Living With Trauma 8

How do we learn to trust, those for whom all reasons to trust were long ago shattered? How can you possibly have another intimate relationship again if you are a rape survivor? Or how are you ever going to trust people of faith again if you, like me, are a survivor of religious cult abuse? And if clergy and priests have repeatedly betrayed your trust, are you ever going to want, or need, to step inside a church again? If you are a casualty of child abuse, and if that abuse has also been repeated through your interactions with schoolteachers and police, how are you going to ever successfully navigate living in a society where there is always implicit the expectation of some deference to authority? And on it goes. We can only take small steps, I would imagine. Today, as part of my search for an adequate new bedspread, I looked on the fabled Commercial Drive, since I saw my last client today in that area. It was a bit of a wild goose chase and I don't expect I will return to purchase any of the samples I was shown, though they were all affordable and some were downright cheap. But I'm looking for solidly coloured fabric, preferably colour blue and this kind of bedspread no longer seems to exist, anywhere. In one store, a crammed with stuff establishment that has been a fixture on the Drive for three decades (I'm sure the owner must have hoarding issues), I sincerely thanked the proprietor for all the time and effort she put in with me. When I reached over to shake her hand on my way out, she shrank back and walked away. I do not know what this person's issues might be, but her shunning gesture was really unprofessional and I don't expect I will be returning to her shop. Come to think of it, I was the only customer present so I wouldn't be at all surprised if she has scared off a number of potential patrons because of her rudeness. I am not about to judge her, or not harshly, anyway. In my own experience in reintegrating into the church I have discovered that I have a strong allergy to shaking hands with strangers. I have mentioned elsewhere on these pages my horrible experiences with sharing the peace in Anglican services. They all treat it like a love-in, backslapping and hugging and warm prolonged handshaking and the most sincere appearing loveliest smiles and everyone's a long-lost friend being finally welcomed into the family they have always missed. Following each and every one of those Anglican services I often felt treated with cold indifference by many of the same people who welcomed me during the peace like a long-lost sibling. This became for me such a total mind fuck that I have since had to leave the Anglican Church for the sake of my own mental health, and neither do I expect that I will ever again set foot inside an Anglican church building. I tried to come to terms with this hand-shaking allergy by visiting other parish churches but was still horrified by the same cancer of hypocrisy wherever Anglicans gather to worship. So, I am now looking elsewhere, following a lengthy vacation from church attendance. The Quakers seem like the most certain option, for now anyway. I find them to be highly ethical, and unlike the Anglicans, the Quakers appear to be very consistent and very grounded in their ethics. But they also shake hands. I have been to five meetings in almost as many months, and following the hour of silent prayer everyone shakes hands with each other. So far I have refused, except with one lady with whom I had previously already had a pleasant conversation. In order to get back on the horse that threw me I am attempting to reintegrate into the church. However, I am not going to dig in the spurs. Downstairs, during the coffee hour I am enjoying meeting and having pleasant and intelligent conversations with some very interesting and fine people. I have also had to get past a couple of difficult individuals, and it has already been explained to me that these people are living with dementia and/or mental illness. I am going to soon start shaking hands with the Quakers, as I am slowly becoming satisfied that to them this is not just an empty gesture they invoke in order to look good to others. Unlike the Anglicans. Regardless of what steps we are going to take to try to overcome, or at least to live with trauma, taking the appropriate steps is what we are going to have to do. Instead of fearing the great void that awaits us for taking those steps I think that we would do better to suspend entirely our expectations that things are going to turn out in a certain way, whether for the good or the bad or worse and simply steel ourselves to enjoying the ride. There are no certain outcomes, apart from death, and death comes to us all, sooner or later. But if we wish to rob ourselves of the enjoyment of the present moment as we move towards our destination, then we, and those who come after us, are going to be that much the poorer for our caving to our fears. We are never going to fully shield ourselves from the anxious fear and dread that comes with stepping out into the unknown. What we do have to do is learn how to live with this dread, to embrace it, and to thank it for all the surprises that will be awaiting us as we step forward in life and into recovery. It will likely take a lot of false, faltering first steps, but if we don't get moving we end up with what we had when we first started: nothing.

Living With Trauma 7

Trauma destroys relationships. You never know who your friends are. Family members have turned on you or have made themselves permanently absent. There is so much betrayal implicit in trauma that to live in a traumatized state is to live in a state of suspended psychic isolation. You don't know who your friends are, and in many cases they are so confused by your inability to trust that they become unavailable or simply carefully ration their presence in your life. Living with trauma is living with a sense of permanent dread. The ability to trust anybody has been snatched from you and the likelihood of ever learning to trust others again is going to be very limited. In the case of collective trauma an entire culture of distrust evolves. Outsiders are shunned or held at arms length. Relationships within the culture become a complicated mess, fraught with broken relationships and hostility. Individuals become paralyzed, often prey to addictions and abusive treatment and behaviour. I imagine that among hierarchical and totalitarian societies such as medieval Spain and the Aztec Mexica, one was always too worried and preoccupied with not getting burnt, hanged, tortured or getting their heart cut out of their chests to think much of anything else other than day to day survival. But these were also incredibly rich cultures with strong and complex kinship systems. The arts and crafts flourished in these cultures and the family unit, in most cases extended family, was very tight and impermeable. Or were they? Who only knows how they coped, these two distinct cultures of trauma? My guess is that family and kinship connections were the single refuge for those peoples living in a state of totalitarian dread. But even within those tight and complex units there was the dread of being ratted out to the Inquisitors in the case of the Spanish for being heretics or witches, or to the priests for dishonouring the gods and then they would be turned into food to expiate the sins of the community. Modern Latin America is founded on betrayal. So is Canada. Unceded First Nations Land, anyone? I have to go through and live with my own struggles about trust. So do the rest of us. This is something that is universal, this experience of betrayal and this struggle to regain a safe sense of trust, a kind of relational golden age, that never really existed. I really believe that trust is a choice. This isn't going to make us immune to anxiety and worry, but we still have to move forward if we are going to move from fear to love. In my own experience, I had to get on an airplane and fly off to Costa Rica where I spent three weeks in the not very safe capital city of San Jose, just to learn to trust again that the plane wasn't going to crash and that nothing awful would happen to me after I landed. I have also consented in the past few years to enter again into close friendships with others, knowing that there will be disappointments and betrayals, but this time with the determination not to be conquered by distrust. There were and are no guarantees, and there never are going to be any guarantees in life. No guarantees. I think that bona fide trauma survivors are going to know this far better than anyone else. I think that the real test is going to be in developing a quality and strength of trust that is going to withstand all the contrary experiences and even if it is shattered, will rise again and rebuild itself, because without trust, there is no love, and without love we are all going to remain suspended in a chronic state of hell.

Living With Trauma 6

It isn't all as horrible as I might seem to be making it. Life is a gift. I believe this even more strongly than a lot of the other garbage you've been reading lately that I've written on these pages. But if life is traumatic, as I say that it is, and if it is by extension so full of trauma as to make barely tolerable even the most mundane transactions, then how could it possibly be seen also as a gift? What makes life a gift is the simple fact that we do not give ourselves life. We do not make ourselves alive. This comes from powers much greater than our own puny little selves, Gentle Reader. Life is a gift from God, for the simple reason that we do not give it to ourselves. It comes from God. Therefore life, to be properly understood and appreciated, first has to be received and accepted as a gift. This does not minimize the trauma, which comes not from God but from us. We are the ones who chronically make ugly messes of the beautiful gifts that we are given, over and over again. Trauma first entered the picture when the very first humans decided to abuse this gift of life and, well, the beat goes on. Trauma is the gift that goes on giving. But so is life, itself. In order to live with trauma I have had to learn and cultivate gratitude, because gratitude is the clearest evidence that God is being acknowledged for his gifts. Even when I was homeless and quite profoundly ill from PTSD back in 1998 and 1999, I still felt grateful, and for many reasons. For one thing, I still had friends, some of whom were taking great care to shelter me in their homes. I still enjoyed good health. While staying with my father part time in Robert's Creek on the Sunshine Coast I was grateful for the chance to get to know him better, even though he turned out to be a churlish toad to live with, and for the beautiful hikes I was enjoying in the surrounding countryside and wilderness. I was grateful that I was still able to paint and show my art and that people were still buying some of my work, thus making it easier to survive under the circumstances. I was also grateful for the sense of adventure and for never knowing what direction the road would be taking me in next. When I finally found a place to live I was constantly giving thanks that now I had the same bed I could sleep in every night and the same room to come home to. Even though my sleep was poor because of my mental health concerns I was grateful for waking up at five in the morning so I could enjoy the blood-copper intensity of the first light of the sun as it coloured like bold stains of paint my bedroom wall. Then I began to seriously learn Spanish, and I expressed gratitude that I was already rapidly learning and improving. Even though I was still frightened of people and needing lots of rest I decided to adopt joy as my ongoing motif, discovering for the first time in my life that joy is the very essence of my being, of the person who I am. This happened shortly after I found myself weeping with gratitude while seated in the back of a café reading books from the library about the UN human rights charters and covenants, realizing for the first time in my life, at the age of forty-three, that I actually had fundamental, inalienable human rights. Life still was difficult. I still suffered. But I got through it okay. I heard on the CBC Radio One religious and spirituality program, this afternoon, Tapestry, someone mention that we cannot have joy without suffering and that suffering has to be accepted and embraced first before we can come into and appreciate joy. This morning, during the Quaker meeting I attended, one of the members shared that trust is the fulcrum between fear and love. Wellness, in the face of trauma, is very much found in this process of learning to trust as our means of escaping from fear into love, as it is also found when we face and embrace suffering as an essential part of our journey towards joy. Each day brings its challenges and difficulties; but in the very heart of those difficulties we can find the seeds of hope and joy that will bring forth such abundant life as to nourish us and help us on our pilgrimage of life.

