when echo stopped calling: on the wound beneath the wound, and why love feels so hard right now

Let me ask you something before we get into all of this.

Do you actually like the opposite sex? Not love in the way we perform it for the camera. Not the highlight reel we curate while the relationship is burning in the next room. I mean down in the body. In the quiet. Do you trust them? Do you feel safe with them? Do you believe, somewhere beneath all the strategy and the armor and the carefully managed distance, that they see you and mean you well?

Take a second with that. Because I think a lot of us, if we got honest, would have to put the phone down and stare at the ceiling for a minute.

In 2024, a question went viral that stopped me cold as a clinician. Women were asked: if you were alone in the woods, would you rather encounter a random man or a bear? The majority answered without hesitation.

The bear.

But it was one woman's reason that I have not been able to set down since. She said she would choose the bear because if the bear attacked her and she survived, everybody would believe her. But if a man attacked her and she survived, she would spend the rest of her life trying to get people to believe her.

Read that again. Slowly. Let it land.

That is not a woman who hates men. That is a woman fluent in a mathematics she never asked to learn. A calculus of danger that was written into her nervous system long before she had words for it. And the thing that breaks my heart as someone who has sat across from human pain in a clinical setting for years is this: she is not wrong. The numbers bear her out. The history bears her out. The text messages and the police reports and the silence of women who did not survive to tell their story bear her out.

That is a statement about what relation has become.

And before you decide this is only about women and men, sit with this. Her answer made sense to almost everyone who heard it. Even the men who got defensive knew, somewhere beneath the offense, that she was not entirely wrong. That the question had touched something real in them too. Something they had been required to become. Something that had been asked of them in the name of manhood that cost them more than they were told it would.

Narcissus never threatened Echo either. He simply could not see her. And she disappeared anyway.

That is where this conversation begins.

The Myth

There Was a Wound Before the Pool

You know the story. Beautiful young man. Finds a still pool of water. Falls in love with his own reflection. Wastes away on the bank, staring, reaching, unable to touch the thing he cannot stop wanting. We took his name and turned it into a diagnosis. A word we use for the difficult people in our lives. The ones who seem to love only themselves.

But we almost always skip the part of the story that matters most.

There was a wound before the pool.

Before Narcissus ever knelt at that water, there was Echo. And Echo was not a minor character. She was the possibility of everything he could have had. She loved him. She sought him out across hills and through forests. She offered him the most ancient and irreplaceable gift one human being can offer another. The experience of being truly met. Of having someone turn toward you and say with their whole self: I see you. I am glad you are here.

And he turned away.

Not with violence. Not with cruelty in the obvious sense. But with something that in some ways is harder to name and harder to heal. An impermeability. A closed door where a heart was supposed to be. She wasted away until nothing remained of her but sound. A voice without a body. A love with nowhere left to land.

She became an echo.

Which is to say,

she became what happens to love

when it has nowhere left to go.

The gods did not punish Narcissus for being beautiful. They responded to what he did to Echo. To what he did to the possibility of genuine relation. And the punishment was precise in the way that only grief can be precise. He was given a love that could never be consummated. Never be disrupted. Never require anything real from him. A love that would never say no, never leave, never grow beyond what he needed it to be.

He was given himself. Only himself. Forever.

He did not fall in love with himself. He fell in love with an image that could not disrupt him. Could not wound him. Could not ask him to become more than he already was. That is not vanity. That is the portrait of a man who learned somewhere early that being truly seen was the most dangerous thing in the world.

I want us to hold that image. Because we are going to return to it. Again and again through this piece. Because Narcissus is not one man in a Greek myth. He is a pattern that lives in our bedrooms and our boardrooms and our megachurches and our legislatures. And the pool is not just water. It is any reflection we choose over the terrifying, necessary, transformative risk of real relation.

The Before

When the Self Was Not Enough of a God

There was a world before patriarchy. I know that can sound like something somebody says at a rally. But I am talking about archaeology. About what scholars have dug out of the actual earth with their actual hands.

