Flocking

Staying grounded when your reality is under siege

This weekend I gathered with some friends I hadn’t seen in a while. We were waiting for the teapot to boil when one of my friends told me that her husband had been diagnosed with cancer. She then told me a story about a relative’s bad behavior. I won’t repeat it here because it’s not my story to tell, but if you’ve ever cared for someone who is very ill, you most likely have your own story of family bad behavior. I do.

I reacted strongly to my friend’s story with my words, expressions, and gestures. Another friend, seeing us talking in this animated manner, came over. The first friend repeated the story. Second friend also reacted with open-mouthed disbelief, and hugged First Friend around the neck. General excoriation of Bad Relative ensued.

That’s flocking.

I’ve talked about this before, but want to revisit it because we are in a time of sharply divided understandings of reality. Many of us are being challenged about what we see and experience for ourselves and being told, no, it’s not like that. The sky is green. It’s stressful to have your reality condemned. Which is why I keep thinking about ways we can buttress and defend our own knowing.

We often talk about the three reactions to trauma or threat as Fight, Flight, or Freeze. But there is a fourth. Flock. You look to your people to validate your experience and provide emotional support in the moment.

It’s that instant in a meeting when the man in charge says something crazy sexist and the only other woman in the room and I look at each other to check in – did you hear that? Did he really just say that? It can be a quick glance, an eyebrow’s swift flight, a turn of the head. In places where it isn’t safe to speak, it is a non-verbal gesture of solidarity and connection.

Fundamentally, it is our way of finding and connecting with our flock, our people, reestablishing ourselves in community by grounding ourselves in a shared reality. Yes. That happened. Yes, it was crazy fucked up. Yes, we saw that.

I talk a lot about the Enchanted Forest, about how people in power try to drag us into an alternate reality to serve their purposes, and disconnect us from our power, our purpose, our reality. Flocking is how we stay out of the Enchanted Forest.

If you’ve grown up in a family or system where your experience or identity is discounted, denied, denigrated, it can be hard to trust your own knowing. You know it, sure, but you need support sometimes. That’s where flocking comes in.

To return to my example of this weekend. It’s possible that First Friend felt, under her intellectual understanding of the injury done to her by Bad Relative, some mixed feelings. I know when I was a caregiver faced with Bad Relatives, I felt a murky kind of guilt, a confused question about whether or not I was overreacting. If First Friend did wonder, if there was a question, it was most like answered by the reaction of Second Friend and I, who clearly and unequivocally renounced Bad Relative. I’m a big one for renouncing, but Second Friend is much calmer, kinder and slower to anger than I, so we all knew that if Second Friend was renouncing, well then, that meant something.

First Friend’s relief was palpable. She picked up phrases and repeated them, and we answered that refrain with our own outrage, like we were riffing on a theme. Flocking isn’t just exchange of information, it is building on a theme, like music, expanding and repeating until the person flocking is built up. Sometimes people will wonder why a friend keeps returning to an incident or phrase, without realizing that it’s not about telling a story, it’s about metabolizing the complex web of emotions around the incident until they are grounded in their own reality, confirmed and comforted.

Right now, we’re in multiple political, cultural and civic arguments about reality. Who owns it, who bought it, who is right, what is wrong. Which is why we need flocking.

After my teenaged son was in a car accident, I spent lots of time in the ICU. He was in a coma. I had two Bad Relatives who disliked the attention my son and I were getting, the stream of family and friends focused on us, our needs. Both of these Bad Relatives were very invested in being the ones with health issues, and spent hours telling me and every other visitor about their health issues, now far in the past and resolved.

It was not helpful.

Mary Virginia, my oldest friend, was one of those visitors, but since she lives on the other side of the state we mostly talked on the phone. She is a therapist, and was the one who told me about flocking. Now, we will text one another “Need to flock” and use that term often. Back then, when my son was in the ICU, we didn’t know the term flocking, but we did the behavior. We have always done it.

I would sit on the hard seats in the ICU, unable to escape the barrage of Bad Relative behavior, and file it away to tell Mary Virginia later. Our flocking then was mockery, mercilessly making fun of the Bad Relatives, exaggerating their lack of skill into hilariously over the top stories, the way a meme takes a short clip and exaggerates it through repetition into farce. A lot of social media content is a kind of virtual flocking.

In the ICU, it saved me, knowing that at the end of the day I could call her and flock like it was my job. Because it was.

Confronting the Bad Relatives wouldn’t have worked because they lacked the capacity and emotional intelligence to perceive the impact of their actions and change them. I could have left, and I would take breaks, but the ICU at Harborview, the county hospital and level one trauma center, didn’t have much in the way of extra space. I was sleeping there. Since I couldn’t sleep in my son’s room I would nap at night underneath three chairs in an alcove with my purse under my body. I lacked the capacity to set boundaries. My family had to negotiate with me to get me to go and shower and change by renting a hotel room near the hospital, so the trip was ten minutes instead of the half hour to my house. When you are under siege, you can’t always muster the energy to tell bad people to go away. Or you don’t have the power or privilege to have options.

But if you’re lucky, you have friends and family that you can flock with, the aunt who raised an eyebrow at me and herded the Bad Relatives out to the cafeteria, the voice of my childhood friend on the phone, even a nurse who gave me a sympathetic glance across the bed at a doctor’s inane comment. Hopefully, even if you didn’t know the term before, you’ve had that experience, the swift upsurge of hope and connection when another person conveys to you “I saw that. I see you. You’re right. That was not okay.”