Living With Trauma 5

There are few things that stick in my craw like the idea of human perfectibility. I really don't know where we got that kind of nonsense but this has caused our species more problems than I could itemize in one little blogpost. I just gleaned this little definition from dictionary.com: "The doctrine, advanced by Rousseau and others, that people are capable of achieving perfection on earth through natural means, without the grace of God." Here's another bit of codswallop from nineteenth century Unitarian minister James Walker (American, natch!): "There is nothing to hinder us from maintaining, as the Scriptures seem to do, the doctrine of human perfectibility. Perfectibility, as here used, differs from perfection in this – that a man may be pronounced perfectible though he never attains to perfection in fact, provided only that there is nothing in his nature itself to exclude the possibility of his perfection, and nothing in his circumstances to exclude the possibility of his continually going on towards perfection…" As a species we humans are fundamentally and essentially flawed and there seems no end to our hubris. Here's a little gem from my novel, the Thirteen Crucifixions, published serially on these pages from June 2014 through much of 2015, should you care to take the effort of trying to find it, Gentle Reader. This is part of a dialogue between Sheila, a café owner in her sixties, and Melissa, a young punk girl in her early twenties who is having a rest in the staff room since her boyfriend has just walked out on her: "There are no perfect solutions.  To anything.  There’s always going to be consequences.  There will always be compromises to be made, there will always be a mess to clean up.  No matter how hard we try to avoid making one.”             “Do you really believe that?”             “I KNOW it.”             “And it always has to be like that.”             “I don’t know if it has to.  But that’s the way it is.”             “But you say it doesn’t have to.”             “All right—say it doesn’t.”             “Then what do we do?”             “I don’t know.  Keep trying I suppose.”             “But what if we keep messing up?”             “But isn’t that how we learn?  Through our mistakes?  By messing up?”             “So what you’re saying then is we’re really here to learn. That it doesn’t matter if we fuck-up or not—excuse my language please.”             “I wouldn’t say it doesn’t matter.  Of course it matters.  That’s why we have to try not to.”             “But why does it matter?”             “I suppose it comes back to being responsible.  To accepting responsibility.”             “But why bother if we’re going to keep messing up anyway?”             “Because this way we can say that at least we tried?”             “I dunno—that sounds pretty lame, if you ask me.”             “But does it?”  Sheila said.  “Because this way, by trying, by saying that we tried, it sets a whole different process in motion.”             “What do you mean?”             “I mean, okay, we try to do good.  But we mess up for having tried.  At least we’re more likely to see where we’ve messed up, and try to do something to rectify it, whereas, if we just don’t care anyway, we’re not going to recognize much of anything, and things will just keep getting worse before we all drown in the end results of our irresponsible behaviour.”             “But even if we try to make our mistakes better, aren’t we still going to screw up some more?”             “We likely will.  I mean, look at Germany after the war.  They were a nation destroyed by their own evil.  So along came the Americans, the well-intentioned conquerors with their Marshall Plan.  So they rebuilt Germany economically, politically.  But they were never able to conquer Nazism, which especially since reunification has become an increasing menace.  Things are still less than perfect, but what they have now is much better than nothing.”             “So there will never be such a thing as a solution?”             “There will never be such a thing as a perfect solution.”             “So we’re cursed with being imperfect.”             “No.  Not cursed. Blessed.”             “Which makes imperfection our perfection.”             “I’ve never thought of it that way”, Sheila said.  “You are a very wise young woman.”             “I’d say the same about you.”             “Well, I’d hardly call myself young.  As for being wise—”             “Learning being wise?”             “Well, I suppose we’re all getting wisdom.  Or we have that opportunity, that choice we can make.”             “So it’s all about the getting of wisdom, this mess-making and bad choices”, Melissa said.             “I suppose it is”, Sheila said, “I suppose that it is.” By the way, Gentle Reader, please pardon the whole formatting mess on this blog lately. Something happened that screwed up the process and I have no idea how to fix it. Patience, please. We can never hope for perfection. Improvement, yes. But because we are so hobbled by our broken and wounded humanity, our progress is always going to be very slow, very uneven...imperfect. Even to get to where we are now, where the majority of the world's nations have abolished capital punishment, and human rights are almost universally accepted, if very unevenly applied, we have had to come a long way from thousands of years of tyrannical kings, rulers and despots, and the constant bloodletting that is called the history of the world. We have come a long way since slavery, human sacrifice, witch and heretic burnings and torture chambers. And we still have a long way to go. And our progress is going to be ever so slow and ever so imperfect. But what option do we have if we don't want to destroy ourselves and take a good chunk of the earth's biosphere with us? We are all born into trauma. It is not just something that happens to soldiers on the battlefield, nor to the innocent victims of war. This is our lot in life. Trauma is our collective inheritance as a human species. We are born into it. And in trauma we die. We will never be perfect, nowhere near that lofty goal and we just have too many horrifying historical antecedents of what can happen when mad scientists are allowed to take the helm. Eugenics, anyone? Master Race? Six million dead Jews later....

Living With Trauma 4

Only a trauma survivor can adequately educate others about trauma. For us, we have that horrible knowledge of life that frightens the bejesus out of the rest of you that quail, quiver and cower before your dread little First World Problems. We have been on the receiving end of abuse and violence, have been excluded, marginalized, rejected and chronically mistreated for being "different", have seen more than our share of sickness and death, rape and madness, and simply know way more about the dark side of human nature than would make us feel welcome in a lot of social settings. Mental health professionals, excluding peer support workers and other workers with lived experience, simply do not have a clue how to help us. And really, I often wonder if we even benefit from a lot of the therapeutic interventions that simply entrench and strengthen the very stigma that keeps many of us ill and dependent upon the mental health system. I count myself very fortunate that I managed to escape a lot of this nonsense and have been able to live relatively free of stigma and, Gentle Reader, you might imagine what this does for my sense of human dignity. Survivors of trauma have to lead the way. We are the ones with the lived experience, the stories and the knowledge. We are the ones with the resources and the information that can help others working their way through the afflictions of trauma. Perhaps some of us might benefit from the therapeutic interventions (medications, and rehab programs) that can help us stabilize and begin to move forward, but once we are moving forward we are going to have to accept that we are not only on our own, but in positions of mentorship and leadership, not just for our peers but for all those middle to upper middle class mental health professionals who are really frightened shitless of us and would rather find refuge in their lovely First World Problems than have to experience the horrors that have become to us almost as everyday and banal as a shopping trip to the mall. Over and over again, I have felt bored to extinction by the banal and mundane conversations of many of my coworkers, simply because most of them do not have a clue what it`s really like to be us. There are some exceptions, of course, but not many, some of them who have had to haul their own loads of crap and those who have been traumatized by proxy, which is to say that our pain has eaten its way into the very core of their souls. A transformative experience, this, that has actually helped make some of the best workers in the field. When I first entered this field of work, I was full of hope with an expectation that peer support work would open doors to other, better paid and more prestigious and involved employment. I could not have been more mistaken. The system is so constructed as to keep those in the lower rungs just where they are presumed to belong: in the lower rungs. After thirteen years of faithful and exemplary service, this is my reward for my labours and service: twelve glorious bucks an hour, no holiday or stat pay, sick pay at the discretion, or should I say, mercy of our supervisors, no medical or dental benefits, no paid travel time, no bonuses. In exchange we are expected to take on often challenging clients whose care and support require much more training and education than we are given for our position. Still, we do well with our clients, and usually far better than the much better paid union staff, and all we get for it is qualified and often faint praise. There are no programs for training contract staff with lived experience to be rehab workers or case managers, even though we often have greater talent, needing just a little bit of training and mentorship, perhaps. There is so much more we could do and offer out of our lived experience, but they are determined to keep us in our place and to save the system tons of money on our backs. They will do everything they can to keep the stigma in place for us, because stigma gives them power over our lives. Unless we refuse to buy into it.

