We're All Screwed 1

Thinking about trauma I cannot help but recall my years working in Christian street ministry and these next several posts will be drawing from my many experiences and very meaningful encounters with some of the most phenomenal human beings I have ever known.  Some I have already blogged about elsewhere on these pages, likely in my Remarkable Persons series, but these encounters bear repeating, if in a rather different format and writing style.

I was thinking today of a conversation I had with an elderly woman over twenty years ago who was present with me during this experiment in Christian community as well as, for a while, being a close and very dear friend.  She did have rather a conventional way of viewing life, being "a dumb old bourgeois", as she plaintively accused me one day of calling her (I never called her "dumb" or "old", and despite a nickname one of the local transwomen had given her of "Dopey" she was really in her way quite intelligent.)  However, I am not writing today about darling old "Dopey", already mentioned elsewhere on this forum, but of two of the young street people I had been engaging with, Wizard and Spider.

Wizard, if he was still alive, would likely be forty or forty-one now.  I think Spider, to my knowledge still alive, is a couple of years older.  They were respectively fifteen and seventeen when we first met, living and begging on the street and sleeping in squats.  Yes, they were doing drugs, tons of them.  Spider also had a sweet little girlfriend, age fifteen at the time, who just a few years later radically turned her life around and began herself to work in a supportive role with street youth and homeless adults.  Ironically, when I became homeless seven or eight years later, she was supportive in helping me find housing.  What goes around comes around, eh, Gentle Reader?

So I would find them sprawled on the pavement, hair all brightly coloured, green in the case of Wizard, and hot pink for Spider and his girlfriend.  Spider wore a massive Mohawk done up in liberty spikes.  I would feed them, like pigeons or squirrels, or take them into a local coffee shop and feed them some more while hearing their stories and, in Wizard's case anyway, trying to sift fact from fiction.  (He did claim to have nearly beaten to death his father with a lead pipe.  Given his size--really little and scrawny--I found it hard to believe).

Dopey insisted that Spider was "less damaged than Wizard."  Given her reference point, the dumb old bourgeois values, I questioned her position to her face and suggested that when you really think of it, we are all damaged.  It's just that those who are all conventionally screwed up, like Dopey and, in some ways, me (I suppose) can get away with it, get an education, a job, raise a family and not seem in anyway unusual or defective because we all have bought into the same standard of dysfunctional mediocrity.  Wizard, of course, did have his problems.  He was violent, impulsive, and very angry.  He also had acquired a very nasty heroin addiction.  He also showed a formidable intelligence and was likely gifted.  I am sad to say, that his inability to come to terms with his many issues opened up and sped his downward spiral to a very young death at the age of seventeen from a heroin overdose.

Spider, being only conventionally screwed up, went on to do okay.  We ran into each other over ten years later.  He was well groomed, healthy looking and smiling as he thanked me for the care and support I had given him while he was on the street.  At the time, he was going to school and getting ready, in his late twenties, to take his role in the urban creative class.

I suppose I am happy for him.  And for his girlfriend.  I still feel a cold, gnawing sadness whenever I think of Wizard, whom I think held the potential to soar so much higher than any of us, and could have, had the help he was needing was available.  It wasn't.

The day I learned of his death, I wrote this song:

Another day, another night,
Another life, another death,
We have no say, we've lost our light,
The dreaded strife draws our final breath.

The raven's wing obscures the sun,
His voice is heard throughout the land,
The robin sings that day is done,
We await the news that can help us stand.

Our stifled cries no one can hear,
No one can see scarring our face,
That pride denies the unwept tears,
We must set free for the human race.

The Golden Bird flies into the sun,
Rising far away in an eastern land,
His cry is heard by everyone
Who greets the day at love's command.

Dayspring rising in the east,
Dayspring rising in the south,
Dayspring rising in the west,
Dayspring rising in the north.


Rest in peace, Wizard.

Community And Trauma 4

Collective trauma is a collective entity.  I had that impression both times I was in Bogota in 2015 and 2016.  Especially among older Bogotanos I noticed how withdrawn, fearful and hostile towards outsiders almost everyone appeared to me, like that really horrible old man who one day tried to set his three vicious little dogs on me, and stubbornly ignored me as I cussed him out in eloquent Spanish.  My crime?  I was an outsider, and being racially white and Nordic-looking, clearly an interloper.

I was treated to lesser expressions of said hostility throughout the upper class neighbourhood where I was staying, even by the woman who owned the bed and breakfast where I was staying.  I was warned by a friend, a young woman in her thirties, that the civil war had especially traumatized Bogotanos older than forty, her father (who became a good and trusted friend) being among them.  When I mentioned to the young woman who ran the internet café where I used to go online everyday that "Esta ciudad esta llena de zopencos!" or "This city is just full of doofuses!", she very enthusiastically agreed.

I have noticed in many situations of collective trauma these particular traits:

1. Fear and hostility of change
2. Fear and hostility towards outsiders
3. Adhering to a rigid and narrow script or worldview
4. Institutionalized violence (psychological or physical)
5. Collective adherence to the same script
6. Invented enemies or exaggerated fear of legitimate threats
7. Culture of addiction and substance abuse
8. Popularity of religious fundamentalism and/or political and social conservatism and even fascism.
9. Racism, homophobia and other forms of intolerance become acceptable and even institutionalized.

There is no healing in such a collective.  The members cling together not out of mutual love and compassion but because of fear and for a sense of protection.  In a culture of collective trauma everyone wants to feel safe.   Just think of New York, the rest of the US and Canada just following the attack on the World Trade Centre in 9-11.

These can also be times where a lot of love and solidarity is set in motion among the survivors with a collective resolve to heal and move on.  My guess is that in many situations of collective trauma you will have a whole mix of dynamics.  Often the sufferers of trauma relive it over and over, and instead of promoting healing the solidarity simply entrenches and reinforces the fear which can easily fester into hatred and intolerance.

To be an already traumatized individual living in a traumatized collective can be a kind of psychological suicide, a spiritual death.  Traumatized collectives are more likely to project their trauma onto others, in the form of stigma.  Instead of facing their fear, pain and trauma, they will in all probability scapegoat the outsider.  The weakest and most vulnerable suffer the worst.

As a contemporary example we can consider our own homeless population here in Canada.  We are in the midst of tremendous change, shifts and frightening events and dynamics in the world.  Globalization has outpaced our ability to cope with the change, along with rapid, dizzying advances in technology.  Climate change from human-caused global warming is already breaking out of control, threatening our environment, our livelihoods, and even in increasing cases, our lives.  We also are again facing the nuclear war abyss as things escalate between the Fat Little Dictator of North Korea and the Great Deplorable in the Oval office.

Our inability to tolerate these rapid changes and threats has numbed and traumatized us, leaving us relatively indifferent to the many casualties around us.  For many of us homelessness has been normalized, and this is something that never would have been considered thirty years ago. 

Collective trauma is not only the experience of people in other countries surviving wars, dictatorships and disasters.  It is now the normative global reality.  We are all in this together, and I think that once we start to admit this, that there is no longer a them and us, that they have become us and we have become them, then and only then are we going to begin to start moving forward.

Community And Trauma 3

We are Shiva and we are community which makes Shiva an apt metaphor for community.  In community, in any human collective, will be found various collections and combinations of the archetypes that form the spiritual DNA of our collective human psyche.  Woven in and out of this fabric, like black and grey yarn are all the evidences of the shadow.

The shadow is a Jungian term for the hidden, feared and sinister side, the dark side to our human nature.  It is part of the process of effectively employed psychotherapy, according to Carl Jung, to bring into evidence the shadow and all its contents.  Exposing the hidden works of darkness to the light leads to healing and wholeness.

The archetypes and the shadow exist in all of us.  When we are a collective, be this a work crew or a baseball team or a book club or a casual circle of friends, we also in groups bring into focus the archetypes, represented in us as individuals and emphasized in community.  The shadow also tends to grow in strength and power because introspection and reflective thinking is always an individual as opposed to collective practice.

Community is dangerous to those who suffer from trauma.  Community is essential for those who wish to heal from trauma.  Remember, Gentle Reader, how in my previous post, I wrote about Shiva, creator, destroyer, transformer.  When I read about this I asked and dwelt for a while on the question: what makes Shiva, the metaphor, I mean, transformer?  How does this relate to creator and destroyer?  It didn't take much thought to persuade me that else could he be transformer, but for being creator and destroyer.

Paradox is essential to our human condition.  We are simultaneously hot and cold, ugly and beautiful, evil and good, joyful and miserable, generous and selfish.  Those paradoxes and contradictions live in all of us and really seem to compose the very root of our humanity.  We cannot simply forget or ignore our dark side and hope that it will go away.  It never does.  If neglected, it merely goes underground where it mutates, festers and takes on a terrifying force and strength when it eventually resurfaces again.

