Fighting with the Cop in My Head

I recently broke something that belonged to a friend. This item wasn’t irreplaceable but it wasn’t super cheap either. More than the cost, not having this item was pretty inconvenient. It was a really silly accident but I felt horrible about it. 

For all the talking and dreaming and aspirational thinking I do about abolition, the cop in my head emerged quickly and powerfully.

My internal dialogue became pretty unkind. 

“You’re so stupid. Why do you ruin everything? This was totally preventable. You better make it right! You need to grovel and hope they forgive you. You don’t deserve empathy or patience right now. They get to react however they want to react and you have to take it. Punish yourself so that they can feel better about the situation. You being miserable is the only way for them to feel like they’ve been made whole again.”

To be honest, I feel embarrassed writing about this. I even felt semi-aware in the moment of what was happening, watching my thoughts go by on a marquee and feeling so out-of-control. This semi-awareness started to create even more shame with thoughts like “you claim to believe in abolition, but you are a fraud.” It was an endless loop of shame and anxiety and guilt.

With a lot of help from my friend and some time to calm down and process, the shame spiral stopped and the realization of my deep programming re-surfaced. Why was it so easy for me to fall into the spiral of the punishment? Why is shame always the loudest voice in those moments?

There’s definitely some intersection of carceral/punishment-oriented thinking and trauma here that creates a terrible storm of blaming, flaming and shaming as Internal Family Systems therapists may say. Watching that programming play out almost automatically felt frustrating, embarrassing, and scary. In the coming days, I tried to reduce shame by understanding more about my impulses and what I hoped they would accomplish. 

When punishment is treated as the only possible road to redemption and repair, and that belief is reinforced through repeated traumatic experiences, the neural pathways are strengthened. I didn’t necessarily want to feel bad, but I did feel like it was the only option. It feels so impossible, but I have to continue teaching my brain that there are more options that are less painful and punitive, even in these less significant situations.

I don’t necessarily have some grand moralizing conclusion to convey. I don’t have some perfectly packaged message to send. Perhaps a more accurate title for this essay would be about losing to the cop in my head. I’m sharing this to be more transparent about how hard it can be to uproot all forms of punitive thinking. This silly but destabilizing day served as an effective reminder that I have to be deliberate and intentional about unlearning these practices intellectually and emotionally.