Cops and Trauma: The Time Warp that Prevents Operationalizing Resiliency and Post-Traumatic Growth

Last week, I participated in an active shooter conference covering topics related to mass casualty events like school or church shootings. The audience was filled with administrators of police departments and Sheriff's Offices around the Mountain West. The last presenter, somewhat off-handedly, mentioned post-traumatic growth as a way of dealing with tragedy. He asked who in the room had heard of the concept, and to my shock, only about six or seven people raised their hands. The leaders of law enforcement agencies across an entire region had never heard of a concept that's been studied and publicized for three decades. 

Once the shock wore off, I was reminded of an observation I made pretty early in my second career: There's a lot of weird things about being a cop. One of the weirdest, though, is the mystery of the ideological time-warp. In the law enforcement industry, there seem to be some topics, concepts, or ideas that appear frozen in time. Specifically, most seem to come from 1990.

There's a lot more to this time-warp idea, but two examples are obvious. The first is teaching methodology. Based on almost every training or academy experience I've encountered around the US, cops use teaching methods that were popularized around the late '80s, so much so that my academy instructors didn't wear socks. Take this analysis with a grain of salt, though, because teaching was my first profession. I was expected to extremely well-versed in how to teach. In law enforcement, "how to teach" isn't a concern on the operational side, so there's no reason it would be emphasized. Officers have too much to learn already.

And if you got the socks reference, I love you.

Anyway, a lot has happened in our understanding of how humans learn, especially under the kind of conditions inherent to law enforcement. If the industry radically updated its teaching methods, we'd be able to develop more effective officers more efficiently. It would radically change the field by giving every cop on the street the knowledge and ability to adapt to whatever conditions they're facing in any given moment, and to make split-second decisions under incredible physiological stress. But it's a huge lift. Most departments don't want to take such a radical risk when failure means putting people's safety, and lives, in jeopardy. So we stick to the status quo, and officers are still taught the same way the officers who beat Rodney King were taught. I'll probably write more about this teaching methodology problem in the future, because I think it's the foundation of the first real evolution of law enforcement since the profession adopted its assembly-line, paramilitary structure in the 1930s.

The second example hits a lot closer to home. Law enforcement really struggles with officer wellness, and the consequences are catastrophic. The modern behavioral sciences, the same ones that figured out better ways to train and educate, have made remarkable strides in two areas that should be of direct interest to law enforcement: developing emotional and psychological resiliency, and post-traumatic growth. 

Both concepts didn't arrive on the scene until the '90s. Based on my time-warp hypothesis, that tracks. It's not a surprise these concepts are largely unknown. Which is tragic, because we could probably be saving a lot more lives if they were.

Resiliency

Let's start with resiliency. Resiliency is our ability to take a punch from life, shake it off, and keep moving forward. As such, it's a preventative measure. Resiliency is relatively easy to develop, but it requires deliberate effort. Interestingly, pretty much everyone in law enforcement already uses two of the core tactics: stress inoculation and controlled breathing.

Stress inoculation, as a preventative resiliency skill, is simply a matter of intentionally exposing yourself to stressful situations. I accidentally stumbled onto two great methods, ultramarathons and Brazilian jiu-jitsu (MMA works too). Both require dealing with extreme discomfort, intrusive negative thoughts and emotions, and moments where you have an overwhelming desire to quit. But since these are voluntary, recreational forms of adult "play," our framing of the events prevents negative psychological consequences. There are lots of ways to inoculate for stress, but the "play" angle is remarkably effective.

Controlled breathing, which most cops know as "box breathing", is just one tool from an extensive toolkit that sport psychologists have identified for managing our parasympathetic nervous system (the "fight or flight" response). In law enforcement, we almost always teach this as a means of calming down in high-stress situations. It's incredibly effective in those chaoetic situations. But it's also incredibly effective during quiet moments.

There's a weird "barefoot running effect" at play here. Barefoot running is an effective way to learn proper running form because it provides immediate biofeedback, you suddenly pay close attention to how everything feels. Awareness.

