America In Therapy: Session Two

Words by Tony Caldwell
Illustration by Doug Chayka

October 21, 2026
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Originally published in issue No. 14 of The Bitter Southerner Magazine

You can be ok and not ok at the same time. A hallmark of a mature personality is the ability to suffer well. Suffering well is holding both/and: joy and sorrow. Often referred to as resilience, emotional regulation, or antifragility, it  means enduring unavoidable pain without becoming bitter, hopeless, or destructive, and finding  ways to grow from the experience. Psychological maturity is not the absence of pain, but rather how we relate to it. Carl Jung said: “There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” Jung believed that true psychological growth requires the courageous and uncomfortable process of confronting one’s inner struggles rather than distracting yourself or simply focusing on the positive.

Today, pervasive, unapologetic, public displays of white supremacy are giving all Americans a glimpse of what Black people have been enduring for a very long time. Scenes like that of Tennessee state Representative Justin Pearson being denied entry to his own state capitol, leaving his 70,000 constituents without a voice, are reminiscent of 1966, when the Georgia House of Representatives refused to seat Julian Bond, a newly elected Black civil rights activist. In May, the Tennessee legislature redrew federal congressional districts, including District 9, which now combines parts of Memphis and Pulaski, 195 miles away, under a single congressional representative. This was a formerly majority Black, Democratic district that Pearson is running to represent in D.C. Pulaski is where the Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1865. When I despair, I think of Reps. Julian Bond and Justin Pearson, and I say, How dare I?

Looking back at the events of  January 6, Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi remarked, “I recognize this. This is the Confederacy 2.0.” When I despair, I think of Rep. Bennie Thompson and the Capitol police officers, and I say, How dare I?

When a culture’s predominant religion becomes indistinguishable from cruelty and racism, gone is a shared moral bedrock of civility, human dignity, and the golden rule. In political and sociological terms, the resulting vacuum is often described as the loss of a civil religion or a shared civic morality, the foundational, unifying public code.

You might think, “What does this have to do with mental health?” The answer is “Everything.” My clients, and their symptoms, speak loudly about this breakdown in meaning and civility. Our collective mental health is being affected by the fact that MAGA Christianity is another outbreak of slaveholder religion. When I despair, I think of my clients, and I say, How dare I?

The death penalty, current gun laws, and regressive policies related to race cannot stay in place without the support of the Christian Right. In the American South, Native children, Black children, and Hispanic children have been separated from their families by white “Christian” men standing on pro-life and pro-family platforms. The Bible Belt, the Slavery Belt, the Jim Crow Belt, the Mass Incarceration Belt, the State-Sanctioned Execution Belt, and the Environmental Racism Belt cover the same geographical territory, with the Trail of Tears running straight through it. When I despair, I think of these children, and I say, How dare I?

Somehow, what Flannery O’Connor dubbed the “Christ-haunted” culture, in which I grew up, could not and still cannot fully see that the Black body and the Imago Dei are the same. Underneath the voice of the preacher who states that no one should put asunder what God has joined together, the marriage of spirit and matter is ripped asunder in mass incarceration, capital punishment, underfunded public education, poverty, and the cradle-to-prison pipeline; all day, every day.

The Hebrew prophets had three things in common: they loudly and publicly named systemic abuses, they were completely unqualified to speak about systemic injustice with such authority, and their rage eventually softened enough so that people received their messages. Theirs was the rage of love.

Our modern prophets also speak with the rage of love. If we want to hear the necessary prophets of our day and time, we need only sit at the feet of, read the words of, listen to the accounts of Black women. The United States has much to learn from the most unheard voices within its boundaries: the voice of the Black Feminine. The voice of the most unheard, objectified, sexualized, colonized, used, and abused people within our borders contains and  carries a particular knowing: the collective grief, loss, trauma, and wisdom that must be distributed among and borne by the collective.

When I despair, I think of these women, and I say, How dare I?

During my childhood, many of the Black women in our community of Verona, Mississippi, expressed a beautiful and palpably unapologetic defiance. Their sense of self was informed by a different place, a transcendent experience, a higher level of authority. Their hard-won identities had not been given and therefore could not be taken away. They literally had nothing to lose, and they experienced an obvious freedom in that knowing. This transformative and liberating power stood in stark contrast to American Christianity marked by religio-political tribalism, hyperliteralism, fundamentalism, extremism, and domestic terrorism, and in which the standard image-bearer of God seemed to be a white Southern Christian heterosexual male.

