A Conversation with Windy Cooler
Ever been in a meeting for business when people had argued, over months or years, about the color of the carpet or where the piano should go? And in a mild Quakerly way, shot daggers at each other as they left meeting? It’s easier to argue over seemingly small issues than the deeper problem, often involving relationships.
Windy Cooler, a member of Sandy Spring Meeting in Baltimore Yearly Meeting, has developed an effective way for meetings and churches to listen to each other on these deeper issues. It’s based on Quaker traditions like open worship as well as trauma theory, and lets people talk about the hardest issues in a safe and inviting way. She has been using it in Quaker communities in crisis for three years now.
In this interview with me, she talks about her story that led to this ministry. Judith Herman writes in her book Truth and Repair that “some extraordinary survivors, recognizing that their suffering is part of a much larger social problem, are able to transform the meaning of their trauma by making their stories a gift to others and by joining with others to seek a better world." "They develop," she continues, "what my colleague and friend Robert Jay Lifton has called a ‘survivor mission.’”
Windy Cooler is indeed an “extraordinary survivor.”
In some places, reading her story is a hard go. Ultimately, her story is redemptive. In her own words, it’s resurrection.
Windy has traveled widely among Friends with a concern for communities in crisis and Quaker family life. She was co-editor of Friends Journal’s news section (2018-23), the Pendle Hill 2020 Cadbury Scholar, a 2022-23 fellow of the interfaith NGO Odyssey Impact program and is a current doctoral candidate at Lancaster Theological Seminary. She recently served as the convener of Testimonies to Mercy, a seven-part traveling retreat series on the future of Quakerism, and continues to serve Life and Power, an international discernment project on abuse. She holds a Master of Divinity from Earlham School of Religion.
Here’s our conversation, lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
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Windy Cooler
So can I just ramble on a little bit?
Judy Maurer
Totally. People say the best things when they ramble.
Windy Cooler
Okay. For a little over a decade, I have carried a concern for interpersonal violence in Quaker communities. I define violence as any kind of coercion, coercive behavior, violating someone's right to consent or ability to consent; violence is when we use our power to overpower others. I define violence pretty broadly.
This came out of my experience of domestic violence. We were both attenders at that time of the same meeting, my former spouse and I, who is also the father of my children.
At the time I had a really hard time recognizing that as domestic violence. I grew up in a really chaotic, abusive home. This didn't look like that. This was a lot of control. This was a lot of not knowing where any money was. This was often being told that no one liked me, until I began to self-isolate, and became dangerously depressed. He would often say that he was sorry to tell me that yet another person didn't like me. It sounds like schoolyard bullying, as I look back on it, and it just sounds ridiculous.
Judy Maurer
It really doesn't sound ridiculous at all.
Windy Cooler
It was just a lot of emotional and financial abuse that I just didn't consider as abuse. At the time, I thought abuse is when someone threatens to shoot you. I thought abuse is when you think you're going to die. I just wanted to die.
I did actually become suicidal. Then I called a friend of mine.
I was just crying. This is the first time I had checked with someone who he had said disliked me. She just listened to me for a while, and she said, “Wendy, I didn't say any such thing. You need to ask yourself why your husband and the father of your children would tell you that I said something like that, even if I did.” Then she said, “I think you're in an abusive marriage, and I’ve been thinking this for years. I need to tell you that you're being abused.”
I couldn't believe it. I really thought that the sun rose and set with my husband. He was the child of a philosophy professor. He had been to Harvard. I had been a teenage mother. I came from a working class family. He was everything I thought was good in the world, and I was everything I thought was bad in the world. So how could he be abusing me?
Windy Cooler
He had all the power in our relationship by this time. I was a union organizer. So I thought of myself as being strong. It doesn’t sound like I was being strong here. But it was very important to my self-concept that I was not the sort of person that was ever going to be abused again. It is amazing how delusional people can be. I look back on this, and this doesn't make any sense at all. But that's where I was.
Judy Maurer
It makes a lot of sense to me.
