Blue Bucket Of Gold is a free weekly newsletter from me, the musician Catrin Vincent. If you pay, I also offer long-form content, like interviews with your favourite artists, new music and songwriting prompts. This newsletter is a passion project; a deep-dive into the human psyche from someone whose life was transformed by discovering how art can heal. It started as a way to digest my favourite music, then turned into a vehicle for change, a beautiful way to understand myself and the world through writing. Please feel free to share and support in any way you can. Thank you for reading.
On long drives, does anyone else start to imagine really visual metaphors?
Last night, as blackened skies rolled past like some sort of tunnel to space, I imagined this big, big island, yellow sand and white chalk cliffs, and realised that for years, I’d been standing at a cliff-edge, telling myself,
“jump, jump!”,
then softly saying to myself,
“I don’t want to”.
Eventually, I did jump. Now, I am in icy, choppy waters, wondering if it would have been easier to stay on the island, despite the island being totally on fire.
And I think that’s a really good metaphor for growth, and something I learned this week called ‘moral injury’. The island, cave, whatever metaphor it’s soothing to use was a comforting place, but not the truth. And I was starting to notice the cracks, the shore-lines not quite meeting where I was told they should, little glitches in the matrix.
The ‘moral injury’ theory describes the psychological distress that results from experiences that fundamentally challenge our moral beliefs or worldview. This week, I wrote something while journalling,
“I want to go back to a time where I didn’t know this existed. This is too painful”.
Of course, I don’t, because I was in pain from not knowing what was truly happening, and I couldn’t escape because I didn’t understand why I was suffering. I don’t want to go back to a time where I was unaware of vital information and context for my well-being, and instead, blamed myself. But like Neo taking the red pill, sometimes I question what I get out of knowing a horrible truth.
There are many islands, in my metaphor-world. And something even more complex to understand is that everyone is on their own version of ‘the island’, everyone sees something totally different as ‘the fire-starter’, and everyone has their own moment they jump.
I now imagine each social group as one, an island, I mean, and often, individuals are scapegoated and forced to jump. I’ve definitely scapegoated before, something I feel a lot of shame around now.
The etymology of the word ‘scapegoating’ is yet another beautiful metaphor, derived from when goats were offered as sacrifices, the ancient ritual of placing the sins of a community onto the head of one goat, known as the "goat's head”, and sending it out into the wilderness. While this goat was released, another was sacrificed.
The concept of scapegoating was first named by French sociologist Émile Durkheim in 1897. Durkheim believed that scapegoating was a way for communities to cope with difficult or stressful situations, serving the social order by providing an outlet for tension. He believed that when people felt overwhelmed or helpless, they would blame someone on the outside to relieve their feelings. - betterhelp
Scapegoating, islands. I’d love to experience the metaphor of a beautiful river next, like Sophie spoke about in my last interview, a river of connection, that leads to every sea. As I grow older, I’m moving towards some sort of reconciliatory model, or prison abolition idea. I’m not sure punishment works, and I’m not sure we can ever truly function in a society that cancels or abolishes people.
Instead, could we live in a society that reckons with deep trauma, and practices radical empathy?
And what does that look like?
I said to a friend recently, “it is the mark of a wise person to hold two opposing ideas within them”. It’s really difficult, in this world, to deal with cognitive dissonance, because the very act of living and being human causes us to exist in cognitive dissonance. It’s unavoidable. Cognitive dissonance is the psychological state when our beliefs and actions oppose one another. This can look like - I know drinking is bad for me, but it helps me relax. I don’t want to let go, but I want my life to change. Someone I love caused harm, and I still love them.
The very act of being a human being in this modern world means taking from a planet with limited resources, knowing we are killing the very thing that gives us life, knowing we participate in a system we don’t agree with. And our minds do very strange things to cope with this impossible knowledge.
Again and again in my life, I have had to reckon with the fact that the people who have wrecked havoc on my life and mental health are, themselves, traumatised, and actually to some extent, unaware of their actions. Even worse, I’m capable of causing harm, too. And I think it’s taken me a while to realise this, because it means there’s not much I can do about it, and it shakes my world view that there is such thing as karma, or justice.
