The Donkey And The Bridge
  • Home
  • Blog
  • About
  • Contact
  • Home
  • Blog
  • About
  • Contact

A COLLABORATIVE CONVERSATION ON WOUNDING AS IDENTITY: PART ONE

1/18/2018

0 Comments

 

WHAT ARE THE CONSEQUENCES AND POLITICS OF WOUNDING AS IDENTITY FORMATION?

Picture
Anselm Kiefer, Aschenblume (Ash Flower), 2004

This  post is an experiment in resourcing collective wisdom via social-media discussions. This and another few related conversations were had on my facebook wall in November of 2017 -- this edited version here alone is over 7,600 words, packed full of brilliant insights and contributions on the topic of wounding/trauma and identity.  Usually, such rich discussions eventually peter out and get lost in the hard-to find backlog  of old posts, the focus always being on the new and immediate. As a longing for the archiving of community wisdom and resilience, I'm making this conversation available again in this format and hope that it may serve as a resource for related research, conversations, and resilience.

Original Post: Does anybody have a clear understanding of how and where and when wounding and trauma came to the forefront of identity formation for so many discourses? I'm curious how much of it was incubated within diagnosis and treatment of veterans and those with direct involement with war -- and I'm pondering how that might have eventually come to be internalized and normalized by society at large...in which case I shudder to think that our culture now views itself as suffering trauma from simply being alive, and that warfare and everyday civilian life within this culture are perhaps increasingly being used synonymously...  ​

Picture
Jeremiah Evans It was decided that we “know” about trauma...and have decided to no longer wonder about it. Now that we know, we set about deanimating trauma. It is now a problem which we fix by applying a static formula.

 
    Matthew Stillman Christos Galanis I would venture to say that at one time when trauma happened to a person or a people that that the traumatic event might have been considered a visitation by an alive spirit or god or gods and the trauma might have been spoken to/courted/tended thusly.
 
  •  Christos Galanis kinda like how death has been understood by most cultures in most places most of the time? 


Karl Frost my experience with 'trauma' in postmodern humanities is 1) postmodern scholars coming in after scientists and healers had come to identify a phenomena as important for us to understand and address, postmodern scholars redefine the term and generate a bunch of writing using the new (not as documentedly important) definition of 'trauma' pretending that the import still applied to their 'interpreted' use of the word, and then 3) use this body of writing to establish legitimacy over something that had both social cache and funding attached to it.
 
  • Karl Frost from a social science perspective, there are links to be made amongst disparate bodies of empirical research on fear in relation to identity formation and identity psychology, study of trauma reactions, reactive backfire effect in relationship to rhetorical statements as identity markers, "conservative/liberal" (tribal/non-tribal) mind. However, the links have not been drawn explicitly to my knowledge in published theory or empirical study, yet.
 
 
Christos Galanis  The history of trauma studies itself as a scientific field is intimately linked to treating veterans in post-war years, most especially WWI (shell-shock) WWII (Gross Stress Reaction) and the Vietnam War (PTSD). Along with Kubler-Ross and the (problematic) depiction of even death itself as a traumatizing event, it seems trauma and wounding have become increasingly central as a diagnosis for anything other than what we would dictate for ourselves and the world.

What I'm curious about is how and where and when significant portions of the general civilian population began basing their primary identity on trauma or wounding -- identifying with one's race/ethnicity/sexual orientation/class/gender/first nations status as not only a politically marginalised identity, but that identifying as a marginalised identity is in itself a diagnosis for wounding/trauma regardless of the specifics of one's own lived experiences and the quantity or quality of hardship one has encountered. I'm not denying or dismissing anyone's lived individual experiences or expressions of them, I'm just wondering on how this slow seep has now apparently spilled into notions of even dominant/centred identities (ie. whiteness) being in their own right traumatized identities because of the effects of oppression on the oppressor. I'm also not denying or dismissing these claims, there are strong arguments to be made in all these accounts. But I'm wondering about the very centrality of wounding/trauma in all these identifications, and what happens once everyone can claim some aspect of their identity as being one of wounding/trauma -- is it possible to have respect and compassion for someone if they don't claim trauma/woundedness, or does one first have to scramble to get under an identity-umbrella of trauma/wounding in order to deserve care and compassion? 

