Living With Trauma: The Healers, 10

First, a little message from the prophet, Isaiah, in Spanish, and I will promptly translate into English: "Pero el Senor Todopoderso sera exaltado en justicia, el Dios santo se mostra santo en rectitude.  Los corderos pastaran como en praderas propias, y las cabras comeran entre las ruinas de los ricos."  In English: "But the Almighty Lord will be exalted in justice, and the holy God will reveal himself in holiness and in righteousness.  The lambs will graze in their own pastures, and the goats will eat among the ruins of the rich."  I long took this passage of scripture as a message from God that helped sustain me during my twenty year penance at St. James, the high Anglican parish church in Vancouver.  Rather than working at trying to change a system that seemed fossilized and moribund I opted instead to rejoice and celebrate my freedom among those sacred ecclesiastical ruins.  It also came to my attention that those same ruins of the old established church were sustaining me, providing me with ballast that would help me run free and thrive in what otherwise might have been an intolerably oppressive environment.  This to me is in some ways analogous to my experience as a peer support worker in a mental health system that simply goes on existing as its own reward.  In an ideal world, all of our clients would become empowered, fully recovered persons getting on with rich and rewarding lives and we in the mental health system would have worked ourselves out of a job, making ourselves eventually irrelevant and in need of new job training and employment, perhaps as computer programmers or retail employees.  It isn't quite that we are employing a kind of planned obsolescence that will keep our people from getting well and thus keep us in employment.  This is not a conspiracy and life is never so simple as to be able to fit the fevered imaginings of losers who  live in their parents' basements.  I have already addressed the flawed model of recovery, that seems to concern itself more with creating happy consumers and shoppers and compliant little workers rather than fully self-actualized persons.  Because the kind of society, and times that we are living in, are being so influenced and formed by this particularly nasty and pernicious kind of global capitalism, this is how a lot of people are going to think, especially those who occupy high positions and make decisions, set policy and control the purse strings.  We also have to keep on questioning and challenging what we mean when we use the word "recovery".  We know what people are needing to recover from, but what are they recovering into, or towards?  It is very challenging to live independently in a city such as Vancouver, where housing costs are way through the roof, where we are held hostage to the greed of property developers , scumlords, longtime home owners who will sell only to the highest bidder, the rapacious real estate brokers who manipulate them, and the buyers market, whether wealthy foreigners or wealthy locals, for whom money is no object.  Not to mention our weak and spineless politicians who live very nicely in their pockets, make nice noises about making this city affordable and tremble and quake in fear of doing anything to offend their wealthy corporate sponsors.  Speaking, myself, as a recovered person, I know that I could not live here independently while still honouring my core values, which means I will never sell myself to the highest bidder (and anyway, I never could, it is not one of my abilities).  So, if owning your own home is a sign of recovery, then I am not recovered.  If renting a market apartment is a sign of recovery, then I am not recovered.  If working for better than a living wage is a sign of recovery, then I am not fully recovered.  Do you see where I am going with this, Gentle Reader?  I wasted several sessions with a very good counsellor in the last few years because one of my supervisors, convinced that being a peer support worker made me somehow fragile and prone to illness, insisted that I get the support.  I was simply informed that there was nothing wrong with me and that I would do fine without the support.  I am fully recovered.  But I still have to live in government subsidized housing.  And so it is with the people I offer care and support to.  They may never show signs of the kind of recovery that this dense and stupid system we work in seems to define as recovery, but they are still going to recover.  They are going to recover on their own terms and not on the mental health system's terms and certainly not on my own terms.  And I will go on supporting them in this.  Whether some of them entirely graduate from the mental health system or not isn't really going to be the gold standard for full recovery, as much as I celebrate their getting out of the system.  Some are so constituted as persons, and so impacted by the ravages of the Medical Model that has left many permanently disabled and chronically ill, that they are always going to need support.  This is not going to stop them from recovering on their terms, nor from flourishing within the ballast of a support system that they shouldn't have to need, but will at least help keep them up and mobile so that they can get on with their lives, move forward and enjoy the beauty of human existence.