And when trauma is so interconnected and complex, and the people perpetrating are often traumatised themselves, how do we balance justice and rehabilitation? We have a prison system that itself abuses and is not ‘just’, and we have a media that thrives on punishing and scapegoating instead of fostering genuine connection and change. So, serving justice and enacting rehabilitation. Is there a way to not view the two as a dichotomy, opposing forces, but instead, as two things in-extricably linked?
We have to change how we think about justice. Kid shows paint a picture of villains being thrown behind bars and thus forever ‘dealt with’. They never show rehabilitation, the villains atoning and changing, the trauma that created the villain being examined and dealt with. Stones are thrown at Goliath, but who is Goliath? Thinking back to metaphors as a way to process our lives and the world around us; is Goliath an idea, not a person?
Justice can mean ‘righteousness’, ‘what is fair to all sides’, ‘remedy when harm is done’… ‘individuals tied in a society together through harmony and balance’…and is ‘wholly dependent on truth’. We live in a world where the truth is constantly hidden, where big oil companies rely on the coping mechanism of denial, because the bigger problem of global warming is so catastrophic and huge that nobody can face it, and demonise those hanging off bridges, because they know society will join in in a public flagellation, a scapegoating, the ‘spectacle of punishment’.
Yet also, there is no universal truth. Okay…this is really falling down the rabbit hole. A quick AI summation on google states; ‘the statement "there is no universal truth" is a philosophical concept often associated with relativism, meaning that truth is subjective and depends on individual perspectives, cultural contexts, and situations, therefore no single truth applies universally to everyone; however, the statement itself can be considered paradoxical because if it's true, then it would be a universal truth itself, creating a contradiction.’
So, if everyone has their own, individual truth, how the hell do we define truth? Well, maybe this is precisely why we live in what looks like an unjust world.
Social justice can look like free education for all, the universal right to vote in elections. And I do believe we are witnessing a big erasure of social justice through late stage capitalism, which is having a knock-on effect inter-personally. I wrote a poem yesterday, one I’ve been thinking up for a while - ‘little fires everywhere’. I’ve been really deeply thinking about conflict, and how when the world took a turn for the worse back in 2023, and what was probably the beginning of our now pre-world war state started, I noticed how quickly people started to turn on each other and paint each other as villains. I witnessed decade-long friendship erased as people felt unsafe, and participated in a lot of conflict.
Rehabilitation means restoring someone to health, or normal life after illness, or imprisonment, re-integrating someone back into society, and I believe it should go hand in hand with justice. Delivering justice and change could be viewed as something hopeful, right? Someone traumatised, re-traumatising others, finally being given the space to heal and change…god, that would be a nice world.
Would that even aid the victim of the behaviour in healing? Often the person trying to heal doesn’t want more suffering, or for the person who inflicted pain on them to suffer, too; just an acknowledgment of the suffering they are going through, a way to rectify it. Often all people need is an apology, and accountability, and support from the community. Unfortunately due to processes like DARVO (deflect, attack, reverse victim and offender), it can sometimes be the victims painted as villains, which stops them getting the help they need in order to heal, and further traumatises them.
We have to somehow foster our own healing, as we can’t wait around for apologies to heal, for then we are forever under the thumb of the ‘persecutor’, and this is precisely the problem. How do we solve the problem of persecutors always being prioritised first as a way to ease the tension, because they’ll cause the most dysfunction, often to the detriment of victims, and their pain being seen or acknowledged?
Well. Stepping out of the conflict. Something that is no easy feat. But if all of us had more awareness over how our minds work, maybe all of us could ‘step out’. Victims get to give up the victim label, and no longer be defined by what happened to them. Persecutors no longer have to view themselves as monsters, or be bound by maladaptive coping mechanisms. Rescuers get to have their own lives, no longer feeling responsible for the weight of the world around them.
