173: The Dark Side of the "Community Culture" Nobody Talks About

Everyone needs community. Everyone should have it. I talk to women about the impact of this ideologic prison that we put ourselves in. We are not mature enough to engage in intentional and elective community because there are just too many projections. There's too much repair required and there's too much fodder for our triggers. If you don't agree to a set of beliefs, There isn't enough of a shared reality to even easily make simple executive and administrative decisions, let alone to better your quality of life. So here's the thing. No one is coming to turn you on. Not your husband, not the right mood, not the right moment, not good weather. Contrary to popular belief, turn on is a skill. It's not something that just happens to you. It's something you can actually learn. And when you do, you live in a world of yes, of possibilities and of sweetness. 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You drop a celebration blast in the comments across any of the platforms, something you're excited about, proud of, or loving about yourself, and you start it with the phrase, my blast. This product is all of my skincare dreams come true, so I cannot wait to get it in your hands. Hi and welcome back to Reclamation Radio. I'm Dr. Kelly Brogan. And today I want to talk about community, this celebrated and sought after concept and how I am relating to it these days. And this may be, as my daughters would say, a bit of a cold take. I don't know how relatable this is. But I just know that I enjoy kind of poking the assumptions around so many of these default reflexively embraced concepts. And I think community is one of them. Like everyone needs community. Everyone should have it. It's always an amazing thing to be a part of. and we should be building it. Okay. So a long time ago, I read an extraordinary book called The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller. I highly recommend it. I've referenced it in my own books. And he talks about grief and specifically something that he refers to as the community wound. And when I read this, I felt that a deep ache inside of me that I'd probably been carrying for my entire life had a name. And this is not personal to me. He would argue that this is one of the cardinal sources of anguish, pain, sadness, and of course sorrow that humans experience. And he says, you know, we are designed to wake up to 40 sets of eyes that can hold a concept of who we are even as we falter in identifying with our own strengths, our own capacity, our own potential. So I went about finding my community, establishing my so-called tribe. And when I moved to Miami, I met a, it's almost like I hand-selected a glorious group of mamas from the Waldorf School that I initially put my girls into, we did. And these women are still my friends today. And the way that they supported my feminine embodiment journey and my experience of motherhood as a role, as an archetype that I had not previously foregrounded because I was in my career woman moment while I was practicing in New York was extraordinary. Okay, so this was essential for my soul journey. And the plandemic years also invited forth the opportunity to coalesce and even like hunker down or create some sort of barracks with like-minded individuals, like-hearted individuals, and to start embracing intentional community. And I had these visions of my daughters, you know, kind of free-ranging, running around with other conscious parents. And my then partner and I really did what we could to establish this. At that time, however, I detonated a sort of bomb in my small group of holistic mom friends. And it had to do with values, right, and holistic health. And I was seeing things differently than some of the women in our small group. And it felt like a deal breaker to me. So I was in the position to sort of establish this group. And at the same time, I had established Vital Life Project, which was the membership and one of the, I think, first pre-established memberships on the scene, on the sovereignty scene during the pandemic years. And so it's one thing when you create the community and you are in a position to set forth the ethos. However, unlike my digital membership, my real life community of moms, there was never a discussion about the ethos we were signing on to. It was all assumed. And I think that this is one of the first ways that community can be exposed for its projection screen potential, right? Where everybody is experiencing it as fulfilling some sort of parental or familial role that it was never really designed to fulfill. Your parents have a role, your siblings have a role, and then extended family has a role and friends have a role. And they're not interchangeable, right? That's where projection, I think, comes in. And so it was one thing for me to sort of spearhead some of these initiatives. Of course, then I get to be in control of what everybody is participating in, right? I am the one who is putting the tablets down that you are going to be referencing as you conduct yourself. So there were a number of years where I had beautiful experiences in community. I was also part of my dear friend's ecstatic dance community, and that was a huge part of my life. I felt just extraordinary opening in my heart space, and I also really wanted my daughters to participate. Now, interestingly, because I had around that time written a book called Own Yourself, my daughters would frequently remind me that they are owning themselves as they would say no to, you know, the Sunday ecstatic dance I thought was so important for them to attend and they didn't feel like it. So already there were little indications that the experience of community was not necessarily what I was fantasizing that it could be. And it also wasn't what would be emergent from a big family right So this like big family experience So as the rupture occurred in my personal life and I was able to see where I was in idealization and then of course that rupture happens and it like all of the glittering lights get turned off and you