With controlled breathing, slowing your breath does two things simultaneously: it activates your parasympathetic nervous system and shuts down the adrenaline response, and it forces you to pay attention to your own arousal state. You start to develop a real sense of how ramped up you actually are. Once you're aware of that, you'll start noticing when anxiety creeps in throughout a normal day, and through conditioning, you'll automatically start breathing in response to that awareness. It's a genuinely cool effect.

This can be made even more effective by adding a secondary reinforcer, which is a classically conditioned association that triggers the calming response on its own. To do this, I chewed spearmint gum. Preferably Mentos brand.

When running and rolling in jiu-jitsu, I'd chew this particular flavor of gum. In both sports, a major goal is efficiency, competition in both is essentially a war of attrition, and calm is efficient. And thanks to evolution, the act of chewing itself has a calming effect. Our ancestors only ate when they were safe from predators. This is also probably why campfires make us feel safe and help us form closer social bonds. Probably also why we all have a "fireplace and bearskin rug" fantasy. Anyway...

The Other Tools

Smart people who like to tinker with human behavior have developed some other powerful tools for improving officer wellness. A major one is learning to reframe narratives.

We see seriously horrific, tragic things on a regular basis. We see people in what they will later describe as the worst moment of their lives. And we see the people who victimize others, individuals whose capacity to cause harm is limited only by how aggressively the justice system pursues them. In short, we see a lot of shit.

What isn't widely understood is that we can edit the story our brain constructs from these events. When something unfolds in front of us, our brain attempts to make sense of it by building a narrative. Our personalities and life experiences shape how that story gets told. But human memory being what it is, we're capable of changing the story when we replay it. All we have to do is deliberately shift what we focus on when we recall the memory.

Embarrassingly, I use Mr. Rogers' "look for the helpers" idea. It actually works remarkably well. When I recall a difficult event, I picture the citizens and colleagues who, in the face of something terrible, instantly snapped into the mode of helping the victims. It's a primal response I've seen universally... it doesn't matter if you're young or old, male or female, liberal or conservative. People help people.

When I focus on that, it gives me tremendous optimism about the future, for my kids, my grandkids, all of us. And it effectively neutralizes the weight of the bad stuff I witnessed. It's a shockingly effective way to prevent PTSD from taking root.

Another well-established technique is having an authentic "tribe", a small group where trust and communication are strong enough that members can speak openly and honestly, and where a shared culture of honor and accountability ensures confidentiality. This small group, usually no more than a handful of people, allows the person who experienced the trauma to talk through every aspect of what happened. That act of retelling does something we still don't fully understand, the other members seem to "absorb" some of the negative emotional weight. Done a few times, this process significantly diminishes the lasting harm of the event.

I study and write about tribes a lot, and can unequivocally say having a group who you can trust and can effectively communicate with will solve most of the problems we face today. That extends to dealing with trauma. 

Some of My Tools

I have a few tools I've developed over the years, and I'm sharing them in case other people find them useful.

The first is curiosity. Whenever I'm on a scene, talking to people, or working through evidence, I'm deeply curious about everything around me. A big part of police work is figuring out what happened from as objective a perspective as possible. To do that well, we need to shift our attention away from the central, obvious thing and notice everything else.

Understanding why that works requires a quick look at how attention functions. We focus on what we're focused on. Our attentional capacity is limited, but what it does focus on gets very high bandwidth. Think of attention as a laser pointer. Most people enter a room and lock that laser onto the most attention-grabbing thing present. Most cops don't work that way. Their laser darts around the room taking inventory before settling on whatever brought them there. This becomes automatic, and it's part of what drives the hypervigilance that plagues the profession.

My strategy involves leaning into what the unconscious brain is already doing. We know a lot about whatever the laser is pointing at. But our unconscious is simultaneously collecting, analyzing, and interpreting everything the laser isn't pointing at, and that's a vastly larger stream of information. The catch is that we can't access it directly; trying to examine it just moves the laser.

What our unconscious does with all that information is genuinely remarkable. It collects, analyzes, interprets, develops a response, and then packages everything into a compact signal we experience as emotion. At any given moment, our brain is sending us these emotional packages. If we learn to pay attention to them and understand what they represent, we can infer what our unconscious is telling us about our immediate situation.