Those of us who suffer from trauma have often been exhausted by the paradox.  We haven't merely been subjected to and harmed by evil but by the juxtapositioning of darkness and light.  I will offer a personal example as a survivor of indecent assault.  If the perpetrator of the inappropriate act is considerably attractive, kind, interesting or polite and nice, this doesn't make the assault easier to live with but so much the more traumatizing for being so insidious.  Being assaulted by a beautiful person is the cruelest blow, and it was from such indignities that I suffered the greatest injury and the most horrendous trauma.  Likewise I could mention my history of family abuse.  My parents and my brother, the people whom supposedly cared about me the most and whom I loved above all others dealt me blow after blow after blow.  I couldn't simply hate them and get over it.  Their abusive treatment did nothing to diminish my love for them and so the pain and trauma were all the worse, more intense and more prolonged.

I am also writing as a survivor of religious abuse which has had on me rather a similar, though not quite so penetrating impact.

People are hell.   People are purgatory.   People are heaven.

I have had to continue to be part of the human community, in order to heal, in order to get on with my life, in order to live.  Other people are inevitable for me just as I am inevitable to others.

It is in the paradox of human community, the frightful collective, where I have found healing.  This is not a comfortable place to be.  At work, there are my many needy clients, coworkers who might not be having their best day; at home there is the hell of coexisting with inconsiderate and noisy neighbours and obtuse management; among friends and acquaintances, well, one doesn`t always know what`s going on.  Friendship is often more a responsibility than an entitlement, especially for people who have known each other a long time.

The natural tendency for trauma survivors to isolate themselves is natural and normal.  It can also stall recovery.  There will be necessary periods of withdrawal or retreat, but they should always be alternated with attempted forays, no matter how brief and tenuous, back into the human collective.  There is not a trauma survivor on earth who has not benefited from the presence of some trusted and caring friend or care provider, there to help ease the transition towards recovery and renewed involvement with others.

Reintegrating should never be done precipitously, suddenly or too intensely.  There will be conflict and obstacles.  There will also be friendship and pleasant, enjoyable experience, often coming from the same people and the same source.  Even at our worst, we need one another.  It also helps when more of us can learn and grow to be for others who are hurting a gentle and trusting presence.

Community And Trauma 2

We are all Shiva.  We are all creator and destroyer and transformer. Shiva is one of the major Hindu deities, creator, destroyer and transformer.  This is us.  We are so full of baggage stinking of selfish malevolence and craven fear, while so redolent with the promise of virtue, light and goodness.  Where do we begin?

As community, as a collective humanity, we are formidable, tender, murderous, nurturing, threatening, creators and destroyers all.  Think of rape as a metaphor for how something meant to be so life-giving and generative and loving as the sex act can be turned into an ugly act of violence, destructive to the soul of both victim and rapist. 

We are the creator.  The destroyer is us.  We are also transformer.

Today I watched as an aboriginal mother was scolding and at times verbally abusing her energetic toddler on the bus, reminding him repeatedly of how much he pisses her off and dragging and yanking him violently by the arms to settle him back into the stroller from which he liked to escape.  When she got bored with the scolding she eventually began to play with him and I could see the maternal affection finally reveal itself, however shyly, on her face.  She reminded me of my own mother.  And like my own mother I wouldn't be at all surprised if she also beats the crap out of her kid when there are no witnesses.  Hopefully not.  Pardon me, Gentle Reader, as I digress a little bit here, but before everyone became so all-walking-on-eggshells- about not offending our native peoples it was an already given that aboriginal children were frequently taken from their birth parents and adopted out, usually to white families.  I believe that, yes, there was colonization involved in that way of thinking.  However, it was also clear that in some of those families the children were being abused and neglected.  Which isn't to say that all aboriginal families were dysfunctional.  Rather, that the impact of colonization so collectively traumatized our aboriginal peoples that they in many ways were often too emotionally wounded, disadvantaged and psychologically damaged to be able to provide for their own children a decent quality of life.

I only hope that with the fashionable reluctance to continue this practice, that cultural values are not being used as a mere cover for leaving native children in abusive and neglected squalor.  Maybe better to be adopted by White, or Chinese, African, Latino, or South Asian parents who can provide a decent quality of life, and still keep the children in contact with their birth families and culture?  I don't know.  I hate the term political correctness, but I can't think of any other appropriate way of describing the dynamic.

But, White, Aboriginal, or other, I still saw in this frustrated and impatient native woman something very similar to my own German-Canadian mother.  Would it have been better for me had I been adopted out to an aboriginal family where I might have been treated with greater kindness?  Why not?  Common sense is always the first casualty, it seems, of fashionable thought.

I still also imagine that regardless of the dysfunction involved, there is still no place like home.  The people we call family might be abusive, intolerant, oppressive and harmful, but they are still family and our roots.  Still, children sometimes need to be rescued from those very families, aboriginal or not.

Family and social construct and social order were very intact and powerful forces in the lives of the medieval Spaniards and also for the Mexica.  The Church that proclaimed the Gospel of life, redemption and love, also ate alive the burned victims of her inquisitions, just as the Aztec gods, in order to keep maintaining and renewing the cosmos, the earth, and humankind, demanded to be fed human sacrifices in order to be kept themselves alive.

This theme of contrary forces runs throughout the weave and fabric of our humanity.  We are never really fully safe anywhere, and we are always vulnerable to trauma, yet we are still nurtured by those same safe places that harm and ruin us for life.

It only begins to make sense when we come to find and experience in the midst of the cruel paradox the very means of our transformation.

to be continued, Gentle Reader...

Community And Trauma 1

I expect to be writing about this for a little while, Gentle Reader.  I kind of started yesterday when I touched on the subject of our own indigenous peoples and trauma, something which I am completely unqualified to write about.  I can have an opinion but we should be reminded that opinions are rather like, er, posterior orifices, to use the polite term.  Everybody has one.

Community can heal trauma.  Community can cause trauma.  Community is an occupational hazard to our humanity.  A rather emotionally unbalanced woman who attends the Quaker meeting house where I attend on occasion, this week said quite plainly that without community we are not truly human.  I suppose she's right, up to a point.

Community, whether we want it or not, is always going to be inevitable.  We are a social species, so that, even if we do not particularly like one another, we are still going to flock together like pigeons in a city square.  Even if so many of us are staggering around like drunken sailors glued to our phones and completely ignoring each other, we still inevitably gravitate towards other humans, even if it is occurring on social media.  We cannot exist without one another.  Try it sometime and you'll know exactly what I mean: there will be no heat or electricity in your home, and you're not even going to have a home, since it took people to design it, draft out the design, buy the land, hire the builders, build it, and finish it, then sell it to you.  There are tons of other examples.

In community we find healing: if, there are healing and supportive professionals; if there are healing and helpful friends and family members; if we have available all the resources we need in the form of reading material, medications, places of rest, recreation, and refuge, which all need to be provided and often managed by...guess!  Other people.

In community we are traumatized when we are excluded, exiled, treated like inferiors, scapegoated, abused, bullied, picked on, assaulted, stalked and insulted.  Hell is other people.  Parents often ruin the lives of their children, often not intentionally, but just because.u

Healing Trauma 10

I am thinking today about the role of community and trauma.  I will begin first with some commentary about my own country's scandalous record with our First Nations people.  It isn't just in the Latin American countries that indigenous people were subjected to almost every possible variety of genocide and outrage.  Perhaps here in Canada our aboriginal people weren't as likely to be hunted down and shot, but there was still wholesale slaughter and some nations, notably the Beothuk of what is now Newfoundland were completely exterminated.   We also have the shameful record of the Native Residential Schools were the key priority was to kill the Indian in the child.  Thousands and thousands of aboriginal children were forcibly taken from their families over more than a hundred years and put in boarding schools where they were systematically mistreated, abused and sometimes killed by the very teachers, nuns and priests who were charged with their care and education.  This has probably been one of the single most traumatizing acts of cultural genocide ever inflicted on our First Nations people.

We have been going through a lengthy truth and reconciliation process, which seems to be a very constructive experience for all parties involved.  Official apologies are being made by the government of Canada and it is being acknowledged that our native populations have really endured indignity upon indignity.  In many cases they are trying to revive their culture and language.  The social and economic inequality between aboriginals and non-aboriginals remains, and likely will continue for some time to be, one yawning void. 

The rates of suicide, early death, infant mortality and general poverty are still much higher for our indigenous people than the national average.  As indigenous people are becoming aware of and recovering their lost dignity many are becoming noticeably angry, hostile and resentful.  This is completely understandable.

Last night I was listening to a weekly radio program on CBC Radio One called Unreserved, which is about Canadian aboriginal issues.  I often have trouble with this program and usually turn off the radio within the first five minutes.  Why?  Because the host, her guests and the subject matter almost always seem to be just bristling with hostility, rage and bitterness.  Last night they were talking about a card game called "I'm not a racist, but..." and when they didn't seem to want to let go of their favourite hobby horse, called "White Privilege", I felt a little bit annoyed and shut off the radio.

Why?