At the end of the long day of traumatized identities, I can't help but wonder if much of this is simply a desperate attempt by so so many to be simply regarded with respect and compassion, and to be resorting to claiming for themselves a traumatized/wounded identity as the most socially acceptable manner to get this?


  • Jared Williams I'm seeing this almost like a collective realization/dream/delusion/vision that we are on a battlefield and, regardless of the kind of support we need, we suddenly understand (at some subconscious level?) that the only potential for escape and the only way we can get any support at all, is to call for a medic... and in that moment look down and are 'relieved' to find that our legs are indeed, blown off and our cries are legitimized. Wounded forever but at least, finally, bound to get the help we need...
  • Amanda Bettison Christos, this resonates so hard. When I think about what I might claim to be offering as a counsellor (eg for an essay I have to write) I really revolt against claiming that I do anything more than offer respect and compassion. Yet pretty much everyone I meet in that context believes he or she is damaged, broken, sick. Intriguingly, respect & compassion seem to help many people despite those beliefs, & I think one way it might is by encouraging the belief that respect & compassion might be available other places too.
  • Christos Galanis thank you for this Amanda -- yes, I can understand your desire to frame your services as simply compassion and respect...my time working with both rescued donkeys and adults with developmental disabilities for years was that diagnosis often got in the way, rather than supporting, respectful and compassionate inter-relationships. The multitude of self-diagnosis tools on the web are also scary, as they further support this mindset of placing oneself into a box of brokeness or less-than ideal. At the same time, I also recognize the relief that can come from naming something and being able to process what one is facing. If i have some weird lump growing on my butt, i certainly want to have a name for it. But when it comes to trauma EQUALLING identity, i think something is really off.
  • Ben Spatz Strongly disagree. It's important to work against the pathologization of people who are already marginalized and thus pathologized. But it's equally important to work against the visions of wholeness and progress offered by colonial frameworks. Recognizing the widespread character of trauma and the ways in which it is fundamental to identity formation (and the therapist's acknowledgment of their own brokenness) is a completely different thing from the DMV style assessment of *certain* people as traumatized.
  • Alisa Esposito it's important to understand the cultural poverty which is the cause and not the nature of humans to be broken and in need of some savior (doctor, diagnosis, drugs or Jesus). Seeing the forest and the trees is certainly a lot of great deal of work, and it's also surely unwise these days to do it, but it's there for the undertaking nevertheless

 
Ben Spatz When I say trauma studies I don't mean the medical work you are talking about Christos Galanis but rather the more recent turn to trauma in the humanities. I basically agree with Karl Frost's narrative of how that developed except I don't see a problem with it. It seems right to me that humanities scholars should take on and rework concepts coming out of medicine from their more distanced and critical position.

In any case the trauma studies I'm talking about were very influenced by Holocaust studies and how to make sense of that historical trauma from the position of the second and third generations, who didn't experience it directly. I think the relevance to identity is much deeper than simply wanting to be heard and respected: it's about how to articulate a kind of wound that is sedimented in embodiment way below the level of articulate language; and also how to get at the workings of violence beyond the level of individuals, not just in terms of group identities but also across time. Trauma studies is not my field but I'm aware of its wide impact across the humanities.

 
  • Christos Galanis I suppose it's this apparent schism between 'medical' trauma and 'humanties' trauma that is curious to me as well -- is trauma a physiological, empirically and quantifiably tested phenomena, or is it a socially performed and negotiated phenomena? I'm not sure those 2 aspects can or should be separated?
  • Karl Frost I find it very problematic to redefine a term away from the original phenomena that was flagged for meaningful social attention and then pretend to something useful to contribute to the identified problem. It diverts funding and attention away from constructively engaging with the identified problem. If you want to study something different, use a different word and don't try to cyphon money off from a common pool used for dealing with the problem. If you claim to be able to constructively deal with the identified problem, show the follow up study to demonstrate positive consequences of the funding.​
  • Ben Spatz This is an epistemological difference between fields of knowledge with highly political implications. I value medicine but I certainly don't see it as needing protection from humanities critique! We live in a technoscientific era and one of the most important tasks of the humanities is to trouble the positivism that medicine has attached to embodiment. What trauma "is" depends on what disciplinary tools you use to approach it. While quantitative studies have their place, treating psychosomatic issues as if they were just empirical in the same way as a broken leg is disastrous for politics.  For much more sophisticated discussions of this than I myself can offer, check out the "medical humanities", an emerging field looking at precisely this interdisciplinarity
 
 
Jared Williams As someone who’s done very little academic research into this stuff, it’s my understanding that modern medicine certainly and modern psychology possibly developed largely in war zones or in their peripheries... is that true? Is that what you’re already implying? That the root of the tool to ‘fix’ the trauma is biased toward trauma and wounding?
 
