Living With Trauma: The Healers, 19

We are a mess. Our humanity has always lived in a severely damaged and broken state. Whether you subscribe to the Judeo-Christian doctrine of the Fall (as I do) or have some other belief or theory as to why we are such a mess, it still doesn't take a genius to understand this most salient and simple fact. We are a severely flawed species and the damage we have wreaked on the web of life is astronomical. We have not only had to struggle to survive as do other species, we have carried with us the conceit that we are vastly superior to other species, believing ourselves to be gods, and this hubris has made us the author of much destruction, self-inflicted as well as what we have wreaked on this planet. We have sought to subdue and subjugate for our use, benefit and pleasure other species, animal and plant, caring nothing about the harm we would be inflicting on them and on all other organisms. In our desperate bid to make ourselves comfortable and safe we have polluted and contaminated the earth, the oceans and the air that surrounds us, and now the future of our earth, from our acts of contamination, hangs by a thread. We seemed to do reasonably well when we were all hunter-gatherers. Sure, survival was always at a premium and the struggle to stay alive, much less thrive, was held under rather steeper odds than what we who whine about our first world problems have come to take for granted. Believing ourselves to be gods, we still despised other tribes, peoples and nations, making ourselves superior, and so the endless struggles throughout our troubled history, for land, wealth, resources and power. So we have slaughtered, raped, robbed and enslaved one another, impoverished one another, killed one another with epidemics and plagues. Only those small acts of love and kindness that occur between persons, whether friends or strangers, have had any real effect against our absolute destruction though it is a crapshoot as to for how much longer our destruction can be postponed. We are all damaged, individually and collectively. Those of us who occupy seats of power and privilege live as though they do not know this. Many others in the middle class, the bourgeoisie, share this delusion of wellness and superiority. Our whole manner of reaching out to others has always been tainted by colonialist arrogance, and this mentality occurs across the ages, countries, peoples, races and religions. It isn't that we want those who are truly suffering to become well and whole, otherwise they would be different from the rest of us, as well as far superior and stronger, and we wouldn't want that to happen, because they would become like gods and rulers over us, transforming the way we live, the way we think. So, we have bartered off our collective soul for a pottage of socially sanctioned mediocrity, and this mediocrity we have made the gold standard for wellness and recovery. Never mind that trauma survivors and others who struggle with the stigma of mental illness should become self-actualized and empowered. This would turn them into prophets and rulers, throwing in society's face our puerile hypocrisy, mendacity and venality. Better to keep them, not exactly sick, but kind of half-well, like the rest of us. The ruling class never easily nor readily cedes control. In the meantime, there will be those of us who do recover and thrive, despite all this lying nonsense, and we still have to make compromises, we still have to create for us a place where we can ourselves flourish and be heard, but eventually we are going to conquer, should enough of us rise to the challenge, not simply of wellness and recovery, but of growing into our true humanity. Not behaving like insolent little gods, but making ourselves servants and healers as we participate in nursing to health this near moribund and failed experiment of the human species.

Living With Trauma, The Healers, 18

It's all a mess, because we're all a mess. We're all a mess because it's all a mess. Chicken and egg. While meeting with one of my supervisors today we were talking about how to negotiate the mental health system that employs us in ways that are completely beneficial to our clients. We already understand that if we do everything by the book that it is not going to be to the clients' best interest, but for maintaining the machinery in good working form. This isn't to diss or rebel against policy. We need policy. It provides us with foundation, scaffolding, structure, even bricks and mortar. No vine, no matter how beautiful and hardy, is going to thrive without a trellis, or with some kind of support or ballast. The mental health system, which I as an employee am part of, provides that ballast. But shouldn't it be all about the client? This is what empowerment is about. But what kind of empowerment? If I were to persuade any of my clients to flush their meds down the toilet, walk away from the mental health team and live their life just the way they want to, I would be fired from my job, and justifiably so. If harm came to said client, I could be charged with criminal mischief, and rightly so. But what if the client doesn't want medication, indeed refuses to take it, and barring a court order, could simply say no and turn her back on everyone involved in her care? There isn't really a lot I could do, except to try to persuade her to reconsider and, within the framework of the mental health team, offer whatever appropriate support that she would be willing to accept, because she would be needing it. If she would become a danger to herself or to others then she would likely be forcibly apprehended and put on extended leave, obligating her to comply with mental health treatment whether she liked it or not. In the meantime I would be in a rather delicate position, negotiating with the client to help her find her voice without contravening any of the expectations or dictates of my employer. Meanwhile, I would feel equally under pressure to persuade my supervisors to allow me as much wiggle room as possible for the client's wellbeing, knowing that I might have to make free with some of the dictates of policy. All of this while persuading client, supervisor and bosses that I am doing my best on everyone's behalf. Usually this works. Everyone is pleased, they all think that I'm on their side, and I am. Is it any wonder that I often go home exhausted? I work with persons, not with systems and structures. I don't care who it is, I don't care what their role is, they are human beings and we are all companions along the way. We need one another and I think that the synergy that results from working out of a place of unconditional love will do much more for our healing and recovery, client and worker and administration alike because we are all hurting, we are all traumatized and thanks to our clients we are able to learn the ineffable significance of love. It is a messy process, often slow, we seldom know what direction we are taking, but I think that our willingness to work together and to work in a spirit of loving-kindness will in time work miracles.

Living With Trauma: The Healers, 17

Those of you who have been faithfully reading my posts in this series (and if you haven't been reading, then I trust that you will have a very good and persuasive excuse. Too busy doesn't cut it, by the way.) might be wondering, as I am, about one little flaw in my argument. How do people who are living with trauma, not yet recovered, ill and not functioning much better than a smear on a bedsheet, how can those sick and disabled people possibly get their lives together enough so that they can offer any practical help or service to the rest of us? The answer is brutal and honest: some of us are never going to be able to do it. Some are going to be so permanently destroyed and incapacitated, not just by illness, but by stigma and the mental health system to move much beyond being able to bathe, clothe and feed themselves, if that. This is a small portion of the diagnosed population and I don't think they represent most who are on their way to recovery. To fully appreciate this, just consider what one has to go through before getting landed with a diagnosis: child-abuse, no support or guidance when the earliest symptoms begin to manifest, no guidance towards better self-knowledge, a culture of prejudice, fear and stigma, social isolation, rejection and bullying. There are many circumstances and variables. Plus, in order to realistically come to terms with mental illness, mental health and mental wellness, lots of introspection is required and we do not live in a culture that fosters or favours introspection. This is a very extroverted culture that we are living in, as introversion and introspection do nothing to keep the manic wheel of capitalism turning and grinding. This shallow, materialistic, consumerist culture of narcissism leaves no room for real personal growth, and only those concepts of spirituality (meditation classes and yoga on demand) that can be successfully marketed to the masses are going to be considered here. There are no rites of passage for adolescents who find themselves held hostage by audial or visual hallucinations, nor for those whose extremes of agony and ecstasy could channel the most amazing creative genius and energy had there been people and traditions to help guide them effectively through the maelstrom. As a community we are vastly too fragmented and scattered and absorbed in our own self-interest to be able to, or care, to provide one another the kind of care, mentorship and friendship that we all need and all have a right to in order to really flourish in our humanity. What we have instead is a society that is hobbled by fear and neurosis and bigotry. Our mental health system simply stigmatizes those in its care, because everyone is too busy and too frightened by the shadows and chimeras of madness to really want to wade too deep into those waters, but wade deep we must if we are to provide a culture of healing, wellness and wholeness. In my own experience, I got off rather well, but I long showed symptoms of trauma without the benefit of diagnosis or of help, because help was so difficult to source. Had therapeutic interventions occurred when I was a child being abused by family members and bullied by my peers then perhaps my life might have taken rather a different direction, and so it goes with all of us. We are still not sufficiently oriented towards compassion, love and kindness in order to offer therapeutic help that is going to be anything other than a Band-Aid. We have come a long way in our methods of mental health care since the infernos that were mental asylums in past centuries. If you were wealthy you could access a psychotherapist. If you were poor, it would be a brutish and very short existence inside the madhouse. I think now that we are getting slowly beyond the medical model that we are beginning to see more inroads of progress: self-empowerment, for example. I am still concerned about what I see to be an overreliance upon medications, and this tendency of mental health practitioners to pathologize any normal human behaviour or reaction that they happen to find unpleasant coming from a client or patient that they dislike or feel personally threatened by. We might also consider one little detail: just as there will always be those mental health consumers who might never recover, there are also those CEO's and corporate douchebags who will never recover from their particular psychopathology: sociopathic narcissism and empathy-deficit disorder.