For the simple reason that I do not like feeling subjected to racist speech.  Even if it's anti-white racism.  I don't care if white people have historical, and largely mythical, privilege.  I am a white person.  And I have never benefited from privilege.  I have always been poor, have had door after door of potential opportunity and advancement slammed in my face, live in social housing and I have never benefited socially or economically because of the colour of my skin.

Neither have I had anything to do with the historical mistreatment of aboriginal persons in my country.  I was born here, okay?  Every since I was a kid I have tried and striven to understand, learn about, and have grown to respect and admire our First Nations people.  This, in spite of being assaulted and robbed by aboriginals.  My crime?  Being white!

To Rosanna Deerchild and her fellow white haters over on Unreserved on the CBC I have this to say:
Get over yourselves.  Get over your resentment.  Get over your hate.

Yes, you and your people have been mistreated and suffered outrageously.  But for reconciliation to really take effect there has to be some sense of forgiveness in response to repentance.  And, for that matter, don't expect that you're going to recover without getting past your anger, as righteous as it is and as justified as it is.

Like you, I am a trauma survivor and the product of an abusive family.  I have grown up and gone through life marginalized and often mistreated.  When I was unwell I used to lash out a lot.  This did nothing to advance my cause nor my healing or recovery.  I have had to learn that for me to heal and move forward, I have not only had to own and express my anger.  I have had to take responsibility for it, manage my anger, forgive and move on.  This never means forgiving the outrages committed against me, but forgiving the miserable and lost individuals and institutions that harmed me.

There is an element of accepting personal responsibility for one's recovery that is essential to moving past the trauma.  I am hoping that more of our First Nations People come to experience and put this into action.

Healing Trauma 9

Yes, tools for empowerment which are also tools for recovery.  I first would like to quote one of my early mentors, French philosopher and mystic, Simone Weil, who once wrote: "The day a man becomes a slave, he loses half his soul.

Like everyone else, I am greatly pleased that slavery no longer exists, at least as a sanctioned institution.  When slavery was abolished in the 1820's in the British Empire, then in the US in the 1860's, psychiatry as a science and medical practice was still in its early infancy.  Therefore, there have been very few first-hand case studies available about the psychological impact of being a slave.  This I do regret, because I would have liked to access such information, but it is much better that slavery was abolished anyway, so I am happy to use guesswork and speculation.

I would imagine that being made a slave would be one of the ultimate experiences of trauma because it is so blatantly dehumanizing.  One person completely robbing the other of their personhood in order to possess and use them for their own utility and often for abuse.  In Medieval Spain as among the Mexica, slavery was a well-established institution.  No one cared a rat's ass about the psychological damage inflicted on the people they owned.  They were regarded as possessions, much as lawnmowers or dishwashers or computers.  Being actual human beings with souls, minds, emotions and dignity of course really changed the dynamic.

I cannot accept that slave-owners were always in complete and absolute denial about the humanity of the people they presumed to own.  The utter soul destruction, for slave-owners as well as for the slaves themselves must have been monumental. There would have still been human interaction, however subtle or undisclosed on a multiple of levels.  For this reason slaves could easily become sexual partners, or elevated into positions of trust and confidence, becoming almost like trusted friends.  But never real friends since, being owned, they could not possibly be regarded as their masters' equals, even if they were their equals, and sometimes very much their superiors in talent, intelligence and human dignity.

We still have to sort through vestiges of slavery in everyday life, especially in the social hierarchies of the workplace and living in rental accommodations.  Even though neither employer nor landlord can own our souls they still have considerable power over our wellbeing and many of us live one firing and one renoviction away from ending up on the street.  We almost all have to live under this kind of prolonged stress, and it does impact us in the long run.   We still always have to watch our back, knowing that the little we have for keeping body and soul together can be easily taken away from us, by one stroke of the pen, or simply by pressing Send.

This is the subtle environment of trauma that those of us in mental health recovery have to learn to negotiate and triumph over.  Herein lies our tools of recovery.

I like to think of it as taking back our lives.  Learning to live with a sense and intensity of personal dignity that is independent of the good will of others, especially of such individuals and parties as have the power to harm us if they so choose.

The process of recovery is not without risk.  Indeed, if we are going to learn how to negotiate life victoriously and triumphantly we have to learn to do it without fear.  This has nothing to do with arrogantly lashing out or fighting back; this is about empowerment.  It is also about treating triggers more like stepping stones than obstacles.

Full disclosure here: I am a trauma survivor, and right now, today, I am negotiating a trigger.  I cannot go into detail, but recently I was inappropriately touched by an individual with whom I am professionally involved.  The last three days have been difficult as I have been fielding some very intense emotions that have been surfacing for me.  On the other hand, I am learning a lot about myself through this experience, and now that I have connected my emotional turmoil with this client touching me inappropriately, I am feeling better, more settled.

I am also feeling empowered.  Our healing is a sure bet when we take courage and face the darkness and those demons that lurk in hidden corners.  It isn't always enjoyable, but it is always so much better once the hidden forces of darkness are dragged out into the light.

"The truth shall make you free."-Jesus of Nazareth

Healing Trauma 8

I have long been fascinated by the role of family in trauma: prevention, healing, cause, and worsening of trauma.  There are no simple solutions and something so fundamental to our existence and DNA as family is going to play a role that is anything but simple and straightforward.

Here is that famous poem, This Be The Verse, by British poet Philip Larkin for your enjoyment (I love it when others write my blogposts for me!):

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   

    They may not mean to, but they do.   

They fill you with the faults they had

    And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   

Who half the time were soppy-stern

    And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

    It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

    And don’t have any kids yourself.


I would recommend that this poem be put on display in the family involvement services, where I work,
in the reception area.  I don't think they would be amused.  They have been trying to rehabilitate the role of the family in our clients' mental health recovery and my feelings about this are, to say the least, rather mixed.  Family involvement for my process of recovery would only have made me worse because it was my own family that traumatized me.  Both my parents had incredibly narrow, closed minds when it came to anything related to mental health, especially my father, and I don't think they would have taken at all kindly to any suggestion that I was ill, or that they had played a significant role in making me ill.  I can only say that, thank God, my treatment occurred later in life when they were no longer available to worsen things for me and I had only a private psychiatrist who was not terribly keen on family involvement, given his years of experience and wisdom.

Mexicans often tell me that because the family and social connections are so strong in their country
there is therefore very little mental illness in their country.  This I would also like to dispute.  In Mexico, as in other Latin American countries, the mental health services and diagnostic tools are way behind.  It might also be said that neither do they fall into the North American trap of over diagnosis or needlessly pathologizing negative behaviour.  For every sadness, grief and ill, we have a happy little pill!  At any rate, family is always there for you in Latin America to cover your little fanny and maybe even to wipe it for you at times.  No one is going to get diagnosed unless it's something really serious and unmanageable because the funding for decent public mental health services do not exist in most of those countries, and really, the extended family will simply cover for you in order to save face.

But the family, despite its destructive toxicity, is often all that we have and all we're ever going to have and maybe the best thing to do is to try our best to work with it, but to also know when to bail, when to politely tell mom and dad to go to hell and leave before they make their kids even worse and then try to provide our clients with every possible tool to help them towards self-empowerment and self-determination, which really is the only route to real mental health recovery and ongoing wellness.

Healing Trauma 7

I just heard on the radio an interview with an individual who said, truthfully, that trauma never really heals, say, like a broken bone, but that recovery is actually an ongoing process.  Nothing could be truer.

I think that we need to also view trauma as an instrument of healing, rather like a surgical tool.  There is a common misconception that trauma is merely destructive of the self.  And this is true in a certain sense.  However, it is also helpful to consider the source of these kinds of claims: they are made by psychiatrists and other high level professionals from First World countries and comfortable upper class families who have never had to suffer much.  True, this is a generalization, but I think it is a fairly accurate generalization.

The kinds of people who make these sorts of claims have never really suffered in their lives.  They have always known where their next meal was coming from; have always lived in nicely-appointed homes; generally come from reasonably affluent and supportive families; have never lived through their own mental health crisis; have generally never suffered from social-marginalization or discrimination.  For the most part, they have always enjoyed good health, have never been treated like garbage and have always felt in full control of their lives and their destinies, have never had a problem with gaining access to the finest educational institutions of the land, and have always had full access to all the good, lovely things that upper middle class life has to offer.

There are some psychiatrists who have experienced trauma, but my guess is that they are relatively few and are likely to be already somewhat older and more experienced in life.  Naturally they are not going to favour the idea of trauma or suffering being beneficial to one`s growth and ability to move their lives forward.

You might recall, Gentle Reader, that from time to time I mention this horrible knowledge of life that all trauma survivors share in common.  We have been through the darkness that scares the bejesus out of everyone else, and we have come out the other side, not unscathed, but often much deeper and much wiser than we were before we went through it.  Therapists are often flummoxed by this paradox.  Some are able to accept and even celebrate it, but as I have already mentioned, they are more likely to have lived in that neighbourhood themselves for a while.

This also gives trauma survivors a terrifying wisdom that make us very painful people to be around.  Not because we won`t stop whining about it, since we are usually silent about what we have seen, but because we have acquired from our sufferings an almost hideous strength.