Merlin Stone, in her landmark work When God Was a Woman, documented that the earliest human spiritual frameworks were organized around a feminine creative principle. Not because women were in charge and men were not. But because the way people understood the sacred was rooted in what the feminine held. Birth. Cycles. The body. The earth. Death and regeneration. The understanding, written into the bones of ancient culture, that nothing exists alone. That the self is always already in relation to something larger than itself.

In those frameworks the earth was not a resource. She was mother. And you do not extract from your mother without consequence. You receive what she offers and you return what you owe. That is relation. That is reciprocity. That is the original operating system of human consciousness.

And in that world there was Asherah.

She stood in the temples.

Her sacred poles beside the altar of YHWH,

not as competitor but as complement,

the way night holds the same sky as day,

the way the womb holds the same miracle as the seed.

She was the earth that received the rain.

She was the place where the holy came to rest.

Archaeologist Marija Gimbutas spent her life excavating the pre-patriarchal world and found her everywhere. In the figurines. In the temples. In the way ancient peoples buried their dead facing the earth like children returning to a mother's arms.

And then she was erased.

Not gradually. Not peacefully. In the Hebrew scriptures you can track the exact moment. The Deuteronomic reforms under King Josiah. Political consolidation. Nation building. The priests who held institutional power needed a God that reflected and sanctioned that power. And Asherah, the divine feminine, the presence that said the sacred lives in the body, in the earth, in the reciprocal web of all living things, was violently purged from the temple.

Her poles were cut down. Her altars destroyed. Her name removed from the text.

And into the silence where she stood

they wrote a woman named Eve.

Who was made from a man's rib,

who was made for a man's loneliness,

who was handed a garden and a warning

and blamed for everything that came after.

Had Asherah remained, the text might have given us a woman who was not an afterthought but an origin. Not a cautionary tale but a co-creator. Not the reason for the fall but a partner in the rising. We cannot know what that world would have looked like. But we can feel the shape of what we lost in the world we inherited.

Because here is what the erasure of the divine feminine actually installed.

When the divine becomes exclusively male and transcendent, above creation rather than woven through it, the earth loses her sacred status. She is no longer mother. She is material. She is no longer a participant in a holy exchange. She is a resource waiting to be used. And everything the feminine principle once held as sacred. The body. The cycles. The relational web. The understanding that worth is inherent and not earned. All of it becomes suspect. Lesser. In need of control.

The masculinization of God was not a theological accident. It was a political architecture.

Think about what that phrase means. The image of God is never only about God. It is always also a mirror that a society holds up to its own power arrangements and says: this is natural. This is ordained. This is simply the order of things. Look. Even God agrees.

And here is where the ground shifts beneath everything we think we know about gender.

Patriarchy is not fundamentally about gender. I need you to sit with that before we move on.

Patriarchy is about what gets to have inherent worth and what must earn its worth from an external authority.

Think about what inherent worth means. It means you do not have to justify your existence. You do not have to produce, perform, comply, achieve, or contort yourself into an acceptable shape in order to deserve care, dignity, protection, and a place at the table. You simply are. And that is enough. That is what the feminine principle held before it was erased. The earth did not earn its worth. The body did not earn its worth. The child did not earn its worth. Worth was intrinsic. Non-negotiable. Written into the nature of the thing itself.

Patriarchy replaced that with a different economy entirely. Worth became something external. Something granted by an authority positioned above you. And that authority, whether it took the form of God, king, father, master, employer, or market, always had the power to give worth or withhold it. Always required something in return. Always held the threat of its removal just close enough to keep you reaching.

Now watch how far that architecture travels.

The woman who must be beautiful enough, compliant enough, fertile enough to deserve protection. The Black man who must be respectable enough, exceptional enough, non-threatening enough to deserve basic humanity. The child who must be obedient enough, quiet enough, useful enough to deserve love. The earth that must be productive enough to justify its existence rather than simply being the sacred ground we stand on.

All of them moved from the category of inherent worth into the category of conditional worth. All of them standing before an authority that gets to decide, on any given day, whether they have earned enough.

That is not a gender story. That is the oldest power story in human history. And once you see it you cannot unsee it. Because you begin to understand that dismantling patriarchy is not a women's issue. It is a human emergency. Because any system that makes worth conditional makes genuine relation impossible.