  • Christos Galanis Modern techno-medicine has definitely developed in relationship to battlefield/military needs, though this is very much true much a vast majority of technology. Gallileo worked as a ballistics researcher for the armoury in Venice, and his work on planetary motion was a personal pet project couched in scientific research on how to construct deadlier projectile weapons, for example. Modern psychology i'm not sure of if/how much much it owes to military application. 
  • And yes, I'm wondering if the adoption of 'trauma' for experiences that are universally experienced by all of humanity is a creeping of military frameworks further into civilian life.
  • Amanda Bettison I’m also wondering about the impact of the expansion of the middle classes in the C20th West. Just thinking about my own family, there was no trauma in my grandma’s life, because there was no possibility of her being sheltered from a tough ( = regular) life by education, money etc. For me at 47 in the other hand, that’s absolutely been an option, and so if despite that I fail to avoid pain, then that must be trauma, surely? (I hope it’s obvs that I don’t actually believe this).
  • Christos Galanis  So you feel part of it might be the dissolution of the dream of the 20th c. middle-class, of somehow being raised above the reality of everyday suffering? I think this is totally possible.
  • Alisa Esposito Christos Galanis I agree this is the case. Something along the lines of redefining what poverty actually is.

 
Tamsin Haggis I'm properly tired today and unable to dive into all this complexity, though I have just skimmed all the comments with interest. Your question stuck in my mind this morning and the first thing I was thinking was, is this a question about discourse, or is it a question about a verifiable biological phenomenon? I'm not up on all the social science and humanties discourses and critique of the history of this idea, but as far as I know, the identification of trauma as a biological phenomenon has come to the fore in the last twenty or thirty years with the work of people like Peter Levine and Bessel van der Kolk (animal studies of behaviour in relation to life-threatening overwhelm situations etc, moving things on from the hazy recognition of the same in humans as 'shell shock' ) and the epigenetic work your friend mentioned in a comment above.

I started to wonder what a definition of trauma might actually be, went and did some googling, and saw that many of the definitions distinguished between physical trauma and psychological trauma. This seems to be extremely outdated in the context of recent neurobiological research which focusses on the nervous system (and fascia and hormones and all the rest of it etc) as part of an interrelated whole. I'm not sure I've contributed much to your discussion except to say that at the level of biology I wonder if the difference between war-created threat to the integrity of the system or abuse/neglect-created threat to the integrity of the system ends up biologically being pretty much the same thing?


 
Dare Sohei id like to chime in from my non-academic view of trauma, which includes acute vs chronic, emotional and physical... i do think that ptsd and such always existed, but people dealt with it in numerous folk medicine/magickal ways... which we have marginalized now and since the burning times.
theres also a strong possibility that one way to reframe trauma is lack: lack of resiliency skills and resiliency skills training from a number of causes, one major one being lack of wilderness skills training, lack of initiatatory ceremonies, lack of animal husbandry skills, lack of trade skills n general. there's a need for BOTH emotional and physical (sensory) resiliency skills training. without those what do we have? learned helplessness, and extreme vulnerability to hardship, addiction to privileges, etc.