see with more sober eyes whether or not it ever was what you thought it was and whether or not you want to persist and continue in the same vein and usually it's time for restructuring. It's time for a reorientation, reprioritization, and a reclamation of responsibility for, in this case, my role in these strained dynamics. So I then went through a period of prioritizing my specific relationships over any sort of group. And I still carried in my heart the yearning for this kind of conscious community experience. And I would pay attention, right? Because this was through the early pandemic years, and I would pay attention to conscious communities that were cropping up. And I would learn over the months and sometimes years that they never really worked out the way that people intended to, right? So these are communities that were built on sovereign principles and beliefs and values and there would be interpersonal conflicts that would end up taking down the whole operation. And so I came to the preliminary conclusion that we are not collectively and many of us individually mature enough as adults to engage in intentional and elective community. Because there are just too many projections, there's too much repair required, and there's too much fodder for our triggers. And when these communities are not comprised of interdependent families that are co-located through some sort of heritage or ancestry, these are almost like man-made communities. And they have a very beautiful intention typically. But this is a whole new, I guess it's not. It's probably been since the 60s and 70s people have been trying to do this. But it is a horizon that I feel like we can begin to pass through once we have matured emotionally. And it's really just coming into the zeitgeist that this is even a concept, radical personal responsibility for our relational experiences, for example, and what inner work is required to get to that place dynamically. So I had a conversation with my friend Alyssa, who will be on Reclamation Radio chats discussing this very topic with me, and who's already been a guest on Reclamation Radio. And she's really the only one I know who has a community around her that seems to be really thriving. For example, in her postpartum weeks, she had her community around her doing laundry and delivering her meals for weeks on end. And this is like a fantasy that most women will never access or imagine would be, you know, all of the sort of challenges that we have as women receiving that would be activated, right? Like, oh, my gosh, you know, I'm burdening these people. It's like too much for them. And my sense in listening to her and you'll hear for yourself is that this is just the expectation, right? It's a sufficient rather than a scarcity-minded collective of people who just understand that supporting each other is a part of the deal. She also shares Christian values with these moms. They gather together with their kids. They are building together, literally and figuratively. And when she was describing this for me, of course, I felt that ache, right? I felt like, wow, it would have been so extraordinary to raise my daughters in that kind of environment. And for myself, hello, not to be living in a box by myself a lot of my life, which I've said many times I think is biologically totally unnatural for women, especially. and yet I became aware, as she was describing this to me, of the part that has absolutely no interest in this whatsoever and is likely the part responsible for the fact that I have what I want, meaning that I don't actually want to be a part of a community. And I talked to that part and I started to really inquire and explore, you know. So I became aware of some of the arguments against community that this part might have been holding over the years. And they have to do with my creative freedom, right? So the permission that I might have to change. And listen, I'm a double Gemini. I don't know how relatable this is, but I know that women are very dynamic beings and that the permission to change and evolve and become and become again and pivot and try on new costumes and jump timelines and experience the different flavors of femininity. I don't know. That's why I came here and I see it even in my own daughters, like what it is to just have permission to not be consistent and to not necessarily stay in the prescribed role. To me, this is feminine expression. And much of the time, this is not a desirable trait for a community that is investing in a static set of agreements and values and, moreover, beliefs, perspectives, even opinions. Especially in this intentional community world. However, this is well described in family dynamics, right? So you're a family of origin. When you emancipate and go on your individuation journey, you are moving beyond the pale. That's part of why maturing into your individuality and actualizing in that way can be terrifying because it often means that you are going to code switch, that you are no longer going to play the same role in your family that you all potentially subconsciously, semi-consciously prescribed for you to play. So when you are the eldest golden child, good daughter, and you break bad, it's going to be extremely disruptive. So you've probably heard about diversifying investments and saving for the future. But what about becoming your own bank and opting out of high interest loans and difficult decisions about whether to sell off an asset? But as a single woman and a mother, my whole system exhaled when I learned about the specific and unique whole life insurance policies that my now friends Josh and Ken offer. So unlike crypto stocks and even gold, you can borrow the money that you invest in this policy even days after you deposit it. You can actually choose never to pay it back because it comes off of the death benefit which is exponentially more than you put in over the years And your policy keeps compounding and growing as if you didn touch it There nothing else based on my research not one other type of investment that allows for that. Every other investment or asset depreciates