The Art and Science of Othering

When we other something… we cease to feel its pain, its connection, its relationship to ourselves.

The other morning when I came down the stairs, there in the middle of the floor was a little mouse struggling to get across the room. A foot or two away from it was my very satisfied looking cat, lazily waiting for it to move quickly enough to be interesting again.

I assessed the situation and just like that, I was in the middle of a very old decision process. I could let nature take its course, as is often said, and walk away. Or I could gather this tiny, frightened thing up, and decide to protect and preserve.

To be honest, I dread moments like this, the pause, the threshold between two doors or two worlds. Making the “right” choice.

One choice was a simple course of action. I could other this mouse. I could decide it was just a pest, just a problem, just a not-mine sort of creature, and then doing nothing at all would cost me nothing at all. The cat or time would handle the situation.

The alternative asked something a little harder, if for no other reason than it asked for me to take responsibility for something other than myself. It asked me to pull the mouse across some invisible line, over to the side where my own belong, the side I look after. Of course, me being me, my heart won out. The poor thing was so frightened and clearly had an injured leg, so I gathered her up and whipped into ‘mend and tend.’

But what stayed with me afterward wasn’t the rescue. It was how easy the first choice had been. How close it was. How quietly it had offered itself to me. The simple act of othering.

So now I’m going to be a little mischievous, and then I promise we’ll get back to the intention of this blog.

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Othering is a magnificent skill.

It makes life so much easier. I mean, once you learn to file something under other, it stops asking anything of you. There goes the guilt, for one, since you can’t really wrong a thing you’ve decided doesn’t count. There goes the hard work of values, because now the line does all your moral reasoning for you. And there goes empathy, that expensive, tiring habit of feeling somebody or something else’s pain inside your own body. Othering is the great labor-saving device of the human heart. It lets us eat without grieving, build without mourning, and win without ever once counting the cost to whoever, or whatever, happened to land on the far side of the line.

Truly, it is its own art.

And yet as simple as it seems. It bears a very BIG cost. One that is often not realized until it is too late. So, thank goodness that every now and then a small, broken creature looks up at you from your living room floor, and the line goes see-through. And you make the choice of same, of self, of connection.

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We come by it honestly

Here is what I find so terrible and beautiful about all this conversation. We don’t learn to other because something is wrong with us. We learn it because something is right.

There’s a point in our human development, somewhere around a year and a half old, when a little one draws that line for the very first time. You can watch it happen on any playground. A toddler grabs a toy, discovers a thrilling and slightly terrible new word, mine, and just like that the whole architecture of me and not-me clicks into place.

It isn’t a flaw. It’s a milestone. We clap for it the way we clap for first steps, because a child who can’t yet tell herself from the world can’t really survive in it. In this first innocent form, othering is the scaffolding we build a self on.

It’s incredibly important to develop, what we refer to as ego strength. It is ego-strength that helps navigate the world without falling into addictions, harmful relationships, cults, or other social dynamics that attempt to rule our autonomy through external influence. It is a step to maturity. But the next level of maturity is to understand that it is just one layer of the foundation of our humanity. That we are only truly successful as an entity if we recognize our interdependence. Like a living system, both internally and externally, reciprocity and connection is how we thrive.

A line can be a gift before it becomes a wound

Think for a moment about your own immune system. Every cell in your body wears a kind of little name tag, and your immune system spends its whole life reading those tags. Self, self, self, and then, not-self. That quiet reading is what keeps you alive. A body that couldn’t tell itself from an intruder wouldn’t last a day.

But you already know what happens when that same beautiful machinery gets confused. We call it autoimmune disease, and it’s the body turning its defenses against its own tissue, attacking itself as though it were a stranger. Nothing actually broke. The body simply lost track of where it ended.

Othering works in just the same way. The ability to say that is not me is a gift. Pointed at a real threat, it protects you. Pointed at the wrong thing, at a neighbor, a stranger, a forest, it quietly begins to take apart the very body it was meant to keep safe.

The warm chemistry of “us”

We tend to think of othering as a thought, something that lives up in our opinions and beliefs. But it’s older than that, and a good deal more physical. It actually lives in our chemistry.

When you bond with someone, your baby, your partner, your people, a hormone called oxytocin rises, and it feels like warmth and trust and belonging. We’ve nicknamed it the love hormone, which is sweet, but it’s only half the story. Because oxytocin doesn’t just draw a soft circle around the ones you love. It also sharpens the edge of that circle. The very same molecule that melts you toward your own can stiffen you against everyone outside it. It whispers these are mine, and in the very same breath, those are not.

