We live in a wounded world. We all know this, though it is easy to forget.
There is good in this world. I love my wife. Kindness, fun, and connecting with other people is awesome. I am often awed that I am alive, which does seem miraculous to me. I appreciate beauty in nature, the simple act of breathing, a touch, a smile, the warmth of the sun, a good story, learning something new and uplifting.
I wish to name the good before I dig into the hurt. I wish to dig into the hurt because I know it is needed to heal. I also know this can be hard. Trigger warnings are a lovely and caring invention; one I am not so fluent in.
It is the good in the world that actually let’s me know we are wounded. Wounds are what happen when wonders are taken away.
As a kid I was traumatized in a fire, where I felt my safety taken away from me. Then I was traumatized by bullying, where I felt betrayed by those I thought were friends. Growing up under capitalism I was overwhelmed with fear that I meant nothing and the only thing people wanted from me was to kill my soul in service to the rich. There were disillusions, confusions, and mistakes. I have struggled to remember the good in the face of the bad.
I became an activist, and trauma is common among activists. Hurt informs us of the need to heal. Healing sometimes calls for a fight. This fight requires bravery to act in the face of pain. I’ve faced Nazis and cops–supremacists and agents of supremacism. I’ve been attacked and arrested. I had my septum deviated and leg scarred. I was in Charlottesville when a Nazi drove a car into the crowd I was in.
The thing that has always felt hardest though, is simply speaking truth in a world that wants to deny it.
We are creatures of pretense; and what we pretend is that everything is ok even when we know it’s not. We pretend because that is what we need to do to get by. We pretend because we are taught that this is the greatest society humanity has ever imagined and that if something is wrong it must be with us. We pretend because, when the problem is us it makes us good consumers and we can attempt to buy our hurt away. We pretend because there is no socially sanctioned way for humanity to heal. There is no socially sanctioned healing because our society needs us wounded.
Dominators admit no wrongdoing, they must justify themselves, and to truly control the body you must control the mind. So we learn to see the world through a lens that justifies our own abuse. The poor are poor because they deserve to be. People of color just need to be respectable. Everyone can succeed if they work hard enough. These are messages from an abuser, intended to justify abuse. It inundates the air we breathe.
Everything is not ok.
Even in the best of circumstances trauma is a normal part of life. I remember realizing as a child, one day everyone I knew would die. I felt incomprehensible pain. Death teaches me fear; and it is a very normal part of life.
The scared child can be consoled that, in this imperfect world with fear, death, and pain, a loving human spirit pushes us to do what we can to make the world better for each other. I have been awed by love and kindness. I have also been disillusioned by cruelty. War and poverty constantly remind us how disposable people can be.
History is filled with the unimaginable–Genocide, the holocaust, slavery, plagues–the very knowledge that this is real is traumatizing. Normal human empathy allows us to imagine some portion of this suffering, and we probably imagine it more intimately if it is part of our family history. All of us are shaped by some story of pain so deep that the mind rebels from accepting it.
Unimaginable violence carries with it a further traumatic legacy. In the United States, neither enslaved Africans nor their descendants have ever been recognized as fully human by the society which tortured them. Can you see how much trauma is inside that sentence? The United States, our home–the place that is intimate to our souls and is ever eager to tell us about our prosperity–has been shaped by regular, legal, and normalized violence. And I want to be clear; although we are taught to fear and fight against “criminal violence,” the most damaging violence has always been legal and perpetrated by the powerful.
There has never been equality, and white statements of human equality have always been suspicious. In our post-slavery history there is so much we could talk about–mass incarceration, police brutality, Jim Crow, red-lining, sentencing disparities, employment discrimination, school neglect, gentrification–so much of it perpetuated by people who imagine themselves “progressive” and insist they are the “good guys,” and thus beyond reproach. The daily weight, the trauma, it is palpable. It is a presence that pulls its chair up at the dinner table and intrudes into every conversation, even as so many of us try to pretend it isn’t there.
Now think of the legacy of sexism. You saw the #MeToo stories? Think of that spread over thousands of years, of the suffering imposed on women and their struggle to survive. Think of torments inflicted on queer people, on the disabled, on the indigenous, on Roma, Jews, Muslims, atheists, on the working class and poor. Can you see how trauma is woven into the fabric of what we call “civilization?”
W.E.B. Dubois wrote about how white supremacist racism primarily hurts people of color but it creates a reflected injury in white people as well. I believe abusers are damaged by the abuse they cause. We destroy the good parts of our own humanity, the things that make us care for each other. I see this in white fragility and white saviorhood, and in how much we white people must fill our heads with stories, denials, and justifications so that we can pretend the skeletons in our closet aren’t there. Sexism hurts men (in my next post I plan to write about my own violent indoctrination into masculinity). There’s a lot of talk about our emotional alienation, for example.
On some level nearly all of us have been both perpetrator and harmed. Our collective trauma unites us and divides us. There is no impartial judge who stands above it all. All we can do is commit to heal together, which is also a commitment to our own vulnerability.
The well of trauma means we are all wounded. Being born means being wounded. For a world that can survive, healing must be a normal part of human growth. Unfortunately that is not a popular sentiment; mainly because we tend to not see the myriad ways that harm is normalized and we are complacent. We cannot fully heal from history while we are committed to a civilization that is exploitative and oppressive. What we can do is create and expand liberated zones. Zones that are revolutionary works in progress, ever struggling against a hostile world.
Healing as Public and Political Transformation
I am ill-equipped to say “here is how we heal from history.” I am struggling to find answers. One partial answer is to be honest about my limitations and failings.
Going forward I am going to try incorporating healing more into my writing and my organizing–and if anyone has good ideas for how to do that, I would love to hear it. But I also want to offer some additional thoughts.
