive workplaces, they cannot be loving and nonviolent in their practice with people in their care. Understanding the sociological and ecological context of broken-heartedness can enable big and small steps towards love.

My book is now available as an e-book! If you would like to have a copy, please go to https://revoltbooks.com/products/broken-heartedness

Thank you for your interest and support!

Nonviolence is explored and shown to be a range of peaceful, proactive ways of being in the world that consciously resist and challenge violence.

You can support my writing by buying my book, reviewing it on Goodreads and by telling a friend about it. It can be purchased from https://revoltbooks.com/

A turning point for me was finding a way to think differently about how violence such as seclusion and restraint occurs. It is a highly restrictive and known to be traumatising practice which is legally sanctioned and seen to be a valid form of care. The turning point was deeply understanding how individual failures of responsibility at all points and levels of service delivery can create system failures of care and love.

The commentary involves very distressing accounts of harm done to people. Please take care in listening to it.

Love is understood in different ways by us all and probably is one of the most valued ideas and experience for many of us. This chapter defines love as a political practice aimed at addressing complex wicked problems with an ethical positioning of love. From this ethical stance we can see the interconnectedness of factors and appreciate how harmful violence is, and to know what to do about it. Love as a practice involves many skills and actions, that are familiar to anyone involved in the nonviolent social and environmental movements of our times. As well as to anyone who consciously relates to others with love and not violence. It helps us connect with empathy and deep understanding to be with and stand alongside people, other animals and Nature who have broken-hearts in justice struggles.

If you are interested in purchasing a copy of the book it can be found at:

https://revoltbooks.com/

Do feel free to give me feedback about the podcast or the book on this site or by leaving a review on Goodreads.

I really appreciate your support.

Certainly it is a weighty chapter that builds upon the preceding ones which showed how lovelessness caused by violence and injustice manifests as broken-heartedness. I explain how my idea is different from pop psychology books on heart break and is more than romantic love and caring for the people in our lives.

There is an unexpected and perhaps unwelcome gift for broken-hearted people, that occurs because they know how important love is. With this hard won wisdom, when broken-hearted people pay forward their pain in the form of loving actions, they increase our belief in the power of love to transform violence power.

If interested, you can purchase a copy of the book at:

https://revoltbooks.com/

I’d be pleased to hear your feedback which can be given directly to me here or on Goodreads - search for my book to place a review.

https://revoltbooks.com/

The podcast is a reading of the first section of Chapter 2, entitled Violence. This term is very complex and means different things to different people. The chapter starts to unpack how I understand what violence means, starting with my childhood experience of domestic violence. I then move on to explore the issue of violence as it is expressed in dominance hierarchies such as mental health systems. This podcast focuses on the vertical and horizontal violence that I became aware of as a social worker. As Sandra Bloom writes, hurt people hurt people. This is a very concerning matter when it is mental health staff who are hurting, for what it means for how they care for people receiving mental health care.

Violence causes lovelessness. Workplaces that are loveless can become the breeding ground for more violence, that can go unchecked and not addressed.

Please take care when listening to this podcast as some of the commentary is very disturbing and can personally impact on you in unexpected ways.

https://revoltbooks.com/

You might prefer to listen to large parts of it in these episodes. I add extra commentary at times but endeavour to stay close to the original book text. In this reading, I share about my experiences as a young girl and how I now understand much of my childhood as being about broken-heartedness caused by lovelessness. I suggest that where there is violence then there is lovelessness, one is the breeding ground for the other. In this way I lay the foundations for a different meaning of love and how violence can undercut and compromise it.

Watch out for further podcasts of the subsequent chapters that build towards an articulation of what a theory of love involves and why it is so urgently needed.

Broken-heartedness is addressed by love, nonviolence and eco-justice practices. A number of personal essays show how I take responsibility for causing broken-heartedness as a social worker. As well as showing how I have been broken-hearted and what I’ve done to pivot on the pain and loss towards love.

This first podcast introduces the book and provides a reading of part of the first chapter. Follow along with subsequent podcasts - coming soon - to listen to almost all of the book, interspersed with occasional additional commentary.

Michael’s candid and reflective views of what matters will resonate with listeners. He is humble yet exudes personal integrity. Further, his willingness to have honest conversations with himself is an inspiring example of how to love of ourselves. Then Michael explains how he pays love forward in the world one person at a time as he seeks to be present and of service.

Abuelaish has been referred to as the Martin Luther King of the Middle East. Fourteen years after the loss of his family, he continues to work for peace through the Daughters for Life Foundation which provides scholarships and support to young women to gain an education. He believed peace will come when women and girls are listened to as they are the culture builders and want to raise their families in peace.

Johnathan grew up in Brisbane. He is a father and grandfather. Johnathan’s mental health career started in 2003 with the Royal Flying Doctor Service in Cairns and is currently working for Queensland Health on the Gold Coast with the Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Health Service. He explains why a yes outcome in the referendum is a moral baseline for First Nation People of Australia to know justice and self-determination.

Peter describes his practice as ‘based on the concepts of the love ethic and connectedness. Love is the underpinning value of how I try to be in the world – love defined not as emotion but as holding all beings in positive regard and actively working with people towards growth and well-being. Love sets a high bar for practice, one which I do not always attain. Also central to my practice is the realization that all beings are connected and that we thrive when we are in reciprocal relationships with each other. My practice is also informed by Critical Theory, care-based ethics, intersectionality, Anti-Oppressive Practice and Eco-Socialism.’

You can find out more about Wallea and her work by visiting her website www.walleaeaglehawk.xyz and reading BTS Not Guaranteed at www.walleaeaglehawk.substack.com.

There is a wide path for practitioners and anyone who wants to practice with revolutionary love which involves being loving, nonviolent, and just in our actions.

It's really good to have you with me today. I'm wanting to make another set of fairly full on comments, about how I'm thinking at the moment about what's important to consider in building a theory of love. For a theory of love to be relevant to you and everybody else who might want to draw on it for some guidance, it needs to be quite nuanced and quite layered, and at the same time, readily accessible for you, in your every every day, every night situation that you might be in. 

Ideas are really big, slippery things, there's no doubt about it. For this podcast, I'm still in the realm of ideas, not so much yet getting into what to do with the ideas and giving guidance around that. If you bear with me, what I wanted to do today is bring a focus particularly to the issue of what I call the problematics of violence. I'm actually interested in love because of the problematics of violence in our world. There are so many dimensions to what violence looks like, why it's a problem and who it's a problem for. It sometimes gets talked about as wicked problems and things like poverty, war, structural unemployment, climate change, domestic violence, and anything we can think of that involves violence toward human beings, other beings, and Mother Nature. Different types of violence kind of get bundled up in this term, wicked problems. We know what's happening on the planet and in people's lives around us in our own lives. But it's not always clear what to do about it. We can get quite disempowered and quite disheartened, in fact, this is what I call broken-heartedness, the witnessing and being aware of violence. 

A theory of love really needs to delve into what power is all about. Because it's really saying that some types of power are not okay, namely, the types of power that do harm to others, even if not intended. It may be done in the name of love, but it is not love. 

The answer is love. 

The problem is violence. 

Within both those statements, understanding, knowing how to work with power, in all sorts of different situations, is really crucial. It can put us in some pretty tough situations, no doubt about it. I've got some notes that I was going to draw on, because I just find this topic, fairly overwhelming to know where to start and where to stop. I'm also wanting to still keep myself in the picture. It's not like I'm saying violence is all out there, over there, and nothing to do with me. I do try and bring it back to myself as well.

I'm a social worker, and I've been a social worker for many decades now. One of the original motivating factors for me to become a social worker in my late teens, was what I experienced and observed when I was a little person growing up in a large family. I've talked about this before. Just to make a couple of summary comments here. I was very aware of how unfair things were sometimes. The unfairness really ran along gender lines, this is in the 50s and 60s, into the 70s when I was growing up. From a young child’s perspective my understanding of fairness was in very simplistic terms. For example, for me it was about who was given the most food on their dinner plate at night. It was assumed that boys needed more food, particularly meat. It's interesting what you'll notice especially when you are hungry. I've talked also before about the lack of love that I experienced in how I understand love now. As a child I felt cared for and part of my family. You know, it was hard to get hold of that idea that it was love that I was really craving and missing. I didn't really know or understand love as I do now. There's a lot that happened in my childhood though where I started to ask questions such as –

* What does this feel right? 

* Why does this feel so uncomfortable or so unfair or so lonely? 

* What's missing here?

I just was puzzling about it and never put it into words to spoke to anyone about it as a child. I was looking for answers and I couldn't find the answers. Becoming a social worker was born of that desire

to understand and find the answer to those kinds of questions, of wanting to make the world a better place. That's a big concept, isn't it ‘make the world a bigger place.’ Just what that means is obviously different for each of us. There are so many ways we can contribute in the world. Being an academic, at this point in my career, it's very much about the passion for thinking through how our ideas can help us in the complexity and richness of what life is. In particular, it requires us to think about what violence and harm can look like, and how we might be able to contribute around that. I believe ideas are really, really important. They could sit as a kind of unspoken hope, or a precious belief, for example, that people are inherently good. I have that belief. I do believe people are inherently good, that much can happen, that can make it seem that they are not so. But I actually believe, as a starting ethical point that people are inherently good. This is one of those ideas that I've just refused to let go of all my life. I believe you will have ideas and beliefs that are ultra important to you as well that you just hold on to, like being honest matters. You know that you just try hard in every situation, even if it doesn't always work out that you're as honest as you might want to be, that you still really believe in honesty. I think that these ideas, these beliefs that we hold, often without even expressing them, and maybe sometimes just below a conscious level of thinking, are still influencing us. I think they help us hold a vision in the darkest of times, of what we're trying to achieve, even if we're not achieving it. These ideas and beliefs can be kind of a mixed blessing, in fact, because not acting on our values and our beliefs can be very painful and disabling as well.

