Season 5, Episode 3: Anticipatory Intelligence and Anxiety with Rebecca Wheeler Walston

Trigger Warning: Proceed only if you are comfortable with potentially sensitive topics.

This is not psychological advice, service, or prescriptive treatment for anxiety or depression. The content related to descriptions of depression, anxiety, or despair may be upsetting or triggering, but are clearly not exhaustive. If you should feel symptoms of depression and/or anxiety, please seek professional mental health services, or contact (in Kitsap County) Kitsap Mobile Crisis Team at  1-888-910-0416. The line is staffed by professionals who are trained to determine the level of crisis services needed. Depending on the need, this may include dispatching the KMHS Mobile Crisis Outreach Team for emergency assessment. 

In the Words and Voice of Rebecca W. Walston:

Anticipatory intelligence  is a phrase that I heard at a seminar talking about racial trauma. The speaker whose name I can't remember, was talking about this idea of a kind of intelligence that is often developed by marginalized people. And because this was a seminar on racial trauma in the United States, her examples were all primarily around racialized experiences as the United States understand that sense of racialized society. And so the idea of anticipatory intelligence is the amount of effort or energy that we put in emotionally, mentally, psychologically, to anticipating how our bodies and the stories that they represent will be received in a space that we are in before we get there.

Speaker 1 (00:18):

Welcome to the Arise podcast, conversations on faith, race, justice, gender, and spirituality. In this episode, I get to interview my dear friend, Rebecca Wheeler Walston, and we are talking about anticipatory intelligence. I think all of us, or at least most of the people I speak with lately when I'm like, how are you doing? They're like, and they're like, well, that's a complicated answer. And it definitely is. There's an underlying sense of unease, of discontent, of just a lack of surety, about what is going to come next in the new year that I think I haven't felt for a long time. The collective sense that I have right now as you listen to this episode and take a sneak peek into some of the conversations Rebecca and I have had for a while, I encourage you to be kind to your body Again. I've put in previous episodes, resources, get out, get mental health care, spend time with friends, play, go play pickleball, get out in the snow, read a good book, text a friend, call a friend.

(01:37):

Do the things that connect you back to life giving activities. Find your spiritual practices, light candles, take a bath. All these things that therapists often say are helpful. I mean, maybe it's you go hug a tree or put your feet, your literal bare feet in the dirt. I don't know what it is for you, but leaning on the people and the resources in your area and also leaning on things that connect you back to groundedness, to feeling in your body. And so those are the things that I do. I enjoy lately eating Honey Nut Cheerios. Sounds weird. I love Dry Honey Nut Cheerios. I don't know why, but I let myself indulge in that. So again, I'm not prescribing anything to anyone. This is not a prescription, a diagnosis, a treatment plan. It is saying, how can you find ways to ground yourself in really good healthy ways that you can actually care for your good body?

(02:50):

I don't enjoy talking about anxiety. I don't love it. In fact, talking about it sometimes I feel really anxious in the moment my heart starts pounding, I get sweaty hands, et cetera. And yet there is something grounding for me about stepping into shared realities with my friends or neighbor, colleague or family. And so this is a reality that Rebecca and I have been talking about. What is anticipatory intelligence? And I'm going to let her jump in and start it off here. Hey, Rebecca, I know you and I chat a lot, and part of our talks are