Living With Trauma 3

I have lived with trauma all my life. The trauma of child abuse, the trauma of chronic poverty, the trauma of underemployment, the trauma of exclusion and discrimination, the trauma of crushed and broken dreams and the trauma of multiple deaths. Then came the trauma of religious cult abuse during my three decades in the Anglican Church, and the trauma of homelessness. All these things have accumulated in my life. Trauma almost broke me. It still hasn't broken me. It never will break me. I have made peace with trauma. When I was homeless, I knew that this would affect me in the long term, and it has. After I found housing and was able to rest a bit I realized that I was frightened and really needed to feel safe. I wasn't having nightmares but it was very difficult for me to stay asleep at night and I really had trouble trusting people. I had full blown PTSD. My treatment was simple and straightforward. Biweekly sessions of fifty minutes with a good psychiatrist, no meds and no hospitalization. It was all talk therapy and CBT. During this time I found affordable housing and long term employment. When my therapy sessions ended after four years I had to fly on my own. It wasn't easy for the first couple of years. I was easily triggered and suffered short term relapses. I got through them okay. I read extensively, as I've always done, and focussed on simplifying my life and on being as healthy as my low pay would permit me to. I worked at cultivating new friendships with good and reliable people. This hasn't been easy, given my trust issues and the fact that not everyone in the world is going to have a lot of patience with an aging single man with trust difficulties. A lot of people have dumped me along the way for this and other reasons, but there is a core of good, faithful people who have stood by me and they are still with me. I think, because I have also been working at learning how to be a good friend, how to trust, and to know when to leave people alone. And when not to. Now, I am taking trauma to a new stage. I am calling the stigma for the farce that it really is. It is a thick, viscous shadow that settles over us like a cold lava flow. It is like a Halloween ghost or monster that has nothing inhabiting the costume. The shadow, the stigma is nothing but a chimera. This is because trauma is not the special preserve of the already diagnosed with PTSD. Trauma is the stuff that surrounds us, inhabits us, frightens us at night and drives us to every conceivable and inconceivable avenue of escape. The fact that we all know that one day we are going to have to die fills us with dread and traumatizes us and this is why so much of our energy is wasted on thwarting and escaping the reality of our mortality. That our civilization, like every civilization, has been built on the bones and fed by the blood of the slain and exploited innocents-the weak and vulnerable destroyed by the powerful-means that this is a civilization of trauma. Even those of us who carry the guilt bear also our share of the pain and this makes the suffering universal. Trauma, or its stigma, is an artificial barrier that protects the so-called well from facing their own sickness, the sickness of fear and pain that we all live with, that we all bear and that we all are trying to run away from. Let's focus on removing the stigma and treating those of us, who have been especially incapacitated with compassion, care and love. Then they will hear our stories and those of us who have already been wounded will lead our caretakers to their healing.

Living With Trauma 2

Gentle Reader, my apologies for not having something ready for you yesterday. I had written a good part of the post, then most of it magically disappeared into the Great Cyber Void and I had to rewrite most of it, then the blog cannibalized itself and it vanished again! Here is the gist of what I wanted to write yesterday: I had an unfortunate confrontation with a nasty and aggressive tenant in my building who is also severely mentally ill. Here, I will spare you most of the details, but I did tell him that I didn't want to go in the elevator with him because he had previously threatened me, unprovoked, and I was now frightened of him. He said something nasty and I let him go up on his own. The incident triggered me and I was feeling very frightened and unsteady for a while. In other words, this was a trigger of trauma for me. I didn't really begin to feel better until I found myself offering up a quiet prayer for this individual's wellbeing, and I suddenly found myself feeling calm and serene again. Then I began to reflect on what an ongoing nightmare this man's life must be for him. It then became abundantly clear that it isn't just a matter of finding ways to soothe and calm ourselves when we are triggered, nor to use PTSD as a convenient excuse, since this experience of triggering is pretty darn universal to our human experience. The thing is that we often tend to compartmentalize trauma and other mental illness as something that happens only to certain people. Trauma is universal. This is our human experience. Trauma. Many people have convenient props and disguises and smokescreens to keep them feeling protected, inured and immune to it all, and especially in our culture of addiction, it just takes that lovely little cocktail at the end of the day, or that whirlwind trip to the mall or time out in the casino or thirty minutes of Internet porn, or fill in the blank, and Bob's Yer Uncle. Not quite like shooting up in a back alley or smoking crack in a doorway, but our culture of addiction still comes to your rescue, soothes the owie, protects you from having to face your pain and your own inner void, leaving you every bit as sick and unwell as the junkie crashing on the pavement at your feet, only you are secure in your job, family and social status and he is a homeless statistic with gaping mental health needs. If anything is really going to heal the trauma, then it's going to be love. I didn't start to feel better yesterday about that unpleasant tenant until I prayed for him. We do not begin to encounter real healing until we reach out to one another in a spirit of love while accepting our own imperfection in that same loving spirit. Love, and love alone, is going to heal trauma.

Living With Trauma 1

What does it mean to live with trauma? What would it be like not living with trauma? I think one of the most effective steps I needed to take towards recovery from PTSD was in knowing that I was not alone. In my social and professional explorations I came to know many trauma survivors besides myself. I had lived with trauma almost all my life, ever since the first blows from my mother, father and brother and my first experiences of childhood bullying. That said, I wasn't really that unusual. I did tend to overreact to things, as I sometimes do now and I seem to have always been prone to anxious worry. On the other hand, I haven't had a lot of drug experience, except for some gratuitous pot-smoking at fourteen and nineteen augmented with three acid trips and an adventure on mescaline alone in Toronto. I was never one for alcohol, I drank only occasionally and socially, have never been an alcoholic, and actually haven't even touched the stuff in any form in years. What I mean to say, Gentle Reader, is that I have never in my life been sufficiently numbed to not having to feel the pain that most people try to drink or smoke out of existence. We live in a culture of addiction. I have said this to some of my clients who live both with addictions and with intense trauma. Alcohol is the official drug of Western Civilization. Be it wine, craft beer, Gran Marnier, or Scotch, Gin and Rye or vodka coolers or whatever, I would challenge most of you, Gentle Reader, to calculate how much of your discretionary spending is invested in alcoholic beverages, write down the number and go seek professional help. I sometimes phone the two local weekday CBC Radio One programs, especially that deplorable On The Coast, to protest their shameful and relentless promotion of alcohol abuse in the form of wine and craft beer. No day is complete without alcohol. There is something horribly sick and dysfunctional about this socially sanctioned need to numb pain, fear and anxiety with alcohol. This is no worse than snorting Colombian White or injecting into your veins the latest shipment from the Golden Triangle. It's just that some of this stuff is illegal. But not all of it. This is not an endorsement, by the way, for prohibition and everyone knows about the sweeping success of the War On Drugs. One hundred thousand dead Mexicans can't be wrong. I had to cope with more than my lion's share of stress and anxiety, not only because of the fallout from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but because I was consciously refusing to drug my pain out of existence. I was determined to face my pain and suffering with my judgment unclouded and all my nerve endings naked and ready. I discovered that I wasn't necessarily any sicker mentally or emotionally than the successful high rollers and high performers who can't live without their daily drinky-poo while celebrating their achievements as being exemplary and sweeping professional, social and financial successes. I am not denying that I have ever been ill from trauma. I am also saying here that so is everyone else, just that some of us have had better luck lying about it than others. On top of not having addictions I have also needed to live with relative poverty and a very low ranking on the social hierarchy, two sure aggravators of accelerated trauma. We are all extremely sick people, living in a sick world, made all the sicker by our collective sickness, making one another and ourselves all the sicker through our lies and denial of how totally and absolutely sick we all are. The capitalist, neo-feudalist system we are living in simply aggravates and accelerates this sickness, sheltering those high on the hierarchy against having to face and live with the consequences, while creating the social and environmental toxic fallout that ensures the ill health and rapid deterioration of quality of life for people stranded on low incomes, people who are members of despised minorities, and on the global environment. For healers we have equally sick doctors already half-incapacitated from trauma and addictions from the stress of their thankless professions. I ask again, Gentle Reader, who isn't sick with trauma?

Ode To Self 7

It's all about me. I think this is what I find particularly troubling about the current trend in Yoga and Buddhist style meditation. It's all focussed on the self. The spirituality of narcissism. I have nothing against Buddhism nor Buddhists, nor against Hinduism, nor Hindus. I do have an issue with the way consumerist western culture has co-opted and bastardized other spiritual practices to suit its own vacuous and self-centred agenda. This is particularly why I tend to skirt around these things, especially where I work. There is a tendency in the local mental health industry to push such eastern spiritual practices as a placebo to help our clients relieve themselves of some of the stronger symptoms of anxiety and depression. So, it's all well-intended. But these practices are not about personal wellness, per se. They are, rather, about emptying the self so that God or however you perceive the highest universal good can fill us. I was very aware of this dynamic this morning during a Quaker prayer service. This is all about silent prayer. We gather together, sit comfortably and we are all quiet. Each in our own way attempts to make ourselves available to the Spirit of the Living God. I at first was trying to focus on centring prayer, then I started to see that this was really self-centring prayer, and not exactly what I was there for. So, I had a mental image of a cup being drained of the dirty stagnant water of yesterday to be refilled with the clean living water of Christ, and I immediately began to feel better. This form of prayer, like its eastern counterparts is not about feeling good or feeling whatever. It is all a matter of emptying ourselves that God may fill us anew with his love and goodness. It is this act of loving, spiritual in our stillness before the Creator, and actively spiritual in our way of interacting with one another, that makes us peaceful and joyful. Which is to say that when we seek spiritual means for selfish ends we are basically masturbating. When we abandon ourselves to the work of the spirit to make us more loving and less selfish, then we become truly and dynamically human. We come to flourish in our purest and strongest and most complete sense of our humanity. I will paraphrase here CS Lewis, who said that if you aim for earth and ignore heaven, you end up with nothing. By aiming for heaven we end up with the complete and best possible fullness of both.

