Showing posts with label Recovery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Recovery. Show all posts

How do we talk about the unspeakable : the necessity of Raw Truth as part of our advocacy for Survivors.

How do we talk about the unspeakable, atrocities that are perpetrated in war and …other forms of abuse and violence perpetrated against vulnerable populations..?



31,000 known murders, many more buried under the rubble, 2 million people facing deliberately imposed starvation, a call for ceasefire repeatedly ignored, billions witness the disgusting violence and maiming on their mobile phones.


Judith Herman has written on this in her book ‘Trauma and Recovery - The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Lewis_Herman


"“In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure no one listens.” 


“The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.” 

― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: 


“The ORDINARY RESPONSE TO ATROCITIES is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.


Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.


The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner that undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy. When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom.


The psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people simultaneously call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention from it. This is most apparent in the way traumatized people alternate between feeling numb and reliving the event. The dialectic of trauma gives rise to complicated, sometimes uncanny alterations of consciousness, which George Orwell, one of the committed truth-tellers of our century, called "doublethink," and which mental health professionals, searching for calm, precise language, call "dissociation." It results in protean, dramatic, and often bizarre symptoms of hysteria which Freud recognized a century ago as disguised communications about sexual abuse in childhood. . . .” 


― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/542700

The only way to describe atrocity is to describe EXACTLY what happens, for example, when a missile strikes a house, followed by another.


What happens in the milliseconds of explosion, fireball, blast wave, air suction and what that did to the peoples bodies in those moments, and what happens when the building collapses, what that does to the bodies on the moments, what happens when the collapse completes, what happens to the bodies crushed, what happens to the survivors, and their thoughts and feelings and sensations before, during and afterwards...


We can then listen to the first responders, neighbours and others who rush into help in what ever way they can, in particular when all they have are their hands and bodies to move rubble, extract survivors and bodies, take them to hospitals etc, etc, etc....


And then describe the way the person issuing the targeting command, location and number of missiles, and his or her command chain, and what happens when they clock off, and go home to their comfortable homes, to cook meals, play with their children, watch a movie, go to sleep, wake up and do it again.


Multiplied by the number of people adversely affected and all the down stream harms that follow, listening carefully to the survivors because their lived experience is first hand evidence  of what that was like...


We could also talk about the designers of the missiles, what research they did, how they tested the missiles, who they understood exactly what their designs do to people and buildings...


There are no adjectives to describe this. Just the raw honest data.


Justice and Repair

Judith Herman has recently published a follow up book looking at how Survivors think and feel about justice.

https://basicbooks.uk/titles/judith-herman/truth-and-repair/9781529395006/

“From one of America’s most influential psychiatrists, an “extraordinary” and “profound” ( New York Times ) manifesto for reimagining justice for survivors of sexual trauma


The #MeToo movement brought worldwide attention to sexual violence, but while the media focused on the fates of a few notorious predators who were put on trial, we heard far less about the outcomes of those trials for the survivors of their abuse. 

  

The conventional retributive process fails to serve most survivors; it was never designed for them. Renowned trauma expert Judith L. Herman argues that the first step toward a better form of justice is simply to ask survivors what would make things as right as possible for them. In Truth and Repair , she commits the radical act of listening to survivors. Recounting their stories, she offers an alternative vision of justice as healing for survivors and their communities. 

  

Deeply researched and compassionately told, Truth and Repair envisions a new path to justice for all.”


Survivors and Justice - a story of resilience, persistence, determination and humane spirit.


Here is a astonishing story of one person who was kidnapped as a child having already been sexually assaulted by neighbours, unbeknownst to his parents, because he was unable to speak.


https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/25/at-four-i-was-kidnapped-and-sex-trafficked-for-years-now-i-fight-for-the-powerless-and-win-every-case


"Although it happened more than 60 years ago, Antonio Salazar-Hobson remembers every detail of his kidnapping. He says that if he closes his eyes, he is instantly taken back to that hot Sunday afternoon in 1960 when he was a four-year-old boy standing with his brothers and sisters in the red dust of his back yard on the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona.

Nearby, at the bottom of a short passageway connecting the back yard to the road out of town, a car is idling.

A white man is leaning out of the window, calling Salazar-Hobson’s name. He is very afraid of this man and the woman sitting next to him in the passenger seat. His older brother and sister are also afraid. They have been told by their parents, who are out working in the fields, that they must not let Salazar-Hobson go anywhere with the couple in the car. He can hear the fear in their voices as they call out: “Thank you very much, but Antonio can’t come for ice-cream.”