The cool thing is that your unconscious never lies. It's the most honest signal available to us. It can occasionally be wrong, but that's rare. Far more often, we dismiss those signals and end up getting hurt. If you want to go deeper on this, Gavin de Becker's work is excellent.

So... curiosity. Whenever I enter a new environment or arrive on a scene, I shift my attention for just a fraction of a second to that emotional package. What is my unconscious telling me about this situation? First, I'm checking for any danger signal, like fear, or a sense that something is incongruent, that something's out of place or someone's behaving in a way that doesn't fit the circumstances. If the package contains even a hint of that, I go straight into tactical mode. This doesn't happen often, but when it does, the package is almost always right.

If the package signals anything else, I go into "what's going on here" mode and get genuinely curious about everything in front of me.

This curiosity is also a particular form of healthy compartmentalization. It allows me to dissociate from the emotionally-charged empathic, compassionate human reaction to genuinely tragic events, to set that aside and engage with the scene analytically. Of course, we also need the ability to snap out of that when the situation calls for comforting or calming people, but that's a learnable skill too. The compartmentalization is what makes all of it possible. It lets me defer the actual emotional processing until later, almost always by talking to my tribe, and focusing on the helpers when I retell the story.

The other major tactic is what I'd call calibrated expectations about human behavior.

In college, I studied history and psychology, and a significant part of that was the intersection of the two. Specifically, the psychology behind the darkest chapters in human history. We have a long, well-documented record of doing absolutely terrible, cruel things to each other, sometimes purely for the sake of watching others suffer. And we get creative about it. Social psychologists like Stanley Milgram have effectively demonstrated that this capacity for "evil" isn't an aberration confined to monsters; the latent potential exists in all of us. Tweak the conditions just right, and ordinary people become the guards at Auschwitz. The flip side is equally true: humans are also capable of infinite selflessness, heroism, and moral courage. After learning all of this, I've spent two decades teaching it.

In short, I've spent my adult life studying and teaching the full spectrum of human behavior. Nothing I encounter as a cop surprises me, because I genuinely understand what we're all capable of, in both directions. It's what Jung meant when he talked about integrating your shadow. And bad things don't follow some cosmic script that rewards goodness and punishes evil, at least not one I can see. Tragedy is largely random and indifferent.

Accepting those two realities, the full range of human capacity and the randomness of bad outcomes, means that what I witness, no matter how severe, doesn't violate my worldview. It doesn't make me feel less safe or trigger existential dread. That acceptance frees me to do my job: keep people safe, investigate objectively, help victims and witnesses however I can, and make sure suspects' rights are protected. And it makes it a lot easier to stay curious.

Conclusion

In law enforcement, we don't have to stay trapped in 1990. The same blind spots that keep us training like we're preparing for the Cold War keep us from implementing real, effective officer wellness strategies.

Building a toolbox for resiliency, and for processing what outpaces that resiliency, is absolutely within our reach. Hell, we could probably solve most of our problems by reading Ordinary Men and then Man's Search for Meaning, training a little jiu-jitsu, chewing gum, and paying attention to what our feelings are trying to tell us..

We don't have to accept the status quo. We can grow. We need to grow. We owe it to our families, friends, and colleagues. We owe it to the people we serve.

~Jason

***

A Political Stance for Human Beings: Beyond Left and Right Toward Strength, Belonging, and Aliveness

Politicians hate to admit a very simple fact of the American political landscape: most of us don't actually fit the political box we've been handed.

You're not just some vague talking point uttered on some biased, partisan news network. You believe in personal responsibility and think the healthcare system is a disaster. You care about community, especially the most vulnerable members of our community, and you think bureaucratic overreach is real. You want strong families and you're not interested in silly culture war theater. You've watched both parties spend decades screaming past each other while your actual life, the relationships, the sense of purpose, the feeling that something real is happening, quietly vanishes.

We sometimes frame this as political apathy, or maybe political fatigue. But really, it's a rational response to a system that keeps attempting to solve the wrong problems, and does a poor job at that.

