When the Pendulum Swings: Why I Don’t Lean Left or Right — I Lean Inward
- Jody Valkyrie | Healing Artist
- Jan 10
- 5 min read
When it comes to politics, I stand fairly neutral—not because I lack values, but because my values aren’t something I outsource.
When the scales shift, I don’t lean left or right.
I lean inward.
In my life and in my practice, I work with the body, with trauma, and with the parts of people we’re often taught to disown—fear, anger, power, grief, and our capacity for responsibility. I’ve learned that healing doesn’t come from choosing sides. It comes from learning how to stay regulated when the system around you isn’t.
Regulation doesn’t mean suppression or forced calm. It doesn’t mean bypassing emotion or pretending everything is fine. Regulation means the nervous system has enough safety to pause—to feel without being hijacked, to stay present long enough to choose a response instead of reacting on reflex. It’s the difference between bracing and breathing. Between collapse and capacity.
This lens changes everything.
I don’t believe light exists to erase darkness. I don’t believe shadow is a flaw. Both have purpose. Both are necessary.
Systems—whether bodies, families, or cultures—don’t break down because shadow exists. They break down because shadow is denied.
When shadow is denied, empathy narrows, compassion turns sentimental, and discernment hardens into judgment. People stop seeing whole humans and start sorting each other into “good” and “bad.” Complexity becomes dangerous. Nuance feels like betrayal. Intention becomes a moral shield, while impact is minimized or ignored.
Brittle systems shatter.
Integrated systems adapt.
Politics isn’t just ideology. It lives in nervous systems.
When people feel regulated—safe enough internally—they can tolerate disagreement. They can hold nuance. They can see that most human behavior lives somewhere between intention and impact, choice and circumstance. They can stay curious without collapsing or attacking.
This is where three essential capacities come online together:
Empathy allows us to feel into another person’s experience without becoming fused to it.
Compassion allows us to care about that experience while still holding boundaries.
Discernment allows us to see the wider field—context, patterns, power, and consequence.
When these three work together, ethics mature.
And this is where a hard truth enters:
Intentions matter—but outcomes matter more.
Good intentions don’t undo harm. They don’t repair impact. They don’t absolve responsibility. A regulated system can hold empathy for intention and accountability for outcome at the same time. An unregulated one cannot. It must choose a side—either excusing harm because it was “meant well,” or punishing people without regard for humanity.
Maturity holds both.
But it gives priority to impact, because impact is where people actually experience harm or healing.
When threat rises—through rapid cultural change, loss of trust, economic pressure, or moral upheaval—regulation drops. Empathy becomes selective. Discernment collapses. Certainty starts to feel safer than truth.
Winning the argument becomes more important than ethical behavior.
Pride becomes more important than admitting the truth.
That’s when the pendulum swings.
History moves this way not because people fail to learn, but because humans respond to instability predictably. Periods of rigid control provoke rebellion. Periods of loosened norms provoke a hunger for order. What feels different now isn’t the pattern—it’s the pace.
Information moves faster than meaning can settle. Outrage travels farther than reflection. And dysregulated systems reach for the fastest regulator available.
Certainty.
This is where values lose their balance.
Empathy without regulation becomes emotional contagion—feeling with others so intensely that clarity disappears. Compassion without discernment becomes enabling—protecting people from the very consequences that might help them change. Discernment without empathy becomes cruelty—correctness stripped of humanity.
Each collapse is an attempt to manage fear by narrowing perception.
True empathy feels another’s pain without absorbing it—without carrying what isn’t ours.
True compassion sees the whole person—their humanity and their responsibility.
True discernment evaluates outcomes, not just intentions.
When outcome is ignored, harm continues under the banner of goodness.
When intent is ignored, people are reduced to their worst moment.
Mature ethics hold both, grounded in what our choices actually leave behind.
This is where political distortions emerge.
Toxic liberalism isn’t empathy—it’s unregulated empathy, where emotional identification replaces clarity and accountability threatens belonging. Virtue signaling becomes more soothing than actually reducing harm.
Toxic conservatism isn’t responsibility—it’s responsibility stripped of empathic awareness, where punishment replaces repair and control substitutes for wisdom.
They appear opposed, but they’re mirrors. One dilutes truth for social safety; the other erases humanity for authority.
Neither reflects regulated moral strength.
What often goes unnamed in these conversations is the role of shadow.
Anger, aggression, desire, fear, dominance—these aren’t moral defects. They’re survival energies. They exist to protect, to assert, to survive. Regulation doesn’t eliminate them; it allows them to move without taking over.
Empathy that refuses to acknowledge shadow becomes naïve.
Discernment that refuses to acknowledge shadow becomes punitive.
When cultures insist they’ve transcended shadow, those forces don’t disappear. They go underground—returning as moral coercion, manipulation, and persecution.
Some of the most destructive systems in history weren’t built by people who lacked empathy. They were built by those who treated good intentions as a substitute for responsibility.
Under sustained stress, systems regress. Political systems begin to resemble dysfunctional families. Roles harden. Scapegoats carry blame. Golden children are shielded from consequence. Rescuers gain identity through being needed. Enforcers believe rigidity prevents collapse.
These aren’t moral positions.
They’re trauma responses—attempts to regulate chaos externally when internal regulation is lost.
At that point, people stop defending ideas and start defending belonging. Outcomes are rationalized as long as intentions sound pure.
This is how radicalization happens—not because people crave extremism, but because empathy collapses into allegiance and discernment collapses into certainty.
Shame accelerates everything.
Shame doesn’t regulate systems. It overwhelms them. It pushes people out of reflection and into performance. Once belonging depends on moral conformity, accountability disappears—and so does learning.
This is as true in families as it is in cultures.
So what actually de-escalates a traumatized system without collapsing it?
Not force.
Not persuasion.
Not moral victory.
De-escalation comes from restoring regulation—clear boundaries, predictable consequences, slower pace, and returned agency. From separating behavior from identity. From allowing disagreement without exile. From leaders and communities who can hold intention and outcome without panicking or boasting.
It’s quiet work. It’s slow. It doesn’t trend.
And it’s the only thing that works.
This is why I lean inward.
Working with bodies teaches you that force creates resistance, suppression creates symptoms, and unexamined intention creates blind spots. Regulation creates safety. Safety creates capacity. Capacity creates change.
I don’t believe peace comes from being right. I believe it comes from being responsible for impact—including our own.
When the pendulum swings, chasing it only adds force.
I anchor—and choose presence instead.
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