Ode To Self 6

There are few things that betray us as the selfish bastards we all are as in the way we negotiate public space. I can think of two examples today. This morning, while I was getting ready to get off the bus, a rather upper class young woman was blocking my way while talking to her friend in that precious uptown dialect that upper class young women are so annoyingly gifted at. I politely said excuse me and she did move her generously proportioned backside but bumped me with it instead. When I told her that either sorry or excuse me works, she replied oh, that's okay. To avoid conflict I simply agreed with her then got off the bus. Later, in the Food Dollarama, also known as No Frills Supermarket, I reached across an older woman who appeared to be from a European country for the tinned tomatoes. Aware that her space might feel invaded, I smiled and said excuse me, then, "even when I'm being rude I try to be polite about it." I got rather dirty looks both from this woman and her presumed husband. As I walked away, I replied, "have a nice day, you friendly people." When I got on the bus, I had already rehearsed what I was going to say, if there was no seating space and the courtesy seats at the front, as usual, were occupied by useless able-bodied twenty-somethings. I was going to stand in front of some of them, my very heavy reusable shopping bag almost spilling over with groceries and my big golf umbrella in my other hand, and I was going to announce, "Grandpa needs to sit down. Now." I did not have to do that. There was a seat available just in front of the back exit. To the young man next to me entranced with his dear little phone, I said that I would take great care not to hit him with my bags. He did respond with a rather kind little smile. I think a lot of us just seem to believe, or to want to believe that we are the only ones present. There appears to be something threatening for a lot of people being out in public, anonymous among unfriendly or even hostile strangers. I've really come to think of the word trauma as kind of a useless catch-all. It has been turned by the mental health industry and the media into a designated label that stigmatizes those who aren't coping particularly well, even if it is really the same trauma that is affecting everyone. We all live, it seems, in a dazed, discombobulated state. We have not been able to successfully absorb or integrate the many huge changes that have come our way, and globalization has simply put this dynamic on steroids. We are for the most part people who don't really know who they are. We all seem to wander through life with just half a soul, if that. Mindless consumers that we have passively consented to being turned into, we simply try one product or service after another, be it food, drink, drug, exercise, fitness, relationships, lifestyle, entertainment, lame attempts towards spirituality, you name it. Anything that will fill that gaping hole where our soul is supposed to be. Having divested ourselves of all the cultural, religious and ethical traditions of our ancestral heritage, we live, most of us, in a grey, viscous fog. We are also, for the most part, horribly brainwashed by capitalism to compete against one another, all in the name of self-actualization, a bitter irony this, since most of us don't even have a rudimentary self to actualize. We need to get all this stuff back, somehow. We also need to figure out that we are all in this together and that the sooner we stop competing against each other, the sooner we start working and playing and interacting together, supporting and loving one another, then the sooner we are each going to acquire for ourselves a soul with a living, beating heart of flesh, and a workable sense of self that is not selfish, but giving and generous. We all rise together, but alone we fall.

Ode To Self 5

I am special. I am special. Look at me. Look at me. I am very special, yes so very special; You will see. You will see. I remember hearing that obnoxious little verse, sung to the tune for Frere Jacques, by a little girl on a documentary about narcissism. Obviously her parents and educators were wanting the little princess to grow up with good self-esteem. Ah, the psychobabble. Don't leave your home without it! I have never liked that word. Self-esteem. Someone once told me that it should not be confused with self adoration. Well, there is no difference. Esteeming yourself is no different from saying that you adore yourself. I had this conversation over and over with my psychotherapist, who was very stranded in the Adlerian nonsense about self-adulation and self-esteem. I eventually told him everything I believe about self-esteem. It is a bunch of nonsense of narcissism that simply inflates people with an exaggerated sense of their own importance. When he told me that I must feel good about myself I fired back that that is not part of my vocabulary. I feel good, or I don't feel good, or I feel bland and indifferent. But it has nothing to do with feeling good about myself. Myself is me and I do not treat myself as a person apart from myself. I am myself and I refuse to be split. This doesn't mean that I don't daily examine myself, my conduct, my behaviour and my attitudes towards others. But if I feel good about myself, it's more likely going to be that I approve of something I said, or how I handled a situation, or how I'm taking care of myself. But that isn't the same as feeling good or anything else about myself. I am not split. And I try to avoid psychic masturbation with just as much zeal as I refuse (usually) to indulge in self-loathing. Self-esteem and healthy self-love are two different gigs, Gentle Reader. When we love ourselves we love others as well. It isn't a question of order or preference because love is without preference. It is the essential healing and positive force of the universe. It is the very nature of God. I love you, I love me. I love me, I love you. And it's all good. Self-acceptance is fine. So is self-respect. Important features they are in coexisting in community. When we live in a collective of people who esteem, or adore, themselves, we have a perfect earthly imitation of hell. Individualized bloated egos too preoccupied with their own fictional significance to care crap about anyone else. This is already the reality we are currently stuck with. All you have to do is spend five minutes on any major intersection downtown in my city, Vancouver. You will find out how much people care about each other. Not very much. And you will also see how much they care about themselves. You will see beggars and homeless people lining the sidewalks with their squalor and heartache and no one seems to notice or care. They have lots of self-esteem and zero amount of care for the less fortunate. I am thinking here of St. Paul the Apostle's admonition to the Philippians, that each one love and esteem the other as being more important than themselves. Absolute heresy to the psychiatric industry, and also the only way we are going to climb out of this mess of collective trauma we have helped esteem ourselves and, by default, one another into. Little children: Love one another.

Ode To Self 4

"I don't have a tattoo. I've already got a personality." Those were the words of a stand-up comedian I heard on the radio some time ago. I couldn't agree more. There was a time when, like almost everyone else, I found tattoos threatening, sinister, representative of the dark side of life. Only prisoners, drug dealers, thugs, prostitutes (remember the Tramp Stamp?)diesel dykes, and rock musicians wore them. This all began to change in the eighties. Then, in the nineties, Gen X caught on and the tattoo became a requisite fashion statement. Tattoo parlours have opened everywhere, competing with pot shops and yoga studios for space. It is said that at least twenty-five percent of people under fifty now wear tattoos. Almost everywhere they are displayed with insouciance. Even bank employees, female as well as male, can be seen showing inked skin. Back in `95 when all trashy skin art was exploding onto the scene I even considered going into partnership with a young man who wanted me to design tattoos for his clientele. I'm glad I never took the bait. A few years later, a Christian gal I was friends with asked me if I thought it would be okay for her to get a tattoo, or WGA (Would God Approve?) I replied that to me it was a matter completely between her and her maker and my friendship would not be contingent on a bit of ink showing under her skin. So far so good. But then I said the deal breaker. I asked her how much it would cost (this woman was not poor.) She replied somewhere in the neighbourhood of one hundred and something. Speaking Christian to Christian I ventured to suggest that maybe the money could be better spent, perhaps on feeding the homeless or being donated to the food bank or, fill in the blank. I suppose this could be why, a year later, when I came out in favour of same sex marriage she dropped me like the proverbial hot potato. Tattoos, by becoming mainstream, have completely lost their rebel chic. They are now every bit as commonplace, mundane and bourgeois as running shoes. And they are still every bit as ugly as they've ever been. They do not beautify the human skin, but make otherwise lovely young people gleaming with health and vitality look like biodegradable back alley walls tagged and scrawled with the most hideous and garish graffiti. The fashion trend of tattoos was inevitable, however. They are a kind of socially sanctioned self-mutilation. A desolate cry of desperate young individuals who do not feel like individuals. They don't know who they are, nor if they even have a soul. Getting significant images inked permanently under the skin gives them an identity, and this they will find in a way empowering. But how sad. We live in this culture of greed and mindless consumerism that reduces the individual into an economic cipher. We are, by living in this place and time, divested of our soul, our individuality, our humanity. So, some of us ink ourselves and this shows ourselves and the world that we are somebody and finally we begin to feel a little bit special. This is how we cope with the trauma of consumerism. We rebel and turn ourselves into human murals in order to declare our existence. We ink into visibility the collective trauma of this dark time we are all living in together. And we still remain powerless. Only now we don't know it.

Ode To Self 3

What do you think, Gentle Reader, of the prevalent use of the article I in our little tech toys and apps: iPhones, iTunes, iPods, iPads, etc. Hey, I just picked up this little answer from Uncle Google: i in iPod stands for some thing personal, like it gives you a Sense that you own it or it make's the iPad, iPod, iMac, etc stand out in the market, How many people do you hear say "I will call them on my iPhone" instead of saying "I will call them on my phone" Apple has very cleverly branded there product name!! (Not my errors in spelling or grammar, by the way!) Hey, wait a minute! Those are small i's, not the big lovely capital I that implies the importance of the person referring to themselves as I. Perhaps this is a subtle importance that they only want you to feel as if you mattered, that you don't really, not to them, anyway, those tech and other corporation monsters that not only sell you product, but in the very act, transform you into product. It doesn't really matter that your significance is just a pretty little illusion. A little i is better than no i at all, right Gentle Reader? Consumerism reduces us to micro-digits of a commodity. We are no longer persons with significance, dignity and intrinsic value. We are stats on a graph, ciphers on a flipchart, coded items on spreadsheet. Coming of age in consumer pop culture could be in some ways almost as dehumanizing as living as slaves or as feudal serfs in Medieval Spain or in the Mexico of the Aztecs. Slaves, by virtue of being purchased and owned, are divested of their presumed humanity, just as the selling and buying of product, by default of being nurtured on any relevant sense of ethic or moral compass reduces us to things, to biologically functioning nonhumans whose raison d'etre is simply to spend money, consume, spend money, consume, keep trying to fill that gaping bottomless chasm that is the human soul without God or ethic, and to really get through life without any developed faculty for critical thinking, nor for really caring for the stranger, the lonely, the destitute, the hungry, or the homeless. Our little tech toys become our identity. They become us, they become our I. Our small i, as they divide and separate us from one another, drawing us ever deeper into the great vortex, that gaping maw of social media, the Web, and illusory connections with illusory persons who are not really present to us at all. This is the triumph of the small i, the mediocre mock-up of a human soul. In the meantime, fixated on our little i's we walk past or step over homeless people and beggars, not even caring to whisper the prayer, "There but for the grace of God go I."