Now I'm here with you because I am wanting to explore the idea of love, which you know, is a big project. I don't understand why, but actually I do understand why, it's taken me all my career, all my adult life, to come into a space like an academic space or professional space and say love matters. It is a word that is typically used in a romantic or sexualized way or for personal relationships. It is not a word typically found in professional codes of ethics. This word, love, is something that should be in the curriculum, we need to be talking with students about this in ways that they can get some guidance for their practice as social workers. I think that's an interesting point to wonder why it has taken so long to feel that I can speak it first, or that I had troubled and thinking it as a child, then speaking it as an adult and understanding how it can be used as, as a revolutionary force, I believe, for change in the world.

Just a quick comment on that word ‘revolutionary’ which I'm using in a very particular way. In terms of the peace revolution, the love revolution, and obviously it has to always be about nonviolence. When violence is happening it not the kind of revolution I'm talking about. I like the word revolution because it helps keep a big picture sense of the major levels and layers of change we need to undertake, to really have a loving world, and to have no violence and no harm being done to the most vulnerable people, animals and landscapes in the world. I believe a commitment to contributing to the love revolution by practicing being revolutionary love, is important for our survival on the planet.

I'm looking for an expansive multi-dimensional way of thinking about love to guide personal and planetary healing. Justice work is integral to that. I think certain ideas become important to us and then become values and guidelines for our behaviors. Love is very much a value of mine, it's actually maybe though surpassed by nonviolence. I think nonviolence has to be right up there. For me, it's one of the most important values I have that inspires me towards justice work to enable nonviolence for others. And of course, even though I say nonviolence is possibly my primary value, it is equal first with love, because to really care about and be concerned about others, we need to be coming from love position. When in doubt what a loving response might be in a specific situation, it is nonviolence that informs my actions. 

Okay, so this is just an opening comment as I want to talk about why I particularly at this time want to be developing a theory of love. It's because I want to be able to give guidance in the most complex, ethically challenging situations that we could imagine ourselves being in. Especially when we're in work situations where we are needing to be of service to others, but not only. You might also want to think about it when we are citizens and see violence and injustice happening. I've had to keep kind of trying to figure out what is it? What is it if I had to say, in a nutshell, what is the most concerning issue on our planet at this time? And I think it's about the use of coercion and other forms of violence. I think it's pervasive in all types of care for others, including animals and nature. I've obviously commented a little bit on this already. For me, it's particularly distressing and heartbreaking for individuals, whether that's human beings, other animals or Mother Nature, seeking or needing care, wanting to be loved and looked after, hoping for kindness, perhaps needing safety. Yet for any being, any individual, to experience lovelessness or coercion, even trauma, and possibly death as part of that care. I find that so disturbing to think about. And the more vulnerable the social group, or the species group or the landscape, the more distressed I get when I think about that.

I'm just going to make some other comments now, rather than going too deep into that feeling, because it is so disabling, for me to think too deeply about it. But to know, this is what I'm committed to try and understand and contribute around. Thus, we come to the concept of violence. It's also one of those really complicated concepts, and it has multiple meanings to people. One of the ways I find it helpful to think about violence is as a spectrum or a continuum of what violence can look like. The range can be from perhaps a slight, embarrassment that we cause someone in not being careful how we say something in front of other people, where there could be a loss of face for them. I think that can be a painful thing for a person and is a form of violence. I put that up one end of the spectrum. Right up the other end would be things such as war crimes, refusal of refugees, asylum seekers, safe haven, and total destruction of landscapes and waterways, to the point where all the living creatures in that space are annihilated as well. And of course, violence as the mass slaughter of some animals for human consumption, right up that other end of the continuum, and everything in between. Also, when we're thinking of violence, it can be about a failure to act, that can be as much a cause of violence and harm to people and other beings. The failure to take responsibility, when you're in a position of power, can be very insidious, because it's not like somebody has acted directly in a situation to cause the harm, but have kind of stepped back. Maybe they should have acted or could have acted to save that violence from happening.

When we think about violence as a spectrum or continuum of actions or failure to act, it involves force, pressure, or attempts to influence actions that hurt harm, intended to hurt or harm, maybe don't intend to, but still do that. It can cause discomfort, fear, loss of personal safety, loss of autonomy and control of our own body or lens, body or landscape, and risk to life. You know, it's hard, isn't it to get hold of it? I think most of us would be able to fairly readily draw on some examples of what we think about when we think about violence. But not to forget the more subtle forms in the workplace such as gossiping behind people's backs in a way that demeans them or undermines them. To do so can impact peoples’ confidence in their competence in the job and is very damaging. This is known as organisational violence, and is a very serious issue. If you're the person being gossiped about, you can often feel something is not OK but you can't always get your hands on it. Gossiping is an example of a subtle form of violence that does extreme harm.

The impact of violence can be linked directly to experience of broken heartedness. There are many ways the impact of violence can happen. One of the reasons that I want to stick with the concept of broken-heartedness as explaining the impact of violence is because typically in Western societies, the kinds of ways people can act when they have a broken heart can look like they have a mental illness. It can feel like they have a mental illness, or their experiences get termed that. Again, mental illness is a complex contested concept. It means many things, I'm going to lose it use it fairly loosely for now. When I'm talking about broken-heartedness it can involve experiences of being mentally unwell, physically unwell, this, this is true. I actually think one of the problems that happens once we label people as having a mental illness, we can forget to look carefully at the issues of violence and trauma that have led to the situation where a person is so impacted and so heartbroken. Thus, I use broken-heartedness to try and encompass the kinds of harm and pain that happens to people who might otherwise be given labels of mental illness. Broken-heartedness includes the whole range of emotional, physical, spiritual, social and environmental pain and injury and trauma. The distress of being brokenhearted is part of the human condition, you know, there's loss and loss and harm as part of the lifecycle. However, the kind of focus that I'm wanting to bring us to is not what might be expected in the life cycle, when a loved one dies from natural causes, for example. What I'm interested in is broken heartedness when it is caused by the lovelessness, and for lovelessness, to be present, violence is occurring. This also can be understood as a type of injustice against the person. This is what causes distress and this distress, the experience of violence, and lack of love, and unfairness that this causes distress. This is what I'm calling broken-heartedness. I believe people, other animals and the landscape, experienced distress and broken-heartedness in a myriad of ways. Just some examples here which I am not going to elaborate on, but just to give a sense of the sort of complexity I'm talking about. If you would be careful here. It's quite explicit –

* The mental patient in seclusion is paralysed with deeper loneliness and fear. This is someone in a mental health facility who's locked in locked in a room on their own. Very, very distressing. Some would say a situation of torture in the name of care

* The pig on the kill floor of an abattoir when they're screaming in pain, deeply disturbing situations

*  And the clear-felled forest which fills the atmosphere with deep vibrational groans as it is dying. Heart-breaking beyond words.

Now coming back up off those particular examples, which are pretty powerful and hard to kind of keep your breath when you think about them. Just coming back up to a broader comment. Some of this violence is done in the name of care. This is a particularly insidious, deeply distressing kind of way of thinking about violence. When violence is done in the name of care and is legitimated in society and accepted by the public. It's done in the name of care and for the good of society. It serves the actors, self-interests, and the elite dominant interests. Many tyrannies occur with legal sanctioning and the implicit support of the community. In fact, some tyrannies can be constructed as necessary to control deviant others for the safety of society. I see the use of power to harm and destroy and the failure to acknowledge and address this harm and destruction is the core issue of society.

I have this idea of wanting to practice being revolutionary love. This capacity is not pre-existing and not something that we are educated to know how to do. We maybe don’t even agree that's what we should be focusing on to have a moral loving society. Nevertheless, I would want to hold to the position that the practising of revolutionary love is a higher order ethical literacy that's requires public education, and ongoing personal education and dedication. I want to make a note here. The weight of the discussion may already be sitting pretty hard on each of us. Keeping this in mind, it's important that we're not overly naive about what this capacity of wanting to make a difference in the world, perhaps in this idea of being revolutionary love, just what that's asking all. It is big and can create moral pressure which mixes with the outrage of what we witness, that it paralyses us. We might be agreeing and saying to ourselves, yes, yes, I'm wanting to be revolutionary love. I find myself doing that at times. And then I take another moment, to think some more. For example, we need to appreciate how this includes be empathic to the powerful. This is having empathy towards individuals, sometimes ourselves, who may be causing broken-heartedness, who may be acting violently. Not to forget that we need to place ourselves I believe in this in this situation to really be able to make some contribution in it. This is very troubling to acknowledge that we may be involved in violence ourselves, and at the same time to be empathic towards others and the reasons why violence is happening. Understanding how people have acted for that violence to be so is not an easy thing to do. It's not seen as a socially acceptable to demonstrate love for the people who are causing the violence. You only have to think of how Vladmir Putin is constructed in the media at this time. He's definitely seen as the villain, and we understand why he is constructed like that. It doesn't though help us know how to act differently, it really closes down the options.

This big task is to have a willingness to see violence in ourselves, to check and change our own behaviors that may be causing harm to others, and to have an empathy as a first step toward people who are causing violence. It's not to say that's all that we need to be doing. But we need to build an empathetic connection and rapport to be able to have the dialogue to do something about who's acting in violent ways. The willingness to engage people, organisations and companies who are in positions of power and authority, who you believe are the causes of the violence, and the heartbreak, this is a very hard thing to do. This can involve us navigating some of the hardest and most threatening circumstances.