Living With Trauma; The Healers, 16

I concluded yesterday's post with the thought that survivors of trauma have a prophetic voice. I would like to explore this a bit. First, let's consider our way of treating people who have been traumatized and marginalized throughout our history. I am also thinking of how the concepts and understanding of mental health and mental illness have changed, and continue to change, throughout history. I would also like to suggest here that mental illness could be very much a social construct that has evolved and morphed over history and that it doesn't really exist in some cultures. This isn't to suggest that an Aztec priest or a Spanish medieval mystic wouldn't have been hospitalized and put immediately on medications here in Canada during the twenty-first century. And it could very well be that a mental health consumer living with schizophrenia might be burnt as a heretic in Sevilla or sacrificed to the war god in Tenochtitlan, except for one salient little theory: both the medieval Spanish and the Mexica were collectively mentally ill and neurotic. Perhaps individuals whom we would deem mentally well and healthy today would have been the most likely targets for the Inquisitor's stake or the priest's blade. As I have mentioned elsewhere, both cultures developed, menaced and trembling under the shadow of death, threat and uncertainty. The collective trauma and neurosis that got integrated into both cultures must have been tremendous. Still, it is only too easy for us who are enjoying while they last the progressive, postmodern privileges of our so very advanced era to look with smug self-satisfaction on other cultures and other eras as inferior, quaint and barbaric. We seldom appear to consider what kind of lens we are going to be peered at through five hundred years from now, if we haven't by that time rendered this planet uninhabitable to our descendants. Given that future generations will have learned from some of our mistakes, I will optimistically assume that they will be kinder and more altruistic people than us their ancestors. They will see this maelstrom of global capitalism and rapid fire information exchange creating vast populations of frightened, trembling neurotics. They will see people more interested in their status on social media than developing their own character. We will come across as shallow, greedy, narcissistic and ruthless little materialists. They will tut-tut at how slow we were to stop the engines of greed that have been destroying our planet, and they will gasp in ironic dismay at how we allowed the breech between rich and poor to grow so irreconcilably wide as to foster one bloody revolution and uprising after another, especially after our own immediate ancestors had worked so hard to institutionalize basic human and economic rights through the UN and other global organizations. They will particularly take note that instead of owning our collective madness and reconciling ourselves with it, we isolated and scapegoated small populations of vulnerable and poor individuals, people not wired or naturally gifted to compete and succeed in the dog race of global capitalism. They will marvel how people gifted with kindness, empathy and compassion, often highly gifted artistically, spiritually and intellectually, were sidelined and rendered incapacitated by medications, some left to languish the rest of their lives inside locked wards. I have long believed that there are two classes of people on this earth: those who have been diagnosed with mental illness, and those who have not been diagnosed. This diagnosis carries a huge weight of influence in the outcome of a person's life, beginning and ending with the ravages of stigma. A narcissist, a psychopath will do very well in our current culture because those personalities foster capitalism and bring it to its most toxic flowering and fruiting. Those of us who have been traumatized, who have been diagnosed with a mental illness have a particular advantage over the rest of you. We know what's wrong with us, and it is the same crap that is wrong with the rest of you. Trauma simply has stripped us naked and rendered us less than capable of lying about who we are: a damaged and toxic species of intelligent ape, emotionally and psychologically wounded, living in collective states of delusion, and wreaking havoc on other species. Trauma shocks us awake. Through trauma we are shown and learn to accept that we are all collectively traumatized, we are all collectively damaged. We are the ones who thus come to see the lies that all of you are still hiding behind. We are the ones who declare, not only that the Emperor has no clothes, but that in his naked state he is indeed a sorry and pathetic sight. We all share this nakedness in common. The already traumatized know this and accept it, and we scandalize and horrify the rest of you because none of you can gut looking at your real and ugly faces in the mirrors that we have been transformed into by suffering, affliction and stigma. The truth will make us free. And this is the prophetic voice of the traumatized.

Living With Trauma: The Healers, 15

"Only scarred lives can heal." This is a line from one of my favourite devotional books, after the Bible. It is titled "God Calling", written by two anonymous Englishwomen in the early 1930's and edited by AJ Russell. These women claimed that every day God would come to them and speak and they would write down the words which were eventually published in the eponymously titled daily devotional. Both these women had had very difficult and challenging lives, but aside from one being Anglican and the other Roman Catholic, almost nothing else is known about them. In the midst of their suffering God became the constant and enduring reality in their lives. I find it interesting that the most effective therapists in the mental health field are the peer support workers. We haven't had a lot of training and our wages are obscenely low, and but for the blessing of subsidized housing, none of us could expect to survive at this work. But we treat our work as a calling because we work out of our own experience of trauma, stigma and illness, our recovery, and I think if anyone in this industry can claim to work from their hearts, those people would be us. This isn't to say that we can do it all ourselves, alone, on our own, without support or ballast. Of course not. We are part of a team. Remember what I wrote about love among the ruins. Regardless of how uncreative, unwieldy, slow and ridiculously inefficient the various government and NGO organizations we are working for, we would not be able to get a lot done without their help, without the foundation and stability that they provide us. Think of a wisteria vine bearing incredibly beautiful fragrant flowers, or a vine yielding the sweetest and choicest grapes, and one might appreciate the need for, the very importance of structure and support. Our lives have been crushed, broken, trodden upon like grapes for the making of wine. But how else could the inner light, love and healing grace be released in our lives? So trauma, as awful as it is, is so often the most necessary evil for training and equipping the healers of humanity. This isn't to insinuate that we have to be, or ever will be completely healed, restored and able to function in complete independence. Independence is one of the many toxic myths of our individualist and capitalist culture, if that's what it can be called. We all need one another. I have seen very gifted healers who themselves cannot hold their lives together without help and support from others, be it regular appointments with a psychiatrist or counsellor, medications, or subsidized and supportive housing. Some of us still have our issues and relapses and addictions. This makes us no less healers and no less necessary and needed by others. This isn't to give us a pass for not moving forward in our recovery. Of course we are moving forward. Some of us do become fully functional. In my case, I have done my recovery without medications or hospitalization and I live to this day stigma-free, despite some of the well-meaning dunderheads that I work with. There are others, healers more gifted than I, who need some or all of those supports What I am saying here is that we really have to reassess what we value in our society: to start giving precedence and priority to the soft virtues of love, empathy, compassion and kindness, over the cold hard efficiency that keeps the machinery well oiled and running but every bit as likely to kill anyone unfortunate to get caught in it. Love, and not selfishness and efficient greed, are at the very heart of the universe, and for this reason peer support workers and others who have survived trauma and stigma are going to be a needed and essential prophetic voice that is going to have to be heard in this very cold and dysfunctional world that we have made for ourselves.

Living With Trauma: The Healers, 14

I am going to address here an elephant in the room.  I will call this entity the poor-bashing immigrant.  This is not an easy topic.  Immigration is part of the lifeblood of the Canadian economy and is essential to the still-evolving Canadian culture.  No one is allowed to badmouth immigrants.  The politically-correct thought police will be down your throat faster than a wad of undigested kale.  For the record, I am pro-immigration.  I am also against bigotry.  Against any class of people.  Including the poor.  But how does one respond when the poor-bashers are themselves immigrant Canadians who have done well in this country?  When I was homeless and had just arrived again in this city where I grew up after almost a year of couch-surfing between my father's rented cabin on the Sunshine Coast and with various friends here in Vancouver, I felt like a refugee.  In my own city.   I had to struggle to find shelter every night, and I also had to struggle to simply get a long term roof over my head.  I had the good fortune of friends helping me out but many others also turned their backs on me.  I felt like a foreigner in my own city.  An unwelcome foreigner.  This was during the late nineties when the poor had already turned into the new coloured folk, targets for the new poor-bashing culture of apartheid.  Yes, there is still racism, and it is still ugly, but now we have an even easier target and no one bats an eye when invective is unleashed on us.  I have heard one new Canadian after another disparage our local poor as lazy, parasitic losers who don't want to work for a living, that we are simply a burden to the taxpayer.  And those kinds of immigrants, who themselves have benefited grandly from the largess of the Canadian taxpayers, are among the first to baulk about paying taxes and if they become well-heeled business entrepreneurs, will exploit ever loophole in the book to avoid paying their share.  And they are also more likely to vote for rightwing politicians. This class of immigrant usually comes to Canada expecting that it is going to be the land of milk and honey and that all hard work will be justly rewarded with a nice house, two cars in the garage and children in university.  This happens often enough for new Canadians.  No one, apparently, verses them on their arrival that this is a country of growing social and economic inequality, that there is no guarantee that they are going to do particularly well, nor that should they prosper that perhaps they might accept an implicit expectation that they might also do their part to help the less fortunate in this country, through volunteer work, by being good neighbours, or at least by paying their share of taxes and not saying unkind things about individuals who were born and raised in this country and somehow end up having to sleep on sidewalks or in shop doorways and beg for change or collect empties in order to survive.  These same immigrants often come from countries with little or no social safety net and a culture of absolute zero compassion towards the less fortunate.  Is it any wonder that so many of them turn into poor bashers?  And local folk aren't really much help.  A friend who is here from another country, while on a student university program in business administration, was told by one of his professors (himself likely not native born) that people in this country are homeless because they don't want to work.  With our own citizens believing and spreading this kind of defamatory nonsense, is it any wonder that newcomers are going to be even less inclined to be kind and respectful to their marginalized neighbours here?  No one talks about the fifty percent of newcomers who actually return to their country of origin within a year, nor about the others who somehow don't make it, fall through the cracks and become themselves, poor, homeless, addicted, suffering from a mental illness, or all of the above,  Most recently we have been courting the controversy over the modular housing for street homeless adults that is about to be constructed near a school in Marpole, which is one of Vancouver's last affordable neighbourhoods.  All the NIMBY's in that area have been out in force, champing at the bit and frothing at the mouth, worried about their precious young progeny being traumatized or worse by this near presence of addicts, criminals, mentally ill and other vulnerable folk.  I noticed in the videos that the majority of the protestors appeared to be recently arrived immigrants, principally Asian and South Asian, though there were also a few local born poor bashing bigots in their number.  One obviously Chinese woman who seemed fresh off the boat was caught yelling that the homeless people should all go live in Stanley Park. Now as part of this culture of poor-bashing we have in mixed housing developments special poor doors for the government subsidized tenants to keep them apart from the well-healed house flippers and yuppies who actually bought to live in the same building.  Living in BC Housing myself, I certainly wouldn't want to be sharing facilities with yuppies, but their lives are so shallow and their life experience so limited, would it really be fair to deprive them of a chance to get to know and mingle with folk who are different from them?  They might even gain a sense and appreciation of their own humanity.  They might even grow a bit!  I find it sad that with our government's obsession with money, wealth and the economy, that would-be immigrants are screened out for all kinds of reasons, especially for lack of funds or resources or skills and connections that will make them competitive in the job market and not end up as burdens to society.  No one has ever been denied access to this country for their lack of compassion or empathy, or for being greedy, ruthless and ambitious.  No wonder they poor-bash.