the minute you liquidate it. And by the way, try not paying back your home loan or HELOC. The strategy is super flexible and it's super low stress. These guys go above and beyond to make sure that you and your family are set up with the best policy. And I've now referred them hundreds of folks who have given me the same feedback. I'm pretty skilled, I think, at attracting sleeper resources that are game changing. So I am delighted to put you on. Go listen to episode 153 of Reclamation Radio. We unpack the whole thing in a way that makes sense. And if you want someone to run the numbers of your specific situation, book a free call with my friends Josh and Ken over at kellybroganmd.com forward slash whole. There could even be punishment associated with that, right? Because you need to stay in your lane and in your character. And so if you are somebody who is like a black sheep in your family, it may be the case that what I'm saying is relatable and that finding your place in community comes both with the satisfaction of belonging, the fulfillment of that primary need, but also with a sense of constraint and also with the possibility that whatever made you a black sheep in the first place could continue to be a black sheep. to guide your development and evolution as a person, and you might find yourself shifting and changing in ways that the group you have now, you know, pledged allegiance to may not abide, may not appreciate. And when I think about, you know, even sovereignty-oriented beliefs that I have traveled an arc of. Let's say I had joined some sort of residential community around lawful principles, and that we were going to be a voluntarist community, and we were going to uphold a lot of the teachings of, I don't know, common law, let's say. And we were going to uphold certain lawful principles. Well, there was a time in my life where I spent a good bit of my vital force energy learning about common law, learning about later equity, learning about these sort of revised perspective on our legal structures and different jurisdictional realities. This felt really, really important to me and really, really true. And then I saw the, I essentially got roped into what I would call a sovereign scam. And I saw the dark underbelly of this so-called movement. Well, my priorities had also shifted and I stopped being a devotee of this worldview and this ethos. Well, that would require me to revisit my participation, let's say, in that residential community and whether it even made sense to me. But obviously, I wouldn't have that freedom to interrogate the very premises of what I was participating in because the whole community is built on that. And so this is obviously where cults come in and the idea that you could be punished for exiting, for leaving, and that you must sacrifice your autonomous self, your individual identity for the greater good of the belief field, for the greater good of the group, of the whole. And I think because so much of our shadow material is still, you know, still hanging with density in the room, so to speak, I'm not really sure how ready we are as a collective to even engage these kinds of endeavors. However, for me personally, because I evolve and I have rested into many different priorities and hierarchies of my attention, let's say, like things that are important to me at any given time, the inability to freely change my mind, to freely shift perspectives and to value different things seems implied. when it comes to this idea of intentional community. And I'm talking about values-based communities, but it gets even weirder in college, right? Like a liberal arts college where you have pretty much nothing in common with these folks at all, other than that you're all willing to pay some version of $90,000 a year to be neoliberally brainwashed. Just kidding. Anyway, the idea of just sort of collecting people into community without an actual value system at the core of what you are consenting to participate in is even weirder, right? Like I'm in an HOA and I live with these folks and it's really nice actually to have neighbors and I know their names and can ask them a favor here and there. And that's fantastic. And we have nothing in common. Okay. And so there are, I'm the vice president, and there are many, many conflicts in this small HOA community because we haven't signed on to some sort of shared value system, perspective, or priorities. So you have both the issue that when you agree to a certain set of beliefs, if somebody diverges, that can be problematic. And then if you don't agree to a set of beliefs, it's at baseline incoherent. And there isn't enough of a shared reality to even easily make simple executive and administrative decisions, let alone to better your quality of life together and through each other. So I'm going to shift gears a little bit and talk about how this applies to entrepreneurship. because in entrepreneurship, digital I should say, entrepreneurship, but not necessarily just that, recurring passive quote-unquote revenue is and has been like the holy grail. So many of me and my colleagues start memberships and subscription models. And it's always touted as an almost implied obvious solution to your problems that you should be a part of community, right? And that being a part of like-minded and like-hearted community, I've used that phrase many, many times over the course of my years in the digital business world. And it's assumed that that's valuable to you, right? Of course you want that. You want to be able to, what? Complain about anybody who is not like you. And you want to be able to do it with people who will understand, right? And then of course, maybe there's the light side where you just want to be able to tap into resources that are uniquely available through others who are living the same kind of life. And I'm not saying that this is inherently flawed or has been exposed for the bankruptcy of the promise of community fulfilling any of your actual human needs. I'm just saying that I see it differently now. So I set up a community called Vital Life Project. It's been