Living With Trauma; The Healers, 16

I concluded yesterday's post with the thought that survivors of trauma have a prophetic voice. I would like to explore this a bit. First, let's consider our way of treating people who have been traumatized and marginalized throughout our history. I am also thinking of how the concepts and understanding of mental health and mental illness have changed, and continue to change, throughout history. I would also like to suggest here that mental illness could be very much a social construct that has evolved and morphed over history and that it doesn't really exist in some cultures. This isn't to suggest that an Aztec priest or a Spanish medieval mystic wouldn't have been hospitalized and put immediately on medications here in Canada during the twenty-first century. And it could very well be that a mental health consumer living with schizophrenia might be burnt as a heretic in Sevilla or sacrificed to the war god in Tenochtitlan, except for one salient little theory: both the medieval Spanish and the Mexica were collectively mentally ill and neurotic. Perhaps individuals whom we would deem mentally well and healthy today would have been the most likely targets for the Inquisitor's stake or the priest's blade. As I have mentioned elsewhere, both cultures developed, menaced and trembling under the shadow of death, threat and uncertainty. The collective trauma and neurosis that got integrated into both cultures must have been tremendous. Still, it is only too easy for us who are enjoying while they last the progressive, postmodern privileges of our so very advanced era to look with smug self-satisfaction on other cultures and other eras as inferior, quaint and barbaric. We seldom appear to consider what kind of lens we are going to be peered at through five hundred years from now, if we haven't by that time rendered this planet uninhabitable to our descendants. Given that future generations will have learned from some of our mistakes, I will optimistically assume that they will be kinder and more altruistic people than us their ancestors. They will see this maelstrom of global capitalism and rapid fire information exchange creating vast populations of frightened, trembling neurotics. They will see people more interested in their status on social media than developing their own character. We will come across as shallow, greedy, narcissistic and ruthless little materialists. They will tut-tut at how slow we were to stop the engines of greed that have been destroying our planet, and they will gasp in ironic dismay at how we allowed the breech between rich and poor to grow so irreconcilably wide as to foster one bloody revolution and uprising after another, especially after our own immediate ancestors had worked so hard to institutionalize basic human and economic rights through the UN and other global organizations. They will particularly take note that instead of owning our collective madness and reconciling ourselves with it, we isolated and scapegoated small populations of vulnerable and poor individuals, people not wired or naturally gifted to compete and succeed in the dog race of global capitalism. They will marvel how people gifted with kindness, empathy and compassion, often highly gifted artistically, spiritually and intellectually, were sidelined and rendered incapacitated by medications, some left to languish the rest of their lives inside locked wards. I have long believed that there are two classes of people on this earth: those who have been diagnosed with mental illness, and those who have not been diagnosed. This diagnosis carries a huge weight of influence in the outcome of a person's life, beginning and ending with the ravages of stigma. A narcissist, a psychopath will do very well in our current culture because those personalities foster capitalism and bring it to its most toxic flowering and fruiting. Those of us who have been traumatized, who have been diagnosed with a mental illness have a particular advantage over the rest of you. We know what's wrong with us, and it is the same crap that is wrong with the rest of you. Trauma simply has stripped us naked and rendered us less than capable of lying about who we are: a damaged and toxic species of intelligent ape, emotionally and psychologically wounded, living in collective states of delusion, and wreaking havoc on other species. Trauma shocks us awake. Through trauma we are shown and learn to accept that we are all collectively traumatized, we are all collectively damaged. We are the ones who thus come to see the lies that all of you are still hiding behind. We are the ones who declare, not only that the Emperor has no clothes, but that in his naked state he is indeed a sorry and pathetic sight. We all share this nakedness in common. The already traumatized know this and accept it, and we scandalize and horrify the rest of you because none of you can gut looking at your real and ugly faces in the mirrors that we have been transformed into by suffering, affliction and stigma. The truth will make us free. And this is the prophetic voice of the traumatized.