Certainly in my career, I've had to be willing many times to step into extreme violence and unsafety for myself and other people to try and do something about whatever the issue was, that was confronting us. The task was to try usually to try and bring about safety in the first instance for whoever was being threatened and harmed, and to try and build dialogue and respect to work through what the issues are. In one situation, I had to respond to a community members concern that one of their neighbors was going to blow up the local alumina refinery management offices. The neighbor had guns and was one of many residents who were distraught and outraged by what the mining company was doing to their town. Many of the residents also felt very aggrieved with the payment for their property, which they felt forced to sell to the company because of pollution concerns. This was occurring in a very charged environment where the adverse impacts on the community were intensifying in the early 2000s (Mayman, 2002). I was privy to that situation, in fact, invited into it to see if I could make a contribution when I was working at a university in the area. I will talk about this more at another point. I’m referring to the story of the small town of Yarloop in Western Australia, and its troubled relationship with Alcoa World Alumina. It was first documented in a book by my colleague Martin Brueckner, which was called Under corporate skies: A struggle between people, place and profit (2010). The neighbor was enabled by his community with me supporting to avoid responding to the injustice issue he was witnessing and feeling in his own situation and seeing his whole community collapse. Here, what we're saying to him is, hey, look, you acting violently toward Alcoa actually does not achieve anything, and will cause more harm to you. It is not about going soft in an ethical sense regarding the extreme adverse impacts that the mining company was having on the community, which is what I was trying to make a contribution around.

Looking back about my involvement, it was interesting to me was that when Alcoa came to the University looking for a sociologist, sociological researcher, to help them with the community that was starting to put very explicit media releases out and affecting Alcoa’s reputation. They wanted a social researcher to come and see what the problem was with the community and sort it out. Long story, but just at the moment, what was really interesting is how none of my other colleagues were willing to touch it, it was already a hot potato in the media, very politically sensitive. In my naivety, but I'm so glad about this as well, I just had just had a sense of what was needed, right from the start. This was because I had grown up in a mining town myself, and I had direct experiences of what that's like for people. A different situation to what was happening at Yarloop. But I felt that I had some level of affinity, a very primitive, I guess, understanding of what could be going on. Also, I knew that it was a diabolically complex situation. Thus, I was the only person who was willing to step forward to see if I could make a contribution in that situation. Interesting how our life experiences can make us more amenable to what I saw as an opportunity, most of my colleagues saw it as ‘Whoa, don't go there. Not good for your career’.

History has given us some incredible examples of people who resist violence in the most oppressive situations. Situations that hooks (2001) would call a culture of domination which is reinforced with extreme control that causes de-humanization and extreme suffering. I just want to bring a focus to asylum seekers across the planet at this time, it is a major complex issue of human rights and survival struggles and to bring the situation to Australia in a not so distant past, and, in fact, how we treat asylum seekers currently, I believe, against their basic human rights to seek asylum. Anyway, I just want to use this one example of Behrouz Boochani, who you may be aware of, because he certainly got some media attention when his book won an award here in Australia. Boochani is a Kurdish journalist and writer who sought refuge as an asylum seeker in Australia. He was taken to an offshore detention centre in Manus Island, where he spent six years, six years! As part of his resistance to the suffering he experienced and witnessed towards others, he wrote No friends, but the mountain: Writings from Manus prison (2019). You may have heard of it. It's a really important historical, political book. He won several significant Australian book awards. The Guardian newspaper (2019) reported that his book was praised by the award judges and I'm going to quote what one of the award judges said, “profoundly important, an astonishing act of witness and testament to the life saving power of writing as resistance”. Boochani wrote the book in secret on a hidden phone by sending segments on WhatsApp to supporters in Australia. It remains a major indictment of the lovelessness and violence by the Australian Government. Boochani was not permitted to attend the award ceremony in person and was subsequently given safe haven in New Zealand. He's continued to write and publish since that time.

While we keep the Boochani’s experience in mind, I make now make some points about power, and then tie it to my theory of love. I don't know how we've got this far in the podcast series and not directly talked about power, but it's all about power. This is needed this focus on power, because I'm needing to describe it as inseparable from the exercise of any intention in the world, any action or failure to act. The theory of love includes use of power. Obviously, what it's arguing is it's only certain types of power that are to be accepted within the logic and ethics of a theory of love. As we see in the Boochani’s example, in the name of protecting the national interest and presumably for the public good and for what seemed to be good action, good intentions, the Australian government enacted, with legal authority, the offshore detention for people seeking asylum. This was done in the name of love and care for the many which is very consistent with consequentialist theory, to act for the good of the whole. By protecting Australia's borders, harm has been done to a minority status group. The harm to asylum seekers is morally unsound. I believe this has been argued by many people, including Boochani and highlights to me that love is not necessarily an innocent idea or action. The people who enacted the offshore detention policy and whole apparatus and structure of oppression that happened with that, in their own way believed they were doing the right thing, the good thing.

During my social work career, it took me too many years to understand that having goodwill toward clients, the people I was working with, was not sufficient to ensure the best outcome for them. This is a kind of segue obviously from a major national and international issue, but down taking my personal responsibility here. I saw myself as a good person and failed to appreciate the authority I wielded in my professional role, even as I used it every day. I also didn't give sufficient credence to how people seeking help would perceive my role. For example, in a public mental health services, that I was part of the state system that could lock them up and throw away the key. This was a classic kind of way people were thinking. I was aware of the stigma of mental illness thanks Goffman's work (1986), and I had held doggedly on to fragment of an idea by Szasz’s (1972) book, that mental illness is a myth. These were kind of gems of ideas that helped influence my practice. But I didn't take this further to place myself in the picture. I was part of the state apparatus of controlling certain groups of people, often against their will, with many worse off as a result of the state intervention. It's one of the most disturbing understandings I have of what violence looks like. Only as I'm doing these podcasts have I gone back and have a look at Szasz in more detail. And I found a quote that I needed to take more heed of in my practice. This is a direct quote of Szasz, “being psychoanalysed, like any human experience, can itself constitute a form of enslavement, and affords, especially in its contemporary institutionalised forms, no guarantee of enhanced self-knowledge and responsibility for patient or therapist” (p. 272). This was Szasz writing in 1972 and I believe this still is the case now. We need to take note of what we're doing it in the name of love, when we're seeking to use incredible amounts of authority.

I just want to say a little bit more about how we understand power because how we understand it really affects how we then act. As I've just explained in my naive understanding of being a good person and using power, therefore I believed in a fairly benign way, but actually not. Embedded in my comments and reflection so far, but not sufficiently accented as it is often invisible, is this idea of power. So I am calling out power here, as part of holding myself accountable for my own theorising that is not power neutral or without affect in the world. I'm taking this seriously trying to stand in the ideas I'm talking about and own my part in how I view power. Because for some people, the implications of a theory of love are unwelcome and even threatening. I will just give one example very briefly here. I believe an implication of a theory of love is that we all need to be vegan. Now, that would be perhaps one of the most contentious statements I can make. And I'm not making it in a judgmental way at all to anyone who may be listening. But if veganism is the practice of non-violence toward other beings, you can see why at least from an ethical positioning, a purist ethical positioning, why I would say that. It would not be a welcomed comment, it would be a very, in fact, possibly even distressing comment for some people to hear. I'm very aware that the implications of the theory of love, ask a lot, ask a lot of us morally. And there are lots of qualifications that can be made to those kinds of comments I've just made.

Thus, we come to the recognition that power is a complex to describe, at least as complex to describe as the idea of love. Lukes (1974) says power depends on who the person is thinking about power. And he described it as being value dependent, it depends on your values. This means how power is exercised is related to how power is understood, as my example showed, and who is doing the acting. Like all complex ideas it has been described in a myriad of ways. But the main theme that goes through most all of those definitions of power, is that it's about some amount of influence, possibly even force, where that force or influence is used against people and other beings. Weber (cited in Cowden & Sansfacon, 2014) identified three types of power, traditional, charismatic, and rational legal. Traditional power, if you think about it as what is occupied, or exercised by someone such as the Prime Minister or the Pope or the Queen, really obvious examples. Charismatic power is about power related to an individual's personality. As much as I don't want to promote the ideology of this person, Trump would be in terms of contemporary world politics, a significant example of a charismatic leader. And we possibly would struggle to see that as a good example, especially if we don't agree with what he is about. When it comes to rational-legal as the third type of power that Weber was talking about, this is the one that is particularly significant for most of us, I would suggest. Rational-legal authority is not about power possessed by virtue of who I am, per se, but it's actually by virtue of the role that I'm in or that you are in. From my example, the Mental Health Act is a significant piece of legislation for mental health practitioners. It gives me the legal authority to act, no doubt about it. Of course, legislation is based on rational thinking, rational arguments of logic. The Migration Act of 1958 is the legal authority that the Australian Government used to take people asylum seekers to offshore detention centres and can constrain them there basically sometimes for many years.

So power is a slippery concept and can also be operating in a situation as an implicit or direct threat of harmful consequences if certain actions occur or don't occur. Power is always present in any interaction from the intimate personal realm to the public realm. We can't get very far talking about power, before we come to Michel Foucault (1980) who explains that all actions or non-actions are imbued with power. Just as we are trying to get hold of how that can look how our actions can be understood, the idea of discourses comes here. This is about the collectivities of ways that we make sense of the world and act and, and the language that we use. What we're interested here in terms of power is the idea of what is often talked about as the influence of dominant discourses in society. These are the dominant ideas that power elites of society used to normalise what is said to be truth. And this matters. The truth that was being promoted at a certain flashpoint in Australia's political story, was that asylum seekers who come by boat to Australia are dangerous and threaten national security. This was promoted as a truth in many ways and followed up by action that had rational-legal authority. A very profound use of power and implications. The dominant discourse was not necessarily how everybody understood it but in the public realm, that is what holds sway. This is about how the power to influence and achieve goals and certain outcomes is closely understood closely tied to how power and ideas are understood. C.W. Mills is another famous sociologist and in 1956 he was writing about the power elites of society and how their ideas are the dominant ideas. One of the comments that I thought really got ahold of this idea of dominant discourses and who it serves was when he “families, churches and schools adapt to modern life, governments, armies, and corporations shape it” (1956, p. 6). Now, we might want to have a robust conversation about that. But I think it's interesting to think about what are the social structures in our society that hold power, and they all do in different ways, but what are the dominant ones that really hold sway in matters of the public interest. You only have to think of the military to know how powerful they can be, especially in circumstances of military coups. The key point is the elites have the resources to employ and to promote ideas that serve their purposes. Foucault (1977) describes these resources as the mechanisms of control and surveillance in places such as prisons and mental hospitals, but not only in those places - we've been talking about offshore detention centres. The aim is about the use of power, what Foucault talks about as “disciplinary power” because it disciplines and controls the objects of its interests, and compliance of undesirable social groups - who have less value, who may be threatening to the power elites. This is part of sociological theory, and I just think it's important to hold this sociological and political perspective of power. We need to see how it looks on the public stage and know how to interpret into the interpersonal space, and local situations that we're in. We also need to be aware of how we use our own power toward ourselves, often talked about as self-esteem and confidence to act in the world.