I want to offer you something different. It's not a new party, and it's not a new ideology with a fancier logo or a catchier tagline. It's a fundamental question... a question that should drive our personal political ideology. 

The Real Diagnosis

Most people think politics is about parties, personalities, and policy fights. Strip all that away, and I think it's actually about something much simpler: 

What kind of life are we building, and what kind of people are we becoming?

That question cuts a whole lot deeper than a simple "are you left or right?"

The reality is we've built a society that is genuinely excellent at survival and genuinely terrible at aliveness. Comfort? Check. Safety? Check. Convenience? We've optimized it to death. But somewhere in that optimization, we quietly dismantled the structures that made life feel vivid. Real relationships have been replaced by impersonal, uncaring networks. Shared struggle has been replaced by private, lonely optimization. Real challenge, the kind that actually develops people, has been removed in the name of safety and comfort.

The result of this shift isn't societal collapse. Instead, it's something quieter and way harder to identify. It's a low-grade hum, like that ever-present buzz of flourescent lights that you think you adapt to until it's gone. It's a life that works on paper but doesn't quite quench our thirst for really living. You can function. You can succeed by every external metric. But something feels off. Not broken so much as just... muted.

I call this the Ache.

The Ache isn't depression, though it can tip into it. It's not burnout, though it can look like it. It's what happens when a human being lives inside a system that keeps them alive but starves the conditions that make them feel alive. It's the byproduct of a society that has banished real belonging, visible contribution, honest feedback, and meaningful hardships and challenges.

"So what the Hell does this have to do with politics?!?"

That's the question I get a lot, especially when I challenge the actions of our President, Congress, State, or even Local officials. And it cuts to the reason The Ache exists.

The Ache, despite what society, your parents, your spouse, or your political leaders tell you, is not a personal failure. It's a failure in the very architecture of our modern society. Modernity, if you will.

How We're Actually Built

Human beings are not built for isolation. We're not lone wolves. The "rugged individual" is a compelling story, but it's a biological fiction.

We evolved in small, close-knit groups. Or were created for small, close-knit groups. Our particular favorite origin story doesn't matter, because the truth holds up regardless. We're made for groups where people were known, where your presence or absence changed things, where contribution was visible, and where reputation was real. That environment didn't just shape our culture. It shaped our nervous systems. We're wired for co-regulation, for trusted contact with people who can offer real feedback and share real weight.

Strip that away, and people don't immediately fall apart. They adapt. They become functional. They get productive. They build careers and accumulate stuff. But something in the system goes underused, like an engine that never gets pushed past idle. 

Modernity is really good at idling.

What modern culture celebrates as independence is often just deprivation with clever branding.

This is why both political parties keep missing the point. Hyper-individualism, the libertarian strain that treats every person as a fully self-contained unit, sounds great in theory. In practice, it produces environments where social bonds wear thin, responsibility becomes optional, and people are left to manufacture meaning entirely on their own. It's freedom in the abstract, but isolation in reality.

But the collectivist answer isn't better. Moving all solutions upward into larger, more distant systems, managed by technocrats who "know what's good for you," trades one problem for another. You get equity on paper but control over your destiny gets stripped away. People aren't shaped by real participation in community anymore. They're processed by systems. Replaceable cogs in a giant machine. Just another number. That doesn't produce aliveness; it produces compliance.

Both answers keep solving for the wrong variable.

The prject I've been developing, Applied Tribal Science, or "Tribe Theory", is my attempt to right the ship using a synthesis of modern behavioral and neurobiological science and old-timey religious and mythological wisdom, blended with the day-to-day realities of your life and mine. And that is what drives my political stance.

My Actual Stance on the Issues

This foundation, rooted in the free, honest expression of our authentic selves in service of a group of people who matter, results in some deeply-pragmatic stances on the issues that seem to hopelessly divide us. But that division is not inevitability. Read through this list; without even knowing you (well, most of you), I bet these resonate regardless of the bumper stickers you slap on your car or truck. 