Then, suddenly, the man is out of the car and moving at astonishing speed towards them. As the children stand frozen with terror, he swoops down on Salazar-Hobson, lifting him up and carrying him away. He throws him into the backseat and the car accelerates away, leaving his brothers and sisters screaming in the dust. In just a few hours, the car will have crossed over the border into California. It will be another 24 years before Salazar-Hobson sees his family again.

What happens to Salazar-Hobson in the time between his kidnapping and his return to his family is so horrifying that it is almost impossible to comprehend. After being snatched from his back yard, he is taken into a nightmarish landscape of sex trafficking, violence and exploitation, where the rest of his early life is spent in an endless loop of fear, pain and loneliness. 

Yet Salazar-Hobson’s story is so much more than the evil that was done to him. Rather than being broken by what he experienced, he instead rose from the ashes of his stolen childhood to accomplish extraordinary academic feats and become one of the US’s most successful labour rights attorneys, representing vulnerable and powerless communities, and dedicating his life to justice and compassion. “I chose not to be obliterated by the abuse and trauma I was forced to endure,” he says. “Instead of being swallowed by the darkness, I survived by walking towards the light.”"

Antonio when he was a young boy, working on the ranch.Photograph: Courtesy of Salazar-Hobson’s family phot


In Ireland the necessary process of Justice and Repair has been underway for 40 years and is as yet unfinished.  Many, many Institutions of Care entrusted to State and Church covered up the most egregious predation of innocents, men, women and children which enabled the predators to continue to cause avoidable harms to hundreds of thousands of vulnerable innocents for 70 years and more, since the inception of the Irish State.



Kindest regards

Corneilius

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Some thoughts on War as a policy of State Power

"True forgiveness cannot be granted until the perpetrator has sought and earned it through confession, repentance, and restitution."

and

"restoring a sense of social community requires a public forum where victims can speak their truth and their suffering can be formally acknowledged. In addition, establishing any lasting peace requires an organized effort to hold individual perpetrators accountable for their crimes. … If there is no hope of justice, the helpless rage of the of victimized groups can fester, impervious to the passage of time. Demagogic political leaders well understand the power of this rage, and are only too willing to exploit it by offering to an aggrieved people the promise of collective revenge. Like traumatized individuals, traumatized countries need to remember, grieve, and atone for their wrongs in order to avoid reliving them."

Judith Herman : Trauma and Recovery

http://www.amazon.com/Trauma-Recovery-Aftermath-Violence-Political/dp/0465087302


------

SONG FOR 1914 : THE CHILDREN WHO GO TO WAR

THE DEADLY GAMES OF POWER, THE PRIZE THE WINNER SEEKS
THE DUTY BOUND ARE MADE TO MURDER, THEY LOSE THIS GAME FOR KEEPS
THIS SLAUGHTER IS PURE CRUELTY, ALL WAR IS CHILD ABUSE
TO PREPARE THE CHILD HE MUST BE BROKEN, IT’S BEST WE FACE THE TRUTH.

ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, OUR FATHERS WERE TALKED TO WAR WITH PRIDE
LED BY POWER AND DUTY, FOR THEIR COUNTRY AND THEIR GOD THEY DIED
AND SO THEY BELIEVED, THEY HAD TO, OR THEY’D NEVER HAVE LEFT THEIR HOMES,
TO BE BILLETED IN WET TRENCHES, SOME BURIED BY BOMBS, SO MANY LEFT TO DIE ALONE

TO SERVE THE IMAGINED GLORY OF KAISERS, KINGS AND GENERAL STAFF
THEY RODE IN LINE, SANG IN LINE, THEY DIED IN LINE AND STILL THEY LAUGHED
THAT UPPER LIP, THAT STOIC SMILE, THAT SENSE OF DUTY HELD, AND LOST SO MANY LIVES
WHERE MEN WERE MURDERED IN THEIR THOUSANDS, AND DESERTERS WERE REVILED

YET THE DESERTERS WERE THE HONEST ONES, THEY SHOWED THEIR FEAR FOR REAL
NO MAN OUGHT GO TO WAR, WHERE THERE IS NO BEAUTY THERE TO BE REVEALED
ONLY THE BLINDED WILL GO THERE, ONLY THE BROKEN CHILD
ONLY THE MAN TRAINED TO KILL, ONLY THE BROKEN MIND

GRACE IN DANGER IS A LIE, IT’S A BLOODY, DIRTY CONFIDENCE TRICK
GRACE IN PEACE IS RESISTANCE TO THAT DREADFUL YET STILL CONSTANT MYTH
THAT WAR BRINGS A BETTER PEACE, A BETTER WAY OF LIFE,
THAT WAR IS SOMETIMES A NECESSITY, A NECESSARY SACRIFICE.