I believe that with the help of a competent therapist who has been there themselves, trauma survivors can use their dreadful and painful experience as a psychological and spiritual goldmine.  The self knowledge, and the knowledge of human nature that we gain, once we work through the pain and anger, can be invaluable instruments of empowerment.  Having been plunged to nadirs of humiliation, we acquire a humility and an empathy that gifts us as healers, albeit wounded healers, to others whose hearts and lives have been so dreadfully broken and crushed.

I work as a mental health peer support worker.  Our (usually untraumatized) colleagues-psychiatrists, rehab therapists, social workers and case managers-often speak about us with glowing admiration, because we are able to get next to our clients in ways that they cannot.  The way one of my supervisors said it: we can work well with difficult clients and move them towards recovery often in ways that no one else is able to.  I replied that this is also because I am generally comfortable with my difficult clients.  They perceive that I am not threatened by their pain, having been there myself, and this helps them relax, trust me more and it makes my job with them an awful lot easier.

It is only natural that we are going to run away from pain and suffering.  I think there is also a great need to embrace pain and suffering, not as masochists, but to bravely face it, in order to extract from the bitter experience all the sweetness of empathy, love and compassion, such things as will also empower us to be healers.

Healing Trauma 6

I am thinking today of community and friendship.  Mexico City, as we know, was rocked by a killer earthquake just two days ago and already more than two hundred dead have been counted.  I just heard the CBC broadcast a comment I phoned in yesterday about earthquake preparedness in Vancouver, for when the fabled Big One hits, which they say is long overdue, will bring on the coming Apocalypse, and never mind that we have had little more than the occasional mild earth tremor in all of the sixty-plus years I have lived here.

I said, among other things, that it is more than simply a matter of each one of us stockpiling our share of unperishable food, bottled water and flashlights as though we're each going to be on our own till rescue arrives.  In Mexico City the people are all pulling together, helping and supporting one another and that we who live in Narcissistic, Self-Absorbed Lotus Land, aka Vancouver, need to take a page from their book.

But this also says something about how well the Mexicans, a historically traumatized people, do community, compared to our selfish and consumerist narcissism here in smug and relatively untraumatized Canada.

I have often felt huge wonder and admiration for the Mexicans' and other Latinos' capacity for community and friendship.  These people seem to really hang together.  I've heard some Latino friends mention that this is one of the reasons they emigrated to Canada, to get away from the suffocating family and community ties en su madre tierra where everyone knows everyone's else's business, when they are taking a shit and how much toilet paper they like to use.

I have just read an article in one of our free community weekly newspapers here in Vancouver, the Courier.  In it the author, Mike Klassen, was saying: "...social isolation (for the elderly)
is driving increasing rates of dementia...The irony was not lost on me that even when bringing people together, there are those among us who remain alone...'in a healthy community we help our families, our neighbours, and those less fortunate.  We build bridges, cities and entire countries together.  The very fabric of society is dependent on helping one another. '"

What do the Mexicans have that we don't?  Well, skyrocketing crime and murder rates, an unwinnable drug war that has cost more than one hundred thousand lives, legendary levels of political, judicial and police corruption, and an incredible history and legacy of violence, disruption, cruelty and social inequality.

For all this, as a community, as people who hold together in mutual support, the Mexican people are unimpeachable.  When I fell ill in San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas State, I was overwhelmed by the kindness that strangers showed me, such as I never would have experienced or expected here in clean, safe, progressive and cold and unfriendly Vancouver.

Of course, social cohesion has been necessary to the survival of the Mexican people.  Historically their governments have been murderous at the worst, indifferent at the best, to the sufferings and needs of the Mexican people.  The communitarian roots of the Mexican indigenous people must have provided a most powerful legacy that holds to this very day.

Trauma, collective and individual trauma, has necessitated for the people of Latin America a strong sense of community and friendships that often last from cradle to grave.  There is still trauma suffered and shared, but somehow this sense of familial and communitarian love and mutual responsibility must make it more bearable as people share, love, fight and argue and reconcile together.

More than enchiladas, tequila and chilpote, this is an import that we really need from Mexico if here in the land of consumerist narcissism we expect to really improve as human beings.  It could take a major crisis of the dimensions of a killer earthquake, or maybe our current problems of housing unaffordability might also be enough to drive us closer together in mutual support and community.

Time will only tell.

healing Trauma 5

This blogpost is written in honour of the courageous and beautiful people of Mexico as they suffer through the ravages of their second killer earthquake in as many weeks.

Art is the ultimate therapy.  I just co-facilitated an art session with the rec therapist at one of my worksites for a client of ours.  She was the only one to show up but that was fine because she got all the greater individual attention.  It was a great conversation and then I raised the idea of art therapy for world leaders.

Imagine, President Dump, the Great Deplorable in the Oval Office, sitting down in a nice locked ward somewhere out of harm's way with crayons and a colouring book (we wouldn't want him to be handling sharp objects, now, would we, Gentle Reader?  Especially if his roommate is Rocket Man, the fat little dictator of North Korea.  Ah, the schadenfreud, Dump and Kim bunking up together in a locked ward for the criminally insane!)

But seriously, folks.  Art has a huge therapeutic value, and some of the most traumatic experiences produce some of the most wonderful and beautiful works of art.  Look at the artistic legacy of Mexico, with the huge traumatic and blood-drenched history of that country, and the visual art, the colours, the images, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and many others, creating an olla podrida (literally, a big rotten stewpot) of such images, colours and forms all riotously derived from combined Aztec, Zapotec, Mayan, Olmec and European ancestry, just like the people of Mexico.

The Mexican people, like other Latin American nations, are collectively traumatized.   The violent and bloody birth of the Mexican nation, the cruel enslavement and exploitation and attempted genocide of the indigenous peoples, the violent warfare and revolutions, the summary executions and tortures for the smallest crimes, and more recently the huge drug war that has claimed more than one hundred thousand lives in ten years.  Art, music, literature and so much more in the creative disciplines, has become even more than all the clinical services that all the psychiatrists of Latin America or the rest of the world could provide, to help foster the healing of the people and to staunch and bring redemptive meaning into the great pain that they suffer.

Art, the whole creative impulse, I believe, can combine with our organic capacity for addiction and then we have a real addictive treasure, cheaper than crack, with none of the toxic side effects and you wake up in the morning feeling better.  Art is calming, inspiring, it can challenge, exorcise demons and organize our disordered minds.  It can teach us how to see all over again and can open our eyes to a world that is always new, healing and beautiful.

The creative process is a joyous experience and I think that if we can created and foster such conditions as to encourage people who suffer to get happily lost in creating, we will see opening before us new paths of healing, neural pathways, and pathways of life.

Art was one of the few things I still had to cling to when I was deeply traumatized some eighteen years ago.  Without it, I might be now taking medications and finding myself in and out of hospital.  But that fate has not befallen me, and I think it can be argued that I was able to paint my way to healing and wholeness.  And this legacy I want to pay forward to all the people whose journey of recovery I am privileged to participate in.

Healing Trauma 4

I will begin by quoting here the entire text of the prayer of St. Francis.  I am not going to copy and paste it off Wikipedia.  This is an incredibly meaningful text and I want to meditate on each word while typing it out for us, Gentle Reader.  If I get any of it wrong, please understand that my memory isn't always as flawless as I think it is.

Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace:
Where there is hatred let me sow love,
where there is injury pardon,
where there is doubt, faith,
where there is despair, hope,
where there is darkness, light.
where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master,
Grant that I should not seek to be consoled,
so much as to be consoled,
to be understood,
as to understand,
to be loved,
as to love.
For it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
in giving that we receive,
and in dying that we are born to eternal life.

So, what do these words have to do with healing trauma?  These words say absolutely nothing about caring for or nurturing the wounded self.  It is all focussed on forgetting self and focussing on the other.

This week, on the CBC Radio One, I am listening to a series on workplace burnout.  In many fields, notably in my own profession, this is a major occupational hazard.  I have at times encountered in myself early warning signs of burnout.  I seem to have succeeded so far in avoiding any major impact.  This isn't to say that I'm immune.  No one is, really.

Still, referring back to the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi.  These words would be considered by any care or support professional a recipe for burnout.  There is nothing mentioned about caring for oneself.  And yet, throughout the prayer, and at the very heart of the Christian ethos, it is all about caring for others.  There is nothing about me.  It's all for you.

I am not going to deny here the importance of good self-care, especially when we are actively caring for others: the importance of sufficient downtime, getting enough sleep and rest, exercise, recreational time, cultivating good and healthy relationships with friends, family and other loved ones.

None of this is mentioned in the Prayer of St. Francis.

To validate and empower those words, without turning them into a maudlin caricature of sanctity and holiness, one has to know where to stop.  Or when to pause.  Especially when, like you and me, Gentle Reader, you are a casualty of such a psychopathic culture of narcissism, greed and selfishness as the one we are living in.

