Preparing Ourselves to Receive Reliable Love

An Interview with Quaker Minister Windy Cooler on Interpersonal Violence

On November 7, 2024, Windy Cooler, convener of Life and Power: Quaker Discernment on Abuse, announced the release of the outcome of that project: a common testimony, in which 41 Quakers answered the following query: Do we live in the virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of child abuse, intimate partner abuse, and all forms of violence within the family and community? The common testimony is a compilation of quotes from individual testimonies of survivors of interpersonal violence. The survivors spoke with trained volunteer listeners over the course of two years. Each person whose quotes were included explicitly gave permission for their words to be used.

Cooler, an embraced public minister who is a member of Sandy Spring (Md.) Meeting, envisions the common testimony as a tool to help meetings address interpersonal violence by promoting justice and its healing effect. The project provides a discernment process called “Coming Together for Continuing Revelation” to help meetings respond compassionately to violence.

Cooler joined Sandy Spring Meeting in 2019. She survived domestic violence in a Quaker home. She was asked to leave her previous meeting in the midst of upheaval related to the violence she experienced. Baltimore Yearly Meeting, of which Cooler is a member, in recent decades adopted the language of “embraced” ministry instead of recorded or released ministry. Sandy Spring Meeting currently embraces Cooler’s ministry. The embracement involves ongoing clearness, spiritual support through regular committee meetings, mutual accountability to the ministry, and regularly updated travel minutes. The meeting also has a fund for meeting members with a full-time call to embraced ministry.

Cooler’s next project is the Friends Public Ministry Incubator, under the care of Sandy Spring Meeting. The incubator’s mission is to increase local worshiping communities’ ability to support and be accountable to Quaker ministry through education, discernment, and spiritual support for all Friends in the ministry.

Friends Journal talked with Cooler via Zoom about Life and Power. The interview has been lightly edited.

Sharlee DiMenichi: How would you describe the training that listeners in the Life and Power project received to prepare them to hear survivors’ experiences?

Windy Cooler: We met for a number of hours on two occasions to practice the listening skills that we used in Life and Power. The process is one that [Quaker pastor] Margaret Webb (who was not a listener in this project) and I created in 2020 and 2021. We created the process for my supervised ministry that was a part of my master of divinity degree at Earlham School of Religion. I use this listening process to help Quaker communities that are in some kind of crisis or intractable conflict, and that’s what it was designed to address. More tools besides clearness committees and mediation seem to be in order in our communities.

This was the first group of people that I ever taught to be listeners. Since then, I have taught this process to others—but not specifically to be used around abuse—at Woodbrooke, Beacon Hill, and Friends General Conference Gathering. And there will be another six-week course coming up at Woodbrooke sometime in the spring.

It’s like the game Othello. On the game box, it says the game takes “minutes to learn and a lifetime to master.” The approach is culturally familiar but also very culturally foreign: it’s very foreign to the way that people naturally want to behave. I would say that the training really focuses on retraining ourselves to respond in a way that we have never been taught to respond when someone communicates their deepest truths to us. It’s necessary to solicit the deepest truths, reflect them back, and treat the focus person with the respect each deserves.

SD: When people were going through the process of retraining on how to respond, what were some of the things they had to unlearn?

WC: Listeners were selected because they had experience in therapeutic or pastoral care environments. The way that they were accustomed to listening was to be very responsive and conversational. They were used to asking a lot of questions during the focus person’s testimony. That is not something we do in this process. It’s really much more closely related to the Quaker clearness process than to any kind of therapeutic listening that they had previous experience with.

Listeners in this project had skin in the game and were very concerned about interpersonal violence in Quaker communities. The tendency to express outrage at what happened to the person in front of you—a person you may have a relationship with and yet had never heard their story before—was something that was very hard. It was hard for all of us to keep the urge to express outrage in check, but it was necessary: not because no one should express outrage, but in that role where you are listening and helping a person listen to themselves, you have to maintain your role as a mirror.

SD: What kind of debriefing and support did listeners participate in after hearing survivors’ stories?

