Living With Trauma: The Healers, 19

We are a mess. Our humanity has always lived in a severely damaged and broken state. Whether you subscribe to the Judeo-Christian doctrine of the Fall (as I do) or have some other belief or theory as to why we are such a mess, it still doesn't take a genius to understand this most salient and simple fact. We are a severely flawed species and the damage we have wreaked on the web of life is astronomical. We have not only had to struggle to survive as do other species, we have carried with us the conceit that we are vastly superior to other species, believing ourselves to be gods, and this hubris has made us the author of much destruction, self-inflicted as well as what we have wreaked on this planet. We have sought to subdue and subjugate for our use, benefit and pleasure other species, animal and plant, caring nothing about the harm we would be inflicting on them and on all other organisms. In our desperate bid to make ourselves comfortable and safe we have polluted and contaminated the earth, the oceans and the air that surrounds us, and now the future of our earth, from our acts of contamination, hangs by a thread. We seemed to do reasonably well when we were all hunter-gatherers. Sure, survival was always at a premium and the struggle to stay alive, much less thrive, was held under rather steeper odds than what we who whine about our first world problems have come to take for granted. Believing ourselves to be gods, we still despised other tribes, peoples and nations, making ourselves superior, and so the endless struggles throughout our troubled history, for land, wealth, resources and power. So we have slaughtered, raped, robbed and enslaved one another, impoverished one another, killed one another with epidemics and plagues. Only those small acts of love and kindness that occur between persons, whether friends or strangers, have had any real effect against our absolute destruction though it is a crapshoot as to for how much longer our destruction can be postponed. We are all damaged, individually and collectively. Those of us who occupy seats of power and privilege live as though they do not know this. Many others in the middle class, the bourgeoisie, share this delusion of wellness and superiority. Our whole manner of reaching out to others has always been tainted by colonialist arrogance, and this mentality occurs across the ages, countries, peoples, races and religions. It isn't that we want those who are truly suffering to become well and whole, otherwise they would be different from the rest of us, as well as far superior and stronger, and we wouldn't want that to happen, because they would become like gods and rulers over us, transforming the way we live, the way we think. So, we have bartered off our collective soul for a pottage of socially sanctioned mediocrity, and this mediocrity we have made the gold standard for wellness and recovery. Never mind that trauma survivors and others who struggle with the stigma of mental illness should become self-actualized and empowered. This would turn them into prophets and rulers, throwing in society's face our puerile hypocrisy, mendacity and venality. Better to keep them, not exactly sick, but kind of half-well, like the rest of us. The ruling class never easily nor readily cedes control. In the meantime, there will be those of us who do recover and thrive, despite all this lying nonsense, and we still have to make compromises, we still have to create for us a place where we can ourselves flourish and be heard, but eventually we are going to conquer, should enough of us rise to the challenge, not simply of wellness and recovery, but of growing into our true humanity. Not behaving like insolent little gods, but making ourselves servants and healers as we participate in nursing to health this near moribund and failed experiment of the human species.