I once heard a story about a K9 Unit dog that was run over by a car fleeing a crime scene; her hind legs and hips were crushed. The dog was also pregnant and not expected to carry to term. But she delivered each puppy successfully. When they began learning to walk, they copied their mother by dragging their bodies across the floor using only their front legs. But when they were put in a kennel several times per day with dogs that walked on all four legs, the puppies soon started walking on all four legs as well.

I, too, had models who taught me how to walk. Ms. Linda Witherspoon was my 7th- and 9th-grade science teacher. She also became my best friend and surrogate mother. One day, she  pulled me aside in the lunchroom and said sternly, “I need you to promise me that you will remember everything I am about to say to you.” I loved her so much that I would have locked  away anything she was about to say, and I did. She continued, “When you breathe, you must close your mouth. You cannot walk around like a salamander. And, when you eat, you cannot monkey grip your fork. You must hold your eating utensil correctly because you are really intelligent. But if you don’t do those things, no one else will know how intelligent you are. And, if they don’t know, you will forget.”

I have treasured that moment since it happened. Ms. Spoon lives in the core of my heart. She lives in my heart because she wanted to, which was her greatest gift to me. Her love was subversive. She inoculated me against racism. I loved her whether I was “supposed to” or not.

We also spent time together during the last years of her life, when she told me that she was very depressed. Despite pouring herself into me and other students who looked like her oppressors, she had been continually overlooked for promotions because she lived at the intersection of being Black and female — and projected the image of “the angry Black woman” when she exercised her voice. Although she had been held back and held down by people who looked like me, she lifted me higher than she was allowed to go.

For me, she represents the true essence of being Christ-like. I do not need anyone’s theology; I knew Ms. Spoon. Words do not communicate as loudly or as deeply as her life, her presence. I long for and work toward a day when we hear no more stories about benevolent Black women who gave more love, nurturance, and care than they received in return. When I despair, I think of Ms. Spoon, and I say, How dare I?

My friend Reverend Sharon Risher, whose mother, cousins, and lifelong friends were killed by Dylan Roof at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, has since dedicated her life to writing a book, traveling, speaking, and lecturing, fighting against the death penalty at every level of government. Sharon aims to prevent the execution of the man who took  so much and so many from her. She often shares her story, which tears her apart every time. She is willing to be ripped open and sutured back up in the pursuit of collective wholeness. At a certain point, she says, retelling becomes reenactment unless the process serves a higher purpose of Healing.

I stood with Sharon as a gun was being melted down; Sharon was invited to the anvil to help beat the hot metal into a gardening tool. Her small body could scarcely lift the hammer; her strikes were so gentle as she let out moans and screams from the deepest part of herself, where her mother, now her ancestor, resides. As she screamed, moaned, and lamented, her voice represented a chorus of countless other voices, it contained all sorrows. Everyone present wept.

I need no theology of resurrection; I experienced resurrection in this moment with Sharon. The organizers later presented Sharon with a small hand shovel, made from the melted gun, with which to tend her garden. Embodying the ethos and instruction of her spiritual lineage, she had literally beaten a sword into a plowshare. When I despair, I think of Sharon, and I say, How dare I?

Ms. Spoon and Sharon were able to hold joy and sorrow at the same time. Their sacred anger was rooted in sacred heartbreak. The Black women in my life have taught me that anger  can be a sacrament and that sacramental anger can be transformed into sacrificial love, which manifests as sacrificial service. They “worked their corner,” doing the next right thing, loving  whoever was in front of them. The fact is, each of us may not lead a sustained group effort. But, as Rev. Otis Moss III says, if we each “work our corner” simultaneously, we can effect change. The combined merit of our individual practices of working our corners simultaneously is sometimes what community looks like. Just ask Stacey Abrams. 

Despair is an appropriate response to injustice and cruelty, but sitting in our despair is inefficient at best. Give that time and energy to someone in need. If you are paralyzed, just pick something, anything. Every day here in Nashville, thousands of volunteers channel anger rooted in heartbreak into service. Each person does one thing, one small, simple task. People are fed, clothed, showered, and counseled. It’s not enough; it will never be enough. But they do it anyway. They keep showing up because that is what love is. That is what community is.

Everywhere you see dehumanization, practice rehumanization. As Howard Thurman, the chaplain of the Civil Rights Movement, stated, the world’s great need is met from who you are, from where your great joy and heartbreak meet the world’s great need. Vocation is simply bringing you to whatever you do. As Alice Walker observed, “We are the ones we have been waiting for.”  ◊