Living With Trauma: The Healers, 13

It's love among the ruins. Our government-funded mental health services are not sufficient for providing the healing that we are needing. Our government is not a healer. This is not one of its gifts. It is good for funding and ballast. Little more. Those of us who work as healers, or agents of recovery, have a long haul ahead of us. We always have a long haul ahead of us. The policy wonks and stingy dunderheads who set policy and control the purse strings know absolutely nothing about what it's like on the ground here. If any of them have ever had a mental health diagnosis, we are going to be the last ones to know about it. They have never known illness, stigma, or poverty. The world has always been their oyster, and none of them have yet choked on the silver spoon they were born sucking on. Even if most of the union staff are paid better than a living wage, this still does little to address or really and justly compensate how much of their hearts and lives they end up putting into their work for the wellbeing of their vulnerable clients. For peer support workers such as myself, it is of course much worse. We are grossly underpaid and we still have to fight stigma and the snooty hierarchy of the mental health system in order to gain any respect for the work that we do. Even though we have been found to be indispensable as therapists and healers, not by training but by the lived experience of illness that has cracked open our gift and calling as healers. As I have learned from my own four years of therapy, and through interactions with clients, healing and recovery is within the purview of the client, and only the client. My psychiatrist did not have a magic wand to wave and, hey presto! Neither could I do the same for the people I work with, nor would I, should I ever be gifted with such magical power. My therapist was the conductor. I was the orchestra, and I was the one who called the tune. So it is with my clients. This is what I like about motivational interviewing. It puts in the hands of the client the choices and options. Not necessarily the power, since they already have the power, they have always had the power to heal their lives. They don't know this, and in some cases are so comfortable in the stigma they live with that they don't want to know it. Recovery can be scary. It means venturing into the unknown. It is a risk, sometimes a huge risk and the comfort of the known and familiar can be very seductive. Only the individual, with respectful, tactful and loving support from others can decide when or whether to step out into the unknown, to take the necessary risks in order to move forward in the darkness. The strength that we gain empowers us, for our own healing and also anointing us to be healers for others.

Living With Trauma: The Healers, 12

Balance and perspective, both contemporary and historical, are among the biggest challenges towards real mental health recovery. It is increasingly more difficult to integrate into a materialist, consumerist society that celebrates banality, greed, escapism and addiction, especially if you yourself tend to be a little bit unusual. This is also one of the huge problems in delivering effective mental health treatment: where does personality end, and where does pathology begin? Or vice-a-versa. How much is the personality so affected and shaped by illness, that the symptoms of illness become the personality and the personality becomes the illness? But is this illness, or is it simply stigma? And by the same token, is it really stigma that becomes the mental illness, and it becomes it's own grey, grotty little gift that goes on giving? What causes mental illness? Is there such a thing as mental illness? We have agreed upon symptoms that indicate schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, schizoaffective disorder, mood and personality disorders, PTSD, anxiety, depression, paranoia, or fill in the blank. What is seldom discussed are the conditions that lead to illness: child abuse, bullying, loneliness, social isolation, unemployment, underemployment, poverty, any kind of harmless unusual behaviour that would mark as merely eccentric a socially adjusted individual, but would land anyone else in a locked ward? This isn't to downgrade the legitimate symptoms of illness that necessitate treatment: suicidal ideation, self-harm, visual and aural hallucinations, paranoiac ideation, violent acting out, loneliness and prolonged depression, sleeplessness and social isolation from heightened anxiety, to name but a few. Not everyone who lands in the mental health system started out as a socially maladroit misfit. But that does often enough tend to give mental health consumers a running start into a career of chronic stigma and illness. Neither am I doubting the necessity, or the efficacy of medications for controlling symptoms and helping people to stabilize so that they can actually begin to get on with the process of recovery. There is a lot of value in medications, but I also wonder if we have become over-reliant on medications, where significant changes of lifestyle, decent housing, self care and, especially a loving, supportive network of friends, a sense of spiritual and ontological purpose in life, resources for creative and self-exploration, and sufficient money for people to live on with dignity (at least double what people are currently expected to subsist on for their disability pensions, and yes, we can afford to do this!), could also do much to help alleviate symptoms. This isn't to assume that it has to be either-or, but I think that by introducing alternatives, should they be accepted and acted on, could also, in some cases, help reduce or even entirely eliminate the need for medications. Those who are most vulnerable are most likely to end up in the system: if you are without adequate family supports, if you have been traumatized by violence and ill-treatment, if you are in any way considered unusual: artistic, spiritual, literary, political, activist, and unable or unwilling to shut-up about your convictions. Anyone who is considered a threat to the social order is only a diagnosis away from extended leave. Let's not kid ourselves. But in order to have a health care system that really adequately addresses and treats mental health disorders, we would need to live in a vastly different and perfect world. We would have to live in a country with a society and culture that are not consumed by greed, competitiveness and addictive behaviours; we would have to be a people already recovered from, or well on our way to recovering from the kind of collective trauma that has marked our human species for millennia. Those things are nowhere near happening for us, and part of the fallout that is going to be confronting us will be the needs and symptoms of, not so much the mentally ill, but persons who are publicly and internally (or self) stigmatized by mental health diagnoses and treatment. The real kicker? In this population we will also find the healers.

Living With Trauma: The Healers, 11

How does recovery look? How is recovery supposed to look? When I began my practice as a peer support worker (I suppose that the word "practice", here, sounds a bit pretentious, since that is rather a sacred word reserved for high-snortin' psychotherapists, but really, a peer support worker is really a psychotherapist without the frills. We don't have the years of training and education, and we certainly don't earn the big bucks, but we have been there ourselves, and this gives us an intuitive knowledge of mental illness and recovery that none of our higher paid colleagues can even hold a candle to. So, I have a peer support practice. Sounds nice, eh?). I am aware of many of the stereotypes and clichés of recovery, and this really says more about the dumbed-down kind of culture we live in. I remember seeing a poster montage of images of how recovery is supposed to look: a happy, Caucasian family having a barbecue together; someone jogging with a buddy, a ball game, someone cooking a meal, a guy working out in the gym. All banal, banal, banal and pretty mundane. There must also have been an image of a happy submissive little employee, but I can't remember them all, it was thirteen years ago, but even then I thought, how lame! I also recall another display in a mental health facility featuring cans of Campbell soups with different recovery cliché names about happiness, diligence, success, confidence, self-esteem, and every other recovery cliché you could think of (sorry, Gentle Reader, for the sound of my retching). So, I remarked to a colleague that they were missing a flavour. He asked what it was, and I replied, "Recovery Propaganda Chowder." He didn't think it was funny. And it's not funny, really. How does recovery look for me? To keep certain colleagues and bosses quiet, I simply would reply, I have an apartment, a job, and friends. Uh-huh. I also draw and paint. But when I was ill, I was already enjoying some success as a working visual artist, painting well, exhibiting my paintings and actually selling quite a few. I had time, because I wasn't really well enough to work at a regular job. Or, at least, I wasn't able to find anything I could stick to, without being fired or laid off for not being considered a good "fit." So, I was on welfare, painting and selling my work. Now that I work full time, I have precious little time to show or market my art, though I still work at it every day. So, I would say that my success has been more of a trade-off. I do generally feel better, less anxious, less afraid, but not less angry. I will always be angry. There would be something seriously the matter with me if I wasn't angry. With all the stupid ass destructiveness that our species is wreaking on the planet, the environment, one another and on ourselves it would be absolutely stupid, callous and selfish to not be angry. I am also writing this blog. Every single day, but this could be considered, by some psychiatrists anyway (especially if they don't like what I write) as obsessive compulsive behaviour. Having no family makes me rather alone in the world, since I have no next of kin, I often don't know what I'm going to do on Christmas Day or Thanksgiving, and when I kick the bucket there simply is not going to be anyone to claim my body. I suppose this makes me vulnerable, but I have always known that I am vulnerable. I have always accepted that I am vulnerable. And I have always celebrated that I am vulnerable, because this makes me feel alive, open and receptive to the world around me and it generates in me a capacity to love others. Not really a poster-boy for the stereotype of mental health recovery, am I, Gentle Reader? As a Charismatic Christian with strong Quaker and contemplative tendencies I also claim to have a relationship with God. In fact, God talks to me. Religious delusion, anyone? But I am recovered. I see the divine in everything and I celebrate each moment as a gift from God. Hm, sounds a bit bi-polar, if you ask me? There are lots of features about my life that could be so easily pathologized and turned into yet another label of mental illness, and this is what stigma can do. Except for one little detail: I have never accepted stigma. And now, more than ever, I reject stigma. While I saw a psychiatrist for four years I kept trying to reconcile myself to the idea that I was mentally ill. But now, in retrospect, I have one little thing to say about this: I am not, nor ever was mentally-ill, regardless of any lame-ass PTSD and anxiety diagnosis. There were some rather high-ranking individuals in the Anglican Church (one was a famous housing worker for the City of Vancouver) who were conspiring to keep me quiet because they had swallowed some lies about me being homophobic, anti-gay, and working to influence others against the church's move towards embracing same-sex marriage. All lies engendered by miscommunications and half-truths and none of those lying hypocrites even bothered to ask me personally where I really stood. Truth be told, I was on my own journey towards understanding and acceptance of same-sex issues. But they tried to convince me that I was mentally-ill, sick with depression and needed to go on medication and to apply for disability. When I was turned down for all those things and told that I had PTSD (largely brought on and aggravated by those losers), and began to accept psychotherapy without medications, without hospitalization, and soon was working fulltime at a real job, they all dropped me like the proverbial hot potato, and when I called one of them on her duplicity she screamed at me about threatening her. But this knowledge, in the wrong hands, would have given me a diagnosis of paranoia, or at least of having a persecution complex. My psychotherapist had a one word answer for all of this: "Nonsense." By avoiding the mental health system, by refusing to allow well-meaning professionals to define me as sick and stigmatize me, I have recovered in spades. My life has flow, order, and a sense of dynamic creative harmony, with good order, structure and self-discipline. If I have recovered then this has occurred on only one individual's terms: My Own.