 
Rebecca Solnit I was told that PTSD was defined as a kind of damage, lasting damage, for political reasons, to make the Vietnam War untenable. And that's stayed with us as the idea that we are a sort of porcelain that can be shattered rather than, sometimes, something resilient or even that sometimes living matter heals. Paradise Built in Hell: The mainstream story also tended to portray everyone remotely connected to the calamity as a traumatized victim. Once again, the language of a frail and easily shattered human psyche surfaced, as it had so influentially before the aerial bombing of the Second World War. The powerful phrase “post-traumatic stress syndrome,” or PTSD, was invoked, suggesting that everyone who survives or even witnesses an ordeal is damaged by it. The term arose from the politics of the Vietnam war, when antiwar psychiatrists and others wished to demonstrate the deep destructive power of an unjust and ugly war. As one British psychiatrist put it, the new diagnosis “was meant to shift the focus of attention from the details of a soldier’s background and psyche to the fundamentally traumagenic nature of war.” The risk for PTSD is far higher, unsurprisingly, for those who are already damaged, fragile, inflexible, which is to say that events themselves, however horrific, have no guaranteed psychic outcome; the preexisting state matters. 
The term PTSD is nowadays applied to anyone who is pained at or preoccupied with the memory of a calamity, rather than only those who are so deeply impacted they are overwhelmed or incapacitated by suffering or fear. On September 14, 2001, nineteen psychologists wrote an open letter to the American Psychological Association, expressing concern over “certain therapists…descending on disaster scenes with well-intentioned but misguided efforts. Psychologists can be of most help by supporting the community structures that people naturally call upon in times of grief and suffering. Let us do whatever we can, while being careful not to get in the way.” One of the authors of the letter told the New York Times soon after, “The public should be very concerned about medicalizing what are human reactions.” That is, it is normal to feel abnormal in extraordinary situations, and it doesn’t always require intervention. Nevertheless, an estimated 9,000 therapists converged on lower Manhattan to treat everyone they could find. The Washington Post commented on the belief that PTSD is ubiquitous among survivors—“a fallacy that some mental health counselors are perpetuating in the aftermath of this tragedy.” It was another way to depict survivors as fragile rather than resilient. Kathleen Tierney remarked, “It’s been very interesting during my lifetime to watch the trauma industry develop and flower. The idea that disasters cause widespread PTSD is not proven, is highly disputed. It is also highly disputed that disaster victims need any sort of professional help to get better rather than social support to get better.”

 
  • Christos Galanis Thanks so much for these insights Rebecca Solnit, reading Paradise built in Hell was insightful in understanding the politics of victimhood and community resilience. Indeed, the discourse around trauma does feel very political, and like it's normalizing a particular sort of identity formation that, to me, assumes a fundamental dynamic of Power Over/Under, rather than power as political and always dynamic and negotiated.
 

 Joy Working The word "broken" has come up a lot in this conversation, and I am reminded of the history of American prisons. At first, prison was largely co-ed and penal. Nobody thought of criminals as "broken", so they never thought to "fix" them.
Then the Quakers came along with notions of redemption and started changing the model to one of reformation. I assume that as reformation became the new norm, supportive services would have been added, and the "root of the transgression" would eventually be considered. There are those here who can add psychotherapy to the appropriate spot on this timeline, as well. I can imagine that as trauma gained the spotlight in conjunction with identifying one's Soul, it may have become a more important piece of self identification. "Look, I'm broken, but can be fixed." 

 
 
Bruce Hooke From what I heard about how the men in my family who fought in WWII were changed by the war it seems clear to me that they came back with what we would now call PTSD, but of course that was before that diagnosis existed. Even so, the reports are that they were never the same after the war and their children suffered as a result, in ways that influenced how available they were for their children (my generation). In other words, my perception is that whether or not we have a name for it, the damage caused to the human psyche by major traumas echoes down through the generations. Since very few places in the world escape war or other traumas that affect broad swaths of the society at least every few generations (if not much more often), part of being human is living with the stress and damage that results from trauma. Pretending otherwise doesn't make the damage go away, it just buries it deeper inside us. 

If anything, I feel like naming and diagnosing PTSD has reduced it's normalization within society. After WWII (and earlier wars) the men and women traumatized by the war were just expected to integrated back into society. War was normal and part of being a man in particular was being able to deal with things like war. Now we at least realize that war is not normal and that it damages those involved in deep and lasting ways. 

It is important to note that the fact of living with trauma should not be used as a way to duck our responsibility to be good people and good citizens of the world. That's a victim mentality, which does not help anyone.

 
  • Jared Williams I agree as well Bruce! However I just was reading this post not so much as some idea that there wasn’t trauma before or even that the idea of needing healing after a war or a trauma didn’t used to be necessary, but rather that the entire identity of oneself seems to begin and end with the notion of ‘fixing’ a traumatic experience or psychic injury lately and that addressing that directly will (finally) get us into a state of wellness and joy. That frame, at least for me, tends to make me start searching endlessly for small traumas and injuries that, if I fix, might lead to peace and quiet... rather than the acceptance of those states as, at least partly, normal and the comfort in knowing that the rituals,culture, community and family structures are there to remind me that I’m ok. Mostly those structures are gone in the West, or we must seek them out with purpose, which is a healing journey in and of itself and often means someone is already seeking out a kind of ‘healing’! 
  • Bruce Hooke Thank you all, and particularly Jared for explaining what I was missing in the original post. In some ways this reminds me of a transition I had to go through: from looking for someone to "fix" what was troubling me to learning that in the end the only real solution was to learn to manage me own mental state.