We are not naturally equipped to be empathetic, kind or generous.  We need to learn this.  Is it any wonder that burnout happens so easily for many of us?  We are moral and ethical weaklings.  We have been so spiritually disempowered and disembowelled by living like self-absorbed little consumers that there is very little incentive and absolutely no infrastructure in our society that nurtures and encourages living as generous beings.

We need to address this, especially given how caring for others often is even of greater therapeutic value to the caregiver than to the recipient.

Learning, being willing to learn, how to love and care for others, in my opinion and through my own experience of recovery from trauma, is an essential core part of healing.  It is not the only part, self-care is vitally important and for a while self-care will need to occupy the front seat.   But eventually we have to move beyond ourselves to meaningfully touch the lives of others.  We are a highly social animal, and we have really lost some of the most essential moorings of our humanity.

Where there is hatred, let us sow love, while reaffirming that we ourselves are loved and loveable;
Where there is injury pardon, not forgiving the offence but forgiving the offender and then forgiving ourselves.

Where there is doubt, faith, faith in God, or however we wish to name as our highest good, faith in others, no matter how disappointed we are, and faith in ourselves.

Sadness, joy.  I think this is the real kicker.  There is something about caring for others with an attitude of joy and humour that lightens the load for us and delivers stellar care to them while protecting us from burnout.

Where there is despair, hope, even hoping in what we cannot possibly know or imagine, but to know that we will get through this mess, we will come out of this darkness.

Where there is darkness, light.  Really, if we are already doing the other stuff, we are going to be full of light and this can only help and inspire others.

Grant that I should not seek so much to be consoled as to console.  There is something about offering comfort while our own hearts are breaking that helps begin and even speed our own process of healing.

To be understood as to understand.  I don't think any of us can realistically expect that anyone but God can fully and truly understand us.  When we begin to seek to understand others we come by extension to understand, know, and accept ourselves better.

To be loved as to love.  I find that when I open myself to the possibility of loving others that this also seems to fill my own need to be loved.

And this is why it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, in giving that we receive, and in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Because our culture of selfishness has left us very weak and soft, I would recommend learning to live this prayer through small steps.  Very small steps.

We are pathetic.  But not entirely beyond hope.

Healing Trauma 3

Today, Gentle Reader, I would like to talk about gratitude insofar that it relates to alleviating some of the effects of trauma.  It isn't a magic bullet.  But it helps.

When we are deeply traumatized we are often so swallowed up in our pain, sorrow and affliction that we cannot see or appreciate anything beyond our own suffering.  It is of course all the worse and more difficult when it is collective trauma.  Misery loves company and there is always something comforting about suffering together, not to find remedy, but to wail and moan together. 

Nobody likes whiners, for the simple reason that human suffering is very painful for others to be around.  This is the dark side of empathy.

Forgiveness is not even thought of.  Vengeance, yes.  Justice, of course.  But to actually forgive the nasty horrible losers who raped you? robbed you? crippled you for life? Killed your family, raped your wife and daughter in front of you, bayoneted your husband, burned your house to the ground?  Yes, you are expected to forgive....All this?

In order to come to terms with my experience of trauma through childhood abuse I had to learn to draw the differentiating line between forgiving the abuser and forgiving the abuse.  I have not nor will I ever forgive the sexual abuse, the physical and emotional abuse, neglect and suffering that I endured at the hands of my father, my mother and my older brother because this would be to make allowances for it, to almost justify it and excuse  its ravages, it would be tantamount to legitimizing the abuse.

I have forgiven them.  I understand them better now.  I understand that both my parents were not mature or ready to have children.  They were themselves too young and too troubled.   I understand that they were themselves abused and neglected as children and that they grew up in an era of tremendous stress (the Great Depression and the Second World War).  I suspect that my mother might have had to horribly compromise herself and her values in order to survive before she married my father.  I'll just say that when she was dying from lung cancer she told me that there were secrets she was going to carry to the grave with her.

I understand that I was not an easy child for them to raise.  They did not know what to do with me.  Gifted and strong-willed children can be a huge pain in the ass, unless the parents have tonnes of resources available for their education and to help facilitate what is not going to be an easy life journey.  My parents had none of these resources, neither could they be expected to.  They were both poorly educated with a narrow working class and very conservative world view.

I can only say that they tried their best and even if their bumbling ruined my life in many ways, I still refuse to blame them.  There was no other possible outcome.

As for my violent and abusive brother, he like me was a product of a less than ideal environment.  He took out on me our father's beatings that were inflicted on him.  Survival of the fittest.  By oppressing and emotionally disabling me he was made all the stronger to do well in his future professional life.  He seems to have always hated me.  We have not seen each other in nearly two decades.  I feel alright about this though I do wonder if he's okay.

I have come to be grateful for the many loopholes and interventions that kept my family from utterly destroying me. As a child I had the intelligence and insight to realize that I was worth better than their abuse and I never lost my integrity.  This sustained me and kept my soul alive and thriving.  As an adolescent, Christians and Jesus Christ himself came into my life, mentoring and reparenting me. 

As a young adult I was more or less reconciled to both my parents and we became friends.  Even though I remained poor, my values as a Christian prevented me from seeking money and profit for their own gain and to dedicate my life to work that involved serving and caring for some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in my city, even though the pay was low.  I was more interested in pleasing God than lining my pockets.

During my thirties I was able to realize my vision of facilitating an intentional and ministering Christian community.  During my forties I was homeless, traumatized and then worked on slowly rebuilding my life through sessions for four years with a competent psychiatrist.  I found adequate affordable housing where I am still living.  During my fifties I worked at developing in my career and profession as a mental health peer support worker, where thirteen years later I am still well-employed, loved and respected by coworkers, colleagues and clients.

Despite my chronically low wage, I have been able to keep my head above water, save a little money and travel for one month every year to Latin America where I have learned so much about the various cultures and people as well as enhancing my Spanish speaking abilities.

I am now in my early sixties.  For the first time in my life, I am surrounded by true and really good friends, all of whom are people of integrity with high values, sincere, generous and intelligent people who are also supportive and kind.   I feel that in many ways my life is beginning all over again and I am anxious to see what the future holds for me.

Without gratitude, without giving thanks to God for the horrible things that did not happen to me, and that worse things did not happen to me, and for all the good people and turns of events in my life that helped prevent really horrible things from happening, but opening the way for good things, I would shudder to imagine where I would be now.

My life is not perfect.  It is a work in progress.  I am still affected by trauma and probably always will be.  But this has only made me kinder and more compassionate to others, because of gratitude.  Sometimes, as in recent days, I am still haunted by the past, and these times have become valuable explorations of my soul, and I always learn something new and become somehow stronger from having gone through the struggle.

And now I watch as the new door begins to open.

Healing Trauma 2

There is no activity that so effectively fights and counteracts the effects of trauma so much as the celebration of life.  Wow, Gentle Reader!  This covers so much territory.

Since these blogposts about trauma are at least loosely related to a larger theme of collective trauma in Latin American countries, let me begin with the Mexican celebration of the Day of the Dead, El Dia de Muertos.  This feast day combines the Catholic Christian observances of All Hallows, All Saints Day and All Souls Day (October 31-November 2) with Aztec and other indigenous customs for honouring the dead.  I have already mentioned elsewhere that death, our impending death, its inevitability, is the principal cause of our collective trauma.  What I love about the Day of the Dead celebrations is in the way that death is both embraced and celebrated as well as laughed at in the face.

I have had the privilege of being in Mexico City for the Day of the Dead celebrations.  Everywhere in the parks golden marigolds, the flowers of the dead were planted.  These flowers look nothing at all like death: bright, golden-orange yellow, they shine each like magnificent miniature suns.  Such are the flowers of the dead.

In the stores and shops they sold and served pan de muerto, a special sweet bread of the dead, and candy and chocolate skulls.  Everywhere hung colourful decorations of skeletons dressed like Victorian era ladies and Mexican men in sombreros.

In the bed and breakfast where I was staying an altar, or ofrenda, to the dead was set up, with beautiful coverings of purple and orange and strewn with flowers, fruits, food, liquor, candles, and the photos of the departed loved ones of everyone who wanted to participate.  There was music and dancing.  Nothing of sorrow, nothing about loss.

We were celebrating death.  We were accepting and acknowledging the beautiful temporary condition of our lives on this earth, as well as remembering and inviting to visit us the spirits of our departed loved ones.

None of us forgets that we are going to die.  Rather, we embrace it, we celebrate it, and we give thanks to God, however we perceive him, for this beautiful gift of life.  Accepting that our lives are but a breath upon this earth we can each go our way rejoicing in this gift of life and treating one another with greater kindness as we all share together in this precious journey of life.

Healing Trauma 1

There is no cure for trauma.  It is the gift that goes on giving.  This morning on the news, in the same five minutes, I have heard that they have caught the waste of DNA that bombed the London Tube, an eighteen year old loser nurtured on hate (ISIS has claimed credit for the bombing, surprise! surprise!); about a protest in St. Louis, Missouri about a white cop being acquitted for killing a black man, and that all the Asshole In Chief, President Dump, could think of doing in response to the killer earthquake in Mexico last week, was to tweet about Mexico being one of the world's worst countries for crime.