One of the one of the contributions Foucault had on power was to really try and challenge the idea that power is a zero sum phenomenon. This is where someone or an organisation or an institution has all the power and others don't have it. I think this idea of the zero sum notion of power is very dominant. And there's good reasons for it, because it can actually feel like it in the lived experience. When you're being exposed to violence and domination, it can feel like you have no power. And it could be that you have very little in fact, it could be that your life is at extreme risk. This in itself, nevertheless, is part of the dominant ideas to make it look as though people don't have power, even when there's that lived experience of that being true as well. It's part of how to keep people feeling fatalistic and defeated and not challenging what's going on. Foucault (1984) talked about that experience of feeling challenging, challenged, and defeated, as being docile bodies.

It just makes your head hurt, doesn't it try to think about this. One of the ideas by Dorothy Smith (1990), one of my favourite social theorists, is about the indirect forms of power. These are the kinds of power you can't get your hands on, but you know, it's having an effect on you. For example, Centerlink rules for payments, you can't get your hands on that set of rules, but it absolutely affects you the moment you try and make an application for a benefit of some kind. Smith talks about these indirect forms of power, that are often located in legislation, but not only as “extra local relations of ruling”. For some reason, like, you know, when you read something that something that really stays in your mind, this has stayed in my mind now for gosh, 30 years, oh, my goodness, since I read that idea. It's been very helpful to not be naïve about how power operates, and who is gaining from that and who it's serving. When Smith is talking about extra local relations of ruling, she's trying to accent the power is layered throughout society, and is far from a benign force, especially in unequal societies and relationships, which is, of course, what I'm interested in. Whenever power is considered, it needs to be also tied to the possibility of resistance to the exercise of power. It's an idea from Foucault, it's a really crucial idea. We come back to it in later podcast, when we ask people, we interviewed a whole lot of amazing people on what love means for them in their practice and their lives. Where the very least, we can do in situations where we feel very powerless to make a difference, and we can see injustice and tyrannies happen, is to at least in some part of our mind refuse to accept it as okay. It may not feel safe to speak up, it you may not feel safe or able to act. But we can refuse to accept, or example, that the way Australia has treated asylum seekers and continues to treat asylum seekers often is not okay. It is a thought that we need to hold on to and when possible, act around. I find this idea of resistance to be incredibly important. To get hold of the idea that wherever power, especially dominant power that is used to harm and hurt and surveil people is being used. Then the ability of the party on the wrong side, let's say you're on the receiving side of that power, dominant power, knowing how to resist and refuse to accept that it's okay, it's not morally okay or okay in any way, is the least that we can do. I would say that's part of our moral obligation in situations of violence to find some way of resisting it.

Against terrible odds Boochani resisted the surveillance and control of the elites in Canberra and the managers in the offshore this intention centres. First of all, by surviving and that's an incredible act of resistance. And then by writing a protest book of historical significance. And getting it out there into the media and speaking back to the Australian people about the tyrannies that were happening. He actually compares Australia's behavior around offshore detention as a type of prisons and that it was absolutely illegal and an extreme form of violence and torture.

A theory of love then has to be relevant to guide responses to experiences such as Boochani’s, and through to situations for practitioners like myself where in the name of care, we may be intervening and using force and legal control against people. If love is the answer, it's form is far from clear. When its absence is related to violence and injustice it is a very troubling moral challenge that needs to be addressed by society. As Gandhi said, the moral fibre of society is to be judged by the quality of life of its most vulnerable members. For me, issues of lovelessness, violence and injustice, issues of the use of power or the failure of the use of power by the responsible actors and institutions, when power is used or withhold, and the impact is harm, trauma and even death, such as abuse of human rights, exploitation of other animals, degradation of nature, this power is the anti-thesis of love as power.

When the Australian Government legislated The Border Force Act in 2015, it was attempting to silence concerned parties who are bearing witness to the human suffering on Manus Island, and other offshore detention centres. The threat in the legislation was that people speaking out would be acting illegally and dealt with under the provisions of the Act. This was resisted in a range of ways. And one of the most impressive was by a group of people called Doctors for Refugees, who spoke out against the Act, arguing for the rights of detainees to receive medical care, and to be able to speak if they were concerned about that not happening (Kaldor Centre, 2018). The government interestingly, despite the threat of the legislation did not invoke the Act against them and subsequently under public pressure, removed that stricture for many, but not all the parties. Doctors can now speak publicly if they have concerns about what's happening in detention around peoples’ medical well-being. The legislation did not extend to social workers who remain unable legally to speak out about what they might witness in offshore detention centres. An implication of the love theory is that immoral legislation needs to be resisted in every way possible. Also, as doctors for refugees showed, doing so can be successful. As Boochani showed against the odds, the silence the culture, the silence that can happen around tyrannies of justice can be broken through incredible acts of bravery and through political resistance in a form of writing. Resistance against harmful use of power is, I believe, one of the most impressive forms of power as love. Always, it has to be nonviolent.

Now just as some concluding comments, because you know, this talking about power and violence is pretty full on isn't it? What I have been suggesting so far basically is that the absence of love can often involve violence, and be experienced as harm in our bodies, in landscapes and other animals. What I'm interested in is how love can make the difference. I absolutely believe that and refuse to let go of that idea. The idea of how love can be a guiding ethic and force in our daily lives in the tradition like Gandhi, for example, to bring about a more peaceful loving world. I think the idea of trauma, which I talked about in a previous podcast, helps us translate across multiple situations what the experience of violence can look and feel like. Trauma gets embedded in our whole bodies and relationships and affects everything. I have talked the idea of broken-heartedness when harm has been done. Broken-heartedness is where the emotional aspect of our heart has become deeply harmed by the violence or unfairness done to us or that we're witnessing done to others, including other animals and nature. Thus, I've struggled with this notion of violence and what it means. And while I'm saying it's the opposite to love. I'm not that comfortable with that dualism and simplification. But I actually do not equate violence with love, that's for sure. I also believe that we have to know how to understand violence and function in violence situations, to come into them and to engage the people and institutions and policies and legislation involved, to find ways to make a contribution. Now, not everybody needs to be directly involved in situations of extreme violence. Some people do, it's kind of like inside the system, we’ve got to be inside - there's no outside society, there's no outside the system - and just where we locate ourselves, is really important. And it may be that our role at times can be allies to others who are doing the frontline work, of trying to address direct more directly the impact of violence.

I just really appreciate that you've taken the time, if you're still listening to this podcast, you know, it's been a fairly heavy duty one. It brings us pretty close to I think to a close for the first set of five podcasts of the main points I want to make about the love theory, the main guiding ethics, principles and ideas. Very shortly we'll be moving into a series of interviews with interesting, amazing people who are using the idea of love in their practice and more broadly in their in life. I think this will help us really tease out and get a much firmer grip and appreciation of the value of a theory of love for being able to contribute in the world. 

Okay, thank you so much!

Bye now, my best love,

Dyann

References

Boochani, B. (2019). No friends but the mountain: Writing from Manus prison. [Trans. O. Tofighian]. Picador Australia.

Brueckner, M., & Ross, D. (2010). Under corporate skies: A struggle between people, place and profits. Fremantle Press.

Cowden, S., & Sansfacon, A. (2014). The ethical foundations of social work. Pearson.

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Pantheon Books.

Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977. (Trans. C. Gordon). Harvester Press.

Goffman, I. (1986). Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity. Touchstone.

hooks, b. (2001). All about love. William Morrow.

Kaldor Centre (2018). Casenote: Doctors for refugees case. https://kaldorcentre.unsw.edu.au/sites/kaldorcentre.unsw.edu.au/files/Casenote_doctors%20case-final.pdf

Lukes, S. (1974). Power: A radical view. Macmillan.

Mayman, J. (2002, 11 and 12 May). The stink of Uncle Al. The Weekend Australian. 

Mills, C. W. (1956). The power elite. Oxford University Press.

Smith, D. (1990). The conceptual practices of power: A feminist sociology of knowledge. Northeastern University Press.

Szasz, T. (1972). The myth of mental illness. Harper & Row.

The Guardian (2019). Behrouz Boochani wins National Biography award – and accepts via WhatsApp from Manus. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/12/behrouz-boochani-wins-25000-national-biography-award-and-accepts-via-whatsapp-from-manus

The topic today is about how love is required for justice to matter. This is a big statement and I aim to unpack it by introducing the idea of eco-justice and tying it closely to the idea of love as a commitment to contribute to justice issues. Wherever there is violence or lovelessness, there is an issue of justice because someone, a group, a community, a species has been harmed or their rights to peaceful co-existence have been intruded upon. Eco-justice or ecological justice is an umbrella term for three interlinked types of justice, namely

* Social justice

* Species justice, and 

* Environmental justice.

I will explain these types of justice and explore their interlinks to put the case for a more inclusive understanding of justice. This is important to ensure a theory of love is encompassing of all of life and all of the complex challenges to sustaining life, peace and wellbeing for all.

Social justice 

Social justice is THE main value of the social work profession and is defined typically in terms of what social justice work involves – for example it is about upholding “social fairness by acting to reduce barriers and to expand choice and potential for all persons, with special regard for those who are disadvantaged, vulnerable, oppressed or have exceptional needs” (AASW, 2020, p. 9). Further, the Australian social workers’ Code of ethics recognises the importance of promoting “the protection of the natural environment as inherent to social wellbeing” as part of social justice but stops short of recognising nonhuman animals’ rights (Ryan, 2011).