 
Zahava Griss What a great question. My grief teacher Sobonfu Some said that the epidemic of homelessness in our country started after Vietnam because the vets did not know how to come home to themselves. They did not know how to belong. I think today there is a crisis of belonging. Om says, "victimhood is wearing the cloak of social liberation." My sense is that really we want healing and belonging and connection but somehow the conversation has been distorted into blame. Perhaps that's because blame is less vulnerable. I think our collective pain body is extremely active and it perpetuates itself. So each time we activate the parts of us that are not our pain such as our soul, our creativity, our love, our resilience, our pleasure not as an escape but as an affirmation of our value… We are shifting this culture.
 
 
Catherine Magill Christos, would this also include things like the 'wound gift concept'? I've been curious about this idea of basing my identify and my gift to the world in a wound...was first introduced to it here: https://ssir.org/.../social_change_and_the_shadow_side_of...
 
  • Christos Galanis It sounds great in many ways, and certainly transforming a perceived wound/trauma into a gift to the world is a great way to nourish life -- and, i'm wondering about the initial identifying with some aspect of oneself as a 'wound' in the first place? Like in one of the examples in the article, someone turns their 'wound' of being short into a gift into the world -- are we really going to agree with the idea that not being of average height is actually wounding or traumatising? What about just the fact that people come in diverse shapes and sizes, and perceiving oneself as wounded because some part of your identity or physiology doesn't conform to an idealzied norm is a problematic ethic to reproduce in the first place.
  • Alisa Esposito Christos Galanis it's my understanding that this cultureless society and its artificial structures, colonized minds, control constructions and default domestication is absolutely traumatizing at the soul level, to the point we are all swimming around in the same toxic poison that can no longer be detected, like fish being unaware of the waters they swim in. Putting a 5 year old on a bus to be raised and indoctrinated by a state institution is traumatizing, but no one recognizing it as such because "everybody does it" and "everybody endured it" and apparently "everybody's fine." There are 1000 more examples of this simple unrecognized trauma that occurs to every single one of us just being born to the still in action manifest destiny machine of western civilization and its program of colonizing minds. Trauma doesn't look like a drunk shouting abusive father or a pedophile priest, real human-soul-trauma-of the deep forgetting and damaging kind is far more hidden and undetectable than the obvious deviousness we all expect. So yes, I say being born to western civilization is inherently traumatic and ghost-producing, full of monsters and homelessness and orphanhood. But the psychiatric diagnosis? If it's not based in that, it's a free pass for shitty behavior and a continued lack of give-a-shit because it doesn't go deep enough than the self, feelings and parents.
  • Catherine Magill Christos Galanis Thanks for the reply. I found it a very interesting concept and very powerful - and I see it repeated in many stories about people and organisations working on social issues. Someone has a significant (painful) life experience and turns it around into a passion to help other people who have experienced something similar or to help people avoid having the painful experience. I just wondered about starting with the wound - vs. other approaches which for example start with an individual's strengths. Just curious if your thoughts on wounding and trauma in identity discourses would have anything to say to expand my understanding of the use of this concept in individual / social change.
  • Christos Galanis Catherine Magill -- I agree, it's a really rich place to ponder, and I'm really at the edge of my own capacities these days in integrating so much insightful thought on these issues of trauma and wounding...I do recognize that there are patterns of rehabilitation/support/care that I might call Nurturing and Resiliency -- one is tending to a person's immediate needs and doing what you can to make them feel safe and support them in regulating their nervous system and shifting out of fear/trauma mode. The other is supporting their capacity for resiliency and their ability to integrate more diversity of thought, experience, contradiction, identity, etc...when and how either is applied is tricky and messy, but certainly when one is in a state of abject terror, that isn't the time to try and get them to go even further beyond their capacities. It's like trying to pour water into a glass that's already overflowing. So I do think there's a vital aspect of supporting each other's resiliency through community and care and boundaries and accuntability, and I don't imagine any people are able to turn their 'wound' into something positive without both these types of support being available. Having said all this, I suppose I'm possibly reacting to what feels like an over-emphasis on Nurturing within individual/social change, and not enough on Resiliency?
 
