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The legal right to doctor-assisted suicide has been dusted off and carted out again for public viewing these days, by some of our major news outlets, the CBC and the Globe and Mail. The CBC is broadcasting a weeklong series on the matter for their Vancouver-based morning program, the Early Edition. Sandra Martin, the death columnist at the Globe and Mail wrote a multipage panegyric about it. Both media outlets are fawning in their praise and unashamedly biased in favour of assisted suicide, giving scant or no attention to any other perspective, position, angle, experience or opinion. Of course the official and editorial position on this controversial subject is going to be favourable. Our chattering classes do want to show the rest of the world how progressive they are. It's all part of the progressive-liberal package: you are going to be pro-choice, pro-diversity, at least two of your best friends are going to be representatives of the LGBTQ contingent, if you are white (and probably you are) you re also going to have at least two or three friends and perhaps even a romantic partner of a different colour, you are going to be either atheist, or spiritual but not religious, you are going to favour Buddhist and yoga practices, dislike Christians and Christianity, be pro-environment, pro-harm-reduction and pro-legalization of all drugs and other psychoactive substances, and you are going to be a feminist, with strong socially progressive values in favour of universal support for the poor and economic redistribution and economic and social equality. This is a package. And there is a general consensus that this is a seamless garment, without nuance, all painted in broad strokes of black and white. I, for example, share most of those values. I draw the line at the anti-Christian talk. I am also against doctor assisted suicide. It is interesting that two of our major media sources are so dedicated about this, and I sometimes wonder why they are doing this with such unqualified zeal. Whose agenda are they fulfilling? Why is doctor assisted suicide so important to our government? I have posited elsewhere on these pages the idea that legal medical suicide dovetails very nicely with the so-called grey tsunami of a huge wave of ageing seniors who are going to drown the hapless taxpayers in their health care needs and expenses. And really, it is all about money. The One Percent, and especially the most gruesomely wealthy .01 percent, are now richer than ever, and guess who is making them so obscenely wealthy, Gentle Reader? That's right, it's us. With our low and stagnant wages and pay, our reduced government subsidized social and health services, by allowing those swine to impoverish us, we are making them wealthy. Their influence over our media outlets is huge, and the Globe and Mail is owned by the Thomson Group which is headed by a Canadian multi-billionaire. They want us to die, if that will reduce costs, and help them stay rich. Chilling, eh? I have written elsewhere about how particularly vulnerable poor single adults are to the abuse of doctor assisted suicide. Any poor geezer who is left having to choose between an old age of hunger and inadequate housing and a quick easy out, is going to be even a little tempted to opt for kicking the proverbial bucket, thus saving the health care system crap-loads of money and keeping the One Percent fat and wealthy. I also find it interesting that Sandra Martin mentions in her article that it is aging Boomers who are spearheading legitimized suicide. They want choice in everything and they do not want to suffer the ministrations of paid strangers when they are at their most vulnerable. This unprecedentedly entitled, spoiled generation of whining arrogant shits would rather flip the bird at God instead of humbly accepting that their demise is going to be as far from their control and choosing as were their conception and the date and time of their birth. And the One Per Cent is trying to capitalize on this narcissistic arrogance, pull strings from behind the scenes so that we'll think we're getting what we want, and thus assuring that they get what they want. By the way, for those of you who know me, I am not a Boomer. I was born during Generation Jones. We are the sub-generation that followed the Boomers in 1055 or so till 1964. Our Boomer elder siblings had already picked all the lovely plums and other low-hanging fruit, leaving us with the pits and skins. The Boomers gave the world Woodstock. We gave you guys punk rock. Got it?

Healing Trauma: Perspectives And Attitudes, 29

I just saw one of the first movies filmed in colour. "The Garden of Allah" was released in 1936, featuring then cinema heavyweights, Marlene Dietrich and Charles Boyer. I saw a version dubbed in Spanish, for the language practice. Dietrich plays a wealthy European Roman Catholic who wants to rekindle her faith and the mother superior from her old convent school sends her to the Algerian desert where she encounters a runaway Trappist monk (played by Boyer). They fall in love, get married, and eventually her new husband is betrayed as a deserter of his monastery and of his Catholic faith. She declares the marriage over and with great pain for both of them, sends him back to the monastery. Sad that the story ends here. I would have been curious to learn what happened to him upon his return. Was he accepted back to the fold? Was he given hard penances? Treated with contempt and suspicion by the other monks? Perhaps envy as well? Did the Dietrich character wind up taking him back? Or did she go into a convent, marry someone else, or ripen into a lusty old cougar stalking palm courts and cocktail lounges for willing young swains? There are of course the broad strokes of black and white that these kind of pious dilemmas are often painted in. The Boyer character wanted to taste the sinful life of pleasure, adventure and romantic love. But away from the monastery, having broken his vows, he is in a state of psychic, emotional and existential torment. He could return to the monastery to reunite with his God in silence and absolute austerity, or he could continue his life of matrimonial bliss, hating himself every step of the way. This is problematic. This idea that one has to conform to a particular religion and within a very narrow context in order to ratify their spiritual vocation is to me a rather sad deformation of Christ's call to discipleship. I have long had the kind of spiritual disposition that in some ways might have made monastery life very tempting to me, or at least the priesthood. A couple of problems here: first of all, I am not, never have been, and likely never will be Catholic. I do not judge those who want to be faithful members to the Old Dinosaur, but Holy Mother Church is not for me. They have way too much blood on their hands from the salad days of the Inquisition, and I could give a few more reasons, but this will have to wait for future, and past, blogposts. I would also like to mention that in cloistered religious communities, one is going to find all the evil and sin that is waiting for them in the big wide evil world outside the monastery walls. Each one of us is going to find all that evil and sin festering inside our own dark little souls, Gentle Reader. Yes, it can be a challenge, leading a quiet and contemplative life of prayer in a world that is completely antithetical to inner peace and practiced goodness, but for this wannabe Christian there is no other way of doing it. Different strokes, eh? The quiet place has to begin within and it is from that place of refuge and blessing that I am able to offer something beautiful of God to those around me, while receiving the same beauty from others. If they can only get off their bloody smart phones long enough to make a little eye contact! Not easy, but worth it. And, in case you still haven't noticed: God is everywhere!

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Anyone who wants to try to live in a way that is good, generous, contemplative and compassionate towards others is also going to have to reckon with spending their lives living as a stranger in a strange land. There is almost nothing in our contemporary, extroverted and selfish ethos that can facilitate inner peace, calmness, self-knowledge and the entire art of caring for others, the earth and the universe. They are absolute incompatibles. Even our braindead Mayor Moonbeam, whenever he and his selected dorks on City Council try to create public or enhance natural space, it is always with the idea of making it attractive to bikes, sports activities, bikes, children's playgrounds, bikes, public gatherings and grey market activities, bikes, places for dogs to play and roam off leash, bikes, places for joggers to run and be a nuisance to pedestrians, and bikes. I have watched with sadness as the quiet spaces in our city shrink and disappear, making quiet solitary walking and contemplation outdoors very difficult to access. You have to either be prepared to join a yoga studio or Buddhist meditation circle, or smoke your brains out on soon to be legalized pot. Even the Arbutus Greenway, which used to be a train track part of the Interurban rail line, has been uglified into a never-ending landing strip, suitable mostly for...bikes. But they generously share the space with people who walk. But to actually get away from other people and their noise and distraction, to not need to rely on iPods or other personal listening devices, to have quiet time unimpeded by narcissistic joggers who do not know how to share sidewalk space, ditto for dog owners and cyclists, to have uninterrupted quiet time, alone, outdoors to give your inner self time to really settle, unwind and listen for the voice of God's silence through the wind in the trees and the songs of birds? Believe it or not, this used to be much easier. I can still get some of this in our local forests, and in the quiet posh neighbourhoods of my city, though a lot of the above-mentioned idiots whose lives appear to be all noise and useless vanity, are even in the trails at times vying for space, totally oblivious to the quiet walkers and watchers around them, who only see and hear those idiots just a little bit too well. But these places still work, I am obligated to make room and space for those who don't, cannot, and seem too threatened by it in order to share my silence, and in some ways this also teaches me to be kinder, more considerate and more compassionate, except for the occasions when I really have to let them know that there is something good about sharing a sidewalk or pathway, and maybe they could relearn the words, "Excuse me" when they seem nearly poised to trample me from behind. This business of making myself vulnerable in silence to God in quiet solitude, also by extension makes me vulnerable to the strident noise and racket around me of the noisy majority who are too preoccupied with themselves and their immediate needs and wants to have time, or even dare to, enter into the silence. But in order to cope, I have taken on these human nuisances and distractions as a challenge to care and to love more, unconditionally, and with compassion. To greet warmly some of the strangers in passing, as though they are every bit the lost friends that they really might be. As long as I can get back into the silence again, to prepare me, to strengthen and rest me, and make me ready for the next distraction.