WC: I did a very poor job of debriefing listeners, and I did a very poor job of having any kind of debriefing process for myself; that’s something I really regret. This was not because of lack of intention. We had talked about having a debriefing process; there were just no resources. The lack of [financial] resources available for this project—or any projects related to interpersonal violence in the Quaker world—really hurt it. It made the project go on for longer than we had intended; it was intended to be a one-year process, but it ended up being two years.

I can’t speak for other listeners, but I experienced a lot of stress because I didn’t have any kind of peer support or debriefing process set up for myself. Material poverty caused some of the project’s failures because everyone that was participating was a gig worker [who volunteered instead of working at a gig]. Every hour spent on this project is an hour that is taking food out of your mouth. We were unable to consistently compensate for the time. People were attracted to the work but not because of the hope of compensation: it was always very clear that there would be none. It became very hard, in reality, to choose to spend another hour on unpaid labor.

SD: How does the structured process prevent the shushing and eldering that Quakers might otherwise employ to suppress stories of abuse?

WC: The process is based, in part, on the trauma theory espoused by [psychiatrist and researcher] Judith Lewis Herman. She talks about creating spaces of safety, memory, and then reintegration. The listener restrains themself from making comments. The listener serves as a container and a mirror, restraining themself in order to create a sense of safety. They are creating a space of psychological safety in which the focus person can hear themself completely. Each focus person receives a typed copy of the testimony. It’s made very clear that nothing will ever happen with that testimony that they haven’t consented to. Anyone who was quoted in the common testimony explicitly gave me permission for that version of what they said to appear. Some people did not consent, so their testimony did not appear.

In the group process now available to meetings, someone is appointed to read aloud the common testimony twice to begin the first worship sharing session, in which people repeat back only what they heard. Someone who gave testimony or a survivor [of abuse] might be present in that session, and the other participants would likely not know that.

Having people repeat back only what they heard is a way of restraining some of the responses we typically get such as, Oh, that’s outrageous! I can’t believe that that happened to someone in our community! That didn’t happen in our community! Who are these people? I have just the solution. I have a story about my own survivorship.

These responses are not helpful. I have found in watching this process that shutting down all of that in that first worship sharing is enormously helpful in allowing everyone to hear and indicate they have heard by repeating back what they have heard. Often survivors have never been heard or have never attempted to be heard in their community. They can actually see that everyone is capable of hearing them when [those who listened] repeat back exactly what was said to them.

Repeating back what was said feels, I think, a little anxiety provoking in the moment; people may be primed to feel impatient. However, repetition is essential for creating the foundation for the kind of conversations they want to have later.

If you’ve ever talked to someone, been triggered by something [they had done], and they don’t acknowledge first that they hurt you, you’re not getting anywhere. This process lets survivors know that they have been heard. It also takes listeners out of that place of having been triggered; they go to a different place in their nervous system by saying, Oh, I heard this. They go to a place of curiosity instead of fight or flight where they can say, I see.

You then build on that curiosity by going into a second worship sharing, where only things that people are curious about are stated: only questions are offered. It’s really important—no matter how urgent those questions feel—for no one to attempt to answer them. It is important that you maintain the place of curiosity. And again, you can think about one-on-one relationships. If you’re talking and trying to vent your feelings and the other person immediately goes into problem solving, do you feel heard? Repeating back what has been said puts people in a place in their nervous system where they can actually act on Quaker theology, which is about listening, curiosity, and creating a new world.

It’s in the third session—which hopefully takes place after some food and rest, and someone who provides pastoral care is present—that people are allowed to speak conversationally with each other again. It’s a work session, but you’re not trying to come up in one hour with a solution to a multigenerational problem. Instead, the goal is to create a list of queries that will guide future work: intentional work in interpersonal violence, as the years go by.

The process brings to the fore interpersonal violence, which can take the form of sexual violence, racial violence, micro-aggressions, gender-based violence, domestic violence, elder abuse, and financial abuse. In fact, there are many ways we hurt each other in the world, and therefore in our meetings. The process allows us to build queries around these hurtful abuses that are specific to each community. I believe this is a better alternative than going to some expert organization that will tell you what the right answer is and that all that is needed is to check your boxes.