You cannot truly connect with someone you are constantly auditioning for.

The Wound That Traveled

Chattel, Colonization, and the Operating System of the Soul

Something has to already be broken in a psyche that looks at another human being and sees livestock.

We say that plainly here. Because the tradition of softening this truth in the name of comfort has cost us too much already.

The transatlantic slave trade was not simply an economic arrangement. It was the full-scale installation of a new operating system into human consciousness. One in which relation was replaced by transaction. In which another person's interior life, their dreams, their grief, their love, their sacred humanity, was made entirely irrelevant to their value.

Their value was what they could produce. What they could endure. What could be extracted from them before they were used up.

And here is the part that almost never gets said in polite company.

Other cultures that kept animals understood those animals as participants in a sacred exchange. You care for the animal. The animal gives what it gives. There is reciprocity even across species. There is relation. The indigenous peoples that European colonizers encountered across this globe treated the land, the animals, the water, with more reverence and more relational intelligence than the colonizers brought to other human beings.

Which tells us something devastating about the colonizer.

Chattel slavery did not just dehumanize the enslaved. It revealed a dehumanization in the enslaver that was already deep in the bone. You do not arrive at the capacity to own a person, to sell their children on an auction block, to assault their bodies as a matter of routine administration, without having already done something catastrophic to your own interior life. That capacity is not born. It is built. Slowly. Carefully. Generation by generation. Each one passing down a slightly more anesthetized relationship to the reality of the person standing in front of them.

And here I want to speak to something that makes some people uncomfortable. Because whenever the history of enslavement comes up, there is always someone who says: my family was here but they were poor. They never owned anyone.

I hear you. And I want you to hear this.

The poor white family who never owned a single enslaved person was still inside the system. The overseer who enforced the rules did not need a deed of ownership to participate in the machinery of terror.

The patroller who chased runaways through swamps in the middle of the night was not wealthy. The neighbor who returned an escaped person to bondage for a reward was barely surviving himself.

The farmer who sold grain to the plantation, the merchant who financed the ship, the seamstress who sewed the clothes that the master's wife wore to church on Sunday while an enslaved woman nursed her child, all of them were threaded into the web.

The system had a genius for making complicity feel like survival. For making participation feel like neutrality. For making the bystander feel innocent simply because they did not hold the whip themselves.

No one who benefited from the arrangement was innocent. And the wound that arrangement installed did not ask for a deed of ownership before it moved into a person's consciousness and made its home there.

The slave master's wife knew.

She has always known.

And the fact that she organized her entire life around protecting the fiction of her husband's righteousness tells you everything about what her wound required of her.

She needed the structure more than she needed the truth.

She needed the hierarchy more than she needed her own dignity.

That is not simple moral cowardice.

That is the psychology of a woman whose entire sense of worth was contingent on her position within a system that demanded her silence as the price of her belonging.

She is also staring at the pool. Just from a different shore. And the pool is lying to her too.

Frantz Fanon, the psychiatrist and philosopher, mapped what colonization does not just to material conditions but to the interior life of a people. The colonized begin to desire what the colonizer has. Including the colonizer's way of being in the world. Dominance reads as strength. Tenderness gets coded as weakness. Volatility masquerades as passion. Control gets called leadership. The aggressor's psychology becomes the aspirational standard without anyone ever voting on it.

Albert Memmi showed us the other side of that same coin in The Colonizer and the Colonized. The colonizer needs the colonized to be less than human in order to live with what he is doing. And in constructing that story, in rehearsing it every day, in building entire institutions to confirm it, he loses something in himself he can never fully recover. He becomes fluent in a language that has no word for the other person's soul.

Anna Freud called the mechanism identification with the aggressor. When a child cannot escape a threatening presence, one survival strategy is to become them. To take on their logic. Their posture. Their way of moving through the world. If I become the thing that frightened me, I am no longer only its victim. I am also, in some terrifying way, its heir.

Multiply that across generations. Multiply it across an entire people. And you begin to feel the weight of what we are navigating right now.

The Wound We Carry

Survival Narcissism and the Armor That Outlived the War

When I watch the conversation happening on social media about whether Black men and women actually love each other, I do not see a community that has failed.