'TIS TIME TO END THESE FALSE APPRAISALS, 'TIS TIME TO TELL THE TRUTH
THAT THE POWER THAT WILL MURDER IS FOUNDED ON ACCEPTED CHILD ABUSE
THAT THE TRAUMA UNRESOLVED WILL CONTINUE TO CAUSE HARM
UNTIL THAT WOUND HAS HEALED WE WILL CONTINUE TO GO TO WAR.

______________

Two items that my readers might wish to explore, to investigate for yourselves, the truth of this piece.


1. Stefan Molyneux: a Radio Chat with a Veteran... moving, honest, revealing, worth hearing...

2. The Cycle of (Legal) Violence?
Child Abuse and Military Aspirations
MA Research Paper by Christopher Khawand
Florida International University 2009 - On the linkage between adverse childhoods and Voluntary Enlistment in Military...




Kindest regards
Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

Abuse and Resolution: an Urgent Question of Maturity

"The abused abuser is no defence - just a devious way of getting a lighter sentence. It is no excuse. "

I hear this often, and feel that more needs to be said or written on this.... as a Survivor,  I am absolutely focussed on prevention...

If we want to prevent abuse, we have to understand how and why it emerges. Otherwise we end up dealing with abuse AFTER a child has been abused, which is way too late....

There are writers, researchers and scientist/pratictioners who have outlined the dynamics of abuse and trauma (PTSD patterns) and the context of natural child development being disrupted very well, such as Alice Miller, James Prescott, John Bowlby, Gabor Maté , Marshal Rosenberg, Vincent Feletti, David Chamberlain, and others.

The basic theme is this : certain biologically mandated experiences and processes are necessary for the development of caring self empathy (sense of self) and caring empathy for others. these biological processes start with the child-mother bonding process, in the womb, at birth, infancy and toddlership... if these mandates are disrupted across a society, then statistically we see a massive increase in abuse, distress, psychological dysfunction.

In the research there is observed a direct relationship between the degree of disruption of the child-mother bonding processes and the degree of violence, hierarchy, religiosity, territorialism and abuse.

All of theses are further complicated by Trauma Events, such as war, poverty, racism, sexism, religion, climactic events esp. where there is no healing/recovery mechanisms and people are forced to cope with the situation.... the coping mechanism is appropriate in the midst of a trauma event, yet it becomes toxic if maintained after the event, if the trauma response becomes chronic... as we see in intergenerational trauma patterning, where the adverse affects of the trauma are passed down through the generations and are expressed even in a situation where the original trauma is but a dim memory, a story of legend or history..

The chronic stress associated with Hierarchically Violent Societies is profoundly damaging, even if the people within it become adjusted to it....

In order to prevent future abuse, it is necessary to support parents in ways that enable the child-mother bonding to be recognised and responded to with support.

It's also necessary to challenge all Government support for War (Trauma),

It follows that it's also necessary to challenge the status of Religious and State Indoctrination,

It becomes obvious that we need to alter State Education so that it becomes a forum for nurturing self empathy, autonomy and response ability (at core, Education needs to be democratised so the children take responsibility and are supported in developing that sense of responsibility, not through sanctions and bullying, but through respect and example...) and that it helps prepare children for becoming effective, nurturing parents as well as preparing them for a life of work...

It's also necessary to LISTEN to Survivors, for their insights are amongst the deepest in this area... as is their motivation to challenge abuse wherever it occurs.

Too often, 'normal' folk shy away from Survivors insights, from the darkness of their experiences at the hands of abusers, and this tends to lend weight to those who HYPE the issue, who contort the issue in ways that make it less likely to be resolved as part of a political ploy.

'Normal' folk also tend to have such a strong reaction and with it a desire to harm abusers, to punish them, which has nothing to do with the Survivors needs, nor the work needed to ensure prevention - it's usually an unconscious reaction of avoidance... it's easier to think of the abuser as someone to abuse (punish, kill, etc etc) than it is to face the pain, terror, harm and shame a Survivor has lived through and walk with the Survivor as a companion in their recovery.... and to then seek to understand how the abuser became the abuser and seek ways to prevent further emergences as best as possible.