 
Christos Galanis And to add another angle to this discussion of trauma, I don't know exact figures but at least a few years ago, the segment of the US military with the highest rates of diagnosed PTSD were remote drone operators -- the men (and women?) who lived at home, with their partner and possibly children, who would report to work every day and remotely operate a drone somewhere on the other side of the world, for their scheduled work-shift, and then when their shift was done, return home to family life. There's many theories for this, and, I find it quite compelling for understanding what exactly it is we're trying to describe with the word 'trauma'
 
 
Lara Owen Predating the PTSD discourse, the concept of the originating wound as a shaper of personality goes back to Freud, surely. Developed further by Melanie Klein and many others. During the years I was studying psych and hanging out in that world, I'd hear people say "What is your wound?" in conversation, as if it was like "Where did you grow up?" The answer is supposed to be something simplistic like "My mother was a narcissist" or "My father left when I was 2" This obviously is not sophisticated thinking, but it is often used as a (thoughtless) shortcut. I don't think it's a helpful way to conceptualise a life but it has become a very common way of telling one's life story to oneself.
 
 
Bethany Reivich Christos Galanis I think it goes beyond such recent historical and linear tracking, although, that's all a part of the culture of trauma. In a 'society' lacking rites of passage/initiation (the marked transition of one identity to another) the culture of trauma has the taste of being a sort of lingering bardo. With dissolution of distinct cultures and human roles in them (in 'globalizing' culture, or a sort of imagined idea of a homogeneous culture, abstracted from land and sense of place), the trauma doesn't crystallize into something meaningful in any given cosmology. There is no community to hold and contain the pain and help make meaning of it -- even if one is lucky enough to have some personal community, there is still no cohesive worldview/container for the experience (anima-mundi -- the individual soul's connection to the world....). So, even if we set up novel initiations, to do a wilderness fast, etc, again, there is no cohesive community/wisdom tradition to return to, because worldview is going through its own initiatory crisis. Though some manage to forge a deeper identity through their personal trials, contemplation, and action, in general the work is too archetypal for an individual and attempts to 'get over it' lead nowhere, because the culture itself is in a liminal time of change and gutting of identity and can't offer a container for individual alchemy. Rites of passage -- ritualized recreations of inner and outer conflicts within humans and between them, and the natural world -- aren't the only traumas in life, but the ritualization of extreme states contains them within a functional cosmology where the place of the one in crisis returns to the community with a new understanding/meaning/inspiration etc of her/his place in it. A growing fascination and increase in mechanistic proficiency, strategy, etc in military business and warfare (and media), and the culture of trauma, as I see them, are more analogous with the dissolution of culture/cosmology than the cause/effect of trauma. People simply identify with the 'figurehead' of war and military. But military and war seem more the unconscious ritualization. Ironically, more conscious ritualization was amputated with the transition from animism to to objectification, from poiesis -- the expanding of an image into many senses (mysterious and meaningful in its polymorphism) -- to utilitarian science -- its deduction into abstraction (conquerable and simplistic). The ritual is war, but that is only the focal point for what is happening analogously -- internally, individually, and collectively in a liminally-stagnated-non-culture -- It's not cause and effect, in that quantifiable, empirical linear way, and trying to deduce it to that is part of what perpetuates it. Any pain is tolerable with meaning (cosmological place), but without it, pain becomes the focus, and the difference between children and adults is harder to define..... As much troubling as the culture of trauma is the backlash/new-age anti-empathy movement. Both are symptoms of a larger gap in our sense of place, which fittingly, often shows up in the psyche like a gaping wound....how one fills it is, or what one does with the understanding is the question.
 
  • Josep Almudéver Chanzà very differently to all the above, perhaps, wounding, and pain was at the forefront of saints, martyrs and hermits' identity formation (even at a time when identity as a concept didn't exist). I'm thinking of Teresa de Avila, for example.
 
 
Andrew Wass "our culture now views itself as suffering trauma from simply being alive": don't several religions have this attitude towards existence, that the here and now is terrible and only when we meet our maker/join nirvana is it all good?
 
