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  Especially among older Bogotanos I noticed how withdrawn, fearful and hostile towards outsiders almost everyone appeared to me, like that really horrible old man who one day tried to set his three vicious little dogs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.