Windy Cooler
So I read some books about emotional abuse, recognized it and confronted my spouse. That was the first time he was physically violent with me - when I confronted him. We went to therapy. I felt very proud of myself for handling this quietly. I felt very mature. I didn't tell anyone. Then he admitted in therapy that he had a problem with control. We agreed to separate, and we agreed on the terms of our separation. When we did separate, the abuse intensified, until it was unmistakably abuse by anyone’s definition.
He began to kidnap our six year old. He would pick him up from school and just disappear with him. The first time he did that I thought he had killed him. I went to the police. At midnight, he called me and said, I don't know why you have the police looking for me. I'm his father. I can do anything I want, and let this be a lesson to you. That was because I was divorcing him.
Judy Maurer
I am sorry. This is textbook.
Windy Cooler
Yes. Now I know it is! He cleaned out our bank account and was basically like “Good luck paying your mortgage.” It was astonishing. I went to the meeting that we both attended, to tell them for the first time about what was happening in my life. I went to the pastoral care committee and said in complete shame, “I need several thousand dollars. I'm in trouble, and this is what's going on.”
They did give me the money immediately, much to their credit, but they also asked me to leave the meeting.
Judy Maurer
Why?
Windy Cooler
They said that they could not keep me safe at meeting, and that it was not their job to interfere in situations like this. In fact, they married him to another member of the meeting under their care, without asking anything about the abuse allegations. His new spouse also has children.
That's the person they kept. They also said that if I were to stay in the meeting, it would make people uncomfortable. A few days after the first time, he took our son from school, and the police were involved. I had gone to meeting and he was there and he came up to me and he hugged me, and he asked me how I was as if I was mentally ill. Or that's how I interpreted it. It was very patronizing. And I told him to go fuck himself. Not once, but about 30 times. I really just had no control, and he was perfectly controlled. He knew what he was doing. So I had a public outburst and I screamed the F word, and all he had done right then was hug me.
Note: I did communications and fundraising for three years for a project to end abuse in faith communities. Her story, including her abuser getting her to lose control in public, is all very familiar to me. I also gave talks to churches on identifying and responding to intimate partner abuse. In every church, from conservative evangelical to progressive, including Quaker churches, I found active members of the meeting/church who were currently in abusive relationships. In most of them, the pastor or lay leadership had said something like, “I know the members well. There’s no abuse in my church.”
If Windy’s story resonates with you (or you are concerned about a friend), consider calling the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 800-799-7233 from a phone your partner does not have access to.
Windy Cooler
One of the things that came up was, “You can't be here because this is just gonna make everyone uncomfortable.” They never said they disbelieved me, and they did support me financially, which tells me that they believed me, but social comfort was important. So I went on my un-merry way. I became suicidal and realized that was the only time in my life I was truly suicidal.That also makes no sense unless you've been there. You think things that are just crazy.
I wasn't so far gone that I thought that everyone would be better off without me. I realized that my children wouldn't be better off without me. In fact, bad things would happen to them. I told myself, I am dead and now I am in my afterlife.
From the afterlife, I could do what I needed to do. So in my afterlife, I got a lawyer. In my afterlife, I was able to stand up for myself and self-regulate in ways and take care of my household and be present to my children. I began to taste life again. But it did not do much for our reputation when I told people, “well, I'm dead!” (she laughs)
Judy Maurer
It’s so interesting, though.
Windy Cooler
It's disassociation. It can be useful sometimes. But it's also a story of resurrection. Psychologically, it's a story about disassociation, and theologically, it's a story about resurrection. It’s about finding a way to put down what needs to be put down and move forward into the Light. And that's what that gave me the power to do.
Judy Maurer
Wow. And what do you mean by resurrection?
Windy Cooler
It was a death unto myself. I wouldn't say I completely changed. I'm still the way I was when I was five, in some pretty substantial ways. I laid down my anxiety when I laid down my life. When I laid down my anxiety, specifically about not being lovable, not being loved…
The betrayal from the meeting was an intense rejection of me. It felt like the affirmation of everything my abuser had said about how unfit I was as a human being. I had been told that nobody likes you, that there was just something mysteriously offensive about me. To be told that I needed to leave the meeting was an affirmation of that.