I’m critical of such externally based solutions because I’ve never actually seen them work in reality. I used to work in this way, and in the last couple of years, I’ve realized it doesn’t work. What happens in your nervous system when you engage that way—just checking boxes—is you’re not embodying the problem, and the problem is an embodied one. We all have experience with interpersonal violence. To be reminded of this experience, to go to that place of Quaker theology and culture that has drawn us together in our worshiping community, and to consider queries created while deeply listening is what the process is designed to do.

SD: What motivates Quakers to be reluctant to hold people accountable for upholding an abusive status quo?

WC: I actually have stopped using the language of accountability, so I’m glad you asked the question that way. I’m going to push back on it a little bit. I’m actually for accountability, but when I used to talk about it, I meant addressing the wrongdoer in some way, as in, why did you do this? And I hear that in your question too, but . . . why? Why are we upholding the status quo of interpersonal abuse? Why can’t we hold each other accountable to something different? That is now the way I hear language about accountability. I don’t want to be offensive, Sharlee, because I don’t really mean it in a bad way, but when I look at myself when I used to use that language, it was incurious or something. The question begins with why, so it sounds like curiosity, but it didn’t feel like it. It felt more like I was asking, why are you pissing me off? Why are you making me angry? That isn’t a curious question; it’s blaming. What this process does is acknowledge my own capacity for violence. It acknowledges everyone’s capacity for violence; it acknowledges our capacity to be victims; it acknowledges our vulnerabilities in radical ways. It’s a way of loving each other more completely, and I think that it’s very uncomfortable for us to love each other in that way.

I’m trying not to use a lot of psychobabble in my answers to you, as though it were a trauma workshop, but in my work as a trauma educator, I talk about attachment theory, which many people are familiar with. I think that people with secure attachments are very rare; I don’t know these people. Most of us are, to some degree or another, anxious or avoidant, which means we either cling too tightly to others and violate their boundaries or we run away from other people and refuse to let them in. And I think that the work toward becoming a more secure person and the work to become a more secure community is going to be deeply uncomfortable, because we have not experienced a world in which it is safe both to expect and to give reliable love. We have to be prepared to receive reliable love. This is not so much about holding people accountable as it is about opening up in order to create the environment in which we can be reliably loving to one another in the world as it really exists.

SD: What are some of the most important insights you gained from the research of Judith Brutz?

WC: I met Judy at a Friends General Conference Gathering several years ago. I had learned of her work from an elder at my meeting who had participated in Judy’s ministry about violence in the family. Judy had had a hard time of it. Back in the mid-1980s she published two peer-reviewed studies on interpersonal violence in Quaker families. We Quakers had as high a rate of interpersonal violence as any other population in the United States. In families where someone carried a peace ministry, it was actually higher. I have seen policies that were authored at that time in response to Judy’s work that prevented workshops on family violence. These policies are still actively in place.

[Editor’s note: Some Quaker organizations have formal written policies that state they will not host educational events about interpersonal abuse. There are also informal barriers to hosting such events. Some Quaker elders have experienced trauma when listening to survivors’ stories that detail Friends’ capacity for violence, according to Cooler. Survivors speaking of their experiences to their Quaker communities could demonstrate emotional dysregulation, and those listening to their stories were unprepared to support them, Cooler explained.]

Judy was a PhD sociologist. People who were not PhD sociologists told her that she must have done her research incorrectly. Eventually, she gave up the ministry. She died recently, I am sad to say. It is so important to name our elders and our peers in ministry, so I name Judy’s life and the impact of her work on her and our community.

The second Judith that is key to the Life and Power project is Judith Herman, who we were talking about earlier. Judith Herman changed my life. She’s one of the few authors where I can say, “I picked this book up as one person and put it down as a different person.”

Before I read her, I was convinced there could be a policy model for addressing interpersonal violence. As a survivor myself, I thought that if I could just find the perfect policy and convince other Friends to adopt it—a kind of technocratic approach—I thought I would feel heard. I think many of us in the Quaker community thought that we would be heard, if we could just find or write and implement the right policy.