I stand for strong people. Not people who need comfort, people who avoid struggle, or people who perpetually play the victim card. People who can survive struggle, face reality, and be counted on to take responsibility and contribute to the greater good.

I stand for real relationships. Not followers, audiences, customers, or loose digital affiliations, but genuine relationships where people are known, needed, and held to something.

I stand for communities with standards. Not cults of personality, brands posing as identities, or businesses posing as "families." Places where belonging means something, where contribution is visible, and where expectations exist because the people inside them decided they matter.

I stand for institutions that earn trust by actually doing what they exist to do in a way that is transparent and honorable, not by performing legitimacy while quietly managing the speed of their rot while they use their position to curry favors, foster nepotism, or maximize that end-of-the-year bonus by exploiting those they lead. 

I stand for truth, competence, and human-level scale. I stand for systems people can understand, influence, and actually hold accountable.

None of this maps cleanly onto the sociopolitical left or right. That's the point. And probably why you, despite jumping through all the hoops your party demands, still feel The Ache.

The Fire Triangle

Tribe Theory is a practical model. Fire makes a handy analogy for the art and science of living a life worth living. If you want a fire, you need three things: fuel, oxygen, and heat. Remove any one of them, the fire goes out. Human beings work the same way.

Fuel is capacity. It's physical health, baseline stability, and the ability to show up and engage. Without it, nothing else really works. You can't push someone toward growth when they're running on empty.

Oxygen is truth flow. It's the ability to say what's actually real , and be heard without immediately having to perform, defend, or filter. In most modern environments, Oxygen is severely restricted. People manage impressions. They soften edges. They avoid saying the thing that would actually move things forward. When Oxygen is low, life becomes performative. People are present but not real.

Heat is pressure. It's challenge, consequence, risk, responsibility. It's the element most modern systems work hardest to eliminate. But Heat is what forces growth. It sharpens attention, and reveals character, turns potential into something real. Without it, people don't break — they stagnate.

Aliveness happens when all three are present and balanced.

Look at American life through this lens and the problem becomes visible. Too much comfort, not enough challenge. Too much performance, not enough truth. Too much top-down management, not enough real belonging. The result is people who seem stable but drifting. Connected but not known. Active but not engaged.

This isn't the result of a policy failure, the tax structure, or some culture war that generates outrage-fueled headlines. It's the result of a structural failure. And policy won't fix it unless the structure changes.

What This Means In Practice

My politics start with a question most political frameworks never ask: Does this system produce stronger, more connected people, or does it create dependency on faraway people solving problems that don't really matter?

On the economy: I support markets when they reward contribution, skill, and competence. Those are the conditions that produce capable people. But markets aren't an ideology I'm loyal to. If an economic system makes people wealthier while uprooting them from the local ecosystem, weakening families, and dissolving local trust , it's solving one problem while creating three more. You end up with people who have more and feel less.

On welfare: There's a difference between a bridge and a holding pattern. I support systems that stabilize people in crisis and move them back into meaningful participation. That's what a functioning society does. But if a system removes urgency and responsibility without restoring the ability to solve your own problems, it doesn't solve the problem. It extends it. Help should put people back in the game, not quietly remove them from it.

On education: A healthy system produces disciplined, capable, socially functional adults. It builds judgment, attention, and the ability to engage with reality. What we have now sorts, signals, and shields. It produces credentials without competence and sensitivity without resilience. Education should form people, not process them so they become marginally better cogs.

On institutions: I support strong institutions, but only when they're both effective and worthy of trust. Competence without legitimacy breeds resentment. Legitimacy without competence breeds chaos. You need both. When institutions fail at that, they don't just break functionally. They deepen the Ache.

On family: Families are a core infrastructure, not a lifestyle preference. Families are where identity is formed, where emotional regulation is learned, where people first experience real belonging and real responsibility. When families weaken, you lose one of the most reliable antidotes to the Ache. The downstream effects show up everywhere. Notably, "families" can take all kinds of forms and need to be measured by the strength of the love and support within the connections, not based on some predetermined acceptable format. 