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Here are some of my mother's immortal words to me: "It's all about survival. Don't let anyone shit on you." Um...Thanks Mom. She didn't mince words, that's for sure. Well, I suppose she was right, given her own perspective and experience of life: A farmer's daughter of German-Russian immigrants who was born in the first year of the Great Depression, grew up on a wheat farm in Saskatchewan, then there was the Second World War, then three years after it ended she moved to Vancouver where a couple of years later she met, became pregnant by, then married my dad, an auto mechanic with a primary school education (I think he did make it to grade nine). They worked hard, struggled, saved, my brother was born just four months later, then in another three years I came along. They bought a house on an acre in Richmond. Dad was a drinker, cheated, we upgraded to a three bedroom split-level house in a nice subdivision, they fought, divorced, Mom got mixed up in what they call the wrong crowd, found her a fat studly Romeo with an impressively long criminal record, who almost killed her a year later, and then, just a few short years after, and I had already been living on my own since eighteen, Mom in her wisdom, gave me those words of wisdom: "It's all about survival, kiddo. Don't let anyone shit on you." Yes. I have always heeded her advice. She is my mother. I am also aware of how incomplete her perspective is. She is my mother. Those are words that almost everyone seems to live by. No wonder we are living in such a bleak, unpromising dystopia. I mean, the First World politicians in Ottawa and the equally First World eggheads from the CBC and Globe and Mail, can tweet and twitter and titter to their little bourgeois hearts' content about what an equal, prosperous, inclusive and land of plenty and milk and honey is our True North Strong And Free, O Canada, and they are still not getting the point. This country is a Darwinist cesspit. Then why don't you move, you might want to sneer. My reply? This is still one of the better cesspits. We have decent sewage treatment in this country! Don't let anyone fool you otherwise. Hence, Mom's immortal words. And you know something, Gentle Reader? I still refuse to swallow this. I know how difficult it is to try to live by higher standards than the going rate, but I am a Christian. I have declared and dedicated my life to God. I am on public display as an open Christian I have to live up to my words or eat and choke on them, and I am obligated to show in my own life and values and manner of communication that there is really more to life than this desperate and vicious struggle of compete, survive and natural selection. I know this from the eyes of the many strangers I say hi to on my walks every day. I know this from the random acts of kindness I often see coming from complete strangers. I know this from the beauty that surrounds me and fills me every day. I know this, because it is true and worth knowing and worth living out into its full and living incarnation.

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Yes, I know I make it sound so easy, this business of turning into loving and caring humans. I only wish. It will probably be one of the hardest, most challenging projects in your life. Especially given that we live in such a toxic selfish society that punishes altruism and rewards self-centred conduct. Everything seems geared towards selfishness and living as though no one else matters. Even when we are together with other strangers, almost everyone tries to behave as though no one else is there. I have heard this lamely referred to as respecting the space of others. Pretending that the person seated next to you on the bus does not exist has nothing at all to do with respect and everything to do with a kind of passive hatred of our own kind and our own species. And people do this to each other all the time. Seeing how many devote their attention to their little techno rigs for their dopamine hits (smart phones, baby, smart phones!) and otherwise appear to bend themselves into coat hangers in order to avoid eye contact with strangers, I am inclined to say that we are all in the midst of a massive, and passive, hate-in. There are, of course, valid reasons for not wanting to interact with strangers on the bus. No one wants to be hit on, or worse, by some creep seated next to them. This has happened to me on occasion, for example, this young man who kept thrusting his erection onto my shoulder while I was seated on the Skytrain. Finally, I looked up at him, gave him a sly little smile. I have never seen such a red face in my life. Busted, he didn't dare try it again. More recently, just a couple of years ago, a South Asian man would not stop pestering the Filipina woman seated next to him. When she yelled at him to stop bothering her, he persisted. I got up, intervened, and told him to lay off her this minute. The coward got off the bus at the next stop. Not a word of thanks from the lady, but such is life, eh? Even when we pretend otherwise, we are all in this together. This is the way we are programmed, genetically engineered: to interact with one another. No matter what we do to try to avoid this it is still going to happen, if we don't try to manage and steward this impulse to connect responsibly and carefully then it is going to erupt dangerously and badly like a banked fire, and it is likely going to take more than a few loud prophetic voices to get everyone's head out of their ass. I am one such voice, and my voice is nowhere near enough. Gentle Reader, do your part. Connect with the stranger next to you. It isn't that hard, and please, no lame excuses about being an introvert or whatever. Just do it, and please don't be a creep about it.

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I am speaking of love as a supernatural force, given that I believe not only in God, but that God is love. Fundamentalist and Evangelical Atheists may pause to take their medication, if they wish. As may the fundamentalist Christians, who really aren't that different from the atheists, I'm afraid, and really, are cut from the same polyester. If you want a written record of love in action, then you need only turn to and read carefully the four Christian Gospels. Everything in the life and teachings of Jesus Christ point to the same cosmic mural: love in action. Never mind that you don't believe, have doubts, that you believe that all religions are equal, that you believe in religious pluralism or in no religion at all, (we are spiritual-not-religious-please-and-thank-you!) I am not asking you to believe, and I am not expecting you to become a born again Christian, nor a born again anything! Just read the bloody Four Gospels if you want to see love in action. It is really the most powerful force in the universe. I see this in my own work. Peer Support Workers have a unique role to play, in that we are able to get right beside our clients in a way that union staff often cannot, and for many legitimate reasons. Because we have been there ourselves, if not actually mentally ill then certainly hobbled for a while with stigma, we are able to express love to our clients. This is why peer support workers are far more effective towards client recovery than other workers, with one simple exception: those workers who will dare to love their clients, not romantically, and not possessively, but with empathy, compassion, respect, and beingness. By beingness, I mean the ability to be with others in a spirit of love and solidarity while they are suffering and working through their issues of unwellness and recovery. Here is a lovely definition for beingness, courtesy of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary online: the quality, state, or condition of having existence It has a crystalline, heartbreaking purity, that ontological beauty … of each object resonating in its beingness … —Phillip Lopate, Slate Magazine, 19 Mar. 2001 Whether or not you are Christian, religious or not at all religious or spiritual, all that matters is to let ourselves become channels and vectors of love in our interactions with others. The only requisite for becoming such channels of love is that we allow our own selves, our own lives to be inhabited by love. I am not asking you to believe in any religion or creed here, simply to open your heart and life to Love. This is not going to be easy. It will mean a surrendering of ourselves, and there could well be difficult experiences ahead that will help break us open, but this is what it often takes to get us ready to participate in this enormous and daunting but not impossible task of bringing to our troubled and broken humanity lasting healing and restoration.

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A lot of fatuous nonsense gets devoted to Gnosticism, especially nowadays with so many people going all New-Agey about their enlightenment. Here is the official definition of the word, courtesy of Uncle Google: "a prominent heretical movement of the 2nd-century Christian Church, partly of pre-Christian origin. Gnostic doctrine taught that the world was created and ruled by a lesser divinity, the demiurge, and that Christ was an emissary of the remote supreme divine being, esoteric knowledge (gnosis) of whom enabled the redemption of the human spirit." I will follow this up with my paraphrase of a verse from the First Epistle of John in the Christian New Testament: "There is no fear in love, because perfect love casts out all fear. God is love." This has been one of the most elemental battles over the Christian faith, love and knowledge duking it out with each other. Tree of Life vs Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. But can't we have it both ways? Yes, but hold onto your petticoats, Hortense! We're not finished yet. First, a word about the Judeo-Christian Creation Myth. Whether or not there were a real Adam and Eve, and whether or not there was a for real Garden of Eden, and whether or not there ever were those two amazing trees with a talking snake entwined in the limbs of one of them, or whether this is just one great fable to help keep us all in line, I neither know nor do I care. Or, don't ask me, I wasn't there. I am even quite prepared to believe, accommodate and integrate both, the Biblical and the Darwinian myths: that our earliest ancestors were ape-like creatures descending from trees in Africa, and who knows, maybe two of them were named Adam and Eve (nowhere near as good-looking as the ones in the Bible, being all covered with hair, kind of stooped and with protruding jaws and brow ridges and absurdly tiny craniums.) Whatever happened, deep in the dawn of our species' existence, some kind of choice was made: we could become godlike and intelligent beings and absolute masters (Ha!) of our own destiny, or one could say, like the very clever yet militaristic and bloodthirsty violent chimpanzees; or we could be joyous lovers living in harmony and peace, if not necessarily the smartest simian on the block, like the make-love-not-war bonobos. And here I would like to return to the New Jerusalem, or the mythic City of Thebes of Ancient Greece. Whether it is a black Gargoyle-Shadow or a fearsome Sphinx guarding the gate, they demand of us an answer to their riddles if we wish to enter in through the gates, or at least if we want to get in there alive. Who are we? What are we? And what is it that truly makes us who and what we are? Here are my answers: We are humans; we are human beings; and it is love that truly makes us who and what we are. The account of creation in Genesis states that God created us in his image. The apostle in the New Testament famously wrote that "God is love." Could it get more obvious, Gentle Reader? If we eat the wrong apple, then we will certainly become clever and god-like, we will master our own destiny, and we will build cities, develop writings], culture and literature, develop the sciences, make ever new and sophisticated instruments of mass destruction, and very possibly eliminate our own species and drag much of the earth's biosphere with us. Or, we could eat the other fruit, and become loving, benevolent, kind, compassionate and gentle beings. We will also become incredibly intelligent, redolent with creative beauty and spiritual power and grace, vastly more intelligent and more godlike than the wrong apple could have guaranteed, because our growth, development and evolution will be governed and guided by love and for love, making us like angels and thus shall we fling wide the gates of the Heavenly City and enter in to claim our sacred inheritance.