There are many things that helped me to see that’s not true. For one thing, some Quaker meetings did begin to enact good policy, and it didn’t change anything. For another thing, I saw in her work something that felt true to me. She said trauma is not a psychiatric issue; it’s a justice issue. What she meant by justice was not holding people accountable necessarily or punishing them. To be more precise, it was about changing the world in a fundamental way: increasing our capacity to hear each other. She talks about how trauma is isolation: isolation from yourself, from your truth, and from your community, and the people that you need to love you.

I have added to this an understanding that it is also alienation from the Divine, which is a really serious thing. Quaker community is where the Divine is speaking to the Divine’s own self through our relationships. What does it mean to be a traumatized Quaker: to be separated from yourself, your community, and from God?

Dr. Herman’s treatment of trauma is about the community responding to trauma and re-absorbing the traumatized person intentionally. Her approach is one of commitment; it’s committed love. It’s staying the course with each other, and that’s what I think we’re here to do.

It entirely changed my frame of mind for approaching survivorship and also in recognizing that in the Quaker community we must increase survivors’ voices about violence. I’ve heard explicitly so many times that we don’t need to revisit the past; we only need to prevent future violence. Dr. Herman helped me to see the reason that idea felt wrong was because it was wrong: we will never prevent future instances of abuse if we can’t talk about abuse. How can we prevent something that is taboo to talk about? If you understand that trauma is ongoing violence against the people in our communities, to say that you can prevent future abuse without addressing the topic is nonsense, because it’s ongoing.

SD: Could you explain a bit more about the understanding of trauma not being a psychiatric issue but instead a justice issue?

WC: So what I understand Dr. Herman to be saying is an inherent criticism of psychiatry, which is interesting as it comes from a psychiatrist at Harvard. I share a concern about psychiatry, even though I’ve had lots of therapy. I love therapy and recommend it to people, as a matter of fact, but psychiatry focuses on the individual and on a person’s behavior. In the United States, psychiatry often takes the individual out of commitment and relationship with other people and puts them in a little chemical box that can be controlled. Justice is a more vague idea than medicine allows for. But Dr. Herman specifically talks about something called a “healing justice”—not a phrase she came up with—by which she means a world in which survivors (she calls them extraordinary survivors) can be in positions of leadership as whole people and help heal the world through the wisdom they have gained by surviving trauma. I think a world in which justice is present is a world in which we can fully, adequately, meaningfully love each other and bring each other into environments of growth and real peace.

SD: How do you explain the dearth of writing on how the peace testimony applies to family relationships?

WC: There’s the unvarnished version, which is about misogyny and racism. It is more comfortable to focus on what you perceive as the world outside of your family and community, and to project yourself into that. It is more difficult to take a good, hard look at yourself, your own behavior, your family, and your Quaker community. It’s not sexy to take a good, hard look at the people around you. There’s no reward for it, as you can see by the fact that I’ve spent 12 years of my life doing full-time, unpaid labor. When I ended that work, nobody came and threw a party for me; nobody gave me a Nobel Prize.

I don’t want to make this about me, but I am a good example. This was really hard work, and I’m not alone in it. There are dozens of Quakers in the United States also doing this hard work. We’ve lost our meetings; we’ve lost relationships; we’ve lost income; we’ve been made vulnerable by it. Why would anybody choose to do that?

It’s White supremacist behavior and male supremacist behavior to be concerned with what you can conquer: war on the outside versus what is slippery and difficult.

SD: What are some examples of how a meeting can respond in healing ways after going through the process of continuing revelation based on the common testimony?

WC: I have faith that if meetings become aware of this process and use it, they will come up with some creative stuff that I can’t foresee. I am entirely sincere when I say wisdom doesn’t come from outside of us; it comes from within us. I’m mostly curious about what can come of this when we experiment with it. I would like to see meetings become spaces where, first of all, we can actually talk to each other about our real-life experience and our individual relationships with violence.