Ode To Self 2

If I hear one more narcissistic airhead refer to his home as a sacred space I am going to lose my breakfast.  I first heard this egoistical nonsense from an ex-friend, last spring, who ended our friendship because I had defiled his sacred space. 

Let me tell you a little bit about this individual (so, sue me!) He is an older gay man, an ex-priest, according to him drummed out of the priesthood because of his sexuality, and claims to be now suffering from PTSD from the ordeal.  He is also wealthy, and used to getting his own way.  I was invited to attend a soiree in his home last winter, just before I left the country for a month's vacation.  I was not doing very well, but still trying my best to get along with people.  He made me feel less than welcome in his home, especially when I wouldn't wear a name tag (it felt too weird) From start to finish, when I left less than an hour later, except for a short token chat, he ignored me while attending to more important guests.  I left, hoping we were okay with each other.  Not once did a rude or untactful comment or tone pass from me to him or to any of the other guests.  When I returned from my trip, he rabidly accused me of defiling his sacred space with my anger.  I was absolutely flummoxed.  Then he ended our friendship, claiming (quite lamely) that I triggered him.

I am always sad when a friendship ends, especially when it is done in such a completely ugly, dishonest and inappropriate manner.

So what made my ex-friend's home sacred?  Why, the fact that he lived there.  Another self-adulating narcissist buying into the fatuous nonsense of contemporary psychobabble.  And I am hearing this same cow dung everywhere: my home is sacred.  No one shall defile it, and other such nonsense.

I remember a time when people used to welcome each other into their homes.  None of this codswallop about their entering a sacred space, but simple, sincere hospitality.  If it's mealtime, put out an extra plate.  That was my own style of hospitality for years and the kind that my parents taught me when I was growing up.  Then, when cafes started opening everywhere, the place of socializing shifted into the public realm, and now it is becoming increasingly difficult to have friends over.  There are friends who refuse to visit me in my home. My place, though small, is clean, attractive, interesting, well-ordered and I take care to make my guests feel comfortable, safe and welcome.  And there is absolutely no risk of anything inappropriate occurring because I totally respect my friends.  But it seems this reluctance to visit anywhere but on neutral turf is becoming fairly widespread, maybe because this sacred nonsense is simply a cover for being too lazy to keep you place clean, or you're really a selfish dickhead who thinks he's too special to go a little bit out of his way for others.

Even I was falling for this kind of nonsense for a few years and now I hope that I've recovered.  By the same token I can understand that people don't always feel ready for something so intimate as a personal space for visiting.  I feel this way at times, and have gone through phases of only wanting to see people on neutral ground, because I didn't feel safe anywhere else.  For this I will cut infinite slack.

But enough of this sacred tripe.  If my home is sacred it is only because God is worshipped and honoured there.  By the same token, given that the image of God is stamped in all of us, perhaps every single place where people are could be considered sacred.  At least the bit of pavement or sidewalk where the homeless person is sleeping.  Because that doorway is her home, that doorway is sacred.  Because that bit of pavement is his home, that bit of sidewalk is sacred.  Which is to say, there is not once single square foot of space anywhere I on this earth because it is all sacred, by extension so are we, and it all belongs to the same God.

But, please, Gentle Reader, no more please of this I am special, oh so special kind of nonsense.  No more using your narcissistic self-adulation as a feeble excuse for shutting others out of your life.  No more of this traumatising nonsense.  How ironic that my ex-friend, claiming to be a PTSD sufferer, should end up traumatising me through his stupid snobbish hatred.  And for those of us who live in nice comfortable homes with a spare bedroom or two, are you really that special that your living space would be too sacred for you to want to share it with someone traumatised and homeless?  Oh, I forgot: you are special, which makes your home sacred.  You live in a church, eh?  Oh, silly me.

Ode To Self 1

Gentle Reader, I am still writing about trauma, but on this little subseries I would like to touch more on the ethics of trauma, which is to say, how a society full of selfish douchebags, such as the one we are living in, can contribute to trauma, and traumatize and greatly intensify the injuries and wounds of the already traumatized.

I am thinking particularly of our own crisis of homelessness here in Vancouver.  This is our own homegrown style of collective trauma.  Made in Canada, you say?   Yesterday I wrote about the well-dressed idiots enjoying their cappuccino on a sidewalk patio café just two metres from a young man sleeping on the sidewalk.  I almost but didn't quite give them a pass for being stupid, ignorant and self-absorbed.  They could have done something, even if buy a coffee and muffin for the guy sleeping next to them on the sidewalk.  I suppose that is something I might have done too, except I am already living on a low income which unfortunately places severe limits on my budget.  I am somewhat persuaded to believe that the sidewalk café yuppies are considerably better off and they weren't doing anything for the poor guy for the simple reason that they didn't want to.

Men are even worse than women for selfishness and these people, through their selfish indifference, simply continually pour vinegar on the wounds of the already broken and vulnerable.  We live in a culture with its roots in feudalism and social inequality remains with us a major scourge.  Thanks to a long history of reforms and changes we, at least in Canada, are no longer hobbled by the British social class structure.  Our inequality is economic, and the prevalence of Neo-Darwinist capitalism has simply entrenched that mentality.

This morning, from the bus, on South Granville I noticed first two bicycles moored to parking metres, then two men sleeping on the sidewalk.  A very well-dressed gentleman of a certain age walked by, his enormous black greyhound straining at the tight leash he was on.

I do not begrudge people having dogs.  They make wonderful pets, as we all know.  However, dogs as pets have come to supplant other humans as key figures in many people's lives.  That greyhound, that beautiful, magnificent beast, is going to be better fed and much better loved and cared for than those two guys sleeping rough beneath that wealthy gentleman's unseeing eye.  He is likely a better and more trusted friend to the distinguished fellow than any mere human would be privileged to.

Dogs are frequently used as therapy animals for trauma sufferers and they are very effective.  For me this begs the obvious question with an obvious answer: Why dogs instead of humans?  Given that the trauma is usually brought on by human agency, why trust a human to bring comfort to the traumatized?  Likely the poor survivors' stress and cortisol levels are going to skyrocket just from the touch of the wrong human hand, since the injury was inflicted by a human being.

What is wrong with us?  I have never been huge on pets, myself, as I really love human interaction, and never would I even consider a therapy dog in place of talking things out with a trusted counsellor, if I could find one.

Our lack of ethics has done much to feed our selfish culture of narcissism and this has made us humans dangerous and toxic to one another.  I would like to see us reclaim our humanity and to become renewed in our capacity for healing ourselves and one another.

Maybe after the flying pigs have landed.

Building On Trauma 10

What is this fire, love, that goes on burning?  I bear it as I can.  Who can say that love is a boon?  Love is disquieting.

That is a poem from the ancient Vedic writings of India, called the Upanishads. 

I mentioned fire in yesterday's post as a metaphor without particularly specifying what it could mean.  It is a metaphor for the pervading presence that creates, sustains and unites all things throughout the Cosmos, from inanimate matter to the human brain. 

St. John the Apostle, in his first epistle, wrote that God is love.  So then love, or God, is that force, that fire.  Here is a song that I wrote back in 1992:

In the vault of the heavens,
in the cradle of the earth,
at the moment of death,
in the agony of birth,
sages of old have sought to know the worth
of the sacred fire, the luminescent flame
whose tongues have embroidered and licked the mystic name
that is born in the pupil of the shining eye of God
that has burnished the places where the saints have trod;
it pours down holy mountains and immolates the land
where rocks and stones split open and crumble into sand
melting desert wastes into regions bright and grand.

Fire of destruction
from eternity you roar,
fire of creation, our spiritual core,
Fire of destruction
from eternity you roar,
fire of creation, our spiritual core.

In your all-exposing light we are naked and alarmed
we crawl nearer to your flame for our bodies to be warmed
where you burn within our hearts to reveal the dwelling place,
the Theophany's new home where we measure out the grace
that will recreate for each of us a face
where we'll sing in the silence to the mystery of your name
that melts our bones like wax as we plunge into your flame,
our beginning and our end, forever the same.

Fire of destruction
from eternity you roar,
fire of creation, our spiritual core,
fire of destruction
from eternity you roar,
fire of creation, our spiritual core.

One thing we all share in common is our fragility.  And our sense of human dignity.  This morning I saw the usual nicely dressed creative class Millennials enjoying their lattes on the patio of the JJ Bean in Yaletown.  Right next to them under a blanket lay a young man sleeping on the pavement.  Very easy to lay blame on the yuppies for being self-obsessed, selfish and uncaring, and they probably are.  But really, they are also victims.  They share the same trauma as the homeless man lying less than two metres from them though it manifests very differently.  It is the trauma of life.  We are all victimized by the same fire.  Knowing there is nothing they can do with their limited resources to help they play deaf and blind, even if they could at least acknowledge the homeless man's existence, but they don't want to know that he exists, so they would rather pretend that he isn't even there.

