Dr. Blake Suzelis, PhD, Mindbody Medicine
Today, I learned that my name and my business had been placed on a public list connected to a church community I attended and supported more than six years ago. The list was shared during Pride Month and framed as a way to identify businesses connected to organizations perceived as opposing inclusion and unity. When I first saw it, I had a few options — defend myself, attack back, stay silent, or become curious. I chose curiosity. Not because I believe public lists are harmless. Not because identity and belonging are not deeply important. And certainly not because conversations around exclusion and harm should be minimized or hurried past. I chose curiosity because moments like these — the ones that sting, the ones that reduce us, the ones that catch us off guard — often reveal something far deeper than the surface conflict. They reveal the architecture of how humans build identity, how we create belonging, how we generate division, and how we might, if we are willing, find our way toward growth.
This piece is not a defense. It is an exploration. And I want to take my time with it.
One of the strangest human experiences is realizing that another person is interacting with a version of you that no longer exists. Most of us know this feeling from multiple angles. A family member still sees the rebellious teenager. A former partner still sees through the lens of old pain. A community still carries the image of who we were when we belonged to it. And sometimes, painfully, we do this to ourselves — freezing our own story at a moment that no longer represents the whole truth. We freeze people because certainty feels safer than complexity. A fixed version of someone requires less from us. It doesn’t ask us to update, reconsider, or hold the uncomfortable reality that people are not static.
Six years ago, I attended a church that was meaningful to me during that season of my life. Today, my work and my values look genuinely different. My career centers on healing, connection, autonomy, human dignity, and reducing suffering. I support LGBTQ+ individuals and communities and believe deeply that people deserve safety, belonging, and the freedom to define their own path. Both of those statements are true. I attended there, and I evolved. The tension — the one that produces lists like the one I found my name on — emerges when our minds struggle to hold both simultaneously. When we need the story to be clean. When nuance feels like a threat to the cause. When the complexity of a person becomes an inconvenience to the certainty of a position.
Here is one of the most important things I have learned across years of clinical practice and my own internal work: humans rarely experience reality directly. We experience reality through lenses — and those lenses are built from everything that has shaped us. Family systems, religion, culture, trauma, nervous system patterning, communities, political identity, attachment histories, and experiences of inclusion and exclusion that reach back further than we can consciously trace. These lenses are not pathological. They are adaptive. Without them, the world would be overwhelming, and we would have no coherent way to navigate it. The problem begins not when we have lenses, but when we mistake our lens for reality itself. When this happens, complexity stops being information and starts feeling like a threat. Nuance becomes dangerous. And human beings — messy, evolving, contradictory human beings — get reduced to categories.
What’s worth sitting with here is that this process is not unique to any ideology, community, or movement. It is a feature of human psychology at its most frightened. The nervous system loves simplicity because simplicity signals safety. Pattern recognition is survival. But pattern recognition applied to people — especially people who have changed, or who hold more complexity than our current lens can accommodate — becomes a different kind of danger. It makes us confident when we should be curious. It makes us categorical when we should be relational.
Identity is not the enemy in this story. Humans need belonging. We need communities, values, traditions, and people who help us understand ourselves. Identity becomes more fragile, though, when it requires opposition to sustain itself. When belonging depends on having an outsider. When certainty depends on having an enemy. When safety requires simplifying another human being. We have a long cultural habit of defining ourselves through contrast: I am this because I am not that. I belong here because I do not belong there. My group is oriented toward good because another group is oriented toward harm. This is not a moral failure — it is a survival strategy. But survival strategies have costs, and the cost here is paid in the currency of complexity, nuance, and genuine relationship. When the boundary between “us” and “them” becomes the primary organizing principle of a community, the community begins to require an enemy to remain coherent. And that is a fragile architecture.
There is an idea I return to often in my work, one that shows up across therapeutic traditions, developmental frameworks, and the wisdom literature of virtually every culture: what we feed grows. Feed fear, and fear expands. Feed shame, and shame begins to organize not just individuals but entire communities — shaping norms, creating enforcement, determining who belongs and who doesn’t. Feed outrage, and outrage becomes an identity in itself, a lens so habituated that it eventually cannot perceive what exists outside it. But feed curiosity, and complexity becomes accessible. Feed relationship, and connection becomes possible. Feed genuine safety, and people begin to show you who they actually are rather than who the situation requires them to perform.