Living With Trauma: The Healers, 10

First, a little message from the prophet, Isaiah, in Spanish, and I will promptly translate into English: "Pero el Senor Todopoderso sera exaltado en justicia, el Dios santo se mostra santo en rectitude.  Los corderos pastaran como en praderas propias, y las cabras comeran entre las ruinas de los ricos."  In English: "But the Almighty Lord will be exalted in justice, and the holy God will reveal himself in holiness and in righteousness.  The lambs will graze in their own pastures, and the goats will eat among the ruins of the rich."  I long took this passage of scripture as a message from God that helped sustain me during my twenty year penance at St. James, the high Anglican parish church in Vancouver.  Rather than working at trying to change a system that seemed fossilized and moribund I opted instead to rejoice and celebrate my freedom among those sacred ecclesiastical ruins.  It also came to my attention that those same ruins of the old established church were sustaining me, providing me with ballast that would help me run free and thrive in what otherwise might have been an intolerably oppressive environment.  This to me is in some ways analogous to my experience as a peer support worker in a mental health system that simply goes on existing as its own reward.  In an ideal world, all of our clients would become empowered, fully recovered persons getting on with rich and rewarding lives and we in the mental health system would have worked ourselves out of a job, making ourselves eventually irrelevant and in need of new job training and employment, perhaps as computer programmers or retail employees.  It isn't quite that we are employing a kind of planned obsolescence that will keep our people from getting well and thus keep us in employment.  This is not a conspiracy and life is never so simple as to be able to fit the fevered imaginings of losers who  live in their parents' basements.  I have already addressed the flawed model of recovery, that seems to concern itself more with creating happy consumers and shoppers and compliant little workers rather than fully self-actualized persons.  Because the kind of society, and times that we are living in, are being so influenced and formed by this particularly nasty and pernicious kind of global capitalism, this is how a lot of people are going to think, especially those who occupy high positions and make decisions, set policy and control the purse strings.  We also have to keep on questioning and challenging what we mean when we use the word "recovery".  We know what people are needing to recover from, but what are they recovering into, or towards?  It is very challenging to live independently in a city such as Vancouver, where housing costs are way through the roof, where we are held hostage to the greed of property developers , scumlords, longtime home owners who will sell only to the highest bidder, the rapacious real estate brokers who manipulate them, and the buyers market, whether wealthy foreigners or wealthy locals, for whom money is no object.  Not to mention our weak and spineless politicians who live very nicely in their pockets, make nice noises about making this city affordable and tremble and quake in fear of doing anything to offend their wealthy corporate sponsors.  Speaking, myself, as a recovered person, I know that I could not live here independently while still honouring my core values, which means I will never sell myself to the highest bidder (and anyway, I never could, it is not one of my abilities).  So, if owning your own home is a sign of recovery, then I am not recovered.  If renting a market apartment is a sign of recovery, then I am not recovered.  If working for better than a living wage is a sign of recovery, then I am not fully recovered.  Do you see where I am going with this, Gentle Reader?  I wasted several sessions with a very good counsellor in the last few years because one of my supervisors, convinced that being a peer support worker made me somehow fragile and prone to illness, insisted that I get the support.  I was simply informed that there was nothing wrong with me and that I would do fine without the support.  I am fully recovered.  But I still have to live in government subsidized housing.  And so it is with the people I offer care and support to.  They may never show signs of the kind of recovery that this dense and stupid system we work in seems to define as recovery, but they are still going to recover.  They are going to recover on their own terms and not on the mental health system's terms and certainly not on my own terms.  And I will go on supporting them in this.  Whether some of them entirely graduate from the mental health system or not isn't really going to be the gold standard for full recovery, as much as I celebrate their getting out of the system.  Some are so constituted as persons, and so impacted by the ravages of the Medical Model that has left many permanently disabled and chronically ill, that they are always going to need support.  This is not going to stop them from recovering on their terms, nor from flourishing within the ballast of a support system that they shouldn't have to need, but will at least help keep them up and mobile so that they can get on with their lives, move forward and enjoy the beauty of human existence.

Living With Trauma: The Healers, 9

Empowering the disempowered. Or maybe getting them to empower themselves? I think that could depend on a number of different variables. I have already mentioned that those who have spent much of their adult lives as recipients of mental health services are not going to be much motivated for doing anything. I would even go as far as to say that a few of them, if they could get away with it, would happily have others wipe their asses for them. This rather reminds me of a favourite joke of my father's: There was a little chickadee who was flying south for the winter. Suddenly the wind began to blow, the snow started to fall and the little chickadee was too exhausted to continue, so he let himself fall to the earth where he landed in a big pile of horse shit. The little chickadee sank down deep into the horse shit and, feeling warm and safe, decided to fall asleep and there he slept for the entire winter, till spring arrived. With the first rays of the warming sun, the snow thawed and the chickadee awoke, poked his little head up through the horse shit and sang out, "Chickadee! Chickadee!" Then suddenly a seagull descended and bit off his little head. Now, there are three morals to this little story: 1. It is not necessarily your best friend who gets you into shit. 2. It isn't necessarily your best friend who's going to get you out of shit. So, number 3, if you find yourself in shit, but you're also warm, safe and comfortable, then stay there and enjoy it. I don't necessarily agree with this little story, as I was not likely to agree with much of what my father had to say. But I think this is a rather astute description of what can happen to what we could call the professional mental health consumer: which is to say, people who have spent so much of their lives in various stages of mental illness and mental health treatment that their lives have come to be defined by both their illness and the mental health system. This is their life, their reality. This is their comfort zone, where they feel safe and at home. And you challenge them at your peril. I first discovered how difficult it can be working with clients attuned to the Medical Model when we want to grandfather them towards recovery. As one former colleague once put it, it is for them a foreign country. It is scary and threatening. It isn't just a matter of their medications, since in the Recovery Model psychotropic medications are every bit as key in mental health treatment, though perhaps they don't quite occupy centre stage. And the mental health consumers are not to be blamed. So frightening and overwhelming are the symptoms of mental illness, from hearing voices, to paranoid delusions, extreme mood swings, depression, anxiety and everything in between, that they are going to gladly welcome any support, any soothing comfort, whatever soporific that can make their lives even a little bit more tolerable. It is already vastly too late to intervene and take preventative measures because the damage has been already done. What is left is usually damage control. Often it is enough simply to coach them into being their own advocates, or helping them to engage a little bit more in the community: volunteer work, accessing public transit, learning to shop for their own food, accessing programs and activities, or simply learning to be comfortable enough to go walking outside in public. I still believe that with sufficient patient and compassionate support that some real healing and recovery can begin to happen for many of these people. They have, for the most part, never felt valued or really respected and I think that this is really key to starting the long journey towards mental health recovery. Our mental health services, such as they are, are not sufficient to provide this, especially if there is no family, nor other loved ones, available to help and support. Only those workers who really care and love enough can help with this, those who are not just in the industry for the paycheque. Fortunately, there are many of us who fit that bill, though our system of care delivery is often so constructed and structured as to make it very difficult for appropriate care and support to be consistently delivered. Not to mention that not all clients are going to rise to the challenge of moving forward unless they can be somehow persuaded that the risk of recovery and the uncertainty that comes with it are going to be worth the effort. It always comes back to the willingness of the client and in the meantime we do what we must, what we can, to continue blowing on those still-warm coals, hoping that the first little spark will set in motion the fire that will move them forward.