I see a community wearing armor that kept their ancestors alive. And nobody told them the war was over. Nobody gave them a space safe enough, consistent enough, trustworthy enough to begin the slow and terrifying work of taking it off.

Here is what enslavement did to the basic architecture of Black family life. The parent could not protect the child. Think about what it means to hold a baby in your arms and know that your love for that child is not enough to keep them. That someone can walk through your door and take everything you love and there is not a law in the land that will help you. The partner could not protect the partner. The people who were supposed to be your safe harbor were as exposed as you were. Often more so.

In that world the only reliable territory was the interior. What I can secure right now. What I can hold onto today. Because tomorrow that person might be gone.

And so we learned to hold ourselves

the way you hold something

you know will be taken.

Loosely.

With one hand already letting go.

What reads as selfishness from the outside is often that inheritance running. The fixation with what I need, what I want, what I am not getting, that looks like narcissism in our relationships today, may in many cases be the logical output of people who learned across generations that vulnerability was not a pathway to connection. It was a pathway to loss.

This is not a character flaw.

This is armor.

And armor does not know when the battle is over. Armor just keeps doing the only thing armor knows how to do.

Sigmund Freud identified what he called repetition compulsion. The way people unconsciously recreate the conditions of their earliest wounds in their adult relationships. Not because they want to suffer. Because the psyche is still trying, across decades and relationships and heartbreaks, to finally get it right. To finally be enough for the cold parent. To finally get the volatile one to choose gentleness. To finally win the love that was always just out of reach.

We call it dysfunction from the outside. From the inside it is the most stubborn, misdirected, exhausted form of hope you have ever seen.

And then there is the commodification thread. The idea, installed so deep it feels like nature, that you are only as valuable as what you produce. What you provide. What can be extracted from you before you are replaced by someone who can give more.

Getting the bag is not just ambition anymore. For many people it is existential proof that they matter. That they have worth. That they are enough. And when that logic moves into our most intimate spaces, people stop asking what do I feel when I am with you and start asking what do you do for me. They stop asking who are we becoming together and start calculating the transaction.

Manipulation, minimization, using people up, these stop being symptoms of pathology and start being called just how the game goes.

The community that was once organized around ubuntu, the African philosophical principle that says I am because we are, begins to mirror the very operating system that colonized it.

And we wonder why love is so hard.

The Wound We Gave Away

Hip-Hop, the Church, and the Commodification of Healing

Hip-hop was born in the Bronx. In communities that had been systematically stripped, redlined, abandoned, and rendered invisible by the same city that would later sell their culture to the world at full retail price.

And what it did in its earliest form was holy.

It gave the wound a voice.

We are here.

We see what has been done to us.

We have something to say

and we will not be quiet about it.

Come to the cipher.

Everybody gets a turn.

That was not entertainment. That was the griot tradition alive in a South Bronx park at two in the morning. The ancient African function of the community's truth-teller, the one who holds the memory when everyone else is too exhausted or too afraid to carry it. When Grandmaster Flash stood at a turntable and made music out of the breaks, that was Echo finding her voice. That was the community saying we still exist. We still have something worth saying. We are still here.

And then the industry heard it.

And the industry did what the operating system of commodification always does when it encounters something sacred. It extracted the voice. Packaged the wound. Sold the pain back to the community at a profit. And promoted the most destructive versions as the most authentic, because destruction is easier to sell than healing. Healing asks something of the listener. Destruction just needs a speaker loud enough.

The cipher became a product. The griot became a brand. And a generation of young people learned that the way to be seen was not to speak truth but to perform trauma in the key of whatever moves units this quarter.

We see the same pattern in the church.

When a Black megachurch locks its doors and will not release the congregation until a financial threshold is met, the easy and satisfying diagnosis is greed. But I want to offer the harder and more compassionate one.

Because I am a clinician before I am a critic, and the clinical eye does not stop at the behavior. It goes looking for the wound behind the wound.

That pastor was once a little boy.

A little boy who grew up Black in America, which means a little boy who learned early and repeatedly that his presence was conditional. That his worth was negotiable. That the room was not always glad he was in it. He felt invisible in ways that left marks no one could see. And somewhere in that invisibility he made a decision, the way wounded children make decisions, not with their minds but with their survival instincts: I will build a room where I cannot be ignored. I will become someone whose absence is felt. I will make them see me.

