Mad and Stuck in Bad Relationships: Learning from the Celtic Anam Cara and Old Norsic Traditions
This essay was published on December 28, 2025 as the fifth entry in my “Cripping Clover: Essays on Lucid Tinn Brains, Demedicalization of Disability, and Irish-American and Celtic Heritage” series.
This essay will explore human relationships, short and long ones, including violating ones that involve rape, sexual assault, and other types of abuse.
While I believe that being disabled is beautiful, I also know that being disabled can be incredibly violent and dehumanizing because of ableism.
Here, I am not going to shy away from that, but I also will move beyond it.
Disabled, mad, and neurodivergent people are substantially more likely to be victimized, whether it be through rape, sexual assault, other types of assault, robbery, and incarceration. Personally, I have been raped, sexually assaulted, and abused in multiple types of relationships. This occurs disproportionately to disabled, mad, and neurodivergent people for several reasons. First, ableism makes people believe it is okay to victimize disabled people and that they will not be held accountable. Second, disabled people often have processing differences that may prevent us from recognizing warning signs of abuse and other violence. Third, we often don’t have personal examples in our lives and in media about what a healthy and unhealthy relationship looks like for a person who is like us. And fourth, disabled people are often isolated due to ableism, which makes us more likely to seek out relationships even when they come with more risks.
The primary goal of this essay is to root a relational ethics relevant to disabled, mad, and neurodivergent people in Celtic and Old Norsic traditions. This objective is in line with my broader work in this essay series to decolonize my ancestry, faith, mental health, and disabilities. Since relationships are a vital part of faith and being disabled, this essay is deeply related to that work. While I will be approaching relationships mostly from the perspective of relationships between disabled people or relationships where at least one person is disabled, the ideas explored here do not exclusively apply to disabled, mad, and neurodivergent people.
I want to begin this exploration with the Celtic idea of the “anam cara”:
“According to Celtic tradition, the soul shines all around the body like a luminous cloud. When you are very open — appreciative and trusting — with another person, your two souls flow together. This deeply felt bond with another person means you have found an Anam Cara, or “soul friend.” Your Anam Cara always beholds your light and beauty, and accepts you for who you truly are.”
— John O’Donohue
Importantly, O’Donohue makes clear that the “anam cara” is not a soul-mate. It is, at its core, someone who profoundly sees and accepts you, as you are, not as they wish or long for you to be. In this way, if you desire something from the other person (such as is often the case in a romantic connections), it is unlikely that they can function as your “anam cara” because the “anam cara” is spritual connection rooted in beholding and accepting somebody for who they are, not who you wish them to be.
“A friend is a loved one who awakens your life in order to free the wild possibilities within you.”
— John O’Donohue
Key to the “anam cara” is the idea of liberation. The soul-friend awakens a person and frees them to pursue new dimensions of themselves. Essential to the concept is the idea of reciprocity. For “anam cara” to exist, both people must witness, awaken, and liberate the other.
Several relationships I have had with other disabled people share these attributes, in the sense that we have beheld one another in a way that most people in society fail to see us. We often grow alongside one another and challenge one another to grow and become deeper versions of ourselves.
I will argue here that a unique feature of “anam cara” for marginalized people, including disabled, mad, and neurodivergent people, is that a friend must be able to see ableism and other systems of oppression affecting you to truly witness and behold you. Without this shared sight, they often cannot truly awaken a sense of possibility in you, because why would you believe words of inspiration from someone who doesn’t get it?
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Outside of the “anam cara” itself, the “anam cara” can provide us with numerous relational ethics to apply to any type of relationship. First, it emphasizes the importance of seeing and accepting people as they are because there is inherent light and sacredness coming from all people. Second, it reminds us of the transformative power of relationships and how relationships and community can lead us to transform and grow, including help us escape from and/or try to change ableism and other types of discrimination and abuse that we may face in the course of our lives. Third, they emphasize the importance of reciprocity, not in terms of resource exchange but in terms of shared acknowledgment of the humanity and goodness inherent to the other person. Fourth, the “anam cara” is a radically accepting relationship that does not judge or impose expectations onto the other. Importantly, coercion and punishment are antithetical to the concept of the “anam cara,” which explain why abuse and other types of sexual and physical violence are a deep violation to this relational ethics.
Bringing this relational ethics into disabled community would mean several things: (1) seeing the diversity of the community and respecting differences in experiences, oppression, and needs, (2) acknowledging the value of all community members and their inherent goodness, (3) entering into relationships not only as a source of community but as a way to grow in community with other people, and (4) a commitment to non-carceral approaches to responding to harm and pursuing repair and accountability.