Living With Trauma: The Healers,8

It seems to me that there are some huge social inequalities that are inherent to our mental health services. I have often noticed how all of my coworkers, save for myself and some other peer support workers have at least five years of completed post-secondary education, and many now have (and require) their masters. Among the recipients of our services it is going to be quite a different story. Out of nine clients I am currently working with, two are university graduates. This is not an unusual statistic, Gentle Reader. And by the way, even with all my lovely writing and high-falutin language and dextrous use of English, your loyal scribe here just squeezed past less than two years of community college. The vast majority of our mental health professionals come from a position of privilege. This isn't to say that their lives are perfect or trouble free. You wouldn't believe all the heart-breaking First World Problems I have heard about in the staff room. On the other hand, some of them do go through there own legitimate life crises: death of loved ones, cancer, accident-related injuries, burnout, and their own emotional and mental health stresses and problems such as which rarely see the light of day. But for them there is still plenty of support, ballast and infrastructure so that none of them will ever themselves end up as clients in the system, even if they do get diagnosed with a mental illness. They are not vulnerable like the rest of us. So, this is not in any way a conspiracy, rather just the way the cards fall in an unequal society. It is also true that a lot of people cannot finish their post-secondary education because of mental illness, given that schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (the two biggies) generally don't begin to surface till the late teens and early twenties, when most people who will have the good fortune of having access to a university or college education will be most likely to be enrolled. I sometimes wonder if this could be why both these mental health situations tend to be overrepresented in our mental health services. No matter which way we look at it, our publically funded mental health services really show a vastly disempowered and vulnerable population, many of who appear to lack the skills, life-skills and education to be able to play an appropriate role in their own problem-solving and recovery. Add to this how much the old Medical Model of mental health care still seems to hang over us like a cold grey shadow and we will have a better idea of why many clients remain so chronically dependent on services and so unlikely to ever really recover. We could also consider our own flawed model of recovery, based more on creating socially-conformist consumers of material and market goods and services than fully self-actualized persons who can adequately steer their own lives and actually challenge and help change this inadequate system of mental health care and services. How to empower our people is another story, and this I will try to address and explore promptly, Gentle Reader.

Living With Trauma: The Healers, 7

I wonder if black-and-white, either-or thinking really is one of the big obstacles to recovering from trauma, as I am often told by my coworkers and bosses. There is this assumption that the experience of evil, especially human evil becomes so deeply seared into the soul that often for years, sometimes for a lifetime, the ability to see things in shades of grey, in nuance, is never likely to occur again for the sufferer. I have often wondered about this, both regarding my personal recovery, and many of the trauma survivors I work with and support. This however could be but one side of the experience of trauma. Especially if the victim is able to see that the same darkness is part of his own human nature. But this is where acts and dispositions of kindness and compassion need to take the forefront. For the trauma survivor, who is not likely to trust, it will take time and great patience for that person to accept that there are people who do not mean them harm, who are actually kind and good and are committed to their own highest good. But this does not negate the responsibility of the trauma survivor. Indeed, those whose lives have been impacted by trauma are the most likely to recover or do well if they are interested and actively helping in the wellbeing and recovery of other trauma survivors, hence the value and importance of peer support. I am also keenly aware of the huge mix of light and darkness that composes our human nature. Even Hitler, as a vegetarian and a nonsmoker had at least two qualities I could admire, but there is something about the systematic slaughter of thirteen million Jews, homosexuals, Roma, Slavs, communists, people with disabilities and everyone else he didn't like that doesn't give a lot of clout to the arguments against smoking or eating meat. Similarly, many of the Jews who survived the Fuhrer's inferno went on to do some very unkind things to the Palestinian Arabs as they stole their land from them and consigned more than a half million to the misery and squalor of living long term in refugee camps. On their own land. That they had lived on for centuries, even millennia. And some of those Palestinians themselves retaliated by turning into butchers and suicide bombers, themselves. And the beat goes on... We are all mixtures of good and evil, light and darkness. A conservative redneck who poor bashes homeless people could also be the kindest neighbour or exemplary father or mother. A justice and peace warrior might also be an unkind douchebag who snaps at children for making too much noise on the school playground. There can be all kinds of valid reasons for being what we are and for each one of us being the whole mess of festering contradictions that make our human nature something so engaging and wonderful. My question here is, do you have to have a mental health condition in order to be an either-or, black-and-white kind of thinker? The unfortunate Colombian from whom I had to disengage yesterday, given his incorrigible poor-bashing, likely does not have any mental health challenges. I could be wrong. I am now and again, Gentle Reader. Or maybe he is manifesting symptoms of the kind of collective trauma that has in some ways paralyzed the national Colombian psyche, following fifty years of civil war; or this could be a collective trauma that is more generically Latino, deriving from a long and very cruel and harsh history that has created a most binary culture of heartless winners, and grovelling losers. Even when I was really suffering from symptoms of PTSD, I was not one for black-and-white, either-or thinking. Not many of my clients are like this. I have noticed this kind of thinking in some of my coworkers, and one rehab therapist whom I won't name here would probably be a hellfire breathing fundamentalist if he ever became a Christian. Or a Muslim. Maybe this label of black-and-white, either-or thinking is just that, a label, and nothing else. I make this suggestion for one simple reason. The vast majority of people working in the psychiatric industry have logged many years of university education, with a considerable emphasis in the arts and humanities. Naturally, many of the said mental health professionals are already going to have a well-developed sense of nuance and subtlety and with that a capacity for understanding and accepting paradox. And this developed faculty is going to have everything to do with advanced education and diddly-squat to do with having a mental health diagnosis. Likewise with our clients, many of whom are not well-educated, by the way, but those who are, or at least are quite intelligent and well-read, I have noticed are also going to be every bit as mentally dextrous at navigating complex human and cosmological arrangements as their allegedly superior mental health support workers and care-givers. Kind of makes you want to scream, eh?

Living With Trauma: The Healers, 6

The Truth will make you free. It is also the truth that heals. I think that if we are going to be healers then we really have to reckon with the kind of lies that we live with and that we accept and adopt as though they were true. Well, they are true in a sense. They are true lies. What are some of those lies? I think the principal falsehood that the bourgeoisie and the post-bourgeoisie make hay on is that we are really better than others and that we are also better than we really are. This really manifests in the kind of classist society we live in. Canada? Classist? The dickens you say! We don't have the same kind of social and class hierarchy that really tends to paralyze the English, but given the British roots of Canadian culture (yes, Justin Trudeau, there is such a thing as a distinctly Canadian culture!) it really was a role just waiting to be inhabited and so now we have our own version of a class system. It is the caste system of the meritocracy. You earn your way to success and prestige and piss-on everyone else who hasn't made it yet. Money is the great equalizer in this country, making us almost as bad that way as our bloated neighbour to the south. The snobbery is revolting, and everyone who has been born into better society, of course, is going to already have more than a leg up the social ladder. And they are going to imagine themselves as better than, say, the plumber or the electrician, who in turn is going to imagine himself better than the barista at Bean Around the World, who is going to imagine himself better than the barista at Starbuck's, who is going to imagine himself better than the barista at Tim Horton's who is going to imagine himself just slightly better than the homeless guy pushing a shopping buggy full of empties. And then there's the rest of us: people living with a mental illness, people living in government subsidized housing, the chronically poor, people whose only real political voice is in having one single vote per election, unable to do anything else to really influence the swine in government office to do anything that will help bring us greater social and economic equality, given their personal lack of experience with disempowerment, and their own reluctance to offend their support base, especially if they are conservative. We are angry. Well, Duh! In my early twenties I frequently heard this accusation from various well-meaning liberal folk who knew me, people who had always done rather well in life, had never grown up treated like garbage, had never really wrestled with disability, want or poverty. But their values were okay, even if they didn't seem to do very much to live them out. But the way we do things in this culture simply invites hypocrisy. Trauma survivors, generally speaking, are not hypocrites. Having suffered already from the lies that surround us, having been wounded on this culture of lies, we are going to find that we no longer have the energy or time for this nonsense. And this can make us really problematic. I think this could be one reason why trauma survivors are often accused of black and white, or, either-or, thinking. Even if we can make ourselves employable again, coping with the competitive and lying culture of the workplace can really take the mickey out of us. Unless we are ready to negotiate, and this is something that many of us end up having to do. We basically have to know when to close our eyes and our ears, or hold our noses while carrying out workplace duties that might conflict with our values, while finding creative ways of negotiating what we can live with, and still promote values that foster love, truth and life. I just had an unfortunate experience with a very pig-headed Colombian with whom I was on Skype for conversation exchange. Without expressing any interest in my own experience nor my many years of professional experience, he dismissed the traumatized and hurting population that I work with as toxic losers that ought to be segregated from society. I told him in very clear Spanish that as we are on very different pages, then we had better not continue in contact with each other. This person, by the way, claims to be a devout Christian. I promptly disconnected from him, then I blocked all possible access between us on Skype and on the Conversation Exchange site. Fortunately, he does not have my email contact. This might be black and white, or either-or-thinking resulting from trauma that was motivating me. I have my doubts. Even though I am a trauma survivor, I will not waste one single breath on the intentionally pig-headed, especially those who hate people who are already wounded and suffering, as such individuals as this man from Colombia, can be particularly upsetting and draining. I also had no desire of leaving myself vulnerable to this individual's manipulation or abuse. Had he shown even a bit of an open mind, a little bit of respect for the experience out of which I was speaking, then I would give him a chance. Otherwise, I am leaving him in the hands of God. It is virtually impossible communicating some things to those who have neither the experience, nor the interest in learning about them. On the other hand, I still have to be open to those who disagree with me, but if they are going to disagree with an already closed mind then I am not wasting any time. These people are too upsetting and are going to have to learn the hard way, by banging their head against the wall until common sense has settled in or until they can no longer use their brain. As if they ever did.

