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.