Living With Trauma,:The Healers, 21

This fear of perishing that informs our will to survive remains with us to this very day, even though there is not a time in our history when we have had it this good. We are wired to fear the unknown, some of us more strongly wired this way than others, and when the wiring becomes excessive we will have anxiety, suspiciousness and paranoia. I mentioned that capitalism, well, capitalizes on this primal fear. We are no longer in danger of cave bears or of being eaten by sabre tooth tigers. We have been so imprinted by this prehistoric trauma, however, that even now in the twenty-first century we all go about as though our lives are in immediate danger. Even if after thousands of years of our having ourselves turned into a meat-eating predator species, we still carry in our genes this fear of being attacked and eaten. So, we invent enemies and dangers and perils, or simply exaggerating real and existing ones in order to feed this primal trauma. Our ancestors had to fight to survive, so must we, even if there exist no threat or danger. Not to downplay the seriousness of these things but having a smorgasbord of threats to keep us frightened and hyper vigilant, such as President Dump, the Fat Little Dictator of North Korea, nuclear war, the Alt Right, Fox News, and of course global warming, to name a few, we should be feeling happier than pigs rolling around in doo-doo. But we're not really, just all the more frightened and miserable, because we carry this fear and misery in our genes, it seems. Any outsider, anyone different or who strayed from the norm was suspect and often treated barbarically, hence the witch burnings in Spain and elsewhere in Europe and the human sacrifices in Mexico. Placating and feeding their gods was a very convenient cover for hating and fearing the outsider, the stranger, the misfit. In our mental health services we act out our socialized and ancestral fear more mercifully, by neglecting and ignoring, then medicating and dumping in locked wards and lame-ass social rehab programs those whom we have designated as mentally ill. This isn't a one size fits all argument, given that there are people who need to be restrained and monitored for their own good and for the safety of others. But how did they get there, in the first place? How much child abuse, bullying and social exclusion and isolation did it take to bring them to make some horrible decisions for themselves, leading often to drug addictions and severe psychotic breaks and often dangerous acting out? Who was there for them when they really needed support, love and guidance, when as children and youth they were at their most vulnerable? What gifts did some of these people have to offer, of a capacity for love and compassion, of creative, spiritual and intellectual gifts that might have enriched us all and helped transform us into something better than a race of shallow, mentally vacuous consumers? Such gifts as will never be offered, nor accepted, because the threat of awakening that they pose us is too great and too intolerable for many of us to want to reckon with? Hardwired as we are to fear the unknown, the outsider, it is all the easier just to lock them away somewhere, and the best hope of our future, and conveniently lose the key.