On free speech: We need open honesty. A system without truth flow can't function. If people can't say what's real, the entire structure becomes performative. But freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequence. Culture still judges. The point isn't to eliminate conflict; it's to let reality boil to the surface so the system can adjust.

On government size: I'm not committed to "small government" as a slogan. I'm interested in systems that are as local as possible and as large as necessary. The problem with scale isn't ideological; it's human. As systems get larger, they become more abstract, more anonymous, less responsive. That erodes trust and communication. And without trust and communication, you can't build anything durable.

Across all of it, the question is the same: does this move people toward Aliveness, or further into the Ache?

What I'm Rejecting

Any effective ideology draws a sharp line between what is accepted and what is rejected. To accept (or reject) everything is to believe nothing. And believing nothing is the worst Ache of them all. 

I reject pseudo-tribes, and American politics is full of them. Partisan identity, online communities, ideological camps, outrage theatrics, activist circles... they give people a sense of alignment, a shared language, and a set of enemies. But they rarely provide what real belonging requires. There's no real accountability. There's no visible contribution. There's no shared stakes. You can enter and exit at will, signal your position, feel the dopamine hit of being "connected," and never actually be known.

Pseudo-tribes give people the theater of belonging while deepening the loneliness underneath it.

I reject therapeutic politics. Discomfort is not the enemy of growth. Policies and cultural norms increasingly built around minimizing offense and protecting people from difficult experiences are not compassionate in practice; they produce environments where truth is filtered, challenge is softened, and people are shielded from the exact pressures that would develop them into resilient, funcational human beings. You don't get stronger individuals. You get people who are less able to engage with reality when it stops accommodating them. Life is hard. We struggle, suffer, and experience tragedy and loss. Coddling people to protect their delicate sensibilities does nothing but create a society that will crumble at the first sign of real adversity.

I reject resentment-as-substitute-for-structure. There are legitimate frustrations driving populist movements. But channeling those frustrations into anger without building anything is not a political vision. It's just the Ache monetized for votes. And it makes us believe our neighbors are somehow our enemies. The Ache loves that isolation. 

And underneath all of it, I reject a society that keeps people comfortable enough to comply and empty enough not to resist.

That pattern shows up across the spectrum, overprotection on one side, distraction and consumption on the other. Both lead to the same place: people who are stable, manageable, and quietly disconnected from anything that would demand something real from them.

The Tradeoff

None of this is easy. I'm not selling a comfortable version of politics.

What I'm describing asks more of people, not less. I'm asking for standards, not just acceptance. I'm asking for friction and productive conflict, not just comfort. I'm asking for truth and honesty, even when it's inconvenient. I'm asking for responsibnility and accountability, not just protection.

We have spent decades chasing comfort and safety as if they were the highest goods. In doing so, we've produced a different kind of suffering... not sharp and acute, but slow and pervasive. A thinning of experience. A loss of edge. The quiet sense that life is being managed rather than lived.

Comfort isn't neutral. It has a cost. And that cost is way steeper than we imagine.

When you remove too much pressure, you remove the conditions that force people to develop. When you remove too much risk, you remove the conditions that make things matter. You end up with people who are protected from hardship and cut off from the experiences that would make them feel real.

The alternative makes different tradeoffs. We have less comfort. We have less universal accommodation. We have more friction. We have more responsibility. In exchange, though, we get stronger people, deeper relationships, higher trust, a life that actually matters.

I'll take that trade every time, because we only have one life to live. We're all going to die. And I would rather spend this life feeling alive instead of feeling comfortable.

The Bottom Line

If you've read this far, there's a good chance you already felt the Ache, even if you've never called it that. The low hum underneath a life that looks fine. The sense that something's missing even when nothing is obviously wrong.

A wise man once told me most of us shoot for a "nice" life, where "nice" means "not inclined to critically-examine." 

After many years of trying to figure out what makes us feel alive, trying to figure our how to live a life worth living, I think that man was right. Because once we really start examining our lives, we start to realize we've been pissing away the limited time we have collecting things and experiences we don't care about to impress people we don't even really like. And our political system just makes us feel better about that sacrifice.