And the rest of the body plays right along. Your amygdala notices the unfamiliar face a beat faster than the familiar one. A little dopamine rewards the warm click of belonging. Cortisol readies you for trouble the second “they” appear over the hill. None of this makes you a bad person. It’s an old, old friend-or-foe circuit, shaped over hundreds of thousands of years of small bands staying alive by knowing who was family and who was danger.

Here’s the catch, though. That circuit never checks who you point it at. It will draw the line around anything you hand it. A mouse. A species. A coastline. And once something lands on the not-us side of that line, something a little chilling becomes possible. We can hurt it without flinching.

How we othered the whole living world

And this, gently, is where it touches the thing I most want to talk with you about.

Somewhere along the way, we did to the living world exactly what the toddler does to the toy, and what the confused immune system does to its own body. We set nature down on the other side of the line.

Just listen to the way we talk. We “use” resources. We “manage” land. We “get out into” nature, as though it were a room we don’t actually live in. We call it the environment, the thing that’s around us, surrounding us, outside of us. A backdrop. A supply closet. A pretty place to recharge before we head back to real life. All of that is the language of being in nature. Nature as a place you visit. An other you can stand inside of without ever quite belonging to.

And once nature is other, harming it costs us almost nothing in the heart. You don’t grieve a clear-cut hillside the way you’d grieve a wound to your own body, because you’ve already tucked that hillside safely away under “not me.” The damage doesn’t usually come from abject cruelty. It comes from a simple, honest mistake about where we begin and end. Most of us aren’t cruel to the world. We’ve just forgotten that it is us.

Most of us aren’t cruel to the world. We’ve just forgotten that it is us.

From in to with

The difference between being in nature and being with nature is really the difference between a stranger and kin.

In keeps the line drawn. I am here, it is there, I’m standing inside of it but I’m separate from it. “With” dissolves the line. The breath you’re taking right this moment was made for you by trees. The water moving through your blood was, not so long ago, a cloud. The minerals in your bones were once plain stone in the ground. Being with nature isn’t a pretty sentiment we tell ourselves. It’s simply a more honest accounting of the facts. That line we drew was always a little bit make-believe.

And this is the deeper, slower work, the soul-level work that growing up actually asks of us. The toddler has to other in order to build a self and thank goodness they do. But the grown-up gets to learn, on purpose, how to un-other. Not to erase every distinction, because you still need to know yourself from an intruder, and that’s just good health. But to stop mistaking different from me for less than me, or for outside of me.

You could call what we’re reaching for coherence. A self that’s whole enough to stand on its own, and soft enough at the edges to remember that it was never really separate from the world that made it.

The whole practice, hidden in one little word

If all of this feels like a lot, let me leave you with the smallest possible place to begin. It lives in a single word.

This week, just notice how often you say you’re going in to nature. And then, as a gentle experiment, try trading that word for with. A walk with the woods. An afternoon with the river. It may feel strange at first, that strangeness is the line itself, showing you exactly where you drew it. Every time the word catches, you’ve found one more place where you quietly filed the living world under “other.”

That’s really the whole practice. Not one grand reconciliation, but ten thousand tiny re-memberings, putting back together what was never meant to be cut apart.

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And then you are responsible

But here is the part nobody quite warns you about. The moment you pull something across the line, the moment you decide it is yours and not other, you have quietly signed up for something.

Remember how generous othering was, how it let us off every hook? No guilt, no agonizing over values, no costly empathy. Well, un-othering hands the whole bill right back to you. And the name written on that bill is responsibility.

I know this because of the mouse.

I didn’t, in the end, let her go. Her leg never healed the way it needed to, and a little creature who can’t run doesn’t last long out there on her own. So she lives here now, in a specialized habitat we built just for her, warm and fed and watched over. She is, officially, part of mine. Not mine to own. Mine to be responsible for.

And that is what crossing the line actually costs. You don’t simply get to feel a lovely rush of kinship and then walk away glowing. You become accountable. The forest you stop othering becomes a forest you now have to help tend. The neighbor you stop othering becomes a neighbor whose troubles are suddenly, a little bit, your own. To stop othering the living world is to quietly agree that its wounds are, in some real way, yours to help mend.

It really would be so much easier to other. I told you, it’s a magnificent skill.

But every single day still hands me a million small chances. To other, or not. The pest, or the creature I cradle in my hands. The stranger, or the neighbor. The resource, or the kin. And underneath every one of them sits the same quiet question, the one I get to answer again, and again, and again.

Not only, which will I choose.

But, what will I take responsibility for?

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Dr. Stephanie Shelburne is the Executive Director of The New England School of Bioenergetic Medicine and the creator of Your Sacred Metabolism®. She writes from her farm in New England, where a recently rescued mouse now lives in a small habitat of her own.