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Yes, the Gate Keeper of the New Jerusalem: a huge, fat, sprawling black presence oozing darkness, fear, anxiety, bad odours, depression. Why does it have to be this way? Does it have to be this way? Why are all the good things in life surrounded by razor wire? Why is there always a dragon guarding the sacred garden where grows the tree of life? If I only knew, Gentle Reader, but so it is. The New Jerusalem, of course, has nothing at all to do with the disputed capital of Israel and Palestine, and everything to do with gaining access to our higher selves, our higher reality, that state of blessedness, light and joy that always eludes us yet ever entices us from afar or in our dreams. Yes, for sure in our dreams, but this is what we aspire to. Something better and higher than what we already are or already possess. Because this is something we appear to have lost long ago. This myth of a long vanished golden age figures in all the world legends and mythologies. It isn't just that we need to become better than what we are. We need to be restored to what we once were, and have lost. The Ancient Greeks had their gods of Olympus, and didn't seem to realize that those gods were themselves, idealized representations of their higher, if still very corrupt selves. Aphrodite, so exceedingly beautiful, but what an unfaithful spouse. Likewise her daddy, Zeus. And Hermes-handsome and graceful god and such a manipulative shyster. Ares, god of war, handsome and bloodthirsty; Poseidon, protector of the sea and sailors but vindictive and nasty to any mortal or other god that got on his bad side. I could go on, but I don't want to lose the thread of this conversation. The gods represent our higher selves and they are our higher selves. We spend our lives trying to gain access to the garden, trying to sneak past the guardian shadow at the Gate of the New Jerusalem, often at great peril and damage to ourselves. Our vulnerability to addiction speaks volumes about this: drugs, alcohol (another drug), porn, gambling, shopping, smart phones, or fill in the blank. We are a race of half-baked, half-formed, incomplete, pathetic little wankers desperate and always on the lookout for that next dopamine hit. That is our human reality. But our human truth? Divining our human truth would involve having to get past the Shadow, which would be the same as Oedipus answering the Sphinx's riddle. I will replay for you that particularly pithy little myth. Oedipus was trying to enter the mythical Greek city of Thebes, but the gate was guarded by an evil Sphinx, a lion with the head of a woman. She would ask each stranger the same riddle, and if he answered correctly, he could enter the city, otherwise, she would rip him to shreds. The riddle: What has four legs in the morning, two legs at midday and three legs in the evening? Oedipus answered correctly. Man is that creature, he said. In the morning, when he is born, he is a baby crawling on all fours. Then he learns to walk and throughout the midday of his life he walks on two legs. Near the end of his life, the evening, he is an old man and must walk with a stick or a cane, as though on three legs. The Sphinx, outraged that he answered correctly, threw herself to her death and Oedipus entered his ancestral city. So, then, what do we say to the Shadow, squatting at the entrance to the New Jerusalem? We reaffirm our humanity, we declare our love for our humanity and our love for one another, and the Shadow, defeated, can only yield and let us pass.

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No Fear. Remember those T shirts from the nineties? All the Gen X extreme sports jocks and associated wannabes seemed to be wearing them during the nineties, often peeking seductively from behind their plaid flannel shirts, that early seventies' look revived by their Grunge hero Kurt Cobain before he blew his head off in 1994. No Fear, as many of you know, is, or should I say, was, a marketing brand for recreational clothing and energy drinks. I never knew this when I first saw people wearing the T shirts. I found the message downright inspiring, actually, thinking as a Christian, that there is no fear in love for perfect love banishes all fear. But even before I figured out that it was simply branding, and that those gormless jocks were just making themselves into human billboards offering free advertising, there was something that didn't sit right with me. To me they were like frightened five year olds trying to make themselves look and feel all brave in the dark. Or it was like rambunctious tween boys yelling back and forth "I dare ya. I double dare ya. I double dog dare ya."(I don`t remember anyone, when I was a kid, using the words, "double dog dare ya." Probably an American interpolation. And that was so long ago, when large animals still roamed the earth!) I was still rather young myself. Getting into my late thirties I had my own issues of fear to reckon with. I always have. We were facing the twilight of a beautiful, if rather absurd , experiment in intentional Christian community. We had premised our ethos on not being afraid. We did often seem like those Gen X jocks wearing their No Fear T shirts, only we were older and maybe not quite so good-looking (as some of them, anyway!). We were determined to not live in fear, to the best of our ability, as a community of God's love. We all knew that that was the only way we could pull it off. We also knew that it wasn't simply a matter of feeling or looking brave. We had to be so full and so consumed with love, that we wouldn't have any room left in our hearts for fear. We had to be willing to become so taken over by love as to care not one little straw about our own safety or wellbeing. We were determined to live the life of Christ according to the Gospels, in the power of the Holy Spirit as we reached out to the unwanted, the marginalized and the lonely, and as we also challenged the lukewarm indifference of the churches, challenging them in deed and word. The consequences were huge, we sometimes put ourselves and one another in danger. Was it all worth it? Yes. We saw people's lives being touched and healed and the blessing to us was huge. We also fought and squabbled almost daily amongst ourselves. This was far from a perfect arrangement. But it was something. It was a start. We exhausted ourselves. And now, I have no clue where the others are. One, I know to be dead, the other two, I haven't seen or heard of in almost fifteen years. I think this can be done. We were rather reckless and there needs to be balance and discipline with a healthy emphasis on self-care. I am alone now, but I am determined, in my small way and imperfect interpretation to continue this work. I am saying no to fear by saying yes to love. That is the only way out, and that is the only way to truly conquer the black weltering Shadow that squats at the Gates to the New Jerusalem.

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A lot of it is shit or get off the pot. But we are often paralyzed by fear, or by fight or flight. I think that fear would be the essence of the Shadow. I don't think that it's indifference that holds us back, but fear disguised as indifference. I wonder what would happen if we were to get past fear. Whether we have neurosis or psychosis it all comes from fear. No? It took me years before I started writing this blog. I was afraid: of having nothing worth saying, of saying it poorly, of writing badly, that no one would be interested, that I would make an ass of myself, or that I would betray myself, or all of the above. Fear is the essence of the Shadow. I think we must be born with this. We must be. It infected our DNA probably while our ancestors were just learning to walk upright. Maybe earlier. We have always had our huge push to survive: sabre tooth cats and cave bears and angry mastodons; lions and tigers; rocks, spears and arrows; bullets and bombs; online bullying and social media; Donald Trump. The world has never been a safe place. Everywhere we turn, there is risk and there is threat. A friend of mine was recently hit by a car, after coming from another country considerably less safe than our dear little Canada. Chances are that he is no longer going to feel safe here. Danger is everywhere. So is opportunity. And most of us blissfully walk through it all with our eyes closed. Or we become hyper-vigilant and need medication to cope. What makes it worse is how little we often feel we can trust others, even our family, even our closest friends. This Shadow, fear has spread its tentacles and has spread its vile, fetid vapours through every nook and cranny of our existence. We are the Shadow. We are the fear. I wonder if the dopamine hit that so many people get from their smart phones has to do with this need to escape from the scary reality that surrounds and inhabits us. We feel safe when distracted. We still go out every day. We have to. We have to work, study, shop, see people, get out of the confines of our small living space. But it seems that we are almost always negotiating the Shadow, Fear. I would like to propose an alternative. This is how I cope. I first assume that no one means to harm me. Even those whose behaviour is risky or just annoying: the smokers, idiots who jog on busy sidewalks, ride their bikes and skateboards on sidewalks, cars that blind you with their fog lights at midday when the sun is shining, rude dumbasses who push their way in front of you as though you don`t exist, yappy chatty Cathies who have to walk right behind me, people who talk loudly on their phones, everywhere. In this collective of undesirables I try to see humans. People who, despite the shadow, are essentially good, or want to be good. I try to greet strangers on the way. I try to make room for others, to make space if they want to visit and talk. Fear makes us very lonely. I decided sometime ago that I will spend the rest of my life defying this fear, reaching across the void to touch other lives. This is how we light the candles in the wilderness.

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I have just crossed a milestone in my own recovery from trauma. It began over a week ago when I really started to admit that PTSD for me was a bogus diagnosis. It doesn't mean that I was never traumatized. Of course I was! We all are! But, rather that making it into a mental illness did little to help me overcome and plenty to help me self-stigmatize. Then a couple of days later, just one week ago today, I had an inkling. I did a quick Google search for the person who had particularly traumatized me when I was still in my early twenties. Just to make sure I pulled accurate results, I added his wife's name to the search, and there she was, recently widowed, being profiled in an article about her ethnic community. It turns out that her husband died in 2013. It didn't say how he died. I estimated that he would have been around sixty when he passed away. Perhaps I should be feeling a little bit ashamed of myself for the way I reacted when I read this bit of news. I don't feel at all ashamed. I was overjoyed. The person who put a curse on me, a so-called Christian leader, was now dead. I felt suddenly set free from that toxic shadow that he and his cohorts had dumped on me just one month before my twenty-third birthday. I was dancing on his grave. Not even a shred of remorse did I feel for him or his widow over his passing. I felt like a German Jew in April 1945, upon hearing of the deaths of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun. It isn't that I wished this man any ill. Simply, I was rejoicing because I felt finally set free. I will explain further here about what happened, though I am sure I have previously written on these pages about this tragic event in my life. I was involved and living with a Christian Community called Dilaram in 1978. The leader, Dan, the man who died recently, was a very charismatic, and very dictatorial leader. He also seemed inordinately fond of me. I realize now that when I expressed my desire to leave, that he was taking the news like a jilted lover. I didn't care. I had to get out from under his oppressive fist and live my life again. But it was already too late. I had invested way too much of myself in this community and at a primal, unconscious level, they had become like God to me. I didn't know this at the time. So, as punishment for going AWOL for the day (honestly, I did not know that I was no longer permitted to go on an outing for the day with a friend) at eleven in the evening, I was called before a counsel of the six leaders of our community. I was told that God had told them to tell me that all the rest of my life would be wasted useless and fruitless for disobeying the community and they pulled out of context several Bible passages to justify their judgment (how ironic that just a couple of years later those very same things became their own fate. If God was actually trying to talk to anyone through those passages of scripture, then it was likely to them and not me). Then I was told to leave the house and the community that same moment. That's right, Gentle Reader. I was tossed out on the street by those "Christians". Late at night and in the dead of winter. Fortunately my mother was available to take me in that night. I had done not one single thing to merit this punishment. I had been praised and admired and respected as a contributing member of that community, especially as a person of faith and compassion and spiritual gifts. Their only reason for getting rid of me was very simple and rather puerile. Dan, the leader, a married allegedly heterosexual Christian man had suddenly figured out that I no longer loved him, and that I had never loved him, not in the way that he wanted me to love him. He was a spurned lover, in a blind rage of unrequited love. But I was still traumatized. I irrationally believed that God had completely abandoned me and that my relationship with God would only be restored once I returned to Dan and Dilaram in a spirit of pure contrition and repentance. For years, I had to struggle against this lie, and all the energy this took really drained and depleted me for other and worthier projects. I dragged this curse, this shadow of trauma until, well, around 2013, the year of Dan's death, when I did sense a kind of sea-change in my life, of everything beginning to really come together in a cohesive, harmonious whole. Learning of his death has finished the process. I am not glad of his death so much, as glad that I am finally free from this man's curse, this shadow that even last week was still lingering. I also believe I have forgiven him, and this completes the liberation. When it comes to trauma, and all the many psychological symptoms that result from it, so often there could be just one incident, be it recent or from the very distant past, that holds us in chains. We, and those who are helping us, have a duty of facing our oppressors, standing up to them, and by refusing to give heed to their lies about us, to vanquish them. This is a process that could take years, and I believe that in my own experience, the shadow of the Self Hater was put to work for my own benefit, for the learning of humility and the getting of wisdom, and now, completely free from its dank, malodorous shroud, I feel that with greater ease than ever I can now move on. Hallelujah! I'm free!