And he did. He built the room. He filled it. He stood at the front of it every Sunday and felt, for the length of a sermon, like the wound was finally healed.

But a wound you perform your way around is not a wound you have healed. It is a wound you have learned to manage. And management requires an audience. The congregation becomes the object in the pool. The reflection that confirms he exists. That he matters. That he is finally, finally enough.

And the heartbreak is this. Many of the people in those pews carry the same wound. Which is exactly why the dynamic holds as long as it does. They recognize the hunger. They have felt it in their own chest on too many nights to count. They came to church looking for the same thing he is performing. And for a moment, on a good Sunday, it almost feels like what they were looking for.

This is not only a Black church story.

When a white evangelical pastor supports policies that cage children at a border while preaching the gospel of a brown-skinned refugee child born to an unwed mother in an occupied territory, that is not hypocrisy in the simple sense. Hypocrisy implies the person knows the difference and chooses wrong anyway. What we are witnessing is something more complete and more chilling than hypocrisy. It is a total severing between the words of a tradition and the interior transformation that tradition was designed to produce. The words stayed. The capacity to feel the other person as real, as sacred, as deserving of the same grace, never arrived.

When people who call themselves followers of a radical love tradition chant in the streets that they will not be replaced, what you are hearing underneath the rage is the terror of a self that was never securely attached to anything real. And so it anchored itself to whiteness. To a hierarchy that confirmed their worth by confirming others had less. Threaten that arrangement and you do not just threaten their politics. You threaten the only self they know how to be.

That is not a political statement at its root. That is an attachment wound wearing a flag.

The Wound on Both Sides of the River

The Bear, the Phone, and the Oldest Weapon in the Room

We need to return to the woman in the woods. Because the conversation is more complicated than it first appears, and the complication is important.

Most women who answered that question chose the bear out of genuine, embodied, statistically grounded fear. Fear that lives in the body before it lives in the mind. Fear that was learned, not imagined.

The United Nations has documented that nearly one in three women globally have experienced physical or sexual violence. Those are not hypothetical numbers. Those are the women in your family. In your congregation. In your building. Some of them are you.

And that fear does not sort itself neatly by race or class. It lands in the body of every woman who has ever calculated whether it is safe to walk to her car alone. Every woman who has gripped her keys differently after dark. Every woman who has smiled at a man she was afraid of because she learned young that not smiling could be more dangerous than smiling.

But there is another woman in this story. And she requires her own examination.

She is the woman who reaches for her phone not because she is afraid. But because she knows exactly what that phone can do.

She does not reach for it out of fear.

She reaches for it out of full knowledge

of who answers when she calls

and what they will do when they arrive

and whose word they will believe

before the first question is asked.

The woman who calls the police on a Black man asking her to leash her dog in a public park. The woman who dials 911 on Black children running a lemonade stand. The woman whose voice shakes perfectly on the recording while her eyes remain entirely clear. She is not confused about the power differential she is operating within. She is counting on it. Her tears are not weakness. They are the most precisely deployed weapon in an arsenal she has been quietly refining her whole life.

That is not vulnerability. That is acknowledged privilege performing vulnerability. Watch me, she is saying without saying it. Watch what my distress can do. Watch what happens when I cry in this country and you are standing next to me.

Now here is the thing that this piece refuses to let us do. It refuses to let us simply swap the villain.

Because that woman is also staring at the pool. She is also carrying a wound. The wound of a woman who was taught that her power could only be exercised through the performance of powerlessness. Who learned that direct authority was for men and that her access to protection required her to be, or appear to be, in need of it. That is its own diminishment. That is its own cage. It does not excuse the harm she causes. Not even close. But it locates the harm inside a system that is wounding everyone it touches, just with different weapons and different consequences.

The woman genuinely afraid in the woods.

The woman weaponizing her tears.

The Black man who has been on the wrong end of that phone call.

The white man who built the system that answers it.