I will now move to Old Norsic (Scandinavian) traditions. Notably, these traditions tend to include less of a focus on emotional depth but rather on the importance of relational actions. I will talk about the role of honor, trust, and loyalty, along with unwritten social rules (the Law of Jante).
In Scandinavian societies, honor and trust were core values that included showing respect to others and upholding personal and familial reputation. Acts of dishonor, disloyalty, or violence were not just viewed as individual problems but affected the reputation of the entire family. While the focus on maintaining social norms may not be ideal for divergent ways of being, this relational ethic — that violence is a family and community problem — is an insight that we can carry into issues of violence that affect disabled people. Too often, sexual and other types of violence are understood as individual problems and we ostracize the people who commit them, rather than accept that their actions reflect attitudes in our families, societies, and cultures that devalue disabled people and make this violence acceptable. If people knew that their friends, family, and community would hold them accountable for violence in personal ways that would make them truly confront what they did and its impact, people would likely act differently. Communities who speak openly about violence are also more likely to design society in such a way so that these types of violence are less likely to occur and so that victims of violence are well-supported when it occurs.
Another Scandinavian value involves a series of unspoken social rules referred to as the the Law of Jante. These are described below:
“You’re not to think you are anything special. You’re not to think you are as good as we [other people in the city] are. You’re not to think you are smarter than we are. You’re not to imagine yourself better than we are. You’re not to think you know more than we do. You’re not to think you are more important than we are. You’re not to think you are good at anything. You’re not to laugh at us. You’re not to think anyone cares about you. You’re not to think you can teach us anything.”
— Aksel Sandemose
This ethical framework is basically an extreme form of humility, that I would argue goes a bit far, and could be damaging to people with divergent lived experiences who do need to teach the rest of society something. That being said, the cultural value of humility is a very worthwhile value to bring into disabled communities and advocacy spaces. Too often, communities and advocacy spaces are destabilized by ego and desire to recreate power hierarchies in these spaces. A focus on this type of humility (i.e., “you’re not to imagine yourself better than we are”) can be a key ethic for any type of community-building that seeks to be truly non-hierarchical.
One interesting personal experience I have had reading more about Celtic and Old Norsic spirituality and ethics is seeing how much of it existed in my life and was apparent in the differences between my maternal and paternal sides of the family. Humility was ingrained in me as a core value by my Scandinavian side of my family, as was the idea that relationships are primarily about actions, honor, and trust. On my Irish Catholic side, there was a far greater focus on relational depth, the importance of seeing people and situations as they truly are, on relationship as transformative, and on having a personal and mystical relationship with a higher power. In this way, Old Norsic and Celtic spirituality are quite complementary because the first is more pragmatic, ethically-oriented, and action-focused, whereas the second is more mystical, ritualistic, and relational.
In the first essay in the series, I wrote about how rejecting being an “angry, white, and woke person” as a cultural identity led me to recognize that I had a lot more to offer to social justice work when I reconnected with my ancestral and faith background pre-colonization. This essay describes in detail some of the specific relational values that I can authentically bring to disabled, mad, neurodivergent, and other community spaces that are rooted in my Irish Catholic, Celtic, and Old Norsic ancestry.
I want to conclude by returning to the point I started on — how disabled, mad, and neurodivergent people are too often victimized or put through bad relationships in part because we don’t have relevant role models. This may in part be because we often have strained relationships with family. I believe that deepening our connection to our ancestral and faith backgrounds can become a source of relational knowledge and guidance that can empower disabled people to find relationships grounded in per-colonial (and thus pre-ableist) cultural values. (That is not to say that all pre-colonial societies were fully inclusive of disabled people, but there is a far greater diversity of disabled experiences prior to settler colonialism).
I want to finish by arguing here that re-connection with ancestral knowledge is particularly important for people who have lost their connection to faith as a result of deconstructing or decolonizing their religion. In my case, I lost my connection to my faith because of the queerphobia, transphobia, and ableism deeply embedded in it. While this was an important action for my growth and well-being, it also left a significant gap in my life that was filled with multiple types of addiction.
Ancestral knowledge can help us fill this gap.
And as someone whose cup has long felt empty, I can feel it filling me up.
Note: Many of the insights shared in this essay are drawn from or informed by the scholarship, activism, and lived work of other writers. I have included a reference list highlighting these writers on the cover page for the essay series.
This is the fifth essay in a series entitled “Cripping Clover: Essays on Lucid Tinn Brains, Demedicalization of Disability, and Irish-American and Celtic Heritage” about decolonizing my understanding of my ancestry, faith, mental health, and disabilities. The prior (fourth) essay is: “Critiquing Neurodiversity as a Universalized Paradigm: Who Are We Divergent Against?” The next (sixth) essay is “Practicing Reflexivity: Lessons from a Decade of Disability-Related Advocacy Collaboration in Ghana.”