Healing Trauma: Perspectives And Attitudes 19

I'm thinking again today of the "Self-Hater". Think of him as a noxious, grey-black shadow that rather oozes its darkness while squatting over you on your shoulder. It would be bigger than a raven. Perhaps the same size as an Andean Condor. If you do not know what an Andean Condor is, it is one of the world's largest flying bird, a species of South American vulture with an enormous wingspan. If you don't know what a raven is then don't expect me to explain it to you if you don't know this by now, Gentle Reader. This shadow, the Self-Hater, oozes also a certain mix of odours, all of them bad: primarily there is a vague clinging stench of death and rotting flesh, with something else redolent of petroleum and its various products, with a tincture of vomit, and rather slightly rancid molasses. Blackstrap, I would imagine. This demon, this Black Imp, has been with us and part of us since time immemorial. He might even have been around, piggy-backing on our earliest ancestors as they first emerged out of Africa. Who only knows? But this Self-Hater. How does he manifest and how does he influence, warp and distort our growth and development? Why, in so many ways. All our contemporary obsessions are the fault of the Imp. Be it self-destruction or self-improvement, it all carries his dark, oozing claw-print. We destroy ourselves on drugs, consumerism and porn because of the self-hater, and we whip ourselves into a frenzy of wellness and fitness in the gym and yoga studio and we are all being whipped forward by that same nasty, rasping and clinging voice and diction: "You are not good enough. You are worthless." I don't know how or when this started. Maybe as our earliest ancestors were descending from trees the Imp might have taken control to tell them that they would never survive in the open veldt. They would never stand up straight enough, never walk or run fast enough. They were too weak, not smart enough. They would be at the mercy of predators and would all go down as kibble for fattening of prehistoric lions. Throughout our history, young people have had to go through often painful and humiliating initiations into adulthood. They are not already good enough. They have to earn merit. And in many cases this has been necessary, especially given the capacity for hubris in arrogant young males. We have always been flawed and, worse, we have always known ourselves to be flawed, not in a way to heal ourselves, but to hate, try to cover, make excuses, or relentlessly improve on what cannot really be changed. We carry in our collective unconscious, all of us it seems, a distant memory of a time of innocence, a golden age that was all light, goodness and delight. Then something happened, our mother and father got it wrong, were expelled from the garden, and what succeeding generations of miserables they have spawned! Even as I am writing these blogposts, I on occasion also feel driven and whipped by the Imp, the Self-Hater, that my writing will never be good enough, that I have run out of ideas, that no one is going to ever read this dreck, and in turn I too so easily become the Imp's vector as I nag and hector all of you, Gentle Reader, to somehow improve, educate yourselves, rise to your higher selves, to your best potential. But there is a difference. We can do this without the Imp. We can do this for love and because of love. And we can do this fueled by love for one another, for our Mother Earth, and for ourselves, Gentle Reader. This will take out the spurs and we can move at a gentler place as we grow into the people we were intended to be. But not too slowly, because time with climate change and global warming, is quickly running out. We can ignore the Imp, or maybe we can make him work for us, by motivating us just enough, without enslaving ourselves to his vile, hectoring message of hate.

Healing Trauma: Perspectives And Attitudes, 18

It isn't all bad and dark. We have to cling to what is good, in ourselves and in others. There is a lot of good in the world. It isn't enough to just ignore the crap, because that is always going to be with us. But what about the diamonds in the horseshit? They are there. There are people among the self-absorbed doofuses who shine like little beacons. Some of those self-absorbed doofuses themselves actually sometimes shine like little beacons. Then they turn back into idiots again. We are not categorically good or evil, but each one of us has tendencies towards both. I think we are just often too lazy or tired or self-interested or impatient to choose the good, or at least the better. So, we have a lot of human virtue getting squandered into applying Band-Aids. The food banks, for example, are a Band-Aid. They are still necessary and it is a charity I support, for the simple reason that people have to eat. I have never had to rely on food banks myself, though I have been desperately poor. Even when I was on basic welfare, I still managed to get by with enough to eat. I did have to make trade-offs and sacrifices. I didn't even take the bus anywhere, because bus fare was too expensive. I got lots of exercise but it was rather difficult looking for work. I didn't have a phone, but subscribed to a voice mail service for people on low incomes. Twenty-five dollars a year. Saving quarters for pay phones for accessing my messages could be a challenge. Fortunately there were a couple of free community phones available, one in my neighbourhood. My rent was also incredibly cheap. For clothing, I was very lucky, since I tended to find stuff everywhere, including in a free box in front of the vintage clothing store belonging to a woman who bought some art from me. I also bought clothes second-hand. So, I did have enough to eat. Being vegetarian also seemed to help. But it wasn't easy, and before any of you think of making me into a poster child for not raising welfare rates, let me remind you that no one should have to make the tradeoffs and sacrifices that I had to make in order to basically survive. There were also kind and caring and helpful people all along the way, who sometimes would quickly turn back into selfish idiots. But the whole problem here is with our system of social and economic supports. No one should have to struggle the way I did, and now that it is even harder to stay alive on so little, we really need and deserve something with more dignity and respect. But the problem isn't just with our broken and dysfunctional systems. We are the problem. We are unfinished, wounded, carrying tons of ancestral baggage, and just too self-centred and tired from having to cope with it all, or so it seems, in order to enact lasting and redemptive change on our systems of government and social cohesion. But things still have to change and they only will begin to change and develop in healing and holistic directions once us humans start doing the same for ourselves and each other.

Healing Trauma: Perspectives And Attitudes 17

We get the government we deserve. I have long played solitary ping-pong with this idea. I first really gave thought to the notion early in my social and political activism. I was a green twenty-seven and our province was being rocked by political controversy. Some of the early neoliberal reforms (sorry about misusing the word "reforms") were being implemented by our centre-right government, the Social Credit, or Socreds. There are many contenders for the origins of the quote, Alexis de Tocqueville, among them. It was 1983 and I really wanted to know what was going on in our legislature in Victoria, the provincial capital of British Columbia, the province where I live. The legislature was in session so I came in and sat in the viewing gallery. I was appalled. The simple rudeness and lack of even the most basic civility and respect between the legislators and the opposition were, to say the least, disheartening and I walked away in disbelief, thinking that since enough people in this province voted those clowns into power to justify the maxim, then, yes indeed, we really do get the government we deserve. But do we all deserve this kind of government, the many who don't vote for them, even if we don't constitute the majority? I don't think so. But this is one of the huge flaws in our democratic process and system. There is also Sir Winston Churchill's famous quote : 'Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’ Churchill, like all good conservatives (if there is such a thing) was very backward looking. He wouldn't have been particularly interested in trying anything new. If it ain't broke, don't fix it (though I think he might have said that rather differently). Democracy isn't bad, and yes it is an improvement over...totalitarianism?...absolute monarchy?...Shariah law implemented by a fundamentalist theocracy? I think it's wonderful that everyone gets to vote. Even the most ignorant and backward, even the most hateful and bigoted, even the least educated and most likely to think with their reptilian brain. Which is precisely how the Great Deplorable got to stuff his orange face with Big Macs inside the Oval Office. And it goes without saying that one year later, after all the atrocious misgovernment of the Dump Administration, those same ignorant, backward dumbasses who voted him into power have reported that they think he is doing a good, if not great job. What's wrong here? I think that our deficit of real democracy says a lot about what a mess we are as human beings. This isn't, by the way, to insinuate that everyone who voted for Hillary Clinton, or here in Canada for Justin Trudeau, are shining examples of perfected humanity, either. But what is it that motivates us to misuse what small power we have so that it works not only against the better interests of society and of the condition of our planet, but our own individual needs and concerns as well? I think that the critical flaw in the democratic process is that this tends to empower also those who should not be trusted with that kind of power, even if it's the power of but one solitary vote. We are not ready to govern ourselves. We are still too damaged, too ignorant, and too half-formed to be entrusted with this privilege. But I also have to agree with Churchill, that as awful as democracy is, all its antecedents are even worse. I can think of only one solution, Gentle Reader. No, I am not going to propose that we install a benevolent dictatorship with Yours Truly at the helm, unless we really want to exploit our collective death wish. Rather, might it not be better to think of ourselves as well as our various forms of government as being a work in progress? We are flawed and damaged as human beings. Every last one of us. We tend to use mental illness much as some of our ancestors pilloried witches and heretics: as scapegoats on which we can all dump our collective sins, darkness, garbage and brokenness and banish them to the outer darkness, be it the dungeon and the stake, or the mental health wing of the local hospital. Our choices are all going to be formed and informed by our life experience, and coloured, stained and warped by our collective fear and self-hatred. There will always be governments being elected that we disagree with or even hate. There will always be plenty of ignorant, fear-hobbled citizens around ready to do this. But we also share a huge collective responsibility: we have to make ourselves teachable, and we have to be willing to learn: other ways, new ways of living, of doing things, of governing ourselves, of living together. I have long believed that so much depends on our ability to see that we are really all in this together, and that whether we rise or fall, we are going to rise and fall together. I say, take the chance of casting your vote, and living with the results. And regardless of which set of dumbasses ends up ruining our country for the next four years or so, we still have to live and work together, and whatever is done with our scant resources, there surely must be ways of multiplying our scant loaves and fishes into a beautiful feast that all can share in (vegetarians like me can eat tofu). I think it is possible to be motivated by love, which alone will conquer the hate and fear that is running roughshod across our earth, and I think that there are good people doing wonderful things, and all we need to do is find these people, focus on them, learn from them and imitate them.