I like Iris Young’s (1990) definition of justice as being reflected in the inclusion of people in decisions which impact them. Nancy Fraser (2009) delves further into the processes required by explaining that the impacted parties need to be regarded as equal moral participants in addressing the justice issue. For me, this needs to also be about the environment and animals as equal moral participants, albeit via the representations of advocates. The ethico-legal principle of procedural justice (Swain & Rice, 2009) sometimes called natural justice, brings attention to the need for authority figures to act in non-discriminatory and accountable ways to protect individuals’ rights. 

International Conventions such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples are premised in western ideas of individual human rights being upheld as integral to justice being experienced. Peoples’ rights are not assured and there is increasing evidence of ecological conflict where human rights conflict with industry rights to access lands for mining. In these instances the human [and animal] communities and the environment tend to lose out (Brueckner & Ross, 2010; Ross & Puccio, 2020).

Species justice

Species justice is a less familiar term and is closely related to animal rights. There is no international convention protecting the rights and wellbeing of animals. Speciesism describes the discrimination against nonhuman animals which occurs due to the human species’ superiority and power to control, use and kill some species of animals for human consumption. The use of other animals is made socially acceptable through the belief that they are not equal and thus do not need to be afforded rights and feelings. Eaglehawk coins the term “anthropocentric harm” that occurs due to human superiority and bias against nonhumans. She argues that “killing animals for human consumption cannot be justified on moral grounds or on grounds of logic [in so far as there is evidence that shows] that humans do not need to eat meat, eggs or dairy to survive and thrive (2020, pp. 102-103).

Species justice, especially for animals with a commercial value, equates a loving recognition of the equal intrinsic worth of all species and it also thereby equates with no violence. Veganism is the refusal to use nonhuman animals for food, entertainment, research, clothing and sport and for me is a moral baseline in how I attempt to live my values. A commitment to veganism also involves working to dismantle the animal industrial complex of businesses, institutions and governments who promote or at least protect the use of nonhuman animals. Alger suggests that veganism “can be used as a tool to contribute to human liberation alongside animal liberation with potential benefits for social justice, public health and environmental sustainability” (2020, p. 5). Just how this might be possible is the subject of her book and one small example I am aware of is the over-representation of migrant workers in abattoirs where there are known severe mental health impacts on the workers, many of whom have experienced trauma and discrimination from being refugees (Nagesh, 2017).

My main focus here is on the ethical dimensions of the argument for species justice where the mass scale slaughter of nonhuman animals is evidence of lovelessness and violence by the dominant species toward other species. hooks (2000) explains that change requires a conversion from an ethic of domination to an ethic of love. There is a pressing need to develop an inter-species ethics to see a different way for societies and individuals to respond, and one interesting writer in this space is Cynthia Willett (2014) who identifies 4 types of ethics to expand humans’ ways of being with nonhuman animals, namely:

Subjectless sociality, where we suspend our individual sense of self to merge our awareness with other animals, sharing a similar space or experience, as occurs during a flood or bushfire disaster.

Intersubjective attunement, which refers to adjusting our behaviour to be in step with other animals to meet their needs to gain their co-operation.

The third type of inter-species ethics is quite wordy, it relates to “affect clouds of biosocial networks… [which are] not properties or states interior to bound subjects or nonporous bodies”, I take this to mean fostering relationships with other animals in a shared environment where for example, animals are known to come to the aid of humans in trouble and when humans and other animals enjoy each others company.

Finally, is the willingness to recognise and make room for the implications of animal spirituality and sense-making and agency (cited in Ross, 2020, p. 87). We know our pets have feelings and research has shown this to be true in so many other relationships with nonhuman animals – see https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/150714-animal-dog-thinking-feelings-brain-science

In a nutshell, practising empathy for other species and regarding them as of equal moral worth are two ways to challenge speciesism and to avoid being complicit in the industrialised mass violence against some nonhuman animals. We all have pets whom we love and would do anything to care for them. Affording other animals this same love offers hope that change towards love is possible.

Environmental justice

Environmental justice can be best understood in terms of the presence of social, economic, and environmental sustainability of ecosystems, whole nations, and the planet. As I note in one of my books:

* Social sustainability shows as equality between people and between people and nonhuman animals;

* Economic sustainability shows as nonviolence and non-exploitation between business owners, governments and wealthy citizens, and other people and nonhuman animals, and;

* Environmental sustainability shows as mutual respect, love, and justice between people, nonhuman animals, and the natural world (2020, p. 38).

The key point is that justice requires these intersecting forms of sustainability and in turn that sustainability issues, as evident in wicked problems and all types of violence, need to be addressed for justice to be realised. It follows that social justice cannot be achieved without environmental and species justice. I agree with White (2009) who argues that it is a state crime if governments do not act to protect the environment from exploitation by private interests. In Australia, most states’ environmental protection legislation contains an environmental precautionary principle to enable governments to not proceed with approvals where to do so might cause irreparable harm or loss to the environment. A recent example is where restrictions on the development approval of wind turbines in northern Tasmania are required to protect the migrating orange-bellied parrot -

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/16/wind-farm-will-need-to-shut-down-five-months-a-year-to-protect-parrots.html

In societies where there is widespread social sustainability - ie social equality – between people, this will be expressed as relationships where there is love, nonviolence, and justice. The fostering of all types of sustainability is at the heart of First Nations’ idea of stewardship. Anne Poelina writes that “country [is] … alive, vibrant and all encompassing […] [and thus is] an active participant in the world and fully connected in a vast web of dynamic, interdependent relationships. These relationships are strong and resilient when they are maintained” (2020, p. ix).

Eco-justice for the love of all beings

The adoption of a more expansive idea of justice is not an idle academic exercise but rather a critical task to develop the ecological imagination and responses required to address the wicked problems of our time. Mitchell Thomashow (2014) explains that an ecological imagination is where we can imagine new ways of being, understand the interconnections between all elements of life and engage with others to co-create new possibilities.

Wicked problems are interconnected issues including poverty and famine, climate change, mining industry pollution, loss of biodiversity, and deforestation. Holly Higgins (2010) coins the term ‘ecocide’ which includes ‘eco’ meaning oikos, dwelling place, in Greek and the French ‘cide’ which means killer - to argue that we need to “eradicate ecocide [by] forcibly removing the systems that are killing and destroying our habitat” (p. xi). By ‘forcibly removing’ she means through the use of national and international legal interventions. She explains that “without the wellbeing of the ecology of our planet, our wellbeing suffers” (xii). 

Higgins’s view is consistent with First Nation ideas where, as Anne Poelina writes “for First Australians land, water, people, and the environment are intrinsically entwined” (2020, p. viii). Poelina goes on to describe how in her language she is “a woman who belongs to the Mardoowarra (Fitzroy River) … [such that] customary law determines that in regard to my relationship to the river, the Mardoowarra owns me. I am duty bound to protect the river’s right to life because it is the river of life” (p. viii).

Thus, for a love theory to guide responses to oppression and violence, we can’t hold to a human-centric stance on who matters.

This brings me to my key ethical premise which is that all beings and entities that compromise life on the planet are of equal intrinsic worth. The life of a tree is as important as my life and as important as the wild horse’s life. To make this statement is one thing, to deeply believe in it is another and to act on this belief is very difficult. It is not a position that is self-evident in western societies premised on the superiority of humans, and in colonialist, patriarchal societies, premised on the superiority of white men, and in capitalist societies it is not self-evident that nature has a right to exist without being considered only in terms of its use value to humans.

This equal intrinsic worth premise places quite some moral pressure on us humans to regard and treat nonhuman animals as having rights to live peacefully and have their needs met. It also challenges us to regard and treat nonhuman entities and other sentient beings as having rights to co-exist without being exploited and harmed. These are by no means well-accepted moral positions. 

In summary 

Love that is multi-faceted and multi-focused that embraces the intersectionality of life on the planet is needed for justice to matter. Without this expansive commitment to love others and other places, untold tyrannies and unchecked exploitation would be rife. Tyrannies and exploitation are occurring but would be far worse without millions of loving people working to enable justice, peace and the survival needs, and other rights of people, animals, and landscapes.

Eco-justice was explored as a way of fostering this multi-dimensional and multi-focused commitment to love. Eco-justice links social, species, and environmental justice in recognition of the interconnectedness of violence, oppression, and exploitation. This idea requires an ethical positioning that upholds the equal intrinsic worth of all beings and entities that comprise nature and the totality of life on the planet.

References

Alger, K. (2020). Five essays for freedom: A political primer for animal advocates. Revolutionaries.

Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW). (2020). Code of ethics. AASW.

Brueckner, M., & Ross, D. (2010). Under corporate skies: A struggle between people, place and profit. Fremantle Press.

Fraser, N. (2009). Who counts? Dilemmas of justice in post westphalian world. Antipode, 41(1), 281-297.

Higgins, P. (2010). Eradicating ecocide: Laws and governance to prevent the destruction of our planet. Shepheard -Walwyn Publishers.

Nagesh, A. (2017). The harrowing psychological toll of slaughterhouse work. https://metro.co.uk/2017/12/31/how-killing-animals-everyday-leaves-slaughterhouse-workers-traumatised-7175087/

Poelina, A. (2020). Foreward. First law is the natural law of the land. In D. Ross., M. Brueckner, M. Palmer & W. Eaglehawk (Eds.). Eco-activism and social work: New directions in leadership and group work (pp. viii-xii). Routledge.

Ross, D., & Puccio, V., (2020). Homegrown community activism in Yarloop. In D. Ross., M. Brueckner, M. Palmer & W. Eaglehawk (Eds.). Eco-activism and social work: New directions in leadership and group work (pp. 26-38). Routledge.

Ryan, T. (2011). Animals and social work: A moral introduction. Palgrave Macmillan.

Swain, P., & Rice, S. (Eds.). (2009). In the shadow of the law: The legal context of social work practice (3rd edn.). The Federation Press.

Thomashow, M. (2014). The ecological imagination: A portfolio of possibilities. https://www.mitchellthomashow.com/blog/what-is-the-ecological-imagination

White, R. (2009). Environmental victims and resistance to state crime through transnational activism. Social Justice, 36(3), 46-60.