All of them are downstream of the same rupture. All of them are living in a world where the capacity for genuine relation has been systematically eroded by centuries of decisions about whose body matters, whose fear is credible, whose humanity is negotiable, and who gets to decide.

The Species Wound

Jane Elliott Was Right. There Is Only One Race.

Jane Elliott, the educator who spent her life holding a mirror up to American racism, said something that has never left me. There is only one race. The human race.

And right now that race is in trouble.

In my clinical work with people of significant wealth and privilege, one of the things I encounter most consistently is not arrogance. It is numbness. A quiet, bewildered inability to feel what they know intellectually they should feel. A life of extraordinary material comfort that somehow, persistently, does not feel like enough. A vague and nameless grief that follows them into rooms that should feel like arrival.

I want to name what that is.

When generations accumulate insulation from consequence, when a person is raised in a world engineered to never require them to genuinely reckon with how they land on another human being, the empathy circuitry atrophies. Not from malice. From disuse. You cannot feel your way into another person's reality if the system around you spent a century making that unnecessary and the system before that called it dangerous.

Narcissus at the pool.

Surrounded by everything.

Starving.

And unable to name what he hungers for

because the pool never taught him

there was a word for it.

The word was Echo.

The word was us.

The community shaped by enslavement develops what I am calling survival narcissism. The collapse inward because outward was never safe. The community that enacted the enslavement develops what we might call entitlement narcissism. The inability to see outward because the system was structured across centuries to make that seeing unnecessary and even threatening to the story they needed to tell about themselves.

Both are staring at the pool. Both have lost Echo. Both are isolated inside their own reflection and calling it the whole world.

This is not a racial crisis.

This is a species in the late stages of a wound it has never fully named.

Playing out simultaneously in every community, every church, every kitchen, every bedroom, every comment section where someone is asking why love feels so impossible right now.

People are not building lives together the way they once did. And I do not believe for a single moment that it is because love has gone out of fashion. I believe it is because the template for love has been so thoroughly contaminated by the transactional operating system that many people genuinely do not know what non-transactional intimacy feels like. They have never been held in it long enough to trust it. Their nervous systems were never taught that it was safe to stop performing and simply be.

Narcissus does not build a life with Echo. He cannot. She requires reciprocity. She requires presence. She requires that he look up from the water long enough to see that something real is standing right behind him.

And the pool only requires his gaze.

The Balm

Echo Is Still Calling

A bomb destroys what is there.

A balm enters the wound.

Those are two very different things. And I need you to know which one you just read.

This is not a piece of accusation. This is not a space where we rank whose suffering is more legitimate or assign grades of guilt or argue about who started it across the centuries. That is the pool talking. That is Narcissus mistaking his reflection for the whole world and calling it analysis.

Nativ Elementz is a space of remembering.

Because healing, in the IFA tradition and in the deepest currents of every indigenous wisdom framework that survived the centuries-long attempt to erase it, is not the acquisition of something new. It is the restoration of something that was always already there. Beneath the armor. Beneath the transaction.

Beneath the performance and the strategy and the carefully managed distance we call modern relating.

The felt sense that the person in front of you is real. That their interior life is as full and as sacred as yours. That you are in relation to them rather than in dominion over them. That the self only becomes fully itself when it is genuinely witnessed by another.

The diaspora and the global majority are my home. This work is rooted there and it begins there.

But the balm is not only for us.

Because the wound is not only in us. The operating system of commodification, of extraction, of the self as the only real thing, runs in everyone it has touched regardless of the skin of the person carrying it. A formerly colonized community that achieves the colonizer's psychology and calls it liberation is Narcissus moving from one side of the pool to the other.

The pool is still the problem.

We either go together or none of us gets there.

Somewhere in the old story, in the space between Narcissus and his reflection, Echo is still out there. Still in the hills. Still holding the last word anyone spoke to her. Still carrying the sound of a love that had nowhere to land.

Still waiting.

Not as a sound that bounces back unchanged.

As a voice that calls someone home.

As the community that goes looking

for the one who got lost at the water's edge

and says, without judgment, without transaction,

without requiring you to be healed

before you are held:

We see you.

Come back.

You were never meant to be enough for yourself alone.

That is the work.

That is the remembering.

That is what we are here for.