Healing Trauma: Perspectives And Attitudes 16

What I find concerning is how slow we are. Of how many of us just stumble and muddle along as though nothing is wrong. Of how many people still drive their cars, buy new ones, and whine off at the mouth with their usual First World Problems about high insurance premiums and parking fees. Of how many idiots still take fossil fuels for granted as though they are always going to be there for us and that even if our use of them is destroying our planet, and eventually us, nothing really has changed as long as we can get to our hockey practice, our yoga studio, the mall, or fill in the blank. We still use plastic bags and other single use disposable products with impunity, and oh the mighty and strident whine that rises up to heaven when anyone suggests a carbon tax or a ban on plastic bags or on single use paper coffee cups! Climate scientists give us, generously, until 2050, more likely 2030, before things have gone beyond no return. There are already several climatologists who believe that we are now past that point, and that we are going to have to white-knuckle it and cope with what is going to be a very bumpy ride. In the meantime, our cities are full of comatose dumbasses who go on with their lives as though nothing has changed. Who are those dumbasses? Who is that woman with the single use coffee cup, glued to her smart phone? Who is that guy who just asked the checkout clerk for four plastic bags, apparently not even thinking of carrying in his backpack a cloth reusable bag? Who are those people who live as though nothing has changed, nor ever will change? Why are they so unaware? Who raised them, who educated them? What do they do for a living? Where are they from? Why do they act and live as though they neither care, nor would it make a single difference whether or not they did? It seems that the majority of those who are doing anything about addressing climate change constitute, demographically, a very narrow minority: highly educated, mostly white people who graduated in the liberal arts and in the environmental sciences. The rest of us? We have a of catching up to do, those of us who are willing to unplug from our phones, our cheap entertainment and whatever we take, drink or do to get ourselves through the night. The first thing we have to do is work on ourselves, examine our values, our attitudes and how what we are doing, or neglecting to do, is going to impact on others, the environment, and ultimately on ourselves. What drives me close to despair is the very logical fear that not enough people are going to be up to the task. They are simply too happy, comfortably drowning in our culture of addiction, be it tech-addiction, shopping-addiction, gambling, drugs or craft beer. We have to stop drugging ourselves and begin facing our inner void and to reckon with our pain and emptiness and loss, if we are to begin this turn around. Before we can begin caring for others we need to start caring for ourselves, and this has absolutely nothing to do with numbing our pain and everything to do with facing ourselves in the cold brilliant daylight of truth. The truth shall set us free.

Healing Trauma: Perspectives And Attitudes 15

I am what could be called an eternal optimist. I believe that we will work it all out. I believe that we will get to a better place in our lives and in our world. I believe in happy endings. I also believe that I have an invisible friend named Jesus. I actually do believe this, and some of you, Gentle Reader, might be already shaking your heads in despair, or switching onto Facebook, or googling Richard Dawkins! But I hope against all hope. It is a matter of being patient. It is a matter of enduring. It is a matter of refusing to abandon all hope, regardless of all circumstances and evidences to the contrary. Despite the Great Deplorable in the Oval Office. Despite Facebook, Twitter, and the endless army of dolts, doofuses, dorks, douchebags and dumbasses all stepping in dog shit and getting hit by cars (natural selection, anyone?) while texting their way to a likely early grave along the crowded and busy city sidewalks of life. I still have hope. Despite the two point six million paper coffee cups that end up in the landfill here in the City of Vancouver every WEEK. Despite all the plastic bags I see groceries filling up in the supermarket because the vast majority of shoppers simply don't care enough to bring cloth reusable bags. Despite the stubborn lazy and entitled idiots who refuse to leave their cars at home, or simply get rid of them. Despite those same idiots adding every day to the carbon emissions that are poisoning our atmosphere and contributing to global warming. Despite the overwhelming population of stubborn carnivores who would rather enjoy their steak than consider the harm that raising animals for meat is having on the environment. Despite the raging fires, floods, hurricanes and rising sea levels that are but the beginning of sorrows as we begin to face the music and pay the piper. What's wrong with us? Well, almost everything. We are the bastard children of Prometheus, the Greek Titan god who against the judgment of Zeus gave humans the gift of fire. We are the bastard descendants of the Garden of Eden, feasting on the forbidden fruit of the knowledge of good and evil when we were too innocent and too immature to be able to live with the consequence of our acquired god-like brilliance. And we have carried our arrogance and hubris throughout our sad and troubled history, each generation adding to the trauma and sorrows brought on by its antecedent, our ancestors, and now us, their children tracking our bloodied footprints across the surface of our wounded and troubled earth. Oh, but nobody's perfect. How many times do we have to hear, much less give voice to, that lamest and most puerile of human excuses for human inaction? Of course we're flawed. Of course we are prone to error. Of course we are all almost incredibly and incurably stupid, slow learners, selfish and self-destructive dunderheads. So instead of trying harder, instead of getting off the couch, butting out, getting educated, informed and finding out what we can do to help heal ourselves, our humanity and this planet, instead of getting off Facebook and porn sites, instead of rising to the challenge of being even marginally better people, most of us do nothing. Or...maybe it's a little more complicated. When we consider the global and market forces at work, and how they manipulate, brainwash and enslave us, of how smartphones have been intentionally engineered to trigger dopamine enhanced addictive behaviour, of how subtly we are induced to spend money and buy garbage we don't need, of how our education and diminished culture facilitates ethically challenged behaviour that has become alarmingly collective. If we are going to change then we have to empower ourselves. In order to empower ourselves we need to educate ourselves. This means time, effort and attention. We are producing one of the most attention deficit generations in our history, thanks to their enslavement to technology, a technology governed by market forces with absolutely no ethical investment in our humanity and only a fiscal investment in maintaining their bottom line and fattening their profit margins. At our expense. It is the responsibility of those of us who know better, those of us who are already aware of the issues to walk our talk, to put our values into motion and to educate others, despite the indifference, despite the narcissistic inaction, despite the pushback. I was telling a friend yesterday that when I hit fifty, I was suddenly confronted with the reality of my impending mortality. I am in my sixties now. Even if I live another forty years or longer (and just to spite all of you, I might last even longer than that!) Every single day now I am reminded that I have one day less on this planet, and that eventually I too am going to die. Every day I try to decide to the best of my ability to be the best person I could possibly be, despite my limitations, my weaknesses and flaws, despite my many chronic imperfections. This is what motivates me to keep going, to get cracking and to talk to people, to try to treat others with kindness, to do what I can to live and speak in a way that will inspire others and will bring out their best selves, to somehow influence myself and others to do what we can, even in the tiniest steps, to slow this process of collective annihilation, and maybe even to reverse it. This is why I write this damn blog. And now I am talking to you, Gentle Reader: Stop making excuses and get off your ass!

Healing And Trauma: Perspectives And Attitudes 14

Does anyone remember the late Gerald Le Dain of the famous Le Dain Commission for the decriminalization of marijuana? He was the Chief Justice appointed by Justin's Dad, then prime minister Pierre Trudeau to oversee a federally funded study on the decriminalization of pot. He is in the news now. It wasn't really mentioned until now that he ended up suffering from depression caused by overwork. He was eventually hospitalized, recovered, but unable to get his position back with the Supreme Court of Canada because he was considered damaged goods. This I find alarming. It also suggests to me how far they have gone in pathologizing not only mental illness (how's that for an oxymoron!) but even more so those who suffer from it. I think that if we really want to go all the way on getting rid of stigma then we have to be prepared to re-examine our perceptions and definitions. Can we really call someone sick when they have a mental health diagnosis, in the way that we call someone with cancer or advanced heart disease sick? I don't think so. There are many reasons and causes for mental health challenges. Often the causes begin in early childhood, especially where there has been a history of childhood abuse and neglect. But the person with the diagnosis has had to reorganize their way of thinking and perceiving in order to cope, often with horrific emotional injuries. Or maybe that is simply their inborn wiring. But instead of re-examining our social values, and reorganizing ourselves to be more human-based, more humane and compassionate, we simply all get swallowed up in the same mad death dance of competitiveness, greed, and performance anxiety. We want to look good for our peers, our mates, our families, our bosses, posterity. We want to be not only our best but the best. This mania to perform, out-perform and excel and exceed all previous expectations has itself taken on the dimensions of a huge collective mental health disorder. Some survive, some don't. No one comes through unscathed. We have a historical, cultural and vocational allergic reaction to weakness and vulnerability and anyone who shows blood is going to get ripped to shreds. This has to be further and more deeply addressed. In the meantime, I am thinking of a brief conversation I had once at a Saturday afternoon soiree some ten years ago. It was with an elderly and evidently very angry lesbian. We were talking about how far everyone had come in LGBTQ rights, especially with the recent legalization of same-sex marriage. I mentioned that now it's the turn of people with mental health issues to gain inclusion and respectful recognition. The old lesbian suddenly snarled, and spat out these words, "Well, at least WE are not sick!" It was a very short conversation.