Willett, C. (2014). Interspecies ethics. Columbia University Press.

Young, I. (1990). Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton University Press.

It's good to have you with me. I'm talking today on love and nonviolence as part of the bigger project that I'm engaged in, with this podcast series, of building a theory of love for us all. The first set of podcasts involves me talking in relation to some of my favorite authors who have deeply influenced my thinking about love so far. Going forward I will actually have some conversations with people as well, which I'm really looking forward to, as part of co-creating a theory of love. 

For the first step, and today, we're looking to talk about love and nonviolence. And as part of my focus, I’m drawing on Mahatma Gandhi’s work and writings, and also Sandra Bloom, very different people, very different situations. I'm mostly talking about Gandhi’s ideas of love as closely related to nonviolence, specifically his idea of Satyagraha or truth force, and then introducing Sandra Bloom’s idea of trauma, and how violence causes a range of different types of unsafety. This links back to the idea of broken-heartedness caused by violence and lovelessness.

A brief note about violent communication

First, to make a comment on the idea of violence. A significant writer in the area of nonviolent communication is Marshall Rosenberg (2015) who explains what violence can look like in our interactions with others –

“If violent means acting in ways that result in hurt or harm, then much of how we communicate is violent, for example – judging others, bullying, having racial bias, blaming, finger pointing, discriminating, speaking without listening, criticising others or ourselves, name-calling, reacting when angry …”

This list of violent actions is perhaps challenging to listen to as we might find behaviours we undertake included here. If we let this sit as a brief introduction to defining violence in interpersonal communication, and going forward I will craft it further to include other aspects.

Love as nonviolence

Gandhi developed his ideas during the decades of India’s nonviolent independence struggle from British occupation. India gained independence in 1947. What I really like about Gandhi’s work, is that he tried to live what he believed, he tried to model his belief in nonviolence as a means of struggle against what he saw as the oppressive forces of the British Empire. He drew on the Buddhist concept of “Ahimsa”, meaning love and “Satyagraha” meaning nonviolence. He saw love as a way of life, that we consciously practice at every opportunity and nonviolence as a method of struggle (R. Gandhi, 2013). Mahatma Gandhi (1928) explained that ‘satya’ means truth and ‘agraha’ means polite insistence or holding firmly to, this being referred to as “truth force”.

In 1909 Gandhi is quoted as saying that his imprisonment as a young man in South Africa during uprisings against apartheid, was “the gateway to the ‘garden of God’ where the ‘flowers of self-restraint and gentleness’ grew ‘beneath the feet of those who accept but refuse to impose suffering” (R. Gandhi, 2013, p. 116). Here is the key principle of meeting violence with nonviolent resistance and self-discipline, and refusing to resort to violence.

Gandhi was clear that violence leads to violence and wrote at the time:

“War demoralises those who are trained for it, it brutalises [people] of naturally gentle character. It outrages every beautiful canon of morality. It's path of glory is foul with the passions of lust and red with the blood of murder. This is not the pathway to our goal” (R. Gandhi, 2013, p. 117). 

He said there could be no love if compassion, forgiveness and equality were absent. 

When Gandhi was questioned about why isn't love more appropriate than the concept of nonviolence, he replied he realised that there needed to be a struggle for justice for love to be experienced for people. He wrote a little later:

“In spite of the negative particle ‘non’, nonviolence is no negative power. [We] are surrounded in life by strife and bloodshed, life living upon life. But it's not through strife and violence, but through nonviolence that [people] can fulfil [their] destiny” (cited in R. Gandhi, 2013, p. 116). Therefore, we need love, Ahimsa plus nonviolence, Satyagraha.

Nonviolence, as I understand it, and drawing upon Gandhi, refers to the peaceful, respectful and tactical use of power and influence to pressure high power individuals and groups to uphold protesters’ justice claims. It can include a broad range of nonviolent direct action (NVDA) strategies such as street marches, media campaigns, petitions, sit-ins, and of course, civil disobedience (see Sharp’s 1973 list of NVDA strategies). Chenoweth (2021) looked at all the major uprisings and revolutions of recent history, and she found that the most successful, the ones that could endure through all sorts of challenges to achieve the public's claims for justice, were ones that were not violent. So I think that's really interesting and gives us hope that we can trust in the power of nonviolence.

Martin Luther King Jr’s philosophy of civil disobedience was very strongly influenced by Gandhi’s ideas on love as nonviolence. Martin Luther King often said, and I'm now quoting from The King Centre web page, that he got his inspiration from Jesus Christ and his techniques from Gandhi. And by way of introduction some of the principles are:

Nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people;

It seeks to win friendship and understanding;

Nonviolence chooses love instead of hate; 

And nonviolence believes that the universe is on the side of justice. 

There's a lot in these principles, and I mention them briefly so we have a bit of a working sense of nonviolence where love is about reaching for the highest good, as the hooks says, in ourselves and the other person, and linked to this, nonviolence are ways of struggling for justice, and good in the world, without doing harm, or resorting violence. 

Violence causes unsafety and trauma

Okay, so, if we could accept that's our working definition of nonviolence, then I want to come to the idea of trauma, because what we've been saying so far, basically is the absence of love, can often be experienced as trauma in our bodies, in landscapes and animals, and our relationships between who we all are on the planet. And what we're interested in is how love can make the difference, and how love can be the guiding ethic and force in our daily lives in the tradition of Gandhi to bring about a more peaceful, loving world.

I think the idea of trauma helps us to translate into multiple situations what the experience of violence can look and feel like. My other podcast refers to broken-heartedness where the emotional aspect of our heart has become deeply harmed by violence or unfairness done to us, or that we're witnessing done to others, including animals and mother nature. Thus, violence is a really important organising concern as the opposite to love, and to summarise, violence includes all forms of oppression, types of injustice and harm. 

What I want to do now is come to Sandra Bloom’s (2017) idea of trauma, because I think what's really helpful in how she thinks about trauma is that it fits with our experiences in our bodies, and how that then can affect our hearts and our ability to love and our ability to flourish in the world. So, Sandra Bloom has done a lot of writing in this space, including about trauma-organised or trauma causing workplaces, which we'll talk about another time. Her background was as a practitioner in the mental health space, and also as a person with lived experience of mental health. She's trying to understand the parallels that can happen in systems of care for people who are receiving mental health treatment, and what's been happening in the individual person's life. 

One of her most important ideas used for unpacking what trauma looks like, is how it involves the lack of safety being experienced by the person where unsafety becomes a potential indicator of harm, and possibly trauma. We're interested in particular types of trauma, where there has been an injustice or harm done to somebody. Bloom identifies four types of safety that we need for trauma-informed responses with people we may have contact with and for responding to our own trauma. The four types of safety are:

Physical safety

Psychological safety

Social safety

Moral safety.

She says we need to cultivate a sense of physical safety in ourselves, so that we feel secure, not only in our bodies, but financial security, and that we're free from all types of violence, including self-destructive behaviour, that is being violent toward ourselves. So that's the first of the types of safety that Bloom would say is needed for people to recover from trauma. Psychological safety is the second type of safety, which refers to being able to undertake self-care, self-discipline, fostering your own self-esteem, and the ability to live in a self-reflective way in a healthy, productive life. Social safety is the third type of safety that Bloom says is really important for avoiding trauma or knowing how to start to recover from it. This refers to the ability to interact with others without being compromised, or harmed, or without harming others. This idea of social safety, links to the fourth type of safety, moral safety, which refers to all the people in a situation following a set of values and commitments that are consistent with treating people respectfully. Moral safety involves being able to act according to our values. 

I find these four types of safety to be really helpful, because we, each of us could perhaps identify ways when we don't feel safe. Basically, what I'm saying here is that violence can be understood as a threat, or experience of unsafety in one or more of these ways, and it can be not only for an individual, but a whole group of people, or a whole landscape. 

Another related idea that I find kind of helpful, which was written about in terms of humans, but I think it really fits for animals and landscapes as well. This is the idea of autonomy infringement by Hem and colleagues (2018). They say that unsafety can occur if the person feels some sort of infringement, an unwelcome infringement, on their sense of self and their autonomy in the world. It could involve coercion and all types of violence and is quite a complicated area in some aspects, but just as a general ethical statement, I want to hold that there are types of violence that cause autonomy infringement against the person. 

Linking back to Bloom, she writes, that trauma involves moral injuries, and this is about that fourth type of safety - moral injury. I really like this quote, where she says 

“Moral injury is where a sense of a just world which is a critical component of healing is absent. And moral injury starts with any action or failure to act that devalues an individual, usually by someone or an entity who holds power over them” (quoted in Ross, 2020, p. 47). 

So trauma exists on a continuum of harm and experience of unsafety and can get laid down in a person's body and can be quite complex trauma and also intergenerational trauma. 

Many of the helping professions talk about the concept of non-maleficence which means doing no harm, as distinct from beneficence of doing good and helping people. And I really like that concept of non-maleficence. I think it's another way of thinking about nonviolence, with the intention of consciously aiming to be of value and do good with people, especially in formal professional helping relationships, but also more generally in our personal lives. 

A note re: more than human trauma

What I also want to make a comment on here is when we talk about violence and harm, we do tend to mostly think about violence and harm in relation to people. And unfortunately, people tend to harm people, other people, when they've already been harmed, often been harmed themselves. This is one of Bloom’s ideas of hurt people hurting people. But what I want to talk about is how there's quite a human bias to this discussion about violence, and unsafety as indicators of violence, and how this often leads to the experience of trauma, which can also be intergenerational, and very complex and sits within certain social disadvantage social groups. 

