Living With Trauma: The Healers, 7

I wonder if black-and-white, either-or thinking really is one of the big obstacles to recovering from trauma, as I am often told by my coworkers and bosses. There is this assumption that the experience of evil, especially human evil becomes so deeply seared into the soul that often for years, sometimes for a lifetime, the ability to see things in shades of grey, in nuance, is never likely to occur again for the sufferer. I have often wondered about this, both regarding my personal recovery, and many of the trauma survivors I work with and support. This however could be but one side of the experience of trauma. Especially if the victim is able to see that the same darkness is part of his own human nature. But this is where acts and dispositions of kindness and compassion need to take the forefront. For the trauma survivor, who is not likely to trust, it will take time and great patience for that person to accept that there are people who do not mean them harm, who are actually kind and good and are committed to their own highest good. But this does not negate the responsibility of the trauma survivor. Indeed, those whose lives have been impacted by trauma are the most likely to recover or do well if they are interested and actively helping in the wellbeing and recovery of other trauma survivors, hence the value and importance of peer support. I am also keenly aware of the huge mix of light and darkness that composes our human nature. Even Hitler, as a vegetarian and a nonsmoker had at least two qualities I could admire, but there is something about the systematic slaughter of thirteen million Jews, homosexuals, Roma, Slavs, communists, people with disabilities and everyone else he didn't like that doesn't give a lot of clout to the arguments against smoking or eating meat. Similarly, many of the Jews who survived the Fuhrer's inferno went on to do some very unkind things to the Palestinian Arabs as they stole their land from them and consigned more than a half million to the misery and squalor of living long term in refugee camps. On their own land. That they had lived on for centuries, even millennia. And some of those Palestinians themselves retaliated by turning into butchers and suicide bombers, themselves. And the beat goes on... We are all mixtures of good and evil, light and darkness. A conservative redneck who poor bashes homeless people could also be the kindest neighbour or exemplary father or mother. A justice and peace warrior might also be an unkind douchebag who snaps at children for making too much noise on the school playground. There can be all kinds of valid reasons for being what we are and for each one of us being the whole mess of festering contradictions that make our human nature something so engaging and wonderful. My question here is, do you have to have a mental health condition in order to be an either-or, black-and-white kind of thinker? The unfortunate Colombian from whom I had to disengage yesterday, given his incorrigible poor-bashing, likely does not have any mental health challenges. I could be wrong. I am now and again, Gentle Reader. Or maybe he is manifesting symptoms of the kind of collective trauma that has in some ways paralyzed the national Colombian psyche, following fifty years of civil war; or this could be a collective trauma that is more generically Latino, deriving from a long and very cruel and harsh history that has created a most binary culture of heartless winners, and grovelling losers. Even when I was really suffering from symptoms of PTSD, I was not one for black-and-white, either-or thinking. Not many of my clients are like this. I have noticed this kind of thinking in some of my coworkers, and one rehab therapist whom I won't name here would probably be a hellfire breathing fundamentalist if he ever became a Christian. Or a Muslim. Maybe this label of black-and-white, either-or thinking is just that, a label, and nothing else. I make this suggestion for one simple reason. The vast majority of people working in the psychiatric industry have logged many years of university education, with a considerable emphasis in the arts and humanities. Naturally, many of the said mental health professionals are already going to have a well-developed sense of nuance and subtlety and with that a capacity for understanding and accepting paradox. And this developed faculty is going to have everything to do with advanced education and diddly-squat to do with having a mental health diagnosis. Likewise with our clients, many of whom are not well-educated, by the way, but those who are, or at least are quite intelligent and well-read, I have noticed are also going to be every bit as mentally dextrous at navigating complex human and cosmological arrangements as their allegedly superior mental health support workers and care-givers. Kind of makes you want to scream, eh?