This is soul death.  Those yuppies have been brought up in a system that is soulless, selfish and uncaring and that leaves them ethically bankrupt and morally useless as adults and too afraid to reach out to the suffering in their face that paralyzes them into inaction.  I don't feel sorry for them.  I do understand them.

Children brought up without ethics or morals become hollow adults unable to operate in real community.  Our world, our city, is full of people like that.  Our most successful citizens, in the professional and materialistic sense, are such persons.  Easier to post a photo or selfie on Facebook and count the likes than do something, anything, to help alleviate the misery of a vulnerable man sleeping out in the open, just six or seven feet away.

We are all warmed and burned by the same fire.  When we embrace the fire it becomes heaven.  When we leave it to embrace us, then we are in hell.

Building On Trauma 9

"How would you like a crutch up your ass?"  That's what she really said, and on occasion I actually heard her say this.  We were friends more than thirty years ago, during my salad days of bar and street Christian ministry downtown.  She would have been in her early twenties, getting around on crutches because of her cerebral palsy.  She was, shall we say, legendary?  I believe I have already mentioned her on these pages on one of my Remarkable People I Have Known posts.

She made the crutch up your ass remark to an individual in a club when he came running over to her while she was on the dance floor, twirling quite ably to the music on her crutches, telling her how brave she was.  She was a force to be reckoned with.  I remember one evening we were visiting together in a local pub.  I stood up to reach for my wallet while paying for my beverage and suddenly yelped from a sharp, searing pain on my backside.  There she was in her chair with one of the wickedest grins I have ever seen.  She had just bitten me on the ass and someone from the next table announced to her, "you're not getting older, you're getting worse!"

Well, so it goes.

Just last Sunday or so I was listening to a program on the radio, an interview with a New York artist who lives with a disability and gets around with difficulty, but still with success.  She commented that one day she was outside jogging.  It would be very clear to see her while jogging that she had a disability.  Suddenly, a man she had never met before came over to tell her what an inspiration she was.  She told him to fuck off.

Several months ago I was at a meeting with one of my clients, his case manager and the occupational therapist, who is also my supervisor.  It was, for the most part a very successful encounter and everyone felt very good about the way things were progressing.  Then at the end the case manager, in an effort to compliment me, told me what a good role model I was.  I thanked her while trying desperately to control my gag reflex.

What do these three incidents all have in common?  Three individuals justifiably offended by ablism. 

My old friend with cerebral palsy, the New York artist with mobility challenges, and me, recovered from trauma and still being treated by my superiors as though all I am able to be is a good role model because I carry for them the stigma of mental illness.

We are sick and tired of being called brave, inspiring and good role models.  We are sick and tired of ablist idiots, themselves also crippled with neurosis and fear, making themselves better than we are by throwing us patronizing crumbs and scraps of bread.  We are better than this and they don't want to know it.  They are afraid of us because they instinctively know that if they ever found themselves in our shoes they would never be able to cope. 

Which also gives us a certain power over those idiots.

There is a wisdom that comes through trauma, and it only comes to us through trauma.  Our souls, violated, and broken into, are also split open, making us more compassionate, more knowledgeable of the human condition and more human.

Gentle Reader, I remember during the seventies and eighties when upper-middle class angst was the queen of first world problems.  These well-off white folk with time on their hands and all their needs fulfilled and feeling somehow...empty.  Unfulfilled.  I remember some of these people from churches I attended during that time.  To them, God was all about fulfilling their inner needs, receiving inner healing, and finding a sense of purpose in the midst of all that awful, neurotic angst.  Some of them actually were motivated to do something constructive.  They dumped their affluent middle class life style and devoted their lives to serving and caring for the poor and traumatized of the world.  I think that some of them were also traumatized by osmosis.

We either walk into the fire or the fire is going to find its way into us.  Either way, we are still going to get burnt.  It's unavoidable and it is inevitable.  Embrace the flame, before the flame can embrace you.

Building On Trauma 8

I would like to open this little essay with an anecdote or two about some of my mental health coworkers and why I should find them at times a little bit concerning.  I am part of a workplace that one could call rather hierarchical.  At the apex we have the psychiatrists.  At the very bottom, the peer support workers, followed by office and clerical staff, case managers, social workers and rehab therapists.

Peer support workers are by far the worst paid, the least respected and the most under-appreciated members of this little workforce.  We earn twelve whopping bucks an hour.  I would imagine that entry level for the office and clerical staff would be at least twice that amount, and up it goes according to hierarchical positioning.

It is generally assumed in my workplace that peer support workers are going to deserve an offensively low paycheque and for the following reasons:

1. We lack the university and training credentials.

2. Most of us are already on disability pensions, which provide some of my coworkers with a monthly stipend of around one thousand dollars a month.  No one should be expected to live on that, and getting an extra twelve bucks an hour at around forty hours a month is still little more than an insult.

3. This I believe to be the principal cause for our low pay and that we are at best patronized by our coworkers.  We, the peer support workers have all been diagnosed with a mental illness.  Even though many of us have done spectacularly well in recovery (in my own case, I have never been on medication, nor hospitalized), we still carry that stigma, and I highly doubt that many of our highly educated, well-trained, and highly skilled professional colleagues are ever going to forget this or let us forget it, not from ill-will, but because of fear.

I have still, despite the invisible apartheid that exists in my workplace been able to get to know somewhat some of my coworkers.  This almost always happens on the fly, since I don't think any of them would be that interested in socializing with us, given that we still carry that stigma of mental illness.  I don't believe this to be intentional on their part by the way, nor because of illwill.  It's just the way it happens.

I recall being part of a few workplace conversations: for example, while in a car with two coworkers en route to a client.  It was springtime and there was an abundance of beautiful azaleas everywhere.  I felt shocked and embarrassed when evidently, neither of my male coworkers (one an occupational therapist, the other a case manager) seemed to know what I was talking about when I mentioned the flowers.  They hadn't noticed and couldn't even see those beautiful red flowers flaming out from the gardens that surrounded us.  Between themselves all they wanted to talk about was cars and sports.  Absolutely blind to the natural beauty around them.  And this we call mental wellness?

I recall sitting in on other conversations between the higher-ranked staff members in the staff room or at a company retreat.  The conversations were always banal, boring, and reflecting people with incredibly mediocre lives and values: shopping, cars, paying mortgages, shopping, cars, mortgages, sports, going to the mall, restaurants.  And this we call mental wellness?

What an uninspiring bunch of losers!  And all of them making, compared to me anyway, whopping salaries.

And to think that these are the same kind of people who are considered custodians of good mental health treatment, care and recovery.  Or you could call it, encouraging our clients to have the courage to come back, as it is known in some of our circles.  Well, come back to what? is what I have to say.

It's the bland leading the bland.

In my thirteen years of working in the mental health system I have long felt, shall we say, disappointed in the celebration of mediocrity that my coworkers and bosses try to pass off as the gold standard for mental wellness: turning us all into happy little consumers and effective little workers, but really doing very little to encourage us to broaden our minds, our horizons or to enrich our souls, or to help us to become more generous and more loving, more creative, more beautiful people.

I think this is because we have not really gotten beyond the Adlerian nonsense of self-actualization as being the be-all and end all of mental health recovery.  Self everything, without a whit of concern about how we all do as a community, as people who impact and influence one another, of developing a moral compass or a life ethic, of coming into an experience of spirituality that is something stronger and more meaningful than the au courant yoga, mindfulness and meditation kind of nonsense.

For helping to create a culture of narcissism, the mental health industry has a lot to answer for!

And the reason why they are unable to provide any of this for their clients is because they can't even provide any of it for themselves.  How can an empty pitcher be expected to fill an empty cup?

We humans really are an incomplete, pathetic, half-baked bunch.  Those of us who do and cope well in that context generally do well professionally, socially and materially.  Everyone else, regardless of their human potential, falls through the cracks, and because of trauma from being left so vulnerable to abuse and misfortune, often become psychiatrically ill and turn into our clients.

Trauma informs our human nature.  It breaks us open and helps us to reach our true potential as human beings.  Among the traumatized, the psychiatrically ill, the psychologically damaged are the artists, the intellectuals, the prophets and seers, the very healers that our human race is not only all the poorer without, but perhaps our very future as a viable species could depend on the full participation of such victims and survivors of trauma such as myself and my many peers with whom I am privileged to celebrate the journey of recovery.  Not to come back to the vacuous and selfish materialism that is the only real item on the menu, but to come into a full sense of our humanity, covering the spiritual, the ethical, the artistic, the prophetic, the compassionate, and the healing.

Our mental health care providers need badly to learn from the very clients and peers they still regard as their inferiors and we, the survivors of mental illness, have to start taking the lead.  Whether they like it or not.

Building On Trauma 7

I am listening to a radio broadcast about deaths from addiction.  There are still those who treat addiction like a moral failing and not like an illness.  It is as though the addicted person is simply a large naughty child who uses in order to keep on tweaking the nose, and other bodily parts, of Aunt Authority.