through a whole life cycle, I would say. And now it's something that I offer to anybody who is working on to support outcomes that we facilitate through one coaching So whether it in health or in relationships or in business or in beauty I have now defaulted to the dyad that I departed from when I left my clinical practice. I now understand we're still there. We're still there. And we can rebrand it from master, student, guru, follower, parent, child to just mentor. So you put yourself in the position to interact with somebody who has more of the skills that you're interested in embodying than you do. And the permission field is expanded. You scale up and now you have an expanded sense of who you are. So that's the beauty of one-on-one coaching. and the community is really just people who are working towards a given outcome. I'm an outcomes girl, okay? They're working towards a given outcome and it is meant to be simply supportive of that. So it's not meant to actually heal a wound in and of itself. It turns out that many of us are still apt to treat even an online community as a surrogate family and that a lot of similar issues can come up. And then we are like coalescing what could potentially be a constraining set of commitments. Right. So in the beauty backroom offer that has been very, very alive for me lately, I talk to women about the impact of this ideologic prison that we put ourselves in. So these women, they have reclaimed their health. They have worked on their, taken responsibility for their role in their relationships as wives, as mothers. They have healed, if you want to use that word, their nervous system so that they have capacity to receive and to be responsive to the demands of different types of life dynamics, to interact with adversity, with curiosity. So they've done this quote unquote work. And now we are exploring the role of beauty through regenerative aesthetics together. And when I talk about this, I ask, so what have you been doing to support your adornment, your beauty? Are you getting facials? Are you using a red light mask? Are you working with injectables or surgery? Do you have serums that you love? Do you have a routine? Do you have no routine, right? What are you doing? And there are a lot of the women who, it seems, feel the need to explain to me why they might be doing something that doesn't exactly fit with their holistic, wellness, girly belief system, right? And the cult of wellness and in my case, radical holistic wellness that they subscribe to. Who knows when, back when, five years ago, let's say. And then there are some women, it's almost like they want to reassure me that they absolutely wouldn't do something because that wouldn't, like surgery, let's say, plastic surgery, because that wouldn't be loving to themselves, right? Like almost these tropes that they've taken on. And so what I offer is my perspective, which is that when it comes to beauty, right, your biological expression of feminine radiance, what if you just do the things that you want to do and you don't do the things that you don't want to do? What if you just really honor your yes and your no with no validation, explanation, or fitting it neatly into the litigation level brief that explains why you have permission to interest yourself or not interest yourself in any given relationship to your own aesthetic expression? And so I get to see what these ideologic chains can do to distort our native impulses and these little seedlings of interest and preferences that women enjoy, would otherwise enjoy. And I am in a moment anyway myself where I feel quite liberated to do something because I want to and not do something because I do not want to. whereas when I was more entrenched in different communities and again, all these communities would splinter off because there would be the health freedom community and then there are the ones that believe in germ theory and the ones that don't, that believe in viruses and the ones that don't and then there are the ones that are voluntarist anarchists and the ones that are pro-MAGA or whatever. So they just infinitely splinter And that's because these ideologies, I remember that Tom Cowan told me, if you marry someone, let's say, and all you share is ideology, but you don't have a shared project, right? Like he and his wife take care of their animals and, you know, he works the land. A shared project is something that weaves the life force that each of you bring to the relationship together. And ideologies shift and change. So what does a community even look like that is founded on these ideologic principles and values that the participants may mature beyond or out of? Like, how does it cohere? And, you know, the extrapolation from the family model isn't really that easy to understand, right? So a family that has all of these different relational tendrils, right? So the cousins and the aunts and the uncles and all of those eyes, that wider village that we are potentially biologically expectant around, right? If that's not here and we're in modular family homes and growing up in boxes in relative isolation, then how do we meet this need? How do we address the community wound that Francis Weller talks about? Well, I don't know the answer, folks. However, my sense is that we're still in the inside job, right? Inside job moment of maturation. And that's why I focus mostly on really clearing the channel so that you can read your no and honor it. and you can read your yes and honor it. That you can develop mastery over your inner experience so that bringing it to any sort of dynamic relationship, even in a dyad, let alone a greater collective and group, is something that you are resourced to navigate without losing yourself so that you can enjoy the twin pillars of autonomy and connection. just not sure that we're totally there yet. I'd love to know what you think and to what extent this is relatable and to what extent it's just the 10,000 different personas I incarnated to play with in this lifetime and the sometimes less populated path I walk because of it. All right, until next time. Thank you.