If we are not focussed on prevention, then abuse will continue. Punishment is applied only to those few, and it is a minority, who get caught or are exposed.

Punishment satisfies a public's immature demand for justice and abandons all future children to potential predation as a hidden cost. This is unacceptable, morally and intellectually.

It's long past time for the discourse on abuse to mature, for those concerned with this issue to step up to the plate and confront it with clarity, commitment, maturity and grace.

I also think that abusers neurological 'wiring' and behaviour emerges out of their experience - they were not conceived with this in place. There is some evidence that certain kinds of trauma in utero and birth and infancy can alter a persons neurology in ways that if not recognised, and therefore modulated or attended to, can become the basis for the developing psychopathy.

In all cases of abuse perpetrated by an adult, we have to face the fact that the adult abuser has CHOSEN to abuse, that there is an element of volition and that this brings with it accountability, before those they have victimised and the community at large and that this accountability and consequences cannot be softened by our awareness.

Our awareness is about PREVENTION, about spotting the signs early on and modulating those children who show signs of psychopathy, of instituting a deeper society wide awareness of the need and basis for empathic parenting and empathic governance - they go together... this awarness is not to be taken to soften the consequences of those who have abused others, to excuse them.




Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

PTSD Culture and change or Recovery and Healing.

This graphic from LIVE LEAK shows the patterns and movement of kingdoms and nation states in Europe over 1000 years.... there is a subtext, one of PTSD affected Culture, which needs to be understood if it is to be changed.

1000 years of trauma, in the name of the 'nation state', the King or a Religion, mostly perpetrated upon the poor, the peasants, the workers, the children - though the rulers were not averse to slaughtering each other, they often collaborated in the slaughter of the poor, the peasants, the workers, the children.

It goes without saying that the preceding 14,000 years of Empire across the world is part of that same phenomenon.

This coping-with-trauma or PTSD has become Institutionalised, Nationalised as a myth of creation and has not yet been resolved, healed. The European Culture is a PTSD culture in almost every aspect. Christianity is absolutely a PTSD based religion, with it's focus on the dreadful torture of Christ on the cross, which is justified as a 'sacrifice' for all our 'sins'....
In the past 50 years, much scientific, clinical and anecdotal or informal work has been done on Trauma, on understanding the dynamics of PTSD and there ARE healing/recovery pathways that ARE known, that are being practiced and are very well understood.

However, that understanding has yet to penetrate Governance, mainstream 'economics', State Education systems or the Religions, (as well as grass roots activism, and the 'internetz' weird theories market) largely because the utility of the myth is essential to Power as we know it, and because Power dictates what children experience in schooling, as well as how parents treat their children amongst many other things.

Power determines conditioning. David Smail writes well on the matter of the day to day reality of distal Power - of the affects of decisions made by people who hold power, who are beyond the reach of those affected most by those decisions - the people of Iraq, the Metis/Indigenous peasants in South America with regard to US State Policy, ie the 'war on drugs' or the workings of social services and welfare in neo-liberal economies, where the poor, the disabled, the vulnerable are subject to Government dictats on 'austerity' and Media coverage void of empathy.

Until the grass roots understands this, how the culture into which we are born is a PTSD culture, and until activists deal with their own PTSD - be it direct trauma related or simple conditioning within a PTSD dominated environment, we will not see change. I believe that this process is underway, and that it will take a few generations to complete itself. The human/biological drive towards health is innate; this is a biological fact.

One of the reasons the Military Industrial Complex and Power pushes so much violence is that they KNOW what trauma does to people, and that enough people become so traumatised that they will continue the cycles of violence (Mujahadeen, 'rebels' etc etc etc) even when it is 100% irrational.... because it guarantees the continuation of their 'markets', and the politics and psychology of Power Relationships over Empathic Relationships and it undermines the potential healing of entire social structures, a healing which Power perceives as a threat. Indeed healing IS a threat to Power as we know it, yet the deeper truth is that that perception is a pathological one and the healing will, in the end, extend to include those with such a pathological view.

Given all that is known about PTSD, is it too much to seek, to demand, to work together so that Empathy is placed at the core of Culture, of Governance, with the welfare of the children (which is also directly linked to the health of the environment)  as the primary gauge of how well a society is, in physical, emotional and psychological terms, in both the short and long term?
If so, then why?

These are pertinent questions, and honesty is the only means by which they can be answered.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe