Healing Trauma: Perspectives And Attitudes, 31

To those of you new to reading this blog, let me make one thing perfectly clear: trauma does not refer specifically to post traumatic stress disorder. Nor does it single out any particular population of persons as suffering from a mental illness because of trauma. Trauma, as I use the word, refers primarily to the baseline of our human experience, ontological, cosmological, collective and individual. This presupposes that everyone who is a human being is somehow essentially damaged and wounded, that this is a historical condition and its roots are in the deepest prehistory of our species' existence. This also presupposes that what we call mental illness, especially where the experience of PTSD and trauma are concerned, is a social construct. It is a toxic and disempowering definition that stigmatizes those who have already suffered tremendously and inordinately. When an entire culture or nation undergoes inordinate stress, violence and tragedy: European Jewry until and during the Second World War, for example, African Americans, or the Palestinian people languishing in refugee camps, or the people of Darfur, or the people of Colombia, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Venezuela, the Rohingya of Myanmar, or pick any one and fill in the blank...We are going to have some very open and naked manifestations of this trauma that is our normative experience. It is that same experience of primal trauma that stays battened down and repressed in the middle class and bourgeois experience of life and almost extinguished among the obscenely wealthy and royalty. But it never leaves. This experience of trauma is us. Whether or not the scab is torn off it is the same bloody, suppurating wound. People whose lives have been scarred by the trauma of a mental health diagnosis simply make visible what normal society would like to keep covered, and pretend to have no existence. We are better than they, or so the well-off and comfortable lie to themselves and each other, while shilling useless programs and activities to the damaged and detritus of society that will keep them busy, maybe even make them a little bit productive, but not even with the courage to come back can they ever expect to be welcomed as "one of us." Their crime? Reminding us so openly through their suffering and open affliction of everything the rest of us want to keep covered, forget about and never be reminded of. I believe there is another word associated with this kind of scapegoating. That word is...SHAME.