Living With Trauma: The Healers, 5

There is strength in disempowerment. Hello? Yes, Gentle Reader, you heard me right. There is strength in being disempowered. Who would have imagined? I have written already about the Horrible Knowledge of Life. Well, this could be called the Terrible Wisdom. It comes principally, and only, through suffering. This wisdom, perhaps could be called applied and experienced knowledge. I have long had this gift. Any child who has been consistently bullied by his peers, beaten and bruised by both a violent older sibling and by his mother, verbally abused by both, and emotionally bullied and at times sexually interfered with by his father, is not going to turn out normal. Add to the mix a child who is gifted, preternaturally as well as intellectually and artistically, with a profound sense of empathy for others and a nascent sensibility for social justice and you are going to wind up with a unique mix of qualities, characteristics, traits and problems. When I was as young as six, I already knew that I was different from other kids, and boy, did they ever reinforce this to me. My mother and teachers were all impressed by my intelligence, and very young wisdom. My father didn't seem to notice or care. My brother hated me. Other kids reviled me. And those obstacles made me wise. As a new Christian I became filled with the Holy Spirit, an experience so powerful and overwhelming that I am still, forty-six years later, digesting and understanding what happened to me. I have been able to move forward on the strength of this experience, although it has often confused the crap out of me. I have, since, never had a sense of not belonging entirely to God, though I have gone through periods in my life where I have really tested this, and even tried to run from it for a while. Still, with or without overwhelming spiritual experiences, suffering, trauma, affliction, and social exclusion change us like nothing else. It isn't simply that these things harm or damage us. In another way, this is how we become wise, and we become wise with a wisdom that others find frightening, threatening, even terrifying. Suffering strips us absolutely naked of all the costuming and masks that we wear in order to feel safe as we pretend to negotiate our way through life. When you are left crying out, or stifling the screams, in the most absolute pain, helplessness, abandonment and vulnerability, there will be no masks and no costumes that are going to fit. You are just going to lie there in your blood, in your naked and ugly (yet even more beautiful!) humanity. This is a most difficult reality for others to face, because those of us who have been disempowered are transformed into mirrors for others. We gain in wisdom, we know at a level and depth that we never even knew could have existed, what it really is to be human, and what we are and what others are. This is because we know what others are capable of but we also discover unknown strengths in ourselves as we learn to live with the consequences of other people's abuse and ill treatment. As I am reading about the very troubled history of the Latin American countries I am just constantly amazed at what the indigenous, mestizo and African people had to endure, of ill treatment, slavery, rape, abuse, systematic slaughter, constant threat and constant oppression they had to live under throughout the colonial era, and what this must have done to shape and form the cultures of Latin America. Even if my own life hasn't been a cakewalk, I shrink and tremble to imagine how I would have coped as a slave in a plantation or household, or as an indentured laborer in a silver mine. This much I do know. The suffering may in some ways damage us, but it also shapes, forms and informs us with that Terrible Wisdom that will also equip us as healers and shepherds to others who are languishing in these very troubling and confusing times we are living in. Because after being knocked to the ground by the truth, we are no longer afraid of it.

Living With Trauma: The Healers, 4

Working in a climate of stigma can either make you or break you. For a while I was letting it suck the life out of me. Then I learned to use it as fuel for personal empowerment. In my thirteen plus year career as a mental health peer support worker I've seen 'em all, and I'm not talking about clients. I am referring here to the mental health union staff, the case managers, the rehab therapists and nurses, etc. When I first entered this profession, it was with the naïve expectation that I would be treated by colleagues as a colleague, with respect, an equal among equals. With incremental pay raises. Boy, was I ever surprised! They do everything they can to put us in our place, keep us in our place and remind us that, in the words of the late Doris Lessing, British author extraordinaire, we are "nothing buts", which is to say that we are "nothing but" our diagnosis, we are "nothing but" our mental health symptoms, we are "nothing but" poster children for mental health recovery, except that their version of recovery often has nothing at all to do with personal growth, development and empowerment, and everything to do with becoming productive members of society, compliant little workers and good little consumers, though it is an absolute cruel and ironic joke that we are expected to shop well and contribute to our local economy on twelve whopping bucks an hour! My first red flag was waved in my face when I had been just less than a year working in one of my early sites. While interviewing a new client the case manager said, in front of me, to the client, that I had also suffered from a mental illness. Later, I corrected her, telling her that it was my job to self-disclose if I so chose. She didn't get it and accused me of feeling ashamed of having a mental health condition. I countered that it is my mental health situation, therefore it is going to be my disclosure and no one else's. She didn't get it and I walked away in disgusted frustration. At that same mental health team, by the way, they closed all staff washrooms to peer support workers, assuming that like some of their most dysfunctional clients, that we all lacked basic toilet training. Once again, talking to anyone about it was like reading Shakespeare to a cat. I have been insulted by union staff left, right and centre. Fortunately this rarely happens any more, I think because my coworkers are a little bit more afraid of me than before, and for good reason. I don't take shit. From anyone. And they know it. Still, some of the idiots I have had to field: one arrogant occupational therapist, for instance, who had the nerve to ask me what kind of medications I was on. Ah, but the look on his face when I told him that I didn't take medication, and that my psychiatrist treated me not with meds, but with talk therapy. And he isn't the only one. Now if that question should come up, and I am glad to say that it never does, my answer would likely be, "And you need to know this, because...?" There was another OT who had the nerve to not only on one occasion tell a client in front of me that I had a mental illness. Even after I confronted her later about it, she still didn't get it. A couple of months later, while interviewing another client, she did it again, adding, in front of the client, that I still have a mental illness. I barked out, "HAD a mental illness. I'm recovered now." Later, I really let her have it. It was like a shark fight and she still refused to get it. Then there was the other OT who kept insisting that I should get support, like another psychiatrist or whatever, because I appeared to be irritable, though it really took a long time and a long learning curve for him to figure out that it was really his poor style of supervision that was making me irritable. I did see a counsellor for a couple of years, but basically didn't need to, and she didn't think that I needed the help either, and now I am happily professional support free. I have since learned that when union staff make those concerned sympathetic noises, it has very little to do with what I really need, and everything to do with their perception of what I need because, in my professional position I am already outed as being sick, because they don't really seem to believe in mental health recovery, even though that is all they seem to talk about. But I really think this has more to do with power and with keeping subordinates, well, subordinate, since the empowerment that comes with real recovery can be very frightening to those who think they are above us and it can turn us into quite a terrifying force. I have also the experience of knowing other union staff who are very progressive and enlightened and they don't talk to us like we're inferior sick people. They seem to have the humility, professional as well as personal, of recognizing that, really, we're all screwed, mental health diagnoses are often labels, and are frequently useless categories for helping us give people who are struggling towards recovery the support to which they are entitled. Fortunately, there are many like us in the mental health system, but I am rather sceptical about our voices being really heard by those who control our scheduling, policy and ultimately, the purse strings.

Living With Trauma: The Healers 3

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/Leonardo_da_Vinci_or_Boltraffio_%28attrib%29_Salvator_Mundi_circa_1500.jpg Gentle Reader, if you click on the above link then you will catch a glimpse of the long-lost Da Vinci (the Renaissance Italian artist, not the TV show) that just sold for a whopping $400,000,000. Sotheby`s, the fabled auctioneers, get an extra $50,000,000 on top of that. Now if you have ever wondered where all the money has gone that we need desperately to eliminate poverty and bolster our social infrastructures, then that should give you a clue. I find this painting rather intriguing. Among other things, this representation of Christ could easily be a male twin sibling to the Mona Lisa. This type of face seems to figure in many of Da Vinci's paintings. It has been posited that the great artist was simply super-imposing his own self-portrait, which in these cases would have him morph as Jesus in one portrait and a young woman in another. Jesus in this painting looks not in the least like the man of sorrows, rather like a Florentine dandy, expensively and fashionably dressed according to the norms of the early Sixteenth Century, with his hair recently permed. He is holding in one hand a crystal orb, likely a rather costly piece, and his other hand is raised in benediction, but if you look carefully, it seems as though he has his fingers crossed. Salvator Mundi. Saviour of the World. But this depiction of Christ bears no resemblance to the carpenter's son who was ignominiously nailed to a cross as punishment for saving the world. There is nothing of the humility of Christ, neither are there the visible wounds in his hands. This is how Leonardo and his contemporaries wanted to reinvent the Saviour of the World. No nasty blood and wounds, no embarrassing humility, simply someone who reflected the values of the burghers and the aristocracy of his age, because the church had long ago bartered her sacred legacy for earthly pomp and worldly power. Purchased at four hundred million dollars. I doubt that the new owner of this piece of art that really ought to belong to all of us is going to see in this portrait the man who was born in humility, healed the sick, preached the Good News, then died in humiliation. I don't think he is going to have a restless conscience tonight, nor any night, nor is he going to harbour any nagging doubts that perhaps he has way too much money, and that the man represented in the portrait, being God made human, was himself so very poor for us. And so, this privileged individual will likely completely lose out on the work of redemption, healing and reconciliation that could make him or her one of the richest persons in the world, if they were but to abandon their riches at Jesus' command for the Pearl of Greatest Price.

