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