This does not mean avoiding difficult conversations. It does not mean pretending that differences do not matter or that harm is not real. It does not mean abandoning accountability, which is a genuine value and not the same thing as punishment. It means paying close attention to the emotional ecosystem we are creating — because ecosystems always grow what they are consistently fed, and because we are always, whether we intend it or not, feeding something.
The question underneath most polarized conversations is assumed to be: which side is right? But I want to suggest that there is a deeper, more generative question, one that requires more courage to ask. Not “who wins?” but “what are we growing together?” Not “which lens is correct?” but “what conditions produced these perspectives, and what do the needs underneath them tell us about what is missing?” This is not moral relativism. Moral relativism says all perspectives are equally valid and lets us off the hook of discernment. What I am pointing toward is something different: complexity. The recognition that human beings experiencing the world through different identity lenses will often arrive at positions that feel unquestionably true from within those lenses, and that from a wider vantage point, both positions may contain important information while simultaneously missing something essential.
I think about this in terms of what my own framework calls the Five Returns — the recurring territories of human development through which we move, regress, and move again throughout our lives. When we operate from fear and fragmentation — the ground state of a nervous system under threat — we sort quickly. Friend or enemy. Safe or unsafe. Us or them. This is not evil. It is biology. But it is costly, because fragmentation eventually disconnects us not only from others, but also from the complexity within ourselves. We become smaller than we actually are. We mistake the contracted version of our experience for the whole of it. And we begin building communities that reward contraction, that mistake certainty for wisdom, and that treat the discomfort of complexity as evidence of moral compromise.
The movement I find myself most interested in — both in my own life and in the work I do — is the one that runs in the other direction. Fear toward curiosity. Fragmentation toward connection. Contraction toward expansion. Not as a one-time achievement, but as a recurring practice, a willingness to keep moving toward greater capacity rather than settling into the comfort of a smaller world.
What happened to me this week was small in the scheme of things. My name on a list is not suffering. But it is a mirror, and I have found that the wisest response to mirrors is to look into them rather than away. What I see reflected there is something genuinely worth caring about: the ease with which any of us — regardless of our stated values — can reduce another person to a symbol, can organize around opposition, can mistake our lens for truth and our certainty for virtue. I have done this. I will likely do it again. The practice is not perfection. The practice is noticing.
I am not asking anyone to agree with me. I am not asking people to ignore history, to minimize harm, or to pretend that identity and belonging are not among the most precious and vulnerable dimensions of human experience. What I am asking — of myself, and perhaps of anyone reading this — is simpler and harder than any of that. Become curious about the lenses you inherited. Become curious about the stories you automatically trust. Become curious about who benefits when humans remain divided, when complexity is treated as a threat, when the frozen version of a person is more useful than the living one. Become curious about what you are feeding, and what that feeding is growing.
Because what we feed grows. If we feed certainty without curiosity, division grows, and it grows in every direction simultaneously, including inward. If we feed shame, fear organizes community — and communities organized by fear eventually become unrecognizable to themselves. But if we feed genuine relationship, if we create the conditions for people to be met in their complexity rather than reduced to their category, something different becomes possible. Not agreement. Not the erasure of difference. Not a forced peace that papers over real wounds. Something more durable than any of that.
Unity, I have come to believe, is not sameness. Unity is the capacity to belong without sameness. To preserve the humanity of another person while disagreeing with them. To allow growth — in others and in ourselves — without requiring that it conform to the timeline or the form we expected. Unity does not eliminate necessary boundaries. It does not ask us to be silent about harm or to remain in relationship with what genuinely threatens our safety. But it does ask something harder than either silence or separation. It asks: can I hold difference without immediately reaching for domination, dismissal, or distance? Can I remain curious when certainty would be easier? Can I see the person rather than the category, even when the category is real, even when the stakes are high?
Sometimes the honest answer is no. Sometimes safety requires distance, and that is not a failure — that is wisdom. But if our only available response to difference becomes separation, we will find ourselves in an increasingly fragmented world, and we will have fed that fragmentation with the full force of our conviction. I don’t think any of us actually want that. I think most of us want something that feels like the future worth building: one where difference is survivable, where complexity is welcomed, and where being human with one another — seeing differently, belonging anyway — is treated not as naivety, but as the most difficult and most necessary work there is.
That is what I am choosing to feed. And I believe, with everything I have learned, that what we feed grows.
Sending love and hugs!