I do not doubt that addiction is an illness.  I am neutral about the moral failing aspect.  I think I have trouble with the term itself.  It seems to assume that society, or humanity is made up of two types of people.  The moral failures and the moral successes.  The pillars of society and the sewers and garbage cans.  So, then, what about the priest who diddles little boys?  Or the obnoxious billionaire occupying the Oval Office, you know, the one who makes creepy incestuous remarks about his daughter, and brags about grabbing women by the p#ssy?  The same oaf who wants to bomb an impoverished small country out of existence because of its fat mouthy little dictator.

I don't know what gets people addicted to drugs, and by drugs I mean all drugs, including nicotine, alcohol and caffeine.  Some of my mental health clients also live with substance dependencies.  I said to one, recently, that the next time anyone judges him for smoking crack, that he simply reply that he would love to see how well this righteous stalwart would cope just one day without his favourite blend of dark roast Arabica that he gets at his friendly neighbourhood Starbucks.

We live in a culture of addiction.  We are a nation of moral failures.  Not one of us has the right to judge.  Those who are living with socially sanctioned addictions do rather well.  Those who smoke crack and shoot heroin and fentanyl not so much.  Stigma, you know.  And if they had a hellish childhood, so much the worse.

Social and economic equality.  Don't leave home without it.  We are a collective of successful addicts and unsuccessful addicts.  Most of us still are addicts.  If it isn't a substance, it could be porn, shopping, gambling, our precious little phones?  PREC-IOUS!!!!! as Gollum would say.  And according to people's ability to cope, depending on whether or not they are voted off the island, it is all social Darwinism.  Winners and losers.  Moral failure?  We're all moral failures.  And our treatment of those who aren't strong enough to survive simply backs up my claim that we are a culture of psychopaths. 

And if we are a culture of psychopaths, and if we are also a culture of addiction, then, pardon the reductionist thinking, Gentle Reader, then we are all equally screwed.  We still prefer good-looking, high achieving and competitive workers and entrepreneurs over those who excel in softer skills and emotional intelligence.  The latter aren't going to be wealthy or powerful and society tends to have a permanent hard-on for the wealthy and powerful.  The same parties who, through greed, violence and war will destroy all of us together.

We need desperately to acquire our humanity.  Historically, this has never really happened.  If our human species is going to have any chance of surviving the challenges of climate change and threats of nuclear war then we are going to have to turn upside down this whole psychopathic mentality that has dominated our history since the invention of agriculture.  When we learn to be transformed into kind, gentle, creative, spiritual and compassionate beings, and when we come to value those very life-affirming and life-giving qualities over the wretched death culture full of greed, terror, arrogance and war-making that is still our legacy, then just maybe we will come a little bit closer to validating our humanity and saving our species from our own imminent self-immolation

Building On Trauma 6

Everything has cracks in it.  That's how the light gets through.  I think many of my Canadian Gentle Readers will recognize those words written by the late Leonard Cohen.  It comes very close to what I mean about building on trauma.

There is no such thing as perfection and this is something that can never be achieved, apart, perhaps, from being a perfect douchebag.  While trauma is not the same thing as imperfection, it certainly plays a role.  We are all flawed, perhaps hopelessly, but perhaps we could think of it as being hopefully flawed. 

Regardless of what we are unable to achieve in this cruel and brutal Darwinist reality that is global capitalism, we can always become better people.  I don't mean better in the sense of stronger or of turning into high achievers or of becoming more competitive.  This kind of thinking badly needs to be turned on its head.

Trauma, the imperfections, the cracks as they are, opens us up.  We will not become better workers, or better looking people, or successful lovers, and this is certainly not going to make us wealthy.  Trauma has nothing to do with survival of the fittest and everything to do with making us more human.

Think of our lives from start to finish.  Even the act of conception springs from a form of trauma because the vagina must be penetrated (in most cases) by a penis and even with both partners being totally willing and good game and giving, this is still traumatic.  It is one foreign body penetrating another. 

The fetus comes to term following gestation and then comes the trauma of birth.  For the newly emerged baby this most be nothing but terrifying, emerging from the dark, warm safety of the womb into a cold, unloving and brightly lit world.  Surviving infancy and early childhood is going to be traumatic.  Has anyone ever seen a baby that never cries?  Totally dependent on the mercy and good will of one, preferably two, adults who often don't have a clue what they're doing or how to raise a child.  Teething?  Learning to walk, falling down and getting up again?

Then there's the terror of becoming socialized and just hope that your little bundle of joy is nowhere on the Asperger's-Autism spectrum or it's trouble here sports fans.  Daycare, preschool, kindergarten, grade school, middle school, high school, trade, technical, college, university, losing one's virginity, dating, fitting in with peers, drugs, alcohol, pop culture, politics, the Internet, the work world, marriage, children, old age, illness and death.

We are never promised a cakewalk.  And real life, even in its bland first world ordinariness is still one scary and horrifying ride not for the faint of heart.

Add in the variables: chronic or terminal illness, mental health disorders, brain injury, child-abuse, sexual abuse, poverty,  racism, homophobia, hate, poor-bashing, alcoholism, drug abuse and addiction, or simply being too unusual or too gifted to really belong anywhere, or all of the above, and then, you are really screwed.

If it wasn't for those variables of trauma we would have no culture, nor much impetus for compassion, empathy and caregiving.  There would be no impetus of growth or improvement.  There would be no real sense of the importance of gratitude, of living in the eternal now, of the importance of loving one another.

We have little option but to build on trauma.  It is one of the most fundamental facts of our human existence.  It is never going to go away.  Why not make friends with our trauma and exploit to the max all those cracks, big and small that are always letting the light in?

Building On Trauma 5

No one else is going to do it.  This is what I keep having to tell myself sometimes.  This is probably a familiar mantra for most trauma survivors, individual and collective.  Rome wasn't built in a day and Rome was built by trauma survivors.  So was Athens.  So was Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital.  No one can go through life without experiencing trauma and its effects. 

Whether we are starting our lives over or building a new civilization, nothing gets done if we just wait wallowing in our misery and pain while no one else does the work for us.  It has to get done.  No one else is going to do it.

The emerging people of Latin America, a curious melting pot of Spanish, European, Indigenous and African origins, did not wait till they were feeling well and better for the culture and nations of Latin America to evolve and develope.  They kept working at it because they had to.  It was a shaky foundation, yes, but they could not just sit there on the ground and wait till they were feeling better.  They had to survive.  They needed food, shelter, clothing, work and only they were going to provide those things for themselves.

I don't think that healing and recovery from trauma ever really begins to happen until the trauma survivor or survivors actually do get moving on something.  Not waiting to feel better but working at improving our lives and our situations, no matter how limited our resources.  It isn't a magic bullet.  There's no such thing as a magic bullet.  The fruits of our labours are still going to be fundamentally flawed and defective.

Having in many ways had to rebuild my life almost from scratch, I know what this is like.  I have been gainfully employed now for the last fifteen years, which is a success.  I have not been able to secure work that pays a decent living wage.  A failure.  I am securely housed in a decent apartment.  Success.  I live in a government subsidized building where forty percent of the tenants are mental health consumers.  Failure.  I am able to travel for at least a month in Latin America every year.  Success.  I have to live like a pauper the other eleven months of the year to survive and save money for said vacations.  Failure.  I am flourishing as an artist.  Success.  I sell maybe one original work of art maybe every two or three years now.  Failure.  I feel stronger, happier and more confident than ever.  Success.  I am still at times overwhelmed with crippling anxiety and self-hatred.  Failure.

And on it goes.

In Latin America, your will find flourishing cultures: indigenous, Afro-Caribbean, Mestizo and Colonial.  The art, music and literature of Latin America has attracted world renown as well as the natural beauty and wonder of the Amazon, the Andes and Patagonia.  Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and till just this year, Colombia, have been hijacked by murderous drug wars and recent civil wars leaving hundreds of thousands dead.  The legacy of brutal military dictatorships, nominally democratic governments hobbled by neoliberal capitalism and archaic and oppressive Stalinist style Marxism still casts a shadow over the many democratic and human rights progress.

My life is built on trauma and my progress is going to be uneven.  The nations of Latin America are all built on trauma and their progress is going to be uneven.  But we are making progress.  Sort of, as we keep trying to stagger our way forward, after falling down, getting up then falling down again.

Building On Trauma 4

Religion is huge for building on trauma.  Such has been the experience of the emerging peoples of Latin America when the Spaniards forced Catholicism down their throats.  In Mexico and in Peru, two countries whose history I am currently reading about and studying, the indigenous peoples were utterly destroyed by genocide, foreign epidemics against which they had no immunity, and perpetual mistreatment, enslavement and abuse by stinking Spaniards who believed themselves to be their racial superiors.  Deprived of their culture, their identity and their gods made them a vulnerable target for proselytization.  Talk about shooting fish in a barrel!

It wasn't the Conquistadores themselves that converted the natives.  They were at most just nominally Christian and their own murderous deeds, avarice and unbridled acts of lust, rape and pillage proved them to be as far removed from Jesus of the Gospels and his apostles as the devil himself.  Rather, they brought with them on their wooden ships, not just (often corrupt) priests, but Dominican and Franciscan friars.  They were the good cop.

The indigenous people, those who didn't have the surviving sense of dignity to keep resisting the Spaniards, swallowed this newfangled religion, hook, line and sinker.  The kindness and evident piety of the friars were just the bait that the rulers of Spain had been banking on for Christianizing the new colonies and thus securing ultimate control over the conquered people, body, soul and spirit.

