Living With Trauma: The Healers 1

I am returning here, Gentle Reader, to the theme of the Wounded Healer. I still haven't read the eponymously-titled book by Henri Nouwen, but I am very familiar with the theme. First of all, in the words of "Tricky Dick" Richard Nixon, who was considered the worst possible disaster in the White House before Dubya Bush came along, and now, even worse, el Presidente Dump, "Let me make one thing perfectly clear." As I already delicately stated elsewhere on this blog, "We're All Screwed!" We are all wounded. Even the One Percent. Even our own Prime Minister Junior and his wealthy friends. What makes people like me a little bit different from the younger Trudeau, isn't only that we are a little bit more likely to know this, we are also going to be named as wounded, or as damaged goods for but two little reasons: we are generally poor, and stigma. I have mentioned elsewhere on these pages that our wounding and our trauma as a human species are universal. We are all born into the same troubled imperfect world by similarly troubled and imperfect parents. Wealth and social status can provide a wonderful buffer for keeping the heirs of wealth and privilege wondrously blind and oblivious to their own fragility. First World Problems 101. There is this nice, middle class lady of a certain age who, with her husband have become a friendly and enjoyable presence to me in a café I often visit. They are both elderly, both nice, and both quite comfortably upper middle class. She sometimes hovers over me in said coffee shop while I am working on a drawing, just to complain about how difficult it is keeping all the rooms in their nice big house in order. From her it's always First World Problems. She has it so good that she has to find things to get anxious about. I have my own way of doing this, when I complain to my friends about the uppity little ageist Spanish-speaking wankers on the Conversation Exchange who couldn't be bothered doing Spanish and English with me for the simple reason that I am over sixty and most of them are under forty. (I only contact them because except for a lady over sixty, whom I have also contacted, and no she has not responded, probably because I'm a man, they are all in their twenties and thirties. But really, I have two Latino friends with whom I am in contact who let me practice my Spanish with them, and another who says he's too busy but at least I can email him in the Language of Cervantes. It is to this same friend that I have sometimes complained about the lack of people who will respond to me in Spanish. But this is the worst of my problems, I am already fluent in Spanish, and enjoy the rare privilege of having mastered a foreign language in midlife, while living in Canada (believe me, Gentle Reader, not as hard as it sounds). So, even if my life has not been easy, and even if I am poor and have had to battle against stigma, I can do the First World Whine as well as the best of them. But this can also be a pleasant distraction from the really awful things that have happened in my life. And really, Gentle Reader, awful things do happen to the rich and privileged: they also get sick sometimes, some suffer from mental health problems and addictions, some of them have been sexually abused as children, some have been sexually assaulted, many have been traumatized by divorce. But they have never lost their social status, have never suffered from stigma and will never have to worry about where their next meal is going to come from, where they are going to sleep tonight, or if they will get beat up or raped for bedding down in the wrong doorway on the wrong sidewalk. It is ironic that mental health therapists and clinicians generally come from this class. Natch, given that they belong to a social class that is most likely to be expected to go to university, and to be able to pay for it. But many of my own clients, such as the one I saw today, have often claimed that they derive precious little therapeutic benefit from their well-educated and highly salaried psychiatrists, psychologists, rehab therapists and case managers. They do mention that they find me, and I have heard this about other peer support workers, vastly more helpful, more insightful, more supportive and more empathetic. We, the already stigmatized and wounded, are also the only real healers in the mental health system, or so it seems. Go figure.