Healing Trauna: Aperspectives And Attitudes 13

Now that I know that my diagnosis of PTSD was, if not bogus, then quite exaggerated, I do have to be prepared to live up to this claim. Or enjoy dining on several generous portions of crow with humble pie a la mode for dessert. Accepting the recovery propaganda of recovery through small steps while expecting triggers and occasional relapses, I rather persuaded myself that I would always remain, if not ill, then not completely well. Buying unconsciously into workplace stigma, since there is a tacit, embedded assumption that mental health peer support workers are going to be somewhat unwell, or, damaged goods, I became semi-reclusive. Often I felt afraid of going out in the evenings or late afternoons, for fear of being triggered by all the stupid crowd behaviour in my downtown neighbourhood. This nearly occurred yesterday. While on my lovely and long daily outing, I ended up unable to source the coffee beans I was wanting to buy. Stopping to chat for fifteen or twenty minutes with a friendly rich woman out raking the leaves outside her mansion also persuaded me to postpone stopping at the local No Frills. I thought I'd go tomorrow (now, today) instead. So, I arrived at home, tried to live with the likelihood of no tomatoes with my dinner, nor coffee in the morning, and simply got on with things. Until...I could see reflected in some of the windows outside the colour of the sunset, and decided, to hell with it, it's just 4:45, I'm going to go out and look at the sunset, and while I'm out, I'm going to the nearest café on Davie Street where I can source the coffee beans of my desiring, stop and buy the damn tomatoes, and some fruit too, put up with the idiots on the sidewalk, and see what kind of tailspin this sends me in. I was out for around forty minutes. There were idiots on the crowded sidewalk. They didn't trigger me, they were just annoying. It's just that I had internalized stigma. I think all the idiots on the sidewalk had always been only annoying, but somehow I had transformed normal irritability into a trigger for imagined mental health symptoms. I did think of going home by a quieter route, but this felt like the coward's way out, so I walked back on Davie Street. Basically, I enjoyed being out. I quietly laughed off the idiots, and got home okay. Unwinding was easy, I wrote an affectionate email to one of my Latino friends while cooking dinner, relaxed for the evening and went to sleep at around 9:30. I slept beautifully with interesting dreams. I woke early, just past 5 am. And the sunset yesterday was lovely. The coffee this morning was pretty good, too. Peruvian, Fair Trade, Organic.

Healing Trauma: Perspectives And Attitudes, 12

I sometimes spend a lot of time on Skype and email, doing language exchange with native Spanish speakers who want to learn, practice or improve their English. I'm currently in touch with a few individuals from various parts of Latin America. One of the Colombians is rather inconsistent, but I have become used to this. The other Colombian and I are in contact several times a week. I have just begun conversing with a man who lives in Venezuela. I have conversed on Skype and by email with people who live in Colombia, Mexico, El Salvador, Venezuela, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Honduras, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Cuba and Spain. Not a bad start. Some have become long term friends, some, I hope will be lasting friends, many have disappeared for one reason or other. There have also been occasional idiots, but they are a rarity, unless they are English language students living in Vancouver, most of whom I have found to be pretty deplorable. They are usually living away from Mommy's lap for the first time in their lives and even if they are in their thirties (Latinos live in the family home for a long time after graduation) they'd might as well be teenagers. I can't say that the people I have met and got to know are bona fide representatives of their countries and cultures for the simple reason that they all come from the middle class. The very poor campesinos and working class people in those countries don't often have easy access to the Internet. Still, I feel that I learn more from these friendships and conversations about Latin America and Spain than I would from reading textbooks or watching documentaries. We have in most cases met on the Language Exchange page on the Internet. It is a very simple and effective premise. We pair up and help each other in our respective languages. I get help with my Spanish and they get help with their English. It is an amazing way of making new friends, as well, I think that because language is such a window onto culture. Language is also a door that opens up onto the human soul. There is something particularly special about my friendships with my Spanish-speaking friends, and I think that this could be because language touches so deeply on who we are, our identity, our history, and that delicate and complex and subtle dance between individual persons and the collectives of the cultures and the nations that help form our identity. Working on language together forces us to open up and be mutual vulnerable. We are teaching and learning from each other, which makes essential mutual humility and vulnerability, with a lot of grace and respect. Of course I am not going to name any of my language friends here, but I will mention a few hints that they alone will be able to identify, and I hope will read, as an anthem of my appreciation to them. I will simply name them by their countries: Peru, Venezuela, Colombia and Costa Rica. Colombia has a few representatives, but because the fellow I am currently in contact with is very consistent and reliable there is already a friendship developing. We have only known each other for a short time but already his humour and his strength of character reflect aspects of his culture that I greatly admire. I hope that we can be friends for a long time to come. Peru lives here in Vancouver, and he has become such an open window to his culture and history to me, as well as a deeply trusted and respected friend. Venezuela now lives here and her open heart and generous spirit and honesty assure me that the people of her country will make it through this dark night they are going through. Costa Rica lives in the mountains of his beautiful country with his family. I stay in their bed and breakfast when I visit. He is patient, sincere and very kind and to me our visits and conversations reveal much of the heart and history of his country and people. I sometimes try to get the longer view of my journey with Spanish. Why am I doing this and where is this going to take me? I don't give it a lot of thought because the journey itself is so captivating and I don't want to lose the joy. I am quite fluent now, and of course there is always room for improvement. I think the door has already opened and maybe I am waiting to acquire the courage to walk on through.

Healing Trauma: Perspectives And Attitudes 11

I am going to air some workplace laundry on this blogpost, as an example of the impact of workplace stigma on people who work in my position. I have mentioned previously in other parts of this blog that mental health peer support workers earn vastly less than a living wage, frozen at twelve dollars an hour since 2010. While my city, Vancouver, has become impossibly expensive to live in, those of us who work in vulnerable situations with vulnerable adults and little and often no support from our supervisors are expected to subsist at a starvation wage that now pays us sixty-five cents above the minimum. As contracted workers we have no rights, privileges or benefits. There has long been a tacit expectation, thanks to workplace stigma, that peer support workers shouldn't need a living wage since we are all going to be receiving a disability pension, that in itself pays a whopping thousand bucks a month. Even with the addition of a low wage for doing part time work, the best paid peer support workers are still going to remain well below the poverty line. Unlike our unionized colleagues, who earn three times or better (I don't have the stats available and they just don't like it when we do this kind of math!), we have to make do on very little, doing similar or identical work to our much better paid colleagues, yet being paid a pittance for our efforts. The excuse of course is going to be that wages should be commensurate to training and education. However, when we are not even getting paid a living wage, without any promise or likelihood of getting even a tiny raise, then this implies a certain unspoken contempt. I no longer have a work phone. It died over a month ago. Generally peer support workers are not given mobile phones. Not only can they not find the funding to pay us a decent wage, but trusting the kids with a phone? Don't even think it! In my case an exception was made because, unlike a lot of peer support workers, I do this full time and have often found myself in situations where not having a phone on the ready has impacted my ability to work well with my clients and colleagues. They managed to find me one. When that phone died three years later they found me a new one. Now, I am suddenly informed that they can no longer do this for me. And this is making it difficult for me to do my job well, as I cannot connect with clients when they are needing to hear from me in order to confirm arrangements and remind them of our appointments, neither am I easily available to my supervisors and coworkers, since things often change on the ready and we need to be easily available for these updates. They leave us on the dust heap of institutionalized stigma and expect us to stay there and just suck it up. Well, they had better be prepared for some of it being spitted back, and that is exactly what I am doing on this blog. here is a sample of my recent communications with my supervisors, any identifying information being edited out, of course: "Not the greatest news, and the way they use our status as contract workers for this kind of wiggle room I find troubling, and this is going to make my job difficult.   If they would pay us a decent wage then I could afford to get my own phone, but on twelve dollars an hour I don't think that would be realistic as I need my landline for door entry  for visitors, so I can't give that up and replace my landline with a mobile device.  I have been lobbying between the Ministry of Health and the Consumer Support Office for a living wage for PSW's.  If they really valued and respected us and the kind of work we do, then I am persuaded that things would be rather different, but they are not, and there is very little likelihood that anything is going to change before I retire in three years. I am seriously considering getting the news media sources involved in this.