I just want to make quite brief comment as a flag, on the idea of anthropocentric harm. This where we have a human focus or bias on causes of harm, and in so doing, we are not giving sufficient regard to violence done toward other animals, our Kin, and also the landscape. This is a concept from Eaglehawk (2020). I think it's really an important one to recognise the equal intrinsic worth of all beings, of all sentient beings and, all material entities on the planet. I think we have an industrialised and globalised approach to the farming of some animal species for human consumption - this is Kristy Alga’s (2020) idea, and she's written about this in her book Five, essays for freedom, which I think is a really important book for our times. Alger says it's a whole industrial kind of business dimension that normalises the use of animals on a scale that is mind boggling - millions and millions of animals, chickens, cows, pigs, fish, are killed for human consumption - and it goes on across the planet everyday. Certain people, business owners, make money on a scale that is also gobsmacking. We don't give sufficient credence to the harm and suffering for the animals and the trauma they experience in all of this. And of course, as part of this, just to say, I don't believe that you can have humane killing on that kind of scale. I think that is commercialised killing for human gain. Complex I know. I am very, very concerned about the scale of violence toward certain groups of animals and believe that peace won't be known on the planet while we continue to kill and use animals in these ways. 

An example of moral unsafety and untold harm to others

I want to give you an example from my professional practice of the consequences of acting against my value of nonviolence in ways that caused moral injury to me but more importantly, caused untold harm to service users. As Bloom explains, when people are not able to live according to the values that are important to them, there is a deep moral harm that is done that is not always recognised. This can be the case alongside being regarded as an ethical and competent professional. Any injustice can cause a fracture in a person's sense of what is right and what is wrong in the world, and what is okay to happen to them and what's not okay to happen to them. This has bigger and more harmful consequences for people who are service users and who are subjected to failures of helping professionals to find less restrictive responses to risk and duty of care obligations. As a social worker of many decades now, the number of times I've been in situations where I have acted in a way that is inconsistent with my values, is just such a large area of moral injury. I carry these failures to act according to my values as part of the colour and pain of my own broken-heartedness. It's very hard to even find a single example of it. But perhaps the most concerning example would be when I have worked in the mental health system, as a clinical social worker. With the authority of the Mental Health Act, I had the power, the legal power, along with others, to force some people to have a mental health assessment, and sometimes I was part of decisions where treatment was enforced against their wishes. This is the most troubling and disturbing experience of my life. The ability to keep living with a sense of integrity, when we are party to behaviours that put us out of step with our deep values is not something that has a quick or satisfactory answer. 

Nonviolence is my number one value and yet I was complicit with what is legal violence, what I believe is unethical violence toward others. That is, even if my actions are seen to be necessary at that point in time, for example, to keep the person safe, it becomes a very morally troubling circumstance to say the least. There have been strong critiques of mental health practitioners by activists in the mental health lived experience movement, which I am not immune to. A valuable book in this regard is Searching for a rose garden: Challenging psychiatry, fostering mad studies, edited by Russo and Sweeney (2016).

Drawing some threads together

In summary, what we're doing here is getting hold of some ideas that help us think more deeply about the idea of love to give us guidance on how to practice love, not only think about it. We got to the idea of violence and all the forms of oppression that go with that as really threatening the love needed for justice struggles, and the ability for people to experience love. I have built on the idea of broken-heartedness by considering the trauma that gets experienced through all sorts of unsafety, namely psychological, social, emotional, and moral unsafety. The fostering of safety are ways to practice nonviolence in our relationships with others and with ourselves. This is also where I see justice work becomes hard to undertake because of the impact of broken-heartedness on the very people who are experiencing injustice and trauma, who are often the very same people who need to stand up and be at the front of justice struggles. 

The ability to act with moral safety and congruence when in a position with legal authority over others is a major challenge in contemporary human services. We shall return to this confounding ethical challenge in a future podcast. For now to note that there is a quite troubling politics that comes with a commitment to be loving and nonviolent in contexts that are often loveless and violent. 

Thank you for your interest and if you would like to leave me a comment please do so. Also if you wish to share any useful books or resources, please contact me.

Until next time, my best love

Dyann

References

Kirsty Alger (2020). Five essays for freedom: A political primer for animal advocates. Revolutionaries.

Sandra Bloom (2017). “The sanctuary model: Through the lens of moral safety”. In S. Gold (Ed.). APA handbook of trauma psychology: Trauma practice (pp. 499–513). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000020-024

Brene Brown (2010). The power of vulnerability. https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_the_power_of_vulnerability?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare

Centre for Nonviolent Change (2022). Six principles of nonviolence. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/sites/mlk/files/lesson-activities/six_principles_of_nonviolence.pdf

Erica Chenoweth (2021). Civil resistance: What everyone needs to know. Oxford University Press.

Wallea Eaglehawk (2020). “Species justice is for everybody”. In D. Ross, M. Brueckner, M. Palmer, & W. Eaglehawk (Eds.). Eco-activism and social work: New directions in leadership and group work. Routledge.

Mahatma Gandhi (1928/1968). Satyagraha in South Africa. Jitendra T. Desai Navajivan Publishing House. https://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/satyagraha_in_south_africa.pdf

Rajmohan Gandhi (2013). “Gandhi’s journey to Ahimsa”. In T. Sethia & A. Narayan (Eds.). The living Gandhi: Lessons of our times. Penguin.

Marshall Rosenberg (2015). Nonviolent communication: A language of life. Puddle Dancer Press.

Dyann Ross (2020). The revolutionary social worker: The love ethic model. Revolutionaries.

Jasna Russo and Angela Sweeney (Eds.). (2016). Searching for a rose garden: Challenging psychiatry, fostering mad studies. PCCS Book Ltd.

Gene Sharpe (1973). 198 methods of nonviolent direct action. https://www.brandeis.edu/peace-conflict/pdfs/198-methods-non-violent-action.pdf

The King Centre (2022). Dr King’s fundamental philosophy of nonviolence.https://thekingcenter.org/about-tkc/the-king-philosophy/

Hi everyone, it’s Dr. Dyann Ross here, the love theorist. I'm very pleased to be talking with you and hope you're well and keeping safe and doing something positive and kind for yourself today and somebody else if you can, as well.

I wanted to talk to you about the idea of love and how the lack of love can be heart-breaking. And especially if that lack of love is related to an experience of injustice or trauma caused by someone hurting you. That is, the topic is about understanding love from the point of view of broken-heartedness. And particularly when that broken-heartedness is caused by someone doing harm, especially in terms of unfair treatment, or an act of violence towards you or someone else.

This is a particular way of thinking about broken-heartedness that can cause very deep wounds in our hearts and impacts our ability to survive and flourish in the world. This is because love can’t flourish in unsafe situations. Love is a necessary ingredient for life. The hardest thing is to believe in love in its absence. After some commentary, and to give us all something to hold on to, I want to suggest a gem of hope for love to ourselves or others. Love that comes from that deep wounding and broken-heartedness, is a gentle way to self-heal, and is a potentially revolutionary force outwards in the world.

Preface

I want to preface that main theme of today with a few comments, which I talk about more in my upcoming book, Broken-heartedness, about the physiological dimensions of broken-heartedness more broadly. This is really a kind of prefacing statement around the concept of broken-heartedness just to anchor the experience in our bodies, human bodies, and it also sits in animals’ bodies and Mother Nature's bodies and entities as well. Broken-heartedness for humans can present as heart failures or what we call heart attacks. Chronic heart disease is the number one killer in Australia, and some other westernised countries. What's going on when people have heart attacks at the physical level is complex and not the same for everybody. At the same time, what I'm interested in is the research that shows that heightened stress, especially stress from unfair treatment or trauma where there is violence involved, can have very harmful effects on the actual physical heart, in our bodies. And that this is intricately related with our emotional heart, the two are not separate.

I believe at the same time that our emotions are anchored and located in our hearts and whole body and the aura of our body, not only our physical body. But for the moment I'm just wanting to focus on the physical aspect of where hurt, harm, and violence is done that causes a physical wound that is anchored in the heart. It may manifest as severe and chronic heart conditions, and possibly even heart attacks, and certainly people dying from heart attacks. I'm wanting to make the link between the physical expression of harm to the heart, and the emotional harm that often goes with that. Research shows that there is a direct link between trauma and very severe physiological effects in the body, and in the heart (Resnik, Acierno & Kilpatrick, 2010). In medical terms, it is referred to as takotsubo or stress-induced cardiomyopathy or “Broken Heart Syndrome” where a sudden shock weakens the heart muscle (Harvard Health Publishing, 2022).

Source: https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/takotsubo-cardiomyopathy-broken-heart-syndrome

When someone says, ‘a person has died of a broken heart’, I actually believe that's exactly what has happened. When the physical heart is broken, this often aligns with an emotional broken heart. There are deep sad, abiding distressed feelings, which I think is a double whammy of harm to the person's being, that is very hard to survive. Given that there is medical evidence of the link between physical harm to the heart and stressful life circumstances, it is really important to not shy away from the sources of harm and violence. As just two examples, imagine domestic violence situations and sexual assault situations where violence occurs and causes trauma, and there are many others. The person’s physical-emotional heart is a sensitive barometer of their social circumstances that needs its own attention to address broken-heartedness.

Broken-heartedness is a really big indicator of lack of fairness and caring in how a person is being treated. Perhaps we are missing opportunities to recognise that broken-heartedness is how injustice and trauma caused by violence to a person can express itself. There's more I could say about this, but for now, to say I believe lovelessness, that sits behind acts of violence toward a person or toward an animal or Mother Nature, is a really big issue of our times. We kind of know it's an issue but maybe don't give it a name. This is an interesting topic for me as I am wanting to have a think about love as part of building a theory of love, by talking about the absence of love.

About broken-heartedness

As we're getting into this topic a bit more, I do want to acknowledge that broken-heartedness has many facets to it, and that people die of broken-heartedness. But also, people can live for a very long time or periods of time, at least, with a broken heart. And it may not even be recognised by others, may not be called that by the person. Yet it's incredible to me that people can live with a broken heart, and can still be making an amazing contribution in the world.

My interest in this topic is trying to understand what can be done around what I think is one of the hardest ways of mending your heart or helping others who are broken-hearted. The hardest experience is when there's injustice and violence done to people, not always spoken by themselves or recognised by others. What can a person do for themselves, and what can people do to support someone who has a broken heart? And what of non-human animals’ broken hearts and Mother Nature’s broken-heartedness? We need a theory of love to guide us in this justice work and loving dedication to others.