But I didn't need that meeting anymore, because I was dead. I died to myself. Or else the anxiety that had been me that had been me, so closely attached to me, for so long was dead. The need to please, the need to be loved, the way a child needs to be loved, and the way a child that wasn't appropriately loved needs to be loved as an adult had died.
Then I was able to resurrect as an adult and leave that childhood self that had been such a perfect victim behind and then to be an adult who has integrity and choice.
And I also left my need to have innocence behind. There was some moral injury in the story. I'm one of those Quakers who believes in police and prison abolition. I do believe that using the courts is a form of violence. It was a well thought out moral position that I had. I didn't abandon it. I chose the police and I chose the court system. I was able to say to myself, this is very painful. And I chose this. I chose this because the other option was to be destroyed by this person.
Judy Maurer
Your idea was that even if the court system were perfect, and it’s far from perfect, you consider it violence to take someone to court?
Windy Cooler
Yes, and I still believe it, even though I would tell anybody in my position that they need to use the court system. I hold both of those things simultaneously. What I'm trying to say is that I left an anxious child behind and became an adult who is able to see difficult choices, and own the choice that I made, and the consequences of that choice.
Judy Maurer
That's fascinating on all sorts of counts. Was it a spiritual journey as well?
Windy Cooler
Yes, very much so. It’s about my recommitment to my Quaker community. I did leave that local meeting and did not return. But I was already very active in my yearly meeting, I had done religious education in the yearly meeting, so I knew families with children. People would ask me Windy, why have you left your meeting? I seem to be incapable of making small talk or lying without a whole lot of effort. I can lie, but it’s a whole lot of work!
So I would just say, “Well, I was being abused, and they asked me to leave.” Initially I was embarrassed. I felt like I was telling them something ugly about myself. But then people started telling me their stories. Then I got really mad. I heard stories about sexual violence and against people I knew people that had been children under my care that were now young adults. Sexual violence and domestic violence that had just been completely unaddressed by their perspective meetings or by the yearly meeting. It just became very clear to me that we had a problem.
Judy Maurer
You mean “we” as the Society of Friends?
Windy Cooler
No, originally, I thought it was only Baltimore Yearly Meeting, because that was my whole world. I didn't know any other Quakers at that time. I thought, well, if we don't know how to deal with this, I'll just go to seminary, and they'll teach me. (She laughs at herself. I join in.)
So I did and, they didn't.
Judy Maurer
That was Earlham School of Religion, right?
Windy Cooler
Yes, that was ESR. I did research while I was there. I visited multiple Yearly Meetings, to most of the FGC affiliated meetings. I traveled across the country in 2018, interviewing Friends about their experiences of pastoral care.
Note: Friends General Conference (FGC) is an association of sixteen yearly meetings and twelve directly affiliated monthly meetings, largely in North America. Meetings belonging to FGC tend to be liberal in theology and to have an unprogrammed form of worship.
Windy Cooler
I asked about pastoral care. So I heard more horror stories, unfortunately.
I had an insight during that time that has shaped all the work I've done since 2018: Friends don't report to their meetings anything that causes them shame. If they do report something to their meeting that causes those Friends shame, it’s because the reporting Friend is unashamed. But if the listener feels shame, then the reporting Friend, if they persist in telling that story or those stories, becomes what I have now started calling the “Outrageous Friend.”
But in family systems theory, the person who keeps on reporting something shameful is called the “identified patient.” It's the one person who expresses the anxiety that's present in the whole group – the family usually. Then that person – the identified patient – becomes the focus of all the people around them who try to control them and “fix” them.
Most Friends will not report things that they think will cause their listeners shame or cause themselves shame. That could be a whole range of things. It could be interpersonal violence or substance abuse. It could also just be being wealthy. One of the things that I heard in the interviews is that wealthy Friends don't want any other Friends to know about their wealth. It's not because they don't want to share it. What I heard is that they would like to. But they just think that Quakers shouldn't be as wealthy as they are.