Healing Trauma: Perspectives And Attitudes, 10

It is almost impossible to get through to some mental health workers about their attitudes and perspectives towards clients. They are some of the principal vectors of stigma and pathologizing. Not all. I did chat briefly yesterday with one colleague who seems particularly diehard at elevating himself above the client. I of course cannot divulge any clinical information on this post because of confidentiality as well as my desire to protect my clients' privacy. That said, this particular case manager began describing to me the client in the most professional and patronizing terminology. I don't for a minute doubt that he was correct on some details, but his tone I found his tone arrogant and offensive, neither did he seem at all interested in appreciate my observations on how well this client is doing (we meet every week for two hours. This case manager sees him maybe for fifteen minutes every three months or so). He clearly does not like this particular client (the feeling is mutual)and when this happens it can be very difficult for the client to get the treatment and the support that he is really needing and deserving. This is one of many reasons for taking mental health treatment out of the pathology matrix and to start treating each person not as a patient, but as a person deserving of respect with all the support available to help that individual get through their issues, without getting stigmatized, and to move towards developing their full human potential. Case managers and psychiatrists tend to be absolute blockheads concerning the humanity of the client who is often degraded as a construction of symptoms and dysfunctions that need somehow to be managed and controlled. Peer support isn't merely about walking in the clients' shoes because we have also been ill. It is also about challenging and busting stigma, even when it is being perpetrated by our alleged superiors. In order to make us into an innocuous and nonthreatening presence we peer support workers are often looked down upon as clients, not entirely well, and the same stigma that is projected onto our clients is also imputed onto us. And many peer support workers by buying into the stigma and internalizing it, merely make things even worse. And if you happen to be someone like me, Gentle Reader, then you are going to be a real deal-breaker. I never was mentally ill to begin with. I was misdiagnosed and my endocrinologist agreed with me that my symptoms of pituitary and thyroid malfunction could easily have been misread as symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Well, I am still qualified to do peer support work. Even if I have never had a real, bona fide mental illness, I have certainly coped with my lion's share of stigma for purportedly having a mental illness. And this is what I have to offer my clients, especially those, who like me, have been misdiagnosed, especially for being socially and economically vulnerable. We will challenge and put to flight this vile shadow of stigma, mentally ill or not, because, you know what? We deserve better. And we are going to claim what is ours. And if we have to, we are going to take what is ours, because now the time has come for a new era in mental wellness. From the medical model, to the recovery model to.....EMPOWERMENT!!!!!

Healing Trauma: Perspectives And Attitudes, 9

What never fails to get me is the way the dominant culture becomes the template for all that is considered good and normal and healthy. In order to cope with the trauma and damage that marks us all equally as broken and imperfect human beings, everyone seems to go into a state of torpor, or collective denial and instead we target as ill or damaged those who deviate from established norms. Even if their behaviour is harmless it is still socially incorrect and therefore they are targeted, shunned and scapegoated, sometimes punished and openly abused. I have noticed in my own work with clients how much pressure we are under to encourage socially normal behaviour and to try to motivate socially appropriate behaviour and that this often becomes the grid for gauging wellness. I know that some people`s behaviour can be challenging to be around, even if there is no threat implied. For example, a martial arts enthusiast who is also a mental health consumer could have a compulsion to do wild and intense Kung Fu kicks and jumps in the middle of the sidewalk. People are going to be alarmed, frightened and made uncomfortable by this and naturally anyone working therapeutically with the individual will do their level best to discourage him from acting out this way. Working well with this kind of person is a challenge. One does not want to discourage her from expressing herself. On the other hand, a legitimate feature of good mental health recovery does involve social adaptability. Where I would tend to differ from my bosses is in the emphasis that is given to social conformity as a sign of recovery. Some inappropriate forms of expression are relatively benign. However one needs to know where to draw the line. Mass shootings are out. So is running naked in public. Nothing wrong with the human body, by the way, and some are downright lovely to behold. There are others who, for the sake of public disgust, really ought to remain fully covered from head to toe, preferably in a burka (they need not be Muslim or female, just shamelessly ugly!) but here I digress, Gentle Reader. I would go as far as to say that the ability to read and respect social cues is in itself a sign of mental wellness, as well as being decenct, respectful, and showing a telling and admirable lack of douchebaggery. Then there is singing in public. I enjoy singing and when I am walking in the forest or in a quiet neighbourhood, I often enjoy singing Christian hymns and songs of worship. I try to avoid that people hear me, though I do sing well and have been a welcome presence in a choir, but I don`t do this to perform, and I try to be discreet. If someone is approaching me, I lower my voice, or even stop singing, unless they happen to be yapping very loudly on their phone or whistling, then I am likely to unleash in their presence the Full Pavarotti (it always works!). I don`t think this is a sign of unwellness, this singing in public, since it is being done with consideration and sensitivity towards others. Neither am I interested in having an audience. I simply don`t care, since it is God to whom I am singing. There is one gentleman who appears to inhabit the South Granville and Fairview area of Vancouver, who sings Italian opera. Loudly. And beautifully. While walking down the crowded and busy sidewalks of Broadway and Granville Street. He appears blissfully unaware of those around him. Some pedestrians try to avoid or give him wide berth. Others seem intrigued, entranced or entertained. I love this guy`s singing myself, and as the weather gets warm in the spring I look forward to hearing him. Is he being appropriate? Hell no! Might he have a mental illness? Could be, but I really don't care. There is a fine dividing line between madness and art, and this line not only gets very blurry. In some places it disappears altogether. If we are going to be particularly effective in the way we deliver mental health services then we are going to have to open our minds a bit and expand our concept of what is normal and acceptable. And stay open to surprises. It is the surprises that teach and transform us.

Healing And Trauma: Perspectives And Attitudes, 8

I am today, manifesting a kind of behaviour that would make me suspect to the mental health industry. I have insomnia. It is 3:06 am and I have been up for an hour. I had a shower, cleaned my apartment, had some devotional time, made some coffee and now I'm waiting for my eggs to boil. My sleep has been broken like this for the past three nights, following a couple of weeks of almost seamlessly sound sleep. This is nothing unusual for me. Following breakfast I am going to curl up for a nap for a couple of hours, go for a long five mile walk then start my workday, this morning a meeting at 8:40 am, followed by two clients, a doctor's appointment, then another client. I expect to be quite whacked by the time I get home. I might even have a good full night's sleep. I am not particularly worried about this, by the way, and if any mental health clinician or practitioner or whatever impressive clinical title they want to be known by, even suggests that this is a symptom of illness, that perhaps I need medication, etcetera, then let me be the first to laugh in their face. I happen to know a thing or two about my sleep needs. I go through cycles of relative insomnia. I wake up after three or four hours, then I have to get up, start my day, have breakfast, then go down for another two or three hours for a nap. It isn't a perfect solution, but it works. I am also aware that the sleep difficulties usually arise with unusual stress. (Excuse me, the eggs are boiling) It is now nearly two hours later. The eggs didn't boil exactly, but the water they were in while on top of the stove. Details, details! Following breakfast I napped for more than an hour in my recliner chair. It wasn't exactly a sleep, more of a light doze while listening to a fascinating radio documentary about the current state of diversity in South Africa. I did dream a little bit, but really, I had five hours solid sleep during the night, thanks to getting to sleep super early at around 8:30. Now, about this insomnia, and why this doesn't make me mentally ill. First of all, there is plenty of clinical research that has found that human sleep patterns are varied and variable, and that there is a sizable population that has a natural segmented sleep cycle. I seem to inhabit this demographic and it has historical antecedents. Before we had electric lighting to keep us awake well into the night, people had a natural tendency of sleeping through cycles. They would fall asleep shortly after dinner, at nightfall, as there was simply not sufficient lighting for staying awake. Then many would wake up in the middle of the night, get up, do things, then go back to sleep for a while till the early morning and then get started with the business of the new day. In other words, a full eight hour sleep, from ten or eleven at night till six or seven in the morning, is a relatively novel concept brought on by industrialization, and doesn't necessarily correspond with natural human sleep cycles. So, don't expect to see me at the pharmacy counter, at least not for anything like that. I do of course have a pituitary and thyroid condition and today I will be seeing an endocrinologist for the first time in over a year. After I was hospitalized for almost a week almost three years ago because of a health breakdown allegedly from my malfunctioning glands, I was seeing a rather unhelpful endocrinologist every three months or so. I finally rebelled and refused to see this specialist, and only at the nagging of my health care provider have I agreed to see another endocrinologist, even though I'm feeling fine. I have also noticed that I am fighting cold symptoms for the past four days or so, and I am certain that this is a psychosomatic reaction to seeing a specialist whom I am going to instinctively associate with my hospitalization. Today is also the anniversary of my mother's death, which also often brings on sleep difficulties and physical symptoms. I'm not worried. These little farts in the road simply remind me of what I should already know by now: that I am a flawed, vulnerable and imperfect human being, nothing more, nothing less. And that as long as I take care not to stress or worry about this fact of mortality, I need not have to worry about making myself ill mentally, psychologically, emotionally or spiritually. In a viciously capitalist, brutally ableist society that celebrates strength, competition and winning, I think it is especially noteworthy that we recall, recognize and celebrate our human fragility, the brokenness that makes us so uniquely, so exasperatingly, and so beautifully human. And now I am going to have another little nap, Gentle Reader.

Healing Trauma: Perspectives And Attitudes, 7

Mental illness, as it is known and commonly defined, is nothing but a social construction. I am going to take liberty with a quote from the late Doris Lessing, who in her 1985 Massey Lectures series, "Prisons We Choose To Live Inside". chose as the title to one of her talks these telling words: "You Are Damned; We Are Saved." Or, one could say: "You Are Sick; We Are Well." Ah, the courage to come back. That is the name of the fancy-schmancy fund-raising gala put on by the mental health poohbahs in Vancouver every year. A special award and honours are given for the token-of-the-year award. The mental health consumer-survivor who has most become exactly the way society wants them to be. Completely adjusted, completely conformed to the current norms, doing well in work, in whatever. And I trust that the recipients of said award are generally pretty happy and doing well with their lives. Against all odds they have become successfully independent, they are going to school, working, they have started their own business, or, maybe they're not really doing any of those things, but they are taking their meds every day, participating in programs for rehab, activities and occupation, and especially doing well working with their peers to help them get off their medicated backside and back into every day life. There is nothing really wrong with any of this. There is also a lot that is right about it. However... It is concerning that people are being awarded for having, in their words, "the courage to come back." Come back to what? I want to ask. I have already elucidated ad nauseum that sickness is merely a collective projection of the diseased humanity that everyone shares in common. Instead of owning it, rather than face what is really wrong with us, because we are the functioning majority, we declare that there is nothing at all wrong with us. I`m alright, Jack, but I don`t know about you! Throughout our sad and troubled history we have always singled out the deviants, those who stray from the norm, demonized them, pathologized them, persecuted and stoned them, shunned and excluded them. Mental health clients are just simply the contemporary manifestation for this broadsided contempt. As a sop to how progressive and enlightened we are now, we don't shun them (well, not really), nor do we burn them as witches or cut open their chests as offerings to bloodthirsty gods. We simply try to cure them. We whisper in their ear how lovely it would be if they could just become like the rest of us. Human monoculture you know. Monsanto for sociologists. It is already known what monoculture does to ecosystems. Those vast plantations of soy, corn, cacao, oil palm, sugar cane, wheat, canola, or pick any one of your choosing, displaces the kind of species and species diversity that make this earth habitable. Similarly in society's approach to mental health wellness and recovery. Simply make them all as much as possible resemble happy little workers, consumers, people with families and regular jobs and very little likelihood to think very deeply about things and, hey presto! You have mental health recovery! Medicated, tamed, domesticated and made completely inoffensive. Law-abiding of course. And living out the rest of their lives in a perpetually lobotomized state. Just like the rest of us!