I think a lot about the drama triangle. The drama triangle was first dreamt up in the 1960s by psychologist Stephen Karpman. The concept speaks of three roles, which people aren’t tied to and can cycle through during even a single conflict; persecutor, victim and rescuer. It takes a while to learn how to step out of it completely and disengage, and I’d actually now argue no one ever completely can. I’d argue conflict is absolutely inevitable, and it’s impossible not to be drawn in. But it’s how we respond that defines us - can we find the strength to step out? In any kind of conflict, I am starting to recognise the roles people play and put themselves in, including myself. “Most of us are neurologically programmed to play these three roles, and we consciously or unconsciously choose one role given the particular context.”
In one of my songs on my solo album, I sing, ‘come sit in the river beside me’, and as always with my lyrics, I have realisations around them some time after writing them. I’ve since realised that the song is me asking someone to leave the drama triangle, and join me in peace, which I contextualise with nature. In that moment, I truly felt at peace, outside of everything. I’d later dip back into the drama triangle in order to try and protect myself, however, as is the case with patterns - they repeat until they break.
A very dear friend once told me a story that rocked me to sleep in her car - she worked in a forest nursery, where children play outside, and they played a game of ‘monsters, kings and princesses’ (I’m paraphrasing, I can’t remember the exact names). I think they observed which roles the kids put themselves in, and which roles the kids picked in relation to one another.
I also learned over Christmas about certain biases we have, as well, like how we victim blame in order to believe we couldn’t be a victim ourselves (well, what did the victim do to make this happen to them? So I can believe it couldn’t possibly happen to me…), secondary abuse (where we minimise people’s pain so we don’t have to cope with the complexity or un-comfortability of something). Often, with dysfunctional group dynamics like, say, families, the ostracised ‘difficult’ person is the one who can’t stand the dysfunction - they are usually the ‘truth teller’, although to the outside, they appear as the problem…the ‘scapegoat’.
So where do people turn to, to step outside of conflicts? How do we process what has happened to us? We write songs, turn our lives into stories, we make art. I often think about the healing power of art, the abstract nature of metaphor, and how we can use these spaces to hide in but still express ourselves, and ultimately process what we’ve been through, without publicly displaying other people’s private experiences and our own.
We are all complex humans with the ability to both persecute and be victims, and in our long life-time, we will end up as both. Some of us will lean more one way than another (for example, in society, women as a demographic are far more likely to be abused, and thus end up as victims more statistically often), but generally, all of us are human and flawed.
This is why it is so important not to censor people. Mainly so we can uncover the truth, and allow people the space and time to uncover their own truths. For trauma victims who have already experienced secondary abuse and minimisation from conversations with loved ones, art is often the last place left, and the only place that feels safe for expression. For persecutors, often persecuting from a place of trauma, offering healing through art over punishment could lead to acknowledgment of their own pain and trauma, and a chance for them to take accountability, and atone, and for things to change.
I’ve written about these concepts a lot on this sub-stack; OCD, religious concepts of good and bad, black and white thinking.
A while back, I shared what Hanif Abdurraqib wrote when Sinead O’ Connor died:
‘Punishment as spectacle’.
I often get so triggered by these huge celebrity court cases like the current Blake Lively one. Because it becomes this ridiculous spectacle under the court of the public, an incredibly unreliable judge, with people taking ‘sides’. How could any of us not involved possibly know? This is why courts are often so private, to protect the process. I saw a comment underneath a post, recently, that said something like, “this has been going on too long now. Hope they patch things up soon’, and I found that really sweet, this little pebble against the Goliath that is the media machine. They obviously likely will never patch things up, but just the thought that a bystander simply ‘cba anymore’ makes me happy. That comment was someone acknowledging a conflict, then stepping out of it. I don’t know these celebrities. Why is anyone trying to make me care? What motive lies underneath that? What game are we all playing, when we take part?
Anyway. This is just a little scream into the void. A scream of growth, realisation, and an attempt at healing.
Good things - I managed a gig the other night - Sophie Jamieson blew me away. Her song ‘Sink’ with a full band is another level…
I’m planning how to release my solo album :)
Exciting news being announced next week with the film I scored.
still here, still happening
<3