I didn't go into other yearly meetings, because I'm primarily an FGC Friend. I wanted to be careful about misunderstanding someone else's tradition.
So at least in the unprogrammed Quaker world, I think we're behaving like a dysfunctional family. Our need to belong inside of our communities is very strong. It’s because we are something of an ethnic denomination.
Windy described this photo as “me out in the field.”
For hundreds of years, Quakers were literally related to each other. Even if we are not really the descendants of those people, we have still inherited their behaviors. They created behavioral patterns that are present today. Also, we work very closely with each other. I have a hard time having time for anyone who's not a Quaker. My whole life revolves around my meeting. Something's always happening with my meeting, and the needs that it has. That's where my life is.
To not belong is like to not belong in your family. It’s that painful. We have this really developed, acute need to belong. At the same time, our identity is about being good and virtuous. That's why we make jokes about it – like the bad Quaker book that Brent Bell wrote.
Friends will say “I suppose this makes me not a good Quaker.” I hear this at least once a month.
Judy Maurer
That's right. I say, “I'm not a good enough Christian…”
Windy Cooler
Yes. We're making the joke, because there is a real need there. There's something there we're pointing to, which is this identity as being virtuous. Our idea of virtue is based in a sense that we are “the harmless and innocent Quakers.”
Judy Maurer
Oh, that is fascinating!
Windy Cooler
That has been a protective force since Quakers rose from the soil of northern England. “We are the harmless and innocent Quakers; we will not create an army to overthrow the King. We have a peace testimony.”
“Quakers were severely persecuted after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. King Charles II and his advisers were terrified of dissent and so imposed strict rules about attending church and swearing an oath of loyalty. Those who objected to this imposition including Quakers were hounded and treated cruelly.” – The Quaker Tapestry Museum
So this is a huge part of our identity, and it has served to protect us. We have a need to belong to each other – and to belong to that identity. For us, to allow shame into our lives and into our communities is incredibly threatening. It’s things like interpersonal violence or substance abuse or having too much money or too little money. These are all taboo in the broader society but I think inside of our little emotional pressure cooker, which is this tiny little Quaker world that we share with each other, being open about the shame of these things would be completely off limits.
Two things guide my work today. The first thing is the absolute confidence that we love each other, and that our expression of that love is dysfunctional. But if it’s true that we love each other, we can do something about the way that we are treating each other in community. We can address the cause of this, which is our desire to be innocent, our desire to remain in our childhood anxieties. We can choose together to grow into an adulthood that is filled with integrity and responsibility, maturity and wisdom.
The second thing that guides my work is the Quaker theology of the God within, that God is inside me, and God is inside you, and God is inside every single person, and that God needs to speak to God's self in continuing revelation. That's what we are actually doing with each other as we are opening up a pathway for God to speak and to hear God's self.
This affirms my rejection of violence.
I am guided by this sense that in rejecting violence and rejecting coercion, in rejecting overpowering someone with my power, I am embracing Quaker theology, most fundamentally. Instead of saying, “This is how we should live together by this list of ten rules,“ I can say, creatively, “how can we hear each other past our anxieties? How can we hear each other into the kingdom of heaven?” I can have faith that we can respond to that because I know that we actually do love each other.
Judy Maurer
Can you think of a time when that works, when it all came together?,
Windy Cooler
I would say that it's very present in my current marriage. On an interpersonal level, I think that's very present in my mothering of my children. I think that that's something that a lot of people have in common – we have experiences of being in relationship, intimate relationship usually, where we have placed a high premium on connection, and we have a lot of tolerance for messiness.
I have seen that happen when we have placed this premium on connection, and lifting up the people that we love, sacrificing for the people that we love sometimes unto great consequence. We can have that experience with people that are not our intimates exactly, or we can gain that level of intimacy with them.
