Living With Trauma: The Healers, 6

The Truth will make you free. It is also the truth that heals. I think that if we are going to be healers then we really have to reckon with the kind of lies that we live with and that we accept and adopt as though they were true. Well, they are true in a sense. They are true lies. What are some of those lies? I think the principal falsehood that the bourgeoisie and the post-bourgeoisie make hay on is that we are really better than others and that we are also better than we really are. This really manifests in the kind of classist society we live in. Canada? Classist? The dickens you say! We don't have the same kind of social and class hierarchy that really tends to paralyze the English, but given the British roots of Canadian culture (yes, Justin Trudeau, there is such a thing as a distinctly Canadian culture!) it really was a role just waiting to be inhabited and so now we have our own version of a class system. It is the caste system of the meritocracy. You earn your way to success and prestige and piss-on everyone else who hasn't made it yet. Money is the great equalizer in this country, making us almost as bad that way as our bloated neighbour to the south. The snobbery is revolting, and everyone who has been born into better society, of course, is going to already have more than a leg up the social ladder. And they are going to imagine themselves as better than, say, the plumber or the electrician, who in turn is going to imagine himself better than the barista at Bean Around the World, who is going to imagine himself better than the barista at Starbuck's, who is going to imagine himself better than the barista at Tim Horton's who is going to imagine himself just slightly better than the homeless guy pushing a shopping buggy full of empties. And then there's the rest of us: people living with a mental illness, people living in government subsidized housing, the chronically poor, people whose only real political voice is in having one single vote per election, unable to do anything else to really influence the swine in government office to do anything that will help bring us greater social and economic equality, given their personal lack of experience with disempowerment, and their own reluctance to offend their support base, especially if they are conservative. We are angry. Well, Duh! In my early twenties I frequently heard this accusation from various well-meaning liberal folk who knew me, people who had always done rather well in life, had never grown up treated like garbage, had never really wrestled with disability, want or poverty. But their values were okay, even if they didn't seem to do very much to live them out. But the way we do things in this culture simply invites hypocrisy. Trauma survivors, generally speaking, are not hypocrites. Having suffered already from the lies that surround us, having been wounded on this culture of lies, we are going to find that we no longer have the energy or time for this nonsense. And this can make us really problematic. I think this could be one reason why trauma survivors are often accused of black and white, or, either-or, thinking. Even if we can make ourselves employable again, coping with the competitive and lying culture of the workplace can really take the mickey out of us. Unless we are ready to negotiate, and this is something that many of us end up having to do. We basically have to know when to close our eyes and our ears, or hold our noses while carrying out workplace duties that might conflict with our values, while finding creative ways of negotiating what we can live with, and still promote values that foster love, truth and life. I just had an unfortunate experience with a very pig-headed Colombian with whom I was on Skype for conversation exchange. Without expressing any interest in my own experience nor my many years of professional experience, he dismissed the traumatized and hurting population that I work with as toxic losers that ought to be segregated from society. I told him in very clear Spanish that as we are on very different pages, then we had better not continue in contact with each other. This person, by the way, claims to be a devout Christian. I promptly disconnected from him, then I blocked all possible access between us on Skype and on the Conversation Exchange site. Fortunately, he does not have my email contact. This might be black and white, or either-or-thinking resulting from trauma that was motivating me. I have my doubts. Even though I am a trauma survivor, I will not waste one single breath on the intentionally pig-headed, especially those who hate people who are already wounded and suffering, as such individuals as this man from Colombia, can be particularly upsetting and draining. I also had no desire of leaving myself vulnerable to this individual's manipulation or abuse. Had he shown even a bit of an open mind, a little bit of respect for the experience out of which I was speaking, then I would give him a chance. Otherwise, I am leaving him in the hands of God. It is virtually impossible communicating some things to those who have neither the experience, nor the interest in learning about them. On the other hand, I still have to be open to those who disagree with me, but if they are going to disagree with an already closed mind then I am not wasting any time. These people are too upsetting and are going to have to learn the hard way, by banging their head against the wall until common sense has settled in or until they can no longer use their brain. As if they ever did.