We are all victims.  To cure trauma is to go into absolute denial about our human condition.  Trauma is our human condition.  It is the air we breathe, and contaminate with car exhaust, factory smoke and second hand cigarette smoke.  We all face this rather scary condition called mortality, or, impending death.  This plays a far greater role in informing and affecting our behaviour than we would care to reckon with.

In the meantime, we cope, some better than others, some worse, but cope and manage is often all that we can do. 

There are redemptive experiences.

I just had one of those today.  From time to time my life seems to appear before a review panel, and that is what could be really happening.  Perhaps in the Court of God I am being arraigned before the Great Judge and some of his angels to determine what has been going on with my life and to do a reset.  These times often take the form of depression, sometimes severe, sometimes mild, but this is not depression.  It is rather a reset time for working redemptively with trauma.

As some of you already know, Gentle Reader, my life has not been exactly a walk in the park.  I was brought up by woefully unprepared and dreadfully unequipped parents.  They really didn't know what they were doing, which I understand to be a very common experience for people of my generation.  I particularly relived one of many episodes of abuse.  Although abuse was a daily experience for me (beatings from either or both my older brother and my mother, shaming, and sometimes being verbally abused, shamed and sexually molested by my father), these things all had a cumulative effect. 

I recalled in lurid detail one day when I was beaten in turn by each one of them.  I went up to my bedroom weeping and howling in pain, shame and distress.  I must have been ten or eleven years old.  It was a Sunday and my father, likely nursing a hangover, yelled to me that if I didn't shut up then he'd really give me something to cry about.

I lowered my voice, but continued weeping for well over two solid hours that afternoon.  After dinner, where I gave no one the time of day, I returned to my bedroom where I resumed weeping till bedtime.

Remembering that incident yesterday, while seated on a park bench, I reflected on how that incident, among others, literally ruined my life and all my future prospects as an adult.  My parents, who should have been there to support, encourage and build me up, had managed to destroy me and render me useless to do anything successful with my life.  I would not be able to go in the natural direction of a child of my intelligence, gifts and abilities.  In the following years I did terribly in school, and because of the wretched soap opera that my family was, I could only cope and survive with no energy, direction or support left over to take a concrete and positive direction in life.  All I could do was hold on to what I already had, working at low-paying survival jobs, unable to finish my postsecondary education, and clearly my parents were to blame for everything, as I was working hard at making the best possible use I could of what little I had left of a life.

The sense of depression continued into this morning.  I was also thinking about suicide.  Never a good sign, but always a symptom of some underlying issue.

While seated in the coffee shop this morning for two hours with my sketchbook I thought and prayed very carefully about what was happening.  I concluded that suicide was not, and never would be an option.  It would be giving up, it would be caving, and the recovery that I have been enjoying thus far has been soundly predicating on my refusal to give up.

But I still had to get to the bottom of this intense sadness, this sense of being useless, of being unloved and unwanted.

When I resumed my walk I prayed and asked God for guidance about what was happening.  It turned out that this was not a suicidal depression I was in but a period of life re-evaluation.  I walked past the sumptuous palaces and mansions lining Southwest Marine Drive while thinking and praying.  When I turned onto a quiet street, it was though a still small voice within was whispering in my ear the words: "When your family was being so cruel to you, Aaron, were they successful in breaking you?"

I reflected, then replied that no, they weren't successful.  I never accepted the lie that I deserved any of their ill treatment.  Rather, I hardened myself against them and for a while hated them as cruel bullies who had no right to mistreat me.

As I continued to walk and reflect, it occurred to me that this was why I was not able to continue my life in a conventionally appropriate way.  My parents, as anyone's mother and father, were my first role models and my prototypes of authority.  I discovered, while still a child, that their authority over me was bogus because they were abusive.  I no longer trusted them.  This actually made me strong and enabled me to resist them and move in rather a different, very radical direction.

I would never make a lot of money as a radical.  But my natural intelligence and insight were considerably sharpened by having to fight and resist those idiots in my family.  I would never be able to trust authority again, hence making postsecondary education and work extremely difficult at times. 

But I did grow as a caring, compassionate human being with a burning thirst for social justice.

I did not turn into a bourgeois with a nice income and lovely progressive liberal values to go with a beautifully stocked wine cellar.

I am, as it were, a dirt poor radical, self-educated, well-read, well-travelled and well-spoken.

I have never had to barter my integrity in order to get ahead in life.

Despite my poverty, I would call my life a sweeping success.

This is one example of working with trauma in order to be healed of its effects.

What Is Trauma? 21

A perfect world.  How would you like to live in one, Gentle Reader?  What, for you would make a perfect world?  What kind of people would inhabit a perfect world?  What kind of person would you be?  Don't expect to be the way you are now. 

If we want a perfect world (and we're not going to have one, at least not in my lifetime and probably not in yours!) then there will be one particular condition that will have to be met.  We are all going to have to be willing to change.  To give up our selfishness.  To give up on being narcissists.  To give up our apathy.  To quit being idle, passive consumers. To give up our greed.  To give up our vindictiveness.  To give up our hatred.  We are also going to have to compromise on our individualism and learn to balance our sense of personal human rights with social and communitarian responsibilities and obligations.

Still want a perfect world?

Life for most of us, throughout our troubled history, has never been easy.  There have always been the natural kickers: earthquakes, forest fires, floods. inclement weather, wild beasts, famine and disease.  It could well be the trauma that afflicted our ancestors as they had to endure generation after generation of heartache, want and necessity that gave rise to some of our less flattering human qualities, which in turn have generated so many problems and so much grief for our species generation after generation.

If we could somehow become kinder, gentler, less selfish and more willing to serve and care for one another, more courageous, and more peaceful then I think we would be well on our way to establishing here on this sorry and wounded earth of ours the New Jerusalem.

This, alas, is nowhere in sight.

We have only whatever clumsy, slow and stumbling steps forward that we can proffer, always countered by Orwell's grim prophesy of the boot stamping on a human face.  The tension that results is enormous, but not necessarily insurmountable.

I say this: accept the imperfection, the trouble and the woundedness that have become our perpetual human reality.  Only one thing: that we not acquiesce, that we refuse to resign ourselves to this horrible fate as something inevitable.

It is true that we all stand on the shoulders of giants.  Those brave individuals throughout history that have gone before us, often to an early grave, in their zeal and vision for a better and more just world.  Indeed, without those visionaries, those heroes, we would still have institutionalized slavery; there would be no democracy, no progressive liberal values; we would be ruled by tyrants; we would always be at war; the vast majority of us would be profoundly impoverished, uneducated and illiterate; we would be at the mercy of every disease that swept through our communities; women would be treated like domestic slaves, personal whores and baby machines; infant mortality would be widespread and the average human lifespan would be less than forty years.

The quality of life for your average human, throughout the world, has improved exponentially, even though there is still poverty, inequality, hunger and despots.  But those ills are yet fewer and scarcer than ever.

We are still, as it were, a deeply troubled and traumatized humanity.  We seem to be finally, in this past century, discovering and obtaining some of the tools of our healing and for the healing of our ravaged and wounded earth, but in tandem with our enhanced capability of destroying our Mother Earth and ourselves and all other species through exponential nuclear annihilation and environmental destruction through human caused climate change.

Time is now very short.

In my next few blogposts, I want to explore some ideas for healing our trauma.  Stay tuned.

And keep those comments coming in!

What Is Trauma? 20

Trauma is a permanent feature of our human condition.  I would go as far as to call it our defining feature.  Life is hard, and life has always been hard.  Only the strong survive.  With this ugly Darwinist reality how could anyone possibly get through unscathed?  By virtue of being human we are all walking wounded.

I remember a passage from a novel by Doris Lessing I keep reading over and over again, titled "The Four-Gated City".  Ms. Lessing offers the image of the grief of a mother, when her young child first
plays outside, falls on the pavement and scrapes her knee.  The mother's grief is caused by that sense of loss of that beautiful innocent wholeness, suddenly being claimed and wounded by the cruel world.  It is a kind of relinquishment of something very precious and pure to forces outside of our control.

Helicopter parents are, of course, pretty pathetic.  They labour so long and hard sheltering their little darlings from the cold cruel world, creating infantilized teenagers that will grow into the most useless young adults that ever crawled the surface of the earth.  The world is still going to claim their little babies.  That is the job of the world.  Overprotected from the evil and surrounding harms that await them, they will go into the world, the easiest prey imaginable.

Trauma is the universal reality.  We all respond to trauma differently.  Some have amazing resilience, are made even stronger, and soldier on in life conquering and to conquer.  Many others do okay.  They are impacted, yes, and might be a little bit scarred for life.  But they can still get on with their lives, earning a living, raising a family, and generally having a fairly good time.

Then there are those whose lives are damaged, even ruined by trauma.  Those who will need medical and community support, mental health support, medications, counselling, therapeutic groups and activities, hospitalization. 