The discernment model we're using I created with Margaret Webb. She was the pastor of New Garden Friends Meeting until fairly recently. At Earlham School of Religion, we had a year called supervised ministry. I asked Margaret to be my supervisor. We created this discernment process that moves from the experience of the individual and to the experience of the community. It’s called Life and Power.
We are developing a common testimony that individual local meetings can use in a guided discernment process, on the presence of abuse and violence inside their own community, so they can use their own wisdom to address it.
I've been using this process for Quaker communities that are in crisis for the last three years. We're just applying the Life and Power process on a large scale. And it works in communities that are having conflict or crisis.
Even if you are not a survivor of violence, there is some harm being done to you in Quaker community, because there is a lot of moral injury in denying people the ability to be heard and to heal. We have hurt each other very, very badly.
Judy Maurer
Yes.
Windy Cooler
The strengths of it are that it draws both on Quaker theology and tradition and cultural practice. These are all familiar forms to us, and it draws on trauma theory.
From Windy’s Quakerspeak video on healing from abuse in Quaker communities.
So the way that the process works is, we do this one-on-one listening and reflection. It’s a convener, a listener, and a focus person. And then the listener types up the notes and gives them back to the focus person; the listener has a copy, I have a copy. And the focus person has a copy. But the copy belongs to the focus person.
Nothing can happen with that copy of the notes that the focus person does not consent to. That is theirs. And it's for them to hear themselves. There is some therapeutic value to be in a space where someone just affirms their experience by reflecting it back to them. There's also some therapeutic value in being told this, this testimony belongs to you. It does not go anywhere else. The convener, the listener, and the focus person have it and that's it. Then, when I have all of the testimonies, I will get in touch with each person that has provided testimony, and I will say, I'm looking for your permission to use this discrete part of your testimony that does not identify you in the unified testimony, may I do that? They can say no, and that's okay. But we will build a unified testimony.
Judy Maurer
Can you talk about what a unified testimony is?
Windy Cooler
It’s excerpts. So there might be two sentences. If I were the focus person, for the testimony just from me, it might say, I went to my meeting, and I explained I was being abused. And they asked me to leave. Then there would be another excerpt from someone else's testimony beneath that. And it's very clear that these are separate people speaking in the document.
It's like a collection of quotes that are thematically arranged. It's sort of meant to mimic messages in waiting worship. You know, like, a person stands and delivers a brief message and then sits and then the next person stands and delivers a brief message. It would be as if you had a transcript of that. Does that make sense?
Judy Maurer
Makes a lot of sense. I like that.
Windy Cooler
The unified testimony is then emailed with instructions on how to do the next three steps, which is to arrange for three worship sharings. In the first worship sharing, the unified testimony is read twice, out loud by the clerk. There is a recording clerk present as well. The members of the community are asked to simply repeat back something they heard in the testimony.
Note: In worship-sharing, the person leading the small group session asks a query or question, and each person responds with their own experience or thoughts without discussing the prior speaker’s contribution.
So no questions, no thoughts, no commentary, just something they heard in the testimony. It's done in the style of worship-sharing with space between messages. The recording clerk writes down what is said during that worship sharing. At the second meeting the recording clerk reads back the notes from the first, which is just again a reflection of what the assembled said they heard. And they are asked, What are you curious about?
No one makes any attempt to answer these curiosities. In the case of mine you might say, I heard that someone told their meeting that they were being abused, and they were asked to leave. Then, in the second meeting, someone might say, I'm really curious about why the meeting decided to ask that survivor to leave. Or they might say, I wonder if we've ever asked someone to leave? So there are a lot of ways of being curious about what was said. The recording clerk is recording what everyone says they're curious about.
Then the third time that they get together, it's more like a work session. The curiosities are read out loud, and they can be read as many times as people need them to be. Then the community laborers together to just make four or five queries that will guide their work from now on.