There's probably a good chance that neither party has ever quite named what you're actually after.

What you want isn't a better political argument. It's a life that feels more real and more connected. You want a life that demands more in all the right ways. You want a life that feels like it's YOUR life, not someone else's.

That's what I'm building. It's not a perfect system, and it's not a frictionless utopia. It's something far messier and far more honest: a society that expects something from you, shapes you through that expectation, and gives you real belonging in return.

The alternative is a society full of stable, lonely, well-managed people... technically alive, functionally absent.

I'll take the messy version, thank you.

~Jason

***

This essay is drawn from Tribe Theory, an ongoing framework for understanding why people feel the Ache, and how to build structures that actually address it.

Forming Your Tribe 101

If we want to build a tribe, we start by unlearning what modern culture has taught us about groups.

A tribe is not a chat thread, a Facebook group, an audience, a brand, or a collection of people who are into the same weird things. A tribe is a small, closely-connected set of people who become accountable to one another through repeated, shared effort.

Tribes of this kind require a few key ingredients, which can be used as a rough guide to start our own tribes.

First, keep it small. Five to twelve people is the workable range. Fewer than that and the group falls apart under if someone stops showing up or, more commonly, conflict causes irreparable damage. More than that and people start hiding in the crowd. Tribes work because everyone is visible. Eventually, once established, a tribe can grow to about 100-150 people and still function as a tribe, but that's WAAAYYYY too big in the beginning. 

Second, the group must already be bonded in some way. You don't start with random strangers sitting in a circle in room and hope connection emerges. There has to be a seed, and that seed can be a shared activity, shared history, shared place, or shared challenge. The bond doesn’t need to be deep yet, but it has to be real. 

Third, boundaries matter. A tribe must know who is in and who is out. That doesn't mean exclusion for its own sake, but it means clarity. Without edges, people don’t invest. Open-ended groups drift into either performance or disengagement. Psychologically, the boundary has to invoke the in-group/ out-group bias. That's the measure we can use to decide if our boundaries are defined well enough.

Fourth, in-person contact must be repeated and embodied. This is non-negotiable, and probably the hardest part about forming a tribe in our modern social media-dominated world. Tribes have to be built through regular, in-person contact. And that contact has to involve effort. Working, training, building, cooking, struggling... even suffering... it has to be something that costs energy. Shared effort creates trust faster than conversation ever will.

Fifth, contribution must be visible. Everyone has to matter in a concrete way. Each member should know what they bring to the tribe, and each member should know what others bring to the tribe. When contribution is invisible, resentment grows and belonging becomes symbolic instead of earned.

Sixth, accountability must be relational. Rules alone do not create cohesion. Expectations do. Members need permission to call each other out when standards slip. This is uncomfortable, which is why most groups avoid it... which is also why most groups fail.

Finally, the tribe needs a story. Not a mission statement or some other feel-good bullshit. Your tribe needs an explanation of why this group exists and why showing up matters, based on the real, lived experiences of the tribe members. The story doesn’t need to be grand, but it does need to be true. If people can’t explain why the tribe exists in a sentence or two, the tribe doesn’t exist. Yet.

There's one more thing that's not quite an ingredient, but a consideration. It's the one place where almost all modern pseudo-tribes fail: 

A real tribe has to be demanding.

I'm not suggesting the tribe be abusive or rigid, but it does have to be demanding enough that participation costs something. That something could be time, effort, discomfort, responsibility... whatever. If the bar is low, people drift. If nothing is asked, nothing is earned. Tribes form around shared standards, not shared comfort. The friction is not a flaw; it is the mechanism that creates the real connections between the members of the tribe that matter. 

If you remove ANY one of these ingredients, you may still have a group, but it will devolve into a club, a support circle, a fandom, or a social outlet. Not a tribe. In that situation, the connections among members is too weak to get the real benefits of a tribe. They're not useless, but they're not the kinds of connections we need to solve the kinds of problems tribes solve.

A tribe is not something you declare. It is something that emerges when these conditions are held long enough for trust, identity, and accountability to form.

This is the starting point.

 Now go form your tribe.

 

~ Jason