My question?  What is it that makes victims of trauma different from trauma survivors and trauma victors?  What traits do each group seem to share in common?

I am thinking here of how the values of the traumatized collective define and interpret the wellbeing of those who have been through specific and impactful trauma.  We live in a society largely defined by capitalist economic priorities, individualism and consumerism.  Outside of liberal human rights there is no defining code of ethics that provide mordant to our collective values, such as they are.  Mental wellness and mental health recovery are going to be perceived through this kind of lens.  If you remain employable and well-employed, and function well socially, then you are considered well, or at least not traumatized and certainly not ill.

If you are a trauma survivor or victim who has a high ethical sense, a developed sense of spirituality and humanity, and who values the beauty of nature and the dignity of other persons, you are not necessarily going to be regarded as well.  If you are not able to work and earn a living, and if there is anything lacking in your family or social network, or your ability to cope under stress and pressure, your wellness is going to be held in question.

Other symptoms of trauma: short temper, outbursts, withdrawal, anxiety and depression could be equally present in the victors, survivors and victims.  Should survivors and victims be a little more honest and open about their feelings and experience, their disclosure could incriminate and be used against them.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, like many other mental health diagnoses, is in some ways a social construct.  Everyone is damaged to some degree.  This isn't to say that there will not be those who are particularly fragile who will be needing extra support and care.  Rather, I think we need to take care not to assume that the rest of us are all right just because there are those in our care who manifest troubling symptoms and behaviours.  Some lie better than others.

One of my highly esteemed supervisors mentioned to me recently that we need to take the word disorder out of PTSD as the word disorder facilitates stigma.  If the rest of us were entirely honest about our own personal demons, fears, hurts and nightmares it could plausibly be maintained that we are all trauma cases, because really, we are all trauma cases, and I think that being willing to own this will make us a little bit less smug and more helpful in supporting those who have been particularly wounded by life.

What Is Trauma? 19

The reptilian brain gets us into more trouble than any other feature of the human body (except maybe for one little part, Gentle Reader!).  By reptilian brain I am of course referring to the amygdala, that small almond-shaped base in the back of the brain.  It is little different from the brains of reptiles and other "lower" animals.  It is the organ of instinct, fear, fight or flight, comfort and survival.  The more evolved parts of the brain, that involve calculation, reason, aesthetics, spirituality, ethics and compassion are also weaker than the amygdala, which has been around longer, way longer, at least five hundred million years longer than all that high-falutin culture, enlightenment and education crap.  If the amygdala has a music playlist, it would be made up entirely of selections of heavy metal, rap and country and maybe Wagnerian opera.

The amygdala should be happy and well cared for if it isn't going to interfere with the more recently evolved, higher functioning areas of the brain.  Civilization and culture tend to flourish at their best when everyone is safe, well-fed and housed and there don't happen to be any wars pending.  Progressive and liberal democracies are more likely to do well during the good times.  But when things get wonky, when there are terrorist attacks and a tanking economy, and when inequality becomes the normal state of affairs within populations, this is when the amygdala gets itchy, nervous and begins to twitch like a debutante on her first dance.

I have mentioned in an earlier blogpost that conservatives, republicans and populist fascists all have a larger than average amygdala.  This is what makes it impossible to reason with these kind of people.  Reptilian brain with all its most basic and instinctive drives becomes too loud, too active and too powerful to pay attention to the sissy know-it-all higher cerebral functions.  Whether you are a BC Liberal Party supporter, a Federal Conservative, or, (worse) an American Republican, or (worse still) a supporter of President Dump, the Great Deplorable in the Oval Office, or a white supremist, it is going to be an exercise in pure futility trying to rationally convince you of the error of your ways, the idiocy and complete lack of coherent logic to your belief system, and you are still not going to get it, you are not going to listen, you will likely yell insults in my face and maybe punch me as well.

The evolution of culture and the development of civilization for the human species has been a long and slow process after tens of thousands of years of our ancestors living in survival mode.  For most of the troubled history of human civilization, people have been ruled and dominated by absolute monarchs, priests, despots and tyrants by fear, threat and terror.  Rule by Amygdala.  During times of war, famine or natural disaster or economic and environmental collapse it is the amygdala that rules and everyone scrambles for survival and then watch things get ugly.

Whether you were in Medieval Spain or living among the Mexica, your life would have been completely run by the collective amygdala of the culture you lived in and the sense of threat and imminence of death you were living under would have kept your own personal amygdala big, healthy, strapping and throbbing.

Trauma liberates the amygdala while impairing the brain's higher functions.  It can take years to rebalance the brain for trauma survivors, who whether like me you are a survivor of childhood abuse, or whether you live in Colombia and are just beginning your long and delicate recovery from the collective trauma that was inflicted on your country by half a century of civil war.

What Is Trauma? 18

Fear appears to be a principal cause and ingredient to trauma.  Whether you have survived a war, a bombing, earthquake, abusive parents, or one bad hair day too many, and you are traumatized, you have likely been already very afraid and for a very long time. 

You are afraid of further misfortune, disaster, abuse, or malfunctioning setting gel.  Usually the trauma justifies the fear and the fear is justified by the traumatic event or events that have caused trauma.  Except for the bad hair days, in which case you might consider buying a wig and treat yourself to an afternoon in the nail spa.

If you have been homeless, as I have been, there is going to be the echo effect.  You will fear becoming homeless again.  If you are a decent human being with empathy, then you will be able to process a lot of this fear of repeating homelessness on having survivor's guilt and will do your very best to advocate for those who are still homeless and unhoused.  You may still experience that shadow of fear, as I do at times, but it will diminish, become manageable and may eventually disappear altogether.

Surviving natural or human-made catastrophes will leave you with a huge fear of losing whatever stability and safety has been returned to you.  If you have been robbed, assaulted, raped or stalked then you will have a dreadful time recovering trust.  You will be paralyzed by fear, the fear that horrible things could happen to you again.

If you were abused as a child, especially by your parents and primary caregivers you will likely never trust anyone in a position of authority or power over your life again.  This has been my personal experience.

The need to feel safe is huge among trauma survivors.  This was my experience for three years after I had been homeless.

If you are living in a dictatorship or some oppressive regime then fear will be constant and chronic.  Trauma becomes a collective event and a collective experience.  I am thinking especially of the Uighurs in China, the Moslem minority from the westernmost promise.  Individuals are being taken away in the middle of the night and forced to spend months in re-education centres where through threats and brainwashing they are taught to love Big Brother.  They return deprived of their love for their religious faith and for their own culture and customs parroting all the lies and platitudes that prove them to be loyal Han members of the communist party, thus upholding Mao's toxic legacy.

Those who are not taken to the re-education camps are traumatized by osmosis, paralyzed by fear after seeing their loved ones transformed by their repressive government into the walking dead.

I have no doubt that such fear paralyzed and kept in check most if not all forms of rebellion among the Medieval Spanish and the Mexica.

It becomes a toxic balance.  Governments that owe their power and legitimacy to their power and ability to bully, threaten and cow into submission their own people.  There is no love there outside of the toxic fruit of Stockholm Syndrome.  The power of the few is derived from the dehumanizing of the many.

I have never had to live under a dictatorship.  I do enjoy the good fortune of living in a country and society that honours and upholds human rights and freedoms.  I am glad to say that my experience of trauma had been largely due to growing up in a broken and dysfunctional family.  Unfortunately the stigma of poverty has also complicated things.  My experience of chronic poverty and underemployment and poorly paid work has put me at the mercy of some of the least flattering aspects of my own Canadian society.  In this country it is still open season on the poor and my experience of trauma has only been intensified in some very painful ways thanks to your average Canadian's hatred of poor people and the politicians they elect into power.

I no longer fear poverty, I mean the extreme kind of poverty where I have the choice between housing or food but I'm not permitted the luxury of both.

I did, some time ago, come to recognize that fear was the prime power source of trauma.  In order to overcome trauma and its results I have opted to face and tackle my fears, one at a time.  This began in 2008 when I began to travel again.  Every year now, thanks to living in social housing, I seem to always be able to save enough money to go on a trip somewhere in Latin America.

These vacations, always taken alone, away from resorts, all-inclusives and other tourists, have been just amazing for helping me address, tackle and overcome some of my fears.  At times my life has  been in danger.  But I keep overcoming.  And I keep on travelling.

And I am noticing that by extension, this overcoming of fear through travel has been crucial in bringing me into a fuller healing and a much richer experience of life.

What Is Trauma? 17

This blogpost is written to honour the memory of the victims of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre sixteen years ago today in 2001, and the victims of summary execution and torture at the hands of Pinochet and his thugs in Chile forty-four years ago on this day in 1973.

I want to write here about the politics of trauma.  Or, how our political leaders cash in on trauma in order to gain and maintain their power.  Before I proceed, I would like to make one thing perfectly clear: I do not subscribe to conspiracy theories.  Remember the Truthers?  The conspiracy theory nutters presenting all kinds of "evidence" that the US Government was somehow behind the downing of the World Trade Centre sixteen years ago this September 11.