In my last post I wrote about the limitations of hope. In that post I wrote, “If we could move beyond hope, we might even realize that what we really need is healing.” I was critiquing liberal gatherings oriented towards a fleeting hope that feels good in the moment but leads to nothing. I mentioned healing because I felt like healing might be what hope pretends to be. And this made me wonder, what if, when well-meaning people gather in public, we stopped putting effort into hope and put it instead into healing?
It strikes me that public healing (as opposed to private) is revolutionary.
Generally we treat healing as an individual’s responsibility to do on their own time. While individual healing is awesome it is also extremely limiting,
- Because it fails to address the scope of the problem. Hurt is not an exception applied to the rare individual who can’t adjust. We are wounded because we are forced to adjust to a world that often doesn’t serve us. We are systematically harmed as groups of people, but the collective nature of our harm can’t be seen when we’re only focused on individuals.
- Because our healing is relational. We wound each other. How much does solitary healing help our relationships? How much does it help with the complex web of relationships that makes a community a community?
- Because relying on no one but myself, possibly my partner, and my therapist (if I’m lucky enough to have access to one) enlists and depends on too few people.
I like self-help. I have learned cool stuff like how to better listen, how to manage my emotions, how to organize my time, how to visualize and strategize for what I truly want, etc. But for me, the question has always been, how can my healing be a service to others? To be an atomized individual trying to improve myself in isolation seems so profoundly pointless.
As a person, I crave care, support, love, connection, contribution, meaning, friendship, recognition, togetherness, and so many things that require a communal existence–a public life. What would it mean if I were part of a community where everyone truly prioritized learning from each other how to better listen, manage emotions, organize time, visualize, strategize, and constructively engage in conflict? What if this community also understood that the world itself is deeply wounded, and prioritized making a future that attempts to reverse the harms of the past?
Such community could not help but challenge the traditional ways of institutions; top-down hierarchy, worship of the written word, denying the importance of feelings, stratifying people into social groups where some are more valued than others, and the routine violence necessary to maintain unjust systems. It wouldn’t automatically cure these daily dehumanizations, but it couldn’t help but challenge oppressive ways because healing, especially in public, is active resistance of oppression.
I think we struggle to embrace public communal healing both because 1, we are individualist and discount the role that community plays in our lives. And 2, things like healing and community are considered feminine, and a root of much oppression is contempt for femininity.
Like everyone, I have been trained into femphobic contempt. My masculine training encourages me to fear the judgement of other men whenever I show appreciation for the feminine. I feel this both in mainstream society and in the revolutionary world. I think it easily leads to environments where we do not care for each other. I have learned to see people as a means to an end and have been frustrated with how people don’t simply do what I think they should. I have avoided showing my own vulnerability, like the fact that I live in constant fear. These are my failings which get in the way of community, healing, and the world I wish to see.
The opposition knows how fragile change-oriented communities can be. They are willing even to accept some losses knowing that, more often than not, the revolution fizzles itself out.
We can do better. As we face a turbulent future, as fascist forces shape our days, the strength of our community is the primary element to surviving and overcoming those whose politics are exploitative, unsustainable, and steeped in normalized brutality.
Some Caveats
It might sound as though I’m saying we must always keep in mind the overwhelming weight of tragedy, violence, and atrocity. Remaining mindful of suffering is central to my own spiritual practice. But healing must also include joy, celebration, fun, play, simple pleasures, connection, etc. Also, although I am claiming everyone is wounded, not everyone is wounded in the same ways or to the same extent.
People heal in different ways and have different needs. Healing in part means we must control our process. This means any sort of public healing has to be open to many paths.
The problem is that the normal alienation and dehumanization we live with requires regular denial of the harm which inundates us. Ultimately, those with institutional power tend to deny institutional harms. I have done this. It is easy to be defensive, and to avoid listening and learning, when someone is harmed by my actions or inactions and I have the power to diminish them.
We live in an overwhelmingly racist country. Most white people wish to deny this. Most men wish to deny sexism. Most rich people deny the unfair advantages that give them tremendous power over their actual equals. It is the role of the managerial middle class to be the experts who justify decisions and act as a gateway to control who is heard and who is discounted. It is normal both to justify the institutions that create this situation and to deny how harmful this situation is (this situation which could be called white supremacy culture, or capitalism, or Western civilization).
For me it has felt like everyone with power expects me to deny my eyes and ears; to pretend, to lie, to adopt a false and coerced reality. I experience this as a containment of my potential (as well as the potential of others); and the coercer rarely understands what they are doing.
I can talk, for example, about police lies and abuse as someone who has experienced it. But people who have not experienced it and generally believe in our institutions will shut me down when they start feeling threatened by my truth. What they do not realize is that their offense is not because we have different opinions, but because they are not willing to accept an inconvenient reality. A person with more power is able to deny the reality of a person with less, even though those with less power better represent the human majority (powerlessness is most people’s truth). In this situation political healing is impossible.
We don’t always have to face the suffering, but minimization compounds harm and prevents healing. It keeps us stuck in tragic patterns and stifles meaningful human progress. So; a healing space should not force people to do anything they don’t want to do, but it must also take an uncompromising stance against minimization.
I believe the primary political struggle of this era is between those who wish to heal from history and those who mostly align with the present status quo. This is not at all a struggle between Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives. Both parties represent the status quo, and our ruling ideologies are trapped inside that status quo. This is not a struggle for some undefined need for “change.” Donald Trump represents change for a lot of people but he certainly is not healing. The charge for healing is led, and has always been led, by the marginalized and oppressed. The struggle is between a survivable future and a dying past. One condition for victory is for enough people with power to recognize they also need healing, that the society we have built is dysfunctional for everyone, and we do need leveling and reparations–and again, though that may sound scary, it is about healing the injustice which harm us all.
Learning Liberation 