So it's discernment that doesn't end with a solution. It's very open ended, and what it's meant to do is create the circumstances under which a community can choose to behave differently than it has ever behaved before. The strengths of it are that it draws on trauma theory. It draws on Quaker culture and religious tradition, obviously. But it also draws on trauma theory, specifically from the work of Judith Herman, and polyvagal theory.
In Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman talks about trauma recovery being a three-stage thing. Most recently, she's added a fourth stage, which is Healing Justice. But in her first stage, the survivor needs to have psychological and physical safety. Well, this process provides psychological and physical safety for everyone involved.
Because it is consent based, our method is nonviolent. It invites the full expression of oneself without having to face the personal reaction of someone that might be antagonistic or made anxious by your experience. So safety is established in it.
The second thing that Judith Herman talks about is memory. You need to have a space in which you can remember and grieve the harm that was caused to you. This very clearly engages that memory that Judith Herman talks about. This is a grieving process – it moves from an individual's ability to grieve to a community's ability to grieve in a safe space.
The third thing that Judith Herman talks about is reintegration to the community.
It moves an experience that individuals had inside of this community into the collective consciousness of the community. We move together in a way that has been impossible for us.
A photo of Windy “in the field,” as she says.
In Judith Herman’s most recent book, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice, she talks about a fourth stage, which is Healing Justice. This is justice that is not based in the police and criminal system, which has been so inadequate, necessary but inadequate, to survivors protecting themselves and engaging in healing. It’s really a kind of deepening of that second thing – memory. It's about being able to remember in public. So imagine the power of having participated as a focus person in this and having your quote read back to your community. They have no idea it was you and you are safe. You get to hear what people in the community are curious about your experience, and they've never been curious before.
Judy Maurer
Yes. Really interesting.
Windy Cooler
Yes, thank you. I'm very excited. It also engages with polyvagal theory. Polyvagal theory talks about how there are three basic states of consciousness that are in your nervous system. There's a resting state in which you can connect with other people and be curious. And then if you are aroused in some way, you go into fight or flight. Your curiosity and sense of your connection turns off – you can't do it anymore. You're too busy protecting yourself. If you remain in that state of arousal for long enough, you end up in a state of collapse, and that's disassociation. Now that's a huge simplification. Our process keeps people in that curious, connected state, because it's a safe space. It's a safe space in which to express things. So it's open and protected at the same time.
Judy Maurer
Wow. And you've actually been using this with meetings in crisis?
Windy Cooler
Yes! For the past three years. I've used it many, many times at this point for communities that are experiencing some conflict. It's never perceived to be about sexual or domestic violence. It's usually about something like, “Well, should we get an Owl so that we can have hybrid worship?” The community falls apart, because they can't make a decision about their Owl.
Note: The Owl she is referring to is a device that many meetings use for hybrid worship. https://owllabs.com
But what's underneath? It’s actually a good example of a technical problem, right? Should we get an Owl or not? But what's underneath that is an adaptive problem. There's a relationship problem that's underneath our inability to just make a decision about things. What comes out of the one-on-one listening and through the discernment process, is what's really going on.
In every case, so far, what has happened is there’s a seemingly insurmountable but incredibly petty problem. They're losing their minds. They go through this process, and they say things like, “We're mad, because we have not addressed social class in our meeting. Thirty years ago, we did a renovation where one group of us pressured another group of us into adding an elevator. We had forgotten that that's what we were mad about. But now we distrust technology, and we feel like we'll never be heard. Because we weren't heard 30 years ago, and we've developed all of these bad habits around communication around that.
Suddenly, they hear each other. Then they go into business meeting, and they decide whether or not they're going to get an Owl. They're able to actually do the work that they needed to do for decades.
Judy Maurer
This is excellent. This is powerful.
Windy Cooler
Thank you. I really think so. I really feel like this is useful. It's hard to explain, Judy, but it's really simple. I don't even have a name for the process.
To learn more:
Windy will be teaching a six week course online this summer for the Woodbrooke Study Centre on this process.
She also takes on work as a facilitator. She may start having openings for this again by summer. If you would like more information, contact Windy at windycooler@gmail.com.