Their idea is that the Bush Administration plotted the destruction of the Twin Towers as a ploy for justifying the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as well as for terrifying New Yorkers and other Americans into fleeing under the protective wings of Mother Washington.

I don't know what really happened.  I don't want to know.  However, given our natural tendency towards being played upon by fear and of traumatizing ourselves, I don't think that our governments really need any more help.  They don't have to conspire a damn thing.  We're already afraid and skittish and all they have to do is make political hay out of our natural tendencies towards fear and paranoia.

I have mentioned in other posts that trauma, rather than being a unique individual response to stress and violence, is more a collective experience that most of us remain in denial about.  Our perpetual collective trauma makes us very compliant subjects for our governments.  In earlier times the legitimate and constant fear of warfare and invasion made the king's subjects flee under his protection. 

The Aztecs and other native peoples of Mexico successfully persuaded the people that the gods needed to be regularly fed on human flesh or the entire cosmos would collapse.  This fear of the unknown made many willing victims climb the steep stairs of pyramids to the altars where their beating hearts would be torn out of their chests.  Fear of offending the gods, and fear of being chosen for sacrifice were more than sufficient for keeping the people under control.

I have already written extensively about the successful monopoly of terror shared by the Spanish monarchs and the popes for keeping the people under control.  Conform to the letter or get burned at the stake.  The very spectacle of hundreds of innocent victims being burned to death and the din of their screams of agony must have been more than enough to keep your average Spaniard submissive and compliant to pontiff and crown.

We live in very different times now.  But we are still afraid.  We, who have less to fear than any of our ancestors are probably among the most timorous losers that ever trembled on the surface of the earth.  Yes, we are afraid of terrorist attacks.  Worse, we fear poverty.  This is the new shadow that keeps us collectively fearful, traumatized and submissive.

When our governments, under pressure from the CEO's of multinational organizations drafting and signing international free trade agreements, cut back on fair wages, fair working conditions, and fair supports for the vulnerable, this transformed the poorest Canadians into objects of fear and loathing.  No one wanted to end up like us: homeless, hungry, sick, alone and unwanted, mentally ill, and very likely to die early in life.  So they became all the more compliant to the dictates of globalism, working, scrambling and competing all the harder to get that education, that degree, that advanced degree, that job, that overpriced rental apartment, that tiny overpriced condo, anything to not sink to the gutter and the open sidewalk.

I am not going to suggest here that our governments intentionally invented legislated homelessness.  I still wouldn't put it past them.  One way or another it has become a very effective scare tactic for keeping the rest of us in line, compliant, competitive and working our poor starving fannies off to make the One Percent all the richer while we become ever so much poorer.

What Is Trauma? 16

I would like to see this become part of the conversation about trauma: social and economic inequality.  Of course this has been a fact of life for as long as we have had so-called civilization.  Haves and have-nots.  Rich and poor.  Hungry and well-fed.  Undereducated or illiterate and well-educated.  Employed, underemployed and unemployed.  The elite and the great unwashed.

Throughout the long and troubled history of our humanity, at least for the past ten thousand years or so, the beat goes on, and this syncopated and dysfunctional and discordant beat continues to go on. 

The highly-stratified societies of Medieval Spain and the Aztecs were of course highly hierarchical and unequal.  The predominance of death and cult and state-sanctioned murder of course helped keep people in their place as did the vast inequality of social status and resources.

We no longer permit human sacrifice nor the burning of witches and heretics.  We've even gotten rid of capital punishment!  We enjoy the privilege of social and liberal democracy.  One person, one vote.  We can even send angry emails to elected officials and not fear that we will disappear in the middle of the night.  Could it get better?

But wait, there's more.  We started out as a white man's (gender specific here) country with a smattering of surviving indigenous peoples and various persons of East Asian and South Asian and African descent.  Only the white men could vote or make politically binding decisions.  Everyone else was treated like, well, like something brown and rather foul-smelling.

Then things began to change.  First women (only white women) won the right to vote.  Then people of other races and finally our own First Nations People were allowed to help decide the course and future of this great land of ours.  Everybody could vote.  Universal suffrage.

The subtler and uglier forms of racial discrimination were finally being addressed.  Then the women's movement gained momentum for equal treatment, freedom of choice, the right to do as they pleased with their bodies, equal pay and respectful treatment from men.  Then came the rights of the disabled and eventually buses, buildings and sidewalks were being outfitted to accommodate wheelchairs, mobility scooters and people with walking difficulties.  The workplace began to make concessions for hiring and giving equal treatment to disabled workers.  Then came the struggle for gay rights, marriage and adoption equality, and finally respectful and fair treatment and inclusion for trans people.

People with mental illness are still struggling for their (our) piece of the pie.  People's attitudes and fears are often very slow to change and stigma remains a cold and oppressive shadow that squats over us still.

What more could we desire?  We live in Utopia!  Everybody is equal now.  No one needs to fear leaving their home and going outside and openly expressing who they are without fear of mistreatment, insult and discrimination.  That some people remain strongly conservative, racist, ablest, transphobic and homophobic is an already-given and they (we can only hope) are a dying breed.

I'm not done yet.  There is one little fly in the ointment.  Rather, one big fat fly.  It is called poverty.  This is the bitter and poisonous fruit of the kind of unrestrained global capitalism that our elected leaders, bereft of anything that resembles a moral compass, have sold themselves and our country to and by extension our own lives.  When NAFTA was ratified that opened a huge Pandora's Box and we have not yet recovered.  Read this from Leadnow's website:

We just got some shocking news: that Canada “will oppose any effort to change" the most toxic part of NAFTA: the investor-state dispute resolution system (ISDS).¹ It's a system that gives multinational corporations and wealthy investors special rights to sue Canada for passing laws or policies that might affect their future profits .²

Giant corporations use ISDS to challenge laws, regulations, or decisions they don't like — such as minimum wage hikes, environmental protections, and public health regulations. ^3-5  Because of ISDS rules in NAFTA, Canada is the most sued country in the Global North, and is currently facing over $2.6 billion in ISDS lawsuits  — which will be decided in secretive tribunals stacked with corporate lawyers, rather than in a Canadian court.⁶

Billionaire CEOs, the Chamber of Commerce, and an army of corporate lobbyists are desperate to entrench ISDS in a re-negotiated NAFTA because ISDS was designed, and works, for them — and it looks like Trudeau is caving. The head of the Business Council of Canada recently said he’s had “extensive opportunities” to meet with Canada’s top NAFTA negotiators are are “adamant” about keeping ISDS.⁷

But together we can push back. The Department of Foreign Affairs has set up a special inbox to collect public input on NAFTA as negotiatons continue.  If we flood it with demands to remove ISDS, decision-makers will feel the heat and know there will be a real political cost to keeping ISDS in NAFTA

Here's the link if you'd like to take action:

https://act.leadnow.ca/stop-isds/

Today I celebrated this cool breezy September Sunday walking on the newly upgraded Point Grey Road on Vancouver's tony West Side, a now quiet bike and pedestrian way lined with sumptuous waterfront homes worth tens of millions of dollars.  A lovely way to pass the time, costing the taxpayer but 12.5 million dollars.  there was a LED electric sign that said: "He pretends that he cares, but he doesn't.  A young couple with puzzled faces were looking at it.  I explained to them that it is likely a message to our mayor.  I explained to them that instead of making housing for the homeless the number one priority for his administration he has chosen to squander the money on such expensive vanity projects  They seemed to genuinely appreciate my input.

Later I did a little math.  The combined costs for this bike and pedestrian way, along with the purchase and development of the Arbutus Greenway, also situated in our city's priciest neighbourhoods,  Then I added the estimated cost for upgrading the Burrard Bridge.  The entire cipher?  About $160,000,000.

I think it can safely be said that the mayor's vanity projects have been built on the backs of our poorest and most vulnerable citizens: the homeless.  Four hundred homeless adults in Vancouver could be in housing now had those funds been rediverted to building more social housing.  My suspicion is that had our illustrious (and fabulously wealthy) mayor suspended all his vanity projects and focussed entirely on remedying our greatest human rights debacle since the Chinese Head Tax and Asian Exclusion Act, we would be already well ahead in solving our homelessness crisis.

The current housing projects underway have been subjected to mixed reviews.  The mixed market and social housing buildings provide the most pathetic spectacle.  In all those buildings there are segregated doors and facilities for the poor and the well-heeled tenants.  It's called the poor door.  This is apartheid.  Nothing more and nothing less.

It is considered proper and legitimate to poor bash and to discriminate against people solely because they are poor.  We are the new niggers.  The new faggots.  Only we are called "bums."

We are human beings and we deserve far better than what we are getting.  If you're not angry yet then you have not been paying attention!  Get angry, get good and angry and start taking action.

It doesn't take a genius to guess the role this kind of inequality and social discrimination plays in causing and perpetuating trauma, individual and collective.  If we want to deal effectively with helping people, ourselves included, to recover from trauma and it's effects, then perhaps we could start on the way we treat our most vulnerable.