Turn This World Inside Out Quotes

“Attachment theory teaches us that true autonomy relies on feeling securely connected to other human beings. Current developments in the field of attachment science have recognized that bonded pairs, such as couples, or parents and children, build bonds that physiologically shape their nervous systems. Contrary to many Western conceptions of the self as disconnected and atomized, operating in isolation using nothing but grit and determination, it turns out that close-knit connections to others are in large part how we grow into our own, fully expressed, autonomous selves.”
― Nora Samaran, Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture

“Transformation is deeply relational. It's not, "I'm going to go and receive enlightenment on top of a mountain by myself. That's a colonizer's story of disconnection and self-sufficiency. While I have personal responsibility, it is in relation to the others. It is an illusion and quite dangerous to think that I can do it all on my own.”
― Nora Samaran, Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture

“This is how you build secure attachment: through daily attunement to the subtle cues of other people and lavishing love and care, while letting them come and go as needed. In this kind of connection, you know your home base is always there for you, so you feel comfortable going out into the world, taking risks, trying new or scary things, because you can return to safe arms when you need to.”
― Nora Samaran, Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture

“When we do not name or interrupt it, out of a desire for those caught in oppressor positions to learn at a pace comfortable for them, we allow systemic oppression to continue, and we allow it to harm people for fear that even naming or recognizing the harm might in some way shame the person causing it. I have seen that dynamic play out many times, where everyone turns toward the person causing harm to comfort them, and leaves the person or people harmed to face systemic violence without protection or even honest naming.”
― Nora Samaran, Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture

“Do you understand the depth of the harm of making someone question their sanity? This is serious shit. This is not like "Whoops, I brought you the strawberry ice cream and forgot you like banana better." It is poking a hole in someone's fundamental capacity to engage with reality.”
― Nora Samaran, Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture

“Do you understand the depth of the harm of making someone question their sanity? This is serious shit. This is not like "Whoops, I brought you the strawberry ice cream and forgot you like banana better." It is poking a hole in someone's fundamental capacity to engage with reality. Understand it in a context in which women have been told every day for their entire lives that their perceptions cannot be trusted—when in fact our perceptions are often bang on—and you have a systemic, pervasive, deeply psychologically harmful phenomenon, insanity by a thousand cuts.”
― Nora Samaran, Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture

“Shame is when a person feels they are inherently ba for have no worth. Healthy remorse, on the other hand, is quite different—it is when you acknowledge that you did something to hurt someone, and because you don't want that harmful impact to continue, you would like to not only apologize but also repair that harm. Systems of oppression can activate an enormous amount of shame-conditioning whenever anyone does something that causes harm.”
― Nora Samaran, Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture

“The cost to my body of coddling a scary, angry, fragile ego—coddling it to make sure it does not attack or abandon—is so great that I actually cannot do this kind of coddling any longer. I realize I have been doing it instinctively for a long time.
If you harm someone and then make it so that they feel afraid to tell you about it, be aware that women are likely coddling you constantly day in and day out in ways that exhaust them and that you take as normal and do not even notice. If you do this as a white person to people of color, be aware of the same.”
― Nora Samaran, Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture

“What I saw modelled in my family, and many other places, was turning away from conflict and not actively addressing harm. Overcoming that instinct has been a huge part of my own growth in transformative justice, so it gives me both a lot of hope that people can learn it, and also a certain skepticism—it makes sense to me that resistance is often the first response of someone asked to take accountability, so that's built into my approach to transformative justice work. I'm used to trying, and hitting resistance. Then trying again and meeting resistance as a second response! But then you come back, engage their values and support system, and sometimes, that resistance shifts.”
― Nora Samaran, Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture

“There is a quality in guilt that paralyzes. Worse, it leads those who feel guilty to lash out like pythons or some kind of wild animal guarding a nest of self-loathing. "Do not look at the man behind the curtain," says the guilt, "or I will attempt to destroy you just to stop you from getting near the core of my shame.”
― Nora Samaran, Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture

“How do you thank those who help you grow this way if they have to tell you because you have not figured it out for yourself? Do you realize just how scary it can be to tell you before they know how you will react? [...] If your focus is more on the fact that harm got named than it is on the harm itself, does this strike you as peculiar?”
― Nora Samaran, Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture

“So how do we hold those in tension? Maybe by not cutting ties permanently with someone who has caused harm, but by establishing what is and is not OK to do, and saying, as a community or as individuals, "These are my boundaries, when you can respect them we will talk." This has a double effect because some abusive people are unwilling or unable to work on it, and you accept that that's not going to happen in this lifetime. But even in setting a no-contact boundary one can be in interdependence. This takes a group or community that can be very clear in what the conditions of their return would look like.”
― Nora Samaran, Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture