Here's a few thoughts on healing.
Primarily that healing and recovery is as much a collective response, as an individual response: the whole matters. There is much about trauma is relayed through the ways in which power is mediated across this culture.
"I argued then that the study of psychological trauma is an inherently political enterprise because it calls attention to the experience of oppressed people. I predicted that our field would continue to be beset by controversy, no matter how solid its empirical foundation, because the same historical forces that in the past have consigned major discoveries to oblivion continue to operate in the world. I argued, finally, that only an ongoing connection with a global political movement for human rights could ultimately sustain our ability to speak about unspeakable things." ~ Judith Herman in Trauma and Recovery
So looking again at healing and recovery, we can start with the individual and look at mindful body work, that is to say working with the body, understanding the mind-body emotional biology, the workings in the relationship between experience, feeling, thought, understanding body chemistry and adaptive experience, with the intent to support healing through understanding what happened, what happens and through rebuilding healthy, stable neurology and endocrine balance through direct experience, exercise, dance, movement, massage, herbs etc....
Just accurate understanding, and caring support.
If the choice to use pharmacological tools is made, then at least let it be honest, informed consented and evidence based rather than as a management tool - it is useful to use such medicines as short term management, and worth finding ways to avoid usage that tends to become long term, to move from management of presenting symptoms towards healing and recovery, as much as possible.
Paying close attention to mindful body work processes so that they are more responsive to each unique case, and so that they can hand the power, share the responsibility to heal to he individual, building the trust that self healing, as much as professional expertise, can work together...
Using thought and action, movement, breathing, diet and other modes to rewrite traumatised neural networks, to allow old hyper alert routes to fall into non-use: aware that this is best completed within a safe environment, and assuring that other material support is made available as a proven route towards recovery.
Dealing with what's happened, and what is, and looking to the future, at the same time
It is critically important that as part of our shared future that we also deal with societal power dynamics that induce chronic stress - ordinary folk to not initiate war, poverty, famine, corruption, abuse of power. The power of institutions, and ruling networks are a source of much harm.
This is what happens when nurture is removed from the centre of human affairs. Power and it's maintenance undermine nurturant psychologies.
A culture that listens to children, that hears and engages with the heart of the child, that affirms the child's experience of self as her or his own, distinct and yet bonded, in what we call healthy attachment.
That has to be at the centre of treatment and social policy...
The inter-generational situational epi-genetic thread of trauma altered behaviour across entire populations is real.
A child can relax into true self, when she or he feels understood, received and cared for.
A child who is 'acting out' is not being heard, nor understood.
If that becomes a pattern, if the child's experience with adults maintains that trajectory, if it is also part of a cultural trauma behaviour pattern that becomes institutionalised, then of course, in that social environment it is clear that some will become bullies, kings, and others will break, many will survive, some will thrive, some will try to hack the system to create personal and familial security, others to give bullies the finger, and then there's the artist.... most will do their very best to live as decently as possible within those constraints.
So I look again at populations, and patterns, and I see that compassion informed by science - close observation, honesty - is merely common sense...
Judith Herman wrote that there were two things about the study of trauma that struck her, because they are so infrequently mentioned in mainstream discourse.
The first was that more study must be done of the vast numbers of people who have lived through trauma, and who have recovered, independent of any professional or institutional assistance. A missing statisitc, and a really critical database.
Natural healing needs to be understood, forensically.
The second was that the study of trauma is necessarily a political enterprise, in that it brings one's attention to the experience of the oppressed.....
I think she was correct, and it may be some time before that insight informs the grass roots - the status quo will seek to co-opt both these areas with whatever tools it has.... Standard practice.
That said the process of healing through understanding the roots of a given problem is underway, has always been and always will - I remember every day that I am really an aboriginal human being, and that my ancestors lived peaceably, and thrived for hundreds of thousands of years... we were a healthy species, and we have been subjected to an unhealthy culture of bullying, and it will pass, and we will return to healthy social behaviour.
When I say 'we' I do not expect myself to see this materialise, and I am happy to work towards it in my own small way, as a participant in the work.
There has to be reliable ways to record and analyse mass anecdotal evidence of those who recover, even as it remains silent to the professional and institutional world.
The suggestion of the inaccuracy of self reporting is not enough on it's own to avoid the problem of how to 'measure' or assess that unspoken experience....
There are layers to how trauma 'informs' our biology, to how chronic stress alters our biochemistry and behaviour : the phrase 'trauma informed' reflects greater understanding in this area emerging into the clinical and practice level, and we need to see that understanding disseminated across the grass roots, at pace.
Power.
The 19th Century Ruling class, the persistent descendants of the Normans, and their modern acolytes and rivals are also trauma mis-informed, in that they represent a mass retraumatising institutional pattern that is deliberate, mediated and intentional.
We are trying to heal within the environment dominated by that mass traumatisation, and that suggests to me that the issue of healing society is a valid exercise, a confrontation with the honest and most truthful history and I think that this is necessary to advocate for, the healing of the individual is not enough - we must heal the culture, we must end the culture of abuse.
It blows political struggles for power out of the water in terms of being a truly valid human exercise. Those who 'seek Power to do good' all too often become protectors of Power at the expense of people.
Only accurate information that can truly counter the ability of the mainstream to trigger reactions in known vulnerabilities as part of the manipulation of 'opinion' and 'public perception' - when across the grass roots we do understand the wound-trigger-reaction process, the conspiracy theorists, extremists, fundamentalists will all fade into obscurity....
Kindest regards
Corneilius
"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"