It's a big topic, isn't it? 

I won't do it justice today, these are just some initial thoughts that I wish to share with you. If you've heard my first podcast in the series, you will know that my ideas about love are strongly influenced by bell hooks, the internationally renowned black activist writer from America. What she says is that where there is love, there will be no oppression (hooks, 2001). hooks uses the concept of lovelessness, at its most simplest meaning the absence of love, which she ties to systems of domination and violence. Two examples of such systems are sexism and racism. When we're working with the idea of lovelessness, as linked to oppression and injustice, I think we're really getting to a much broader and less recognised understanding of what lovelessness is about. This is what I'm wanting to talk a little bit about today – how lovelessness caused by violence can in turn cause broken-heartedness. 

An invitation

I wonder if you would just for a moment like to contemplate my comments so far, and feel free to think this through for yourself as well. I expect we will have some different views and experiences. Let me know what you think about what the lack of love feels and looks like. Maybe you've experienced it in your life. 

Love and its absence

bell hooks explains that many of us do not know love, and certainly many struggle to feel self-love, which is the basis for all other love. She says that she grew up in a family that was very caring, but that she did not feel loved. She felt very isolated and not understood and not heard as a child. I'm wondering if any of us ever grew up in a space where we felt all the dimensions of love. hooks would say that love is about caring. Yes, absolutely … and more …. It also includes, nonviolence, responsibility, critical thinking, compassion, and knowledge (hooks, 2001; Ross, 2020).

Brene Brown (2010) explains that self-love involves understanding the power of vulnerability in our lives which she defines as “having the courage to show up when you can’t control the outcome” that is derived from a sense of worthiness and being lovable. She believes that vulnerability is the “birthplace” of things like love and joy and trust (cited in Jensen, 2019). But we can become numb to being vulnerable which makes it harder to be kind to ourselves and others. [Brown’s ideas are explored further in a separate upcoming podcast dedicated to self-love]. I would say for the moment, that emotions are the messages from our hearts and in unfair or unsafe life situations our ability or willingness to feel or express our feelings can be very fraught even dangerous.

In my family, my mother and father were really amazing, against the odds in caring for us. So that's one component of love. Love is also about having a critical understanding of what's going on in the world and what's happening in the family as well in terms of fairness and how we treat each other. For example, it is about understanding the impacts if we're a member of a minority group or a minority status family, due to our religion or ethnicity, or in my circumstance, lower socio-economic status. I was constantly shamed around being poor as a child, and that can be very harmful and directly led to me not feeling loved. Love is closely dependent on having self-knowledge, knowledge of others and knowledge of relationships and how to build loving relationships. hooks adds it is also about the ability to take responsibility for our actions and to be able to have a purposeful life. These are some of the dimensions of love where love is about how we act. This compares with how many people think about love as a feeling and often a romantic connection in private between people. This matters but for our purposes it's more of an action, often many actions, in the world.

Love absolutely has got to be about non-violence as well as non-harming behaviours toward others. When we really think about love, in that regard, I can say I grew up in a family that was caring, but there was also abuse. There was also neglect and lack of understanding of my needs as I felt misunderstood, unable to speak for my needs. I felt very concerned about others in the family and remember trying to be responsible as one of the oldest siblings. Then getting blamed for not looking after the children properly, when I was a child myself.

What that early childhood experience growing into adolescence meant to me, is that love can't really flourish in an unsafe environment. Lack of love had quite the opposite effect. As a child, I rarely felt safe and was often unable to keep my siblings safe because I grew up in a situation of domestic violence. That's had a formative influence on my ideas around love. I would say I did not feel love as a child. I've been seeking to understand love, to give love to others, my whole life as social worker. It's inspired amazing things and amazing dedication. To be at this time in my life it is a privilege to be pausing to think - what would a theory of love look like? What would my childhood look like, if my parents had the support and knowledge they needed to be fully loving? What would it look like if they kept not only caring, but really met the needs of myself and my siblings and as part of this to really be willing to hear us? Instead, they raised us with the attitude that children should be seen but not heard. This was very much a norm at the time, but it left a gaping hole in my heart. Living with domestic violence that is not declared and addressed, also a norm in my community, is frightening and heart-breaking. 

One of the aspects of lovelessness that I grew up with was a strong sense of how unfair it was that my father could be violent and behave however he wanted. There was actually no one holding him responsible. His mates weren't holding him responsible, other people who knew in the community that it was happening, were not holding him responsible to act differently. This always perplexed me how it was left to the children and their mother to try and keep the home place safe against the odds. This is where my sense of the injustice was cultivated but I had to bury it because my survival instincts silenced me to be loyal and keep the secret in the family. 

I realised when there was such an abiding sense of unsafety and injustice, to be loved in that situation was always going to be compromised. It was not going to be possible because it was so unsafe with children who were basically too frightened to ask for their needs or protect themselves. These are just some reflections of my childhood that I share with you as a way of anchoring what love in its absence can look and feel like.

Glimmers of hope

I had little glimmers of hope for love mattering as a child, little moments of being heard as a child, being seen and not being ignored. It was very fleeting and it didn't have to only come from within my family. Just someone else recognising who I was and encouraging me on my way kept me going for years. There was a teacher in my fourth grade and I remember her saying to us, and it wasn't only to me, but I've heard it in a very particular way. She said, ‘you can all grow up to be whatever you want to be, you just need to work toward that happening’. And I thought, ‘oh, I think that's a message for me!’. It was just a little glimmer of hope that there could be a future for me and that it could be life without the absolutely depleting, soul destroying effects of living with either violence or the fear of violence day by day. Like many others, someone somewhere needed to show up for me so many other times as well. 

For me to be able to believe in love, in the absence of it, is one of the hardest things in the world to do. To be nursing a broken heart from what I've witnessed as a child, in my family and in other families, and to be trying to be loving in the world, is also one of the hardest things to do. Given this, I don’t say the next point lightly. I think the love revolution on many occasions is happening with broken-hearted people who are expressing love out into the world. In so doing they are transforming their broken-heartedness into love energy instead of hate energy. This is one of the secrets of a broken heart, we are experts in the importance of being loving.

Wicked problems in need of love

From childhood, I've lived with a broken heart. It hasn't gone away, even though there's been healing around a lot of my childhood experiences. There are now multiple sources of lovelessness, harm and violence that break my heart anew. The influence of social media is making us more aware of what's going on in the furthest corners of the world. Wicked problems such as the devastating effects of climate change are multi-layered, and interconnected, and not typically amenable to one solution or one person’s actions of love. It is devastating to understand the way that climate change seems to disproportionately harm minority groups in vulnerable countries. For example, low lying Pacific islands are starting to flood from the sea water because of the melting of the ice caps. It is not always an option to move to higher ground. Relatedly, it seems that the highest cost for the impact of climate change is being worn by vulnerable groups of people, animals, and landscapes within impacted countries. Thinking about what's happening in the Amazon, one of the great last lungs of the world, the incredible forests, and the complex competing needs in that landscape and the geopolitics that go with that. The rights of minority people, groups who live in that forest, as far as their daily right to survive, and to be able to use the resources of their place. It just gets overrun by so many other competing interests. All of this is so heart-breaking, as is anything to do with what's happening to Mother Nature that we see in all sorts of contexts. 

In Australia, at the moment, we're having devastating floods on the east coast and the loss is multi-layered. One of the most upsetting things and heart-breaking things I saw just last week, is that the floodwaters in the northern part of Queensland have washed out on to the coastline creating a layer of silt and soil that is covering up the seagrass. As a result there's hardly any seagrass left and dugongs, who are just incredible, beautiful, big creatures of the sea, are not getting enough food to eat because the seagrass is covered up. It's just heart-breaking to know that this is happening. There are people trying to do something about it but the scale of devastation of the seagrass beds is so large, that at least in the short term, the loss of dugongs is totally distressing. 

Closing comments

From the fragments of my story of what my broken heart looks like, I'm sure if we were talking together, you would have some very powerful personal stories as well. And this is what I'm talking about where there's an injustice located in the broken-heartedness. I think it is a particular kind of lovelessness that requires of us different kinds of healing and actions including self-care, care of each other and care of the planet. This podcast is trying to get an angle and think about what love is by saying what it isn't. I’ve really just given some introductory comments on how broken-heartedness is about how lovelessness is caused by violence. I gave the example of my childhood experiences and some of the wicked problems that are happening in the world. 

That means that for each of us, we all I believe, to some extent, are living with a broken heart. I think one of the secrets and little gems of hope that sit within us as broken-hearted people comes from learning how to live with a broken heart. It can give us the fuel and the motivation, to pivot on that broken-heartedness to do good in the world, to be loving, and to refuse to accept violence as an answer in any situation.

Thank you for spending time with me today. I really appreciate it. Please let me know of your thoughts and any great references you might wish to share. I've mainly been drawing on the bell hooks’s work - All about love - which is perhaps still the best book to start with, if you're not familiar with this idea of love, as needed for oppression to be addressed. Further to hooks’s ideas of love and lovelessness, broken-heartedness is an idea that I'm using to enrich my understanding about what the lack of love looks and feels like. 

Okay, till next time, all the best love to you,

Bye, Dyann

**

References

Brene Brown (2010). The power of vulnerability. https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_the_power_of_vulnerability?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare

Harvard Health Publishing (2022). Takotsubo cardiomyopathy: Broken heart syndrome. https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/takotsubo-cardiomyopathy-broken-heart-syndrome

bell hooks (2001). All about love: New visions. New York: William Morrow.

Erin Jensen (2019). 5 takeaways on vulnerability from Brene Brown’s “the call to courage”. https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2019/04/19/brene-brown-call-courage-netflix-vulnerability/3497969002/

Heidi Resnick, Ron Acierno, & Dean Kilpatrick (2010). Health impact of interpersonal violence 2: Medical and mental health outcomes. Behavioural Medicine, 23(2), pp. 65-78.