Living With Trauma: The Healers, 2

It is a sometimes bitter irony that those who are the most gifted and most qualified to be healers will be those who have suffered the most.  This is a cruel paradox. What is meant by healing?  I think that restoration of health would be the simplest and most precise definition.  Who would imagine that the people who have suffered most would have the greatest power to heal?  Ah, but there is power in suffering.  I see this day after day in my contacts with others.  There is something very shallow, smug and empty about the life that has not been tested.  This isn't to glorify suffering as a virtue in itself.  Usually, it's a horrible thing to experience unless you have a kink about pain.  But those of us who have lived experience of pain, suffering, stigma, ill-treatment?  We know what it's like.  We can actually get beside the person who is hurting and we will speak the same language: the language of affliction.  Words are not enough, and we know it, but we can be with others while they are hurting in such a way that they will know that they are being neither pitied nor judged, but understood.  Accepted.  Respected.  Loved.   Professionals and clinicians who have not been there themselves are virtually useless as real healers of broken souls.  They are very good at prescribing medications and recommending programs and activities and making all the appropriate sympathetic noises, but unless the pain of the client enters into your soul and transforms you, you are not going to be able to be much help. I find it particularly appalling that almost none of my clients in my practice of thirteen years as a mental health peer support worker have ever been advised by any of the various psychiatrists, psychologists and rehab therapists who treat them about the value of self-knowledge as a vital key to psychic healing.  I recently had this conversation with two of my clients.  Both indicated that I am the first person in the system who has ever mentioned to them the importance of self-knowledge.  What is wrong with us? It is also concerning that not only is self-knowledge undervalued as a key to recovery, it has been replaced by a zeal to make mental health clients fit as perfectly as they can into consumerist society: recovery has been conflated with employability and social conformity.  There is absolutely nothing here about personal growth or self-actualization.  Could this have anything to do with the fear, subliminal or otherwise, that fully-recovered clients might become fully-empowered persons who will ask  difficult and unwelcome questions and make every effort to challenge, undermine and transform our dysfunctional social system, rather than conforming to it? In order to give one of my clients today an idea of how artificial the role playing in my industry, I described it to him as a three tier system: first, the clients, who are considered to be totally screwed up; then the peer support workers, who were screwed up, or are no longer quite so screwed up and are now getting better; and finally, the union staff, who have never been screwed up since they make all the administrative and clinical decisions.  This is the lie that we have to work with.

Living With Trauma: The Healers 1

I am returning here, Gentle Reader, to the theme of the Wounded Healer. I still haven't read the eponymously-titled book by Henri Nouwen, but I am very familiar with the theme. First of all, in the words of "Tricky Dick" Richard Nixon, who was considered the worst possible disaster in the White House before Dubya Bush came along, and now, even worse, el Presidente Dump, "Let me make one thing perfectly clear." As I already delicately stated elsewhere on this blog, "We're All Screwed!" We are all wounded. Even the One Percent. Even our own Prime Minister Junior and his wealthy friends. What makes people like me a little bit different from the younger Trudeau, isn't only that we are a little bit more likely to know this, we are also going to be named as wounded, or as damaged goods for but two little reasons: we are generally poor, and stigma. I have mentioned elsewhere on these pages that our wounding and our trauma as a human species are universal. We are all born into the same troubled imperfect world by similarly troubled and imperfect parents. Wealth and social status can provide a wonderful buffer for keeping the heirs of wealth and privilege wondrously blind and oblivious to their own fragility. First World Problems 101. There is this nice, middle class lady of a certain age who, with her husband have become a friendly and enjoyable presence to me in a café I often visit. They are both elderly, both nice, and both quite comfortably upper middle class. She sometimes hovers over me in said coffee shop while I am working on a drawing, just to complain about how difficult it is keeping all the rooms in their nice big house in order. From her it's always First World Problems. She has it so good that she has to find things to get anxious about. I have my own way of doing this, when I complain to my friends about the uppity little ageist Spanish-speaking wankers on the Conversation Exchange who couldn't be bothered doing Spanish and English with me for the simple reason that I am over sixty and most of them are under forty. (I only contact them because except for a lady over sixty, whom I have also contacted, and no she has not responded, probably because I'm a man, they are all in their twenties and thirties. But really, I have two Latino friends with whom I am in contact who let me practice my Spanish with them, and another who says he's too busy but at least I can email him in the Language of Cervantes. It is to this same friend that I have sometimes complained about the lack of people who will respond to me in Spanish. But this is the worst of my problems, I am already fluent in Spanish, and enjoy the rare privilege of having mastered a foreign language in midlife, while living in Canada (believe me, Gentle Reader, not as hard as it sounds). So, even if my life has not been easy, and even if I am poor and have had to battle against stigma, I can do the First World Whine as well as the best of them. But this can also be a pleasant distraction from the really awful things that have happened in my life. And really, Gentle Reader, awful things do happen to the rich and privileged: they also get sick sometimes, some suffer from mental health problems and addictions, some of them have been sexually abused as children, some have been sexually assaulted, many have been traumatized by divorce. But they have never lost their social status, have never suffered from stigma and will never have to worry about where their next meal is going to come from, where they are going to sleep tonight, or if they will get beat up or raped for bedding down in the wrong doorway on the wrong sidewalk. It is ironic that mental health therapists and clinicians generally come from this class. Natch, given that they belong to a social class that is most likely to be expected to go to university, and to be able to pay for it. But many of my own clients, such as the one I saw today, have often claimed that they derive precious little therapeutic benefit from their well-educated and highly salaried psychiatrists, psychologists, rehab therapists and case managers. They do mention that they find me, and I have heard this about other peer support workers, vastly more helpful, more insightful, more supportive and more empathetic. We, the already stigmatized and wounded, are also the only real healers in the mental health system, or so it seems. Go figure.

Living With Trauma 24

Americans and, by extension, we Canadians, have an incredible sense of entitlement. This has one very simple little explanation. Neither of these countries, as well as being wealthy and privileged, has ever been invaded, conquered or occupied by a foreign power, which is to say, just turn a blind eye to the effects of European colonization on the Indigenous First Nations and my argument will be almost watertight. But both our countries, like Australia and New Zealand, are incredibly innocent, as is England which, barring the German bombings that occurred during both World Wars, was never occupied or successfully invaded. This could well be considered the privilege by default of English-speaking countries. This is not to say that we have nothing to be guilty about, we have lots to feel shame over in all the aforementioned countries. But our ass has never been kicked. We don't know what it is like to be overrun and taken over by outsiders, to have our freedoms taken away, our culture and language threatened and prohibited, our basic rights evaporated. We were victorious in both world wars, so neither do we really know the bitterness of military defeat. This has turned us into well-meaning monsters. I believe that our obsession with individualism, self and our cultural tendencies towards narcissism and selfishness is partly because we have never had our ass kicked. This, I believe, is particularly why the nonsense of individualism has mutated into something so monstrous in the US with its milder version here in Canada. Winning two World Wars hasn't hurt either. Canada might be a fairer and gentler country than our enormous neighbour to the south, but we are still a society of winners and losers. Some of our immigrants here do particularly well because their rapacious ambition would never have got them very far in their native countries but here in the True North Strong and Free it is celebrated that the winner takes all, costing them maybe just a little more in tax dollars than in our fat monster neighbour to the south. I have known my share of successful immigrants. They are insufferable. Especially the ones from the Philippines, and many of those same successful immigrants voted for and support the butcher Duterte whose thugs have already slaughtered in just over a year more than seven thousand other Filipinos on drug charges. Canada is an odd American-European hybrid. Like many countries in Europe we have public health care and a better-than-nothing social safety net. But we are still a country of polite Americans where one is expected to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and if they don't have a pair of boots then they deserve to die sleeping on the sidewalk. Our current crisis of homelessness is clear evidence of where the winners and losers mentality is taking our society. If we want to see this mess healed then we had better not look to our prime minister. Junior has not yet choked on the silver spoon he was born with in his mouth. I have always found Justin Trudeau's charm offensive to be more the latter than the former and for one simple reason. Our prime minster, being a millionaire, is a member of the One Percent, yet he led this liberal Party to a sweeping majority on the intoxicating alchemy of his sex appeal and his pity for the more wretched folk, not the really poor, but the middle class, and those who would like to join it. (his words, not mine!) Junior is a millionaire, surrounded by other millionaires, such as Stephen Bronfman of the expensive booze fame and chief fundraiser for the Federal Liberal Party and Bill Morneau, the wealthy finance minister who wanted to raise taxes for the not quite rich independent business persons while ignoring his own class, the filthy rich with all their taxable funds squirreled away in Grand Cayman and other tax havens. Our prime minister and his cronies cannot bring healing to the traumatized in this country because they lack the necessary depth and knowledge that only real suffering and disempowerment can bring. They are part of this whole fabric of the culture of winners. They are good only for other winners, other success stories. Ever notice, Gentle Reader, the way we are programmed by national propaganda to remember the wars? We are expected to remember and shed tears only for our own soldiers. That's right, the people who were on the giving end of the artillery. Absolutely nothing is said about the casualties of the so-called enemies, especially civilian casualties. This kind of limited and very toxically selective memory is very typical of those who have not really suffered, or those who have never known disempowerment. To heal the truly broken and dispossessed they are absolutely useless. The real healers of our collective trauma are going to arise from our most disadvantaged populations. That's right. They are going to be people who themselves have been broken and damaged by a vicious and callous society that cannibalizes its weakest and most vulnerable members in order to press on ahead with the engines of progress. Until we can go no further and that day might be coming very soon.