Healing Trauma: Perspectives And Attitudes, 6

I have long found it appalling the way the mental health system seems to bank on the low self-esteem of peer support workers. Many peer support workers are still chronically hobbled by internalized stigma, but this also appears to serve the agenda of our employers. I have also noticed that in one of my worksites, there appears to be a tendency towards hiring peer support workers who still don't present as fully recovered, or at least seem largely affected by internalized stigma. I even noticed this several years ago, while participating on an interviewing panel screening new candidates for the peer support training program. I was one of three, the other two being one of my supervisors and the then clinical supervisor of one of the sites where I work. We saw three candidates. I liked the first one, but the other two didn't want to consider her. They liked the next person, but I didn't think he would be suitable. We were unanimous about the unsuitability of the third applicant. The first applicant was a young woman, casually dressed, very pretty and athletic looking, friendly, warm, outgoing. I also thought she appeared confident and self-possessed. Even though as a candidate for peer support training she would have had to have lived experience of living with a mental health challenge, she appeared as though there had never been anything wrong with her. She also looked like just the sort of worker I would have wanted to have, as I thought she had really good energy and she did seem to radiate health and wellness. The others on the panel didn't like her, but didn't seem able to really articulate why. They seemed to take offense at her self-confidence. The second candidate, a man, seemed a bit slovenly, but also broken and very submissive looking. Full of internalized stigma, I thought, and this appeared to be exactly why both supervisors I was working with wanted to pick him. Their excuse was that a client would be able to relate to him, but to me, he had this crushed worm aspect that I don't think would have been very inspiring towards wellness and recovery. The third candidate I`ll say nothing about, except that we all found her deplorable. Let me give you a bit of a history. In terms of my own recovery, I never pulled off or occupied the role of mental health consumer and for the simple reason that I am not, never was and never will be a mental health consumer. I have never been a client of a mental health care team. I have never been a member of any of the organizations or societies that help and support mental health consumers. Only a couple of my many personal friends have ever been mental health consumers. I have never in my life been on any form of psychiatric medication, nor have I ever been hospitalized because of mental health issues. My recovery consisted of one appointment of fifty minutes every other week with a private psychiatrist for four years. Nothing, and no one else. When I asked my psychiatrist if I should think of myself as mentally ill he cautioned me to not be so hasty about this self-assessment. He at one point pronounced me recovered. Shortly after, he retired. We had been working together for four years minus two months. I was also advised that, even though I could ask that arrangements be made for seeing another therapist, that this would not likely be necessary. I had already been a peer support worker for two years when my therapist retired. He gave me some excellent coaching and training during that time, often exploring with me many of my scenarios with clients and benefiting me with his many years of invaluable experience and training. As I eased into my job I also came into an unexpected dilemma: being surrounded by coworkers still suffering from various degrees of self-pathologizing stigma, by osmosis I felt pressured to also view myself in this way. I found myself seeking in such simple difficulties and misfortunes as insomnia and worry, symptoms of lingering mental illness. I was like the proverbial frog in boiling water, when it is being gradually heated to beyond its lethal temperature. Our superiors, bosses, supervisors and colleagues all seem to expect us to be ill. In meetings I have sat through one meltdown after another by coworkers who didn't seem able or willing to accept that maybe they were just having a hard day, but instead of being adults about it, wanted to use their mental health diagnosis as bargaining chips for whatever extra concession or indulgence they wanted to gain. And this was condoned. It was when I began to travel and take other measures to develop a life that was not at all related to the mental health system that I eventually came to one startling conclusion: I was never mentally ill to begin with. Like many PTSD diagnoses, my diagnosis was bogus. I wasn't exactly well during that time and had some very messy emotions to work through. But only when I felt encouraged, even obligated to label those same emotional difficulties with the baggage of mental illness did I begin to feel trapped in this. I would say that in these last three or four years I have never felt so free from this nonsense of stigma. I think that by indulging and encouraging others to remain in this toxic but very comfortable miasma, the mental health system is doing a great disservice and rather than encouraging healing, wellness and self-empowerment, that persons who would otherwise be much stronger and much more independent now as fully functioning adults are still being kept in a semi-infantilized state of imagined illness, bowed down by the weight of stigma. This has to change.

Healing Trauma: Perspectives And Attitudes, 5

Yesterday I was Skyping with my new Colombian friend. He lives in Medellin which just twenty years ago was an axis city for the narcoterrorism that was sweeping that unfortunate and incredibly beautiful country. When I asked him about the current peace and reconciliation process he unleashed quite the verbal volley. I had been trying to encourage him to practice his English with me but he could only let loose for almost half an hour in his native Spanish expressing in very clear accents his cynicism and disappointment while venting his rage and sadness about the many flaws and hypocrisies in the process. Rather, it seems, a dog and pony show to make the Colombian government look good and benevolent. As he went on about how children and young people are being particularly impacted and as he waxed on about the vast social inequality in his country, for example the way the children of the bourgeoisie get sent off to safe havens in Europe or North America to study in good universities while the children of the campesinos and poor workers end up getting recruited and brainwashed and transformed into little more than child soldiers that are going to get their heads blown off, it was very clear to me that I had touched a nerve. He also seemed a bit miffed with me for wanting to conclude the conversation (we'd already been online together for almost one and a half hours) so that I could start dinner, but I could see that he was needing to vent and likely will want to vent some more about this very controversial topic during our next conversation, probably tomorrow. Stay tuned, Gentle Reader. I will probably not mention this to my friend, but I have previously written that it was during my first visit to Colombia, in Bogota, where I really became conscious of this whole phenomena of collective trauma. I find that it is not my place to judge, pontificate or form opinions. This is so not my battle, but to listen respectfully and without forming judgments when my friend, or any other Colombian wants to spout off about FARC and their equally dreadful government. These people have been grievously wounded by this half century of violence, kidnapping and extrajudicial killing and murder. What we can best do for them as friends is hear them out and continue offering our support for them while they struggle to find and develop their own solutions. This process of reconciliation is not going to be equal, neither is it going to be welcome to all Colombians, especially those who think that guilty members of FARC should be punished with hard jail time. This is going to take a long time. We need to be there for them and we also need to keep our smug mouths shut and learn something from the Colombian people, especially given how easy life is here in dear chilly old Canada.

Healing Trauma: Perceptions And Attitudes, 4

I have a friend who has lived with military conflict all his life. He is old now, and in order to respect his privacy I will write nothing that would identify him. He is a Jew who lives in Israel. We have spoken at length about the ongoing struggle between Jews and Palestinians. He doesn't take a solid position but mourns that no one is willing to compromise. This does seem like an unresolvable conflict and I am not going to pretend to know the answers. I am concerned about my friend. He is a very kind and generous soul and one who makes friends easily. I also have noted in our conversations a very negative cast about how he seems to view humanity. This I understand to be part of the fallout of living in a war zone. This is a clear manifestation of collective trauma. Imagine, all those decades living in a country that has to fight for its survival on land that has been stolen from others who languish now in squalor, in refugee camps and also have to fight for their survival. imagine devoting years with trying to heal this, to move for reconciliation or for mutual accommodation, and no one wants to listen to anyone. Never knowing when your head is going to get blown off, or people you love will get killed, while dealing with your own conscience that you are living on stolen land and that others are having to suffer now because of your government's policies. Here in Canada, if you are not aboriginal, or poor, it has been very easy to be seduced and won over by our current telegenic prime minister and his "sunny ways." I call Justin Trudeau, our current prime minister, or our rent boy on Sussex Drive, "Junior" for the simple reason that if his sophisticated international philosopher-playboy daddy hadn't been prime minister of Canada for fourteen years, then Justin would probably still be teaching English classes at an elite boys' school on the west side of Vancouver. I have nothing against either Trudeau, sonny or daddy. Pierre, in my opinion, was one of the best prime ministers in my lifetime, and I have high hopes for his darling and almost ridiculously pretty son. (Junior was born on Christmas Day, by the way, but let's not rub it in, eh?) However, they are both children and grandchildren of privilege. Neither one knows, or ever will know, what it's like to be marginalized, discriminated against, poor, vulnerable to police harassment, or unlikely to gain adequate housing, education or employment. Their mouths are full of silver spoons. And even though I am a white male Canadian, I have never been ever to cash in on so-called "White Privilege." I didn't have any of the advantages of the Trudeau's, and not having a head for business or entrepreneurship, I have had to settle for what to many would appear to be a very reduced and compromised quality of life. (I'm, not complaining or feeling sorry for myself by the way, since things have still turned out very well for me.) Unlike my Israeli friend, I do not have a sour or negative view of humanity. I have never had to live in a war zone. And the most important people in my life are themselves generous, positive and warm loving souls. And they haven't had it easy either. My Israeli friend calls this country "Paradise". He lived here for a while. I think I know what he means.