I am a Christian and I do believe that God will work in any situation that people may come to know him.  Right now, I have no time to get into a discussion about religious plurality, syncretism, nor any of this my God is better than your God kind of nonsense.  Simply, I am of the opinion that some of those friars were authentic and that there were likely some authentic experiences of Christian conversion, since Christ makes himself real to us in trauma.  But this is not an apology nor any justification for the way it was done and the Spanish still have to apologize to the people of Peru, Mexico and elsewhere in Spanish America for the inexcusable and horrific abuses that were committed. 

I am reminded of Jesus' words, it is inevitable that offences are going to happen, but woe to those by whom they occur!

God reveals himself to us when we are at our worst.  Just as he became real for me and permanently changed my life when I was an internal refugee of a highly dysfunctional and toxic household.

Christianity in Latin America, whether Catholic, a fusion of Catholic and indigenous, or Protestant, flourishes to this day.  It is the meek that inherit the earth and it is to the poor in spirit that the kingdom of God is revealed.

This doesn't necessarily make us strong or highly functional.  Often, we go on limping and hobbling along in life while maintaining faithful and close ties to Our Lord, and more often or not he reveals his love and truth, compassion and justice in our lives while we are not necessarily at our best.  This has been my experience.

This doesn't make us less functional, but functional in different ways.  We may not necessarily be competitive in the workplace, nor enjoy a high ranking on the social hierarchy.  But our lives will reveal a love, joy and grace, and graciousness that will make us otherwise the envy of all.

This is how I have experienced my mental health recovery: At sixty-one I earn far less than a living wage but my work is incredibly gratifying as I get to walk with others towards their mental health recovery and a richer quality of life.  I do not live in a nice home that I own, but I pay affordable rent in a lovely little apartment in a building that is well and carefully managed by a Christian organization.  I do not have a lot of nice expensive possessions. But the few things I have are very beautiful and as an artist I have been able to create visual beauty for my home, to delight my eyes and the eyes of my guests.  I will likely die poor, but rich in more ways than I can possibly tell here.

In terms of the Latin American countries, political and economic instability has been rife throughout those countries.  Costa Rica and Uruguay appear to have the most stable democracies and most prosperous economies.  Chile does well in its economy and cost of living index but the shadow of Pinochet still looms somewhat, given the neoliberal economic policies that keep Chilean society with that of Colombia among the most unequal in South America.

For all the historical problems of crisis, corruption and social and economic inequality, an incredibly rich and vibrant culture has been fused throughout Mexico, Central and South America.  The people celebrate life and spirituality in a rich and fecund frenzy making them the envy of the rest of the world.  Even though many Latinos are so influenced by US pop culture and shallow materialism as to forget who they are, they still do it with a joyous, celebratory and sexy flourish that can only be Latino in its flavour and character.  Salsa dancing on the way to the mall, anyone?  Meringue while taking in the sales?  Cumbia all the way home?

They might still be unstable and reeling from corruption in high places and repressive governments and military and drug wars, but Gawd! the art, the music, the literature, the dance, the irrepressible joy and celebration of life!  I might add here that, except for in Bogota Colombia, but for some lovely friends I know there, a notoriously unfriendly city, I have been overwhelmed by the kindness and generosity of the people I have known in Latin America.

Building On Trauma 3

Nothing goes farther in life than empathy and compassion.  They even outstrip hate and selfishness in their reach.  Trauma is the birthplace of love, which is to say, the love that engenders empathy and compassion.  I think this is what has always made Jesus particularly attractive to me.  The trauma of the cross being the fountainhead of the mercy, compassion and grace pouring out from the wounds on his body, providing the lifeline for our broken and disenfranchised humanity.

I heard something on the CBC program about spirituality and religion, Tapestry, this afternoon, that I find concerning.  They were talking about a virtual reality machine or app for stimulating religious experience and empathy.  Then, in a spirit of irony, the host suggested that they might use a similar app for reducing empathy in the case of training soldiers to be able to kill on the battlefield without compunctions of conscience. 

I did not leave my parents' house that day in December, just four days after Christmas in 1970, with the intention of seeing the course of my life changed forever.  But that is precisely what happened.  I had done nothing to prepare, to read or study, or attend church groups or speak with a minister.  Returning home that evening with a profound sense that Christ had just entered my life would have been the last thing on my mind that day, and had anyone told me that that is exactly what would have happened then I would have had a good, hard and long laugh about it.

As previously mentioned, Gentle Reader, I was already traumatized, by childhood abuse, schoolyard bullying, and my parents' prolonged divorce.  I had already staked my own claim in my future by venturing out alone over the last six months to explore life, to experiment and experience and to learn.  The trauma that had afflicted me was my guide in this.  It wasn't to staunch the pain, but to find meaning in it all.  I had to know what this all meant, and what benefit, if any, I could possibly extract from my sad first fourteen years of existence on this earth.

That night, driven out of my home by trauma, kneeling in an attic bedroom in an ancient house on the Fairview Slopes (no longer standing) and surrounded by a half dozen Christian young men, themselves brought here by trauma, I surrendered my life to Jesus Christ, the Lord and Healer of trauma.

It has not been an easy life, but it has been filled with joy along with the pain, and even though the experience of trauma has remained the gift that goes on giving, it has always born fruit, as the presence and reality of Jesus Christ keeps making sense of, teaching me, and redeeming the pain.  With this, I still move forward.

Building On Trauma 2

My life is built on trauma.  I remember my first tottering efforts at self-actualization and these came largely as a reaction against my family's abusive treatment of me.  Family life for me, growing up in suburban  Richmond, was an excruciatingly dull and boring pseudo-reality.  My parents were negotiating a prolonged, nasty and bitter divorce.  Only recently were the beatings becoming sporadic.  Before my older brother started working on fish boats for the summer I was constantly at the mercy of his fists.  My mother, completely stressed from living with my alcoholic father, was hitting me when my brother wasn't.  There was also sexual abuse. 

The absence of the two toxic males in my family from our household brought us a very welcome and unusual sense of peace.  Mom no longer had to cope with either Rick or Dad and she became herself calm, gentle and reasonable towards me.  She almost never hit me now.  We were becoming friends.

The damage had already been done.  I was a traumatized child.  I wanted to make as clean and complete a severance from my damaged and damaging family as possible.  Fortunately we were living then in revolutionary times.  It was 1970.  I was fourteen.  The hippies, the Summer of Love and Woodstock south of the boarder had already happened, as had the race riots and the fires in Detroit and other US cities.  We had here in Vancouver our own gentle Canadian version of the hippies on Fourth Avenue and in Gastown and the Georgia Straight was our notorious underground newspaper.  And everyone was smoking pot and dropping acid.

I wanted in on the action.  I was finishing grade eight and celebrated my last day of school smoking a couple of joints with some older kids I'd just met in the park.  I was soon hanging out with these people on a regular basis and the easily available drugs were a draw as was the soaking up of an atmosphere such as never would have been imagined or countenanced in my conservative working class home.  It was inebriating, as were the free beer and cheap wine we all drank out of the same bottle.

This was my first summer of exploration.  I would wander alone downtown, buying the Georgia Straight on street corners, talking to interesting strangers, sometimes sharing a joint or a sip of wine, looking into and exploring the most fascinating art and curio stores and wandering freely in Stanley Park along forest trails that no fourteen year old boy should be allowed to wander unaccompanied by a responsible adult and feasting on the wild salmonberries.  That was the summer that I learned about ducks.  The mallard drakes, in June, changed their plumage till they looked almost exactly like the females.  The only thing that set them apart from the females was their larger size and their yellow or olive green coloured bills.

Reading the articles in the Georgia Straight, I learned that there were alternatives to what I had already been taught: everything from the articles about ending the war in Vietnam and support for war resisters everywhere, eco-justice, and prison reform and human rights for refugees and respect for our indigenous peoples, and gay rights, and information about sex and reforming the abortion laws and the need to rethink and reconfigure the narrow self-interested kind of capitalism that we were still imbibing with our mothers' milk.

I still remember the first issue of the Georgia Straight that I bought.  It was the Revolution edition.
The cover was red and black, featuring a photo of four naked hippies, two men and two women, alternating each other (even the most radical folk were still very heterocentric in those days) holding automatic machine guns in such poses as to hide their naughty bits.  I was titillated, of course, and intrigued and became incurably interested in revolution, its causes, its effectiveness and its fallout.

When I began grade nine in September I was suddenly years ahead of my peers in terms of my worldview and knowledge of alternative perspectives and lifestyles.  I was an unusually bright and creative kid, diagnosed as gifted.  I was also traumatized.  None of those forays and explorations, none of those efforts of taking back and claiming my own life did one single thing to make me more functional in the real everyday world.  Family trauma had impacted my ability to learn well in the classroom.  My mother, for her own lack of imagination and resources, didn't have a clue that there even existed alternative schools that might have been my ticket of rescue.  She wouldn't have cared, anyway, simply wanting a kid who would turn out as normal as possible, rather like wishing a monarch butterfly to morph into a clothes moth. 

I was not about to become employable nor adaptable to the soulless capitalist system we were living under.  I was becoming an enlightened and informed human being.  However, especially with the stigma of trauma, there is really no place in our workaday world for persons informed or enlightened.
I was developing my soul, but at the risk of never in my life earning a living wage.