Living With Trauma 23

Trauma opens the door to God. I suppose that would seem somewhat cruel to you, Gentle Reader, but let me offer you this little bit from Christianity For Dummies, the Aaron Edition. I recall listening to a spirituality and religion program on CBC Radio One, called Tapestry. A liberal minister from a "progressive" Christian denomination suggested that it's judgmental and unkind to assume that God is with you when he is also with everybody else. Yes, you know the typical reductionist kind of reasoning I'm getting at here. Well, fair enough. God is with all of us, with each one of us, because he made us, he loves us and he inhabits us. What the dear lady on the program omitted was the likelihood that it's a two-way street. This is a relationship. We have the option of being with God, or not being with God. This does not mean that he is going to give us special or privileged treatment, by the way, especially when you consider what happened to his own Son (who fortunately rose from the dead three days later) and his twelve apostles, each of whom was cruelly and savagely martyred. What I'm getting at is that God is with all of us, without fail. This does not mean that we are all with God. Richard Dawkins, anyone? Or any other fundamentalist atheist. Just try and suggest this God claptrap to any of those guys and see how far it gets you. This doesn't mean to say that God isn't with atheists, as well. Of course he is! But it ain't necessarily so that too many of the atheists are going to be with God, though in a way, they are, always will be, and can't help that as much as they must loathe the idea. But in terms of a relationship, no such relationship would exist between God and an atheist, nor anyone else not particularly interested in having the Almighty in their lives, because God is a God of relationship, based on choice and consent. Given that the world is full of folks who would prefer to be their own little gods than cede their lives to the one who made and sustains them, I would say that the frequency of this sort of relationship is still in short supply. This is basic Christianity 101. There are, of course, many explanations for this lopsided relationship with our maker. I subscribe to the idea that we all live in a fallen state from grace which has somehow alienated, or at least significantly distanced ourselves from our creator. Jesus came to heal the divide by offering himself as a sacrifice for our sins, hence his death on the cross. Christianity for dummies. And most liberal Christians (not all, since I also consider myself liberal, despite my theological orthodoxy), simply do not want to get it. Now where I tend to differ from a lot of theological conservatives (not the same thing as being orthodox, and this has nothing to do with the Orthodox Church, if you must know!)is that we are not expected to sign on a dotted line, nor even initial anything. There is no contract, no need to attend a revivalist meeting or an evangelistic rally and go flowing up to the front during the altar call to the dulcet strains of "Just As I Am" to kneel down and give your heart to Jesus or whatever you want to call it. I am thinking here, instead, of the carefully considered decision of committing our lives to the highest good. Whether this is the same thing as asking Jesus into our hearts or not, I would be the last to know. But I can't imagine Jesus going through all he went through just to have another lame-ass religion invented, this time in his name. And this is not to put down Christianity because there is the legitimate need to codify all the issues and events and history surrounding the life and teachings of Christ. I can only return to my own experience. On the advice of the Christians I met, given that I was already aware that God was calling and drawing me to himself, I gave my consent. I had no question that it was Jesus calling me to himself, and I still harbour no doubt. I cannot speak about your own experience, because, Gentle Reader, I am not you. But Jesus came to me when I was traumatized, already a survivor of child abuse and my parents' bitter divorce, I was seeking, open and humble. That is all that is required to open our lives to God, which is to say, love. When we are humbled, vulnerable, traumatized, we are also receptive to love because we really know our need, and there is God in his infinite love ready to come and heal our broken hearts. I know this runs contrary to the message of our age and the findings of psychiatrists and psychologists, pop or otherwise. For them it's all about self: self-esteem, self actualization, self-love, self everything. Which is to ignore the fact that we live among more than seven billion other human selves with whom we must live and coexist. As we allow our precious little god-self to be dethroned by the love and spirit of the Living God himself, then we will be empowered to bring healing to the trauma that marks our species and our earth. Failing that, we will each remain stranded in our own egoistic isolation and the only significant thing that we will all end up doing together will be in our collective drift downward into the hell of our own devising.

Living With Trauma 22

I wrote in the last post, Gentle Reader, about an idealized divine love that very rarely seems to happen in real life, ironically, it is even less frequent in the Christian churches. Spain brought to the New World disease, bloodshed, theft, rape and pillage as well as wholesale genocide of the aboriginal peoples of what is now called Latin America and the extermination of the three great civilizations that were born of that region, the Aztec, the Maya and the Inca. They also brought Roman Catholicism. I mentioned that divine love is even more absent in the churches than in other places, which is rather a cruel twist. The church was allegedly founded by the Lord of Love, jesus Christ. So, one might ask, what happened How could something that began as something so beautiful wind up committing some of the ugliest crimes against humanity, no less horrific and gruesome than the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews, Gypsies, homosexiuals and the disabled, or the purges of Stalin or the Leap Forward and Great Cultural Revolution of Chairman Mao, all of which resulted in the slaughter of millions of innocent human lives? The church was a pawn of the Spanish Crown and had long ago been eviscerated of its spiritual essence. They no longer loved God and really had stopped loving God for over a millennium. This was inevitable when Constantine the Great in the Fourth Century made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire. Instead of the state becoming a vector for the church and the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the Living God was no longer welcome in the church and fled, leaving an empty shell for the state to fill with its violence, greed, arrogance and fear and lies. The aboriginal peoples of the Americas were so receptive to the Christian Gospel because they were already broken, crushed and traumatized. Since God is most welcome among the wounded and broken, he made his presence known to the indigenous people. Not for any virtue of the church but because those people were already destroyed and needy. Trauma opens the door to the Holy Spirit. This is the Divine Irony. To find our way to healing we must first be wounded and the wounding makes us receptive because we are made humble and weak. Love heals the trauma and trauma opens the door to love.

Living With Trauma 21

Love, I mean divine love or holy love always carries with it a price, a very high price. I find it interesting that of all the founders of the world's great religions that Jesus alone actually died for what he offered the world, and the religion based on his life and teachings, unique among all world religions, is based not on his success, but on his failure and death: the very failure that came out of his love and the same failure that became for his followers, and those who love him, the most sublime success. We have also the profound belief in the Resurrection, understanding that love, divine love, incarnated in human form, could not remain dead, being the very essence of life itself and for this reason Jesus rose triumphantly from the dead. I am not writing these words, by the way, in order to diss other faiths. I respect and honour all religions, but I do not play at comparative religion. I follow Jesus Christ and so I will write about Christ and the Christian faith. Since I do not have the wisdom or insight to judge or evaluate other faiths, I am not going to attempt to do so, but will leave that task to the ecclesiastical bigheads. Love, universal love, divine love, this is an ongoing theme that all the religions seem to share in common. In the Christian faith, divine love seems to play a particularly pivotal and foundational role. Here we have the idea of God being so moved by love and compassion for the race of dunderheads he created, that he became one of those doofuses himself, to live, walk and suffer with us with the exception of not falling into sin. He incarnated the love divine and expressed this throughout his life and mission, not merely teaching about love but living it, even to his cruel and ignominious torture and death on the cross. We Christians, believe Jesus to be God, God visiting us in our broken and raw humanity, and God dwelling with us and suffering with us and giving his all, his very best to us as Jesus. Other religions do not believe this, nor should they be expected to. I choose to believe this, as a Christian, yes, but also, as Simone Weil once wrote, this is so beautiful that it must certainly be the truth. There is a high cost to this love. And never before in the history of our world and our broken and suffering humanity has there been a greater need for this kind of love. When we give our consent to divine love we are also consenting to suffering and ill-treatment by a world that rejects love, and sometimes even death. To accept and wholly subsume ourselves into the love of God is in itself a kind of death, because we are dying to our own ambitions, ideals, and desires for the love of the very highest, the Very Highest Love, to live and love in us and through us and to help bring change and healing to our traumatized world and humanity. This is a love that neither seeks, nor needs, recompense. We don't love this way in order to be loved back. It becomes its own reward. I have seen and experienced over and over again in my life this love and I believe that if we are to see lasting change then more of us must also give our consent. People need this kind of love even though they constantly reject it, because they fear the fire and the consummation of self that occurs because of this love. So many of us live without the love of God in our lives, and the Christian religion in its many forms has done such a horrendously lousy job at communicating this love, that is it any wonder that so many people are alienated from God and trapped as prisoners in their shallow, consumerist existence? And of course, they are going to lash out at us, because this love also threatens our sense of autonomy, and everyone likes to be their own little god. And this just creates more problems, except for one little truth: Love is even stronger than the resistance of those who refuse love and eventually love, the love divine will conquer. For those of us who are vectors and channels of this love it is going to be costly and at times painful and lonely, but someone has got to do it. Start the work in me.