  • Christos Galanis Andrew Wass, yes exactly -- i'm wondering how much we're simply reproducing this same narrative, that somehow life itself is broken or corrupted or wounding, and that we have to fix it or escape it or transcend it. It's not insignificant that so many north americans in the 60s went straight from christianity to buddhism/hinduism -- much of the underlying narrative is interchangeable.
  •   Andrew Wass the logic/story remains the same. the aesthetic and the tools change.​
  • Christos Galanis the west went with a dualism that privileges materiality, the east went with a dualism that privilileges immateriality. ultimately both are arguing different sides of the same coin. I think its very difficult for many of us (including myself) to be able to integrate a paradigm in which it doesn't have to be either of these.​ 
 
Daniel Bear Davis The term "post-traumatic growth" deserves a place in this conversation somewhere. I'm seeing it used more and more often. Also, many have dropped the D from PTSD, recognizing that the functioning of the nervous system is not a disorder. Which leads right into your question...
Picture

Katie Lee Weille What an interesting thread. One additional perspective is that trauma theory, which I learned about in the 1990's as a young psychotherapist, presented a new paradigm of liberation from old pathologizing ways of formulating people's - especially women's - distress - as personality disorder, hysteria etc. . So Freud had suggested his female patients had fantasized about sex with a male relative and Masson published this book saying that in fact freud's patients had in fact been sexually abused not had sexual fantasies. And with van der Kolk's groundbreaking work on trauma (from veterens to abuse survivors), we could now validate (that word came up earllier in this thread) the reality of our clients' suffering rather than just diagnosing them as borderline or some other label that suggested a deficiency or lack. In other words, it was empowering for someone to re-formulate themselves as not crazy but rather adaptive, ie they had had to cope with something difficult, hence their distress/ symptoms. By extension, trauma as a construct could legitimize the suffering of whole groups of people, and van der Kolk's later work considers community level experience and processes. Also the fascinating points people make here about the role of dance and other embodied forms of healing, have slowly been finding their way into the psychiatric/ clinical discourse on trauma, as the clinic van der kolk started in boston and the training programs associated with this ouvre have increasingly embraced an embodied 'somatic' approach to treatment (and of course, on his own parallel track, so has Levine). 
So my impression is that the clinical tradition has done its best, given the intrinsic biases and blindspots endemic to the whole western medical model which undergirds and often rules psychiatry, this movement and van der kolk's work seme to me relatively progressive and open-minded, making intelligent use of accumulating research and clinical experience. However, the fragilities of the social justice movement and victimization becoming weaponized, are a whole development that go way beyond this clinical history. For this, i would strongly recommend Jessica benjamin's incredibly groundbreaking work on the psychodynamics of victim - victimizer dynamics and what is needed to break out of the polarized stalemates that people on all levels of micro-to-macro interactions find themselves digging into, hurting eachother perpetually as a result. Her last book Beyond doer and done to' has some powerful work on this topic as she looks at what heals: in short, mutual recognition, or, witnesing the suffering - without freezing the sufferer into an othered victimized status- and acknowledging the capacity for destruction that lies in all of us.

 
 
Richard Povall I'm no expert in this field, but based purely on personal observation I believe this narrative has grown directly out of the 'survivor' culture that has become increasingly endemic. Your point about veterans and their perhaps influential contribution to the notion of survivor guilt and other forms of trauma feels apposite. Certainly living in the US in the 1980s, and in northern California in particular, the presence of so many Vietnam vets contributed to a much heightened awareness of both survivor culture and post traumatic stress. Justifiably so. California was one of the first countries in the world (I believe) to introduce kerb cuts at intersections in order to allow better access for wheelchairs - because there was a much greater prevalence of wheelchair users in a place where many vets were landed on return from the war zone, and many simply stayed. Here, survivor-hood felt not only palpable but a moral imperative. Notions of 'wounding' and 'trauma' and being a survivor now seems to have been claimed by the many in a culture focusing on the self and self-hood. Survivor discourse became a mechanism for claiming special rights and privileges. I feel like I'm stepping into precipitous territory here, but I find much of the current discourse shallow and, frankly, an irritant.
 
  • Christos Galanis Richard, that is very much what I'm experiencing as well, and, it's great to have your own insights and lived experiences of how the return of traumatized vets affected the culture and infrastructure of n. california. It also affirms for me why I could never live there and why I've always had such a strong reaction to the kind of 'survivor' culture you're describing, and how it's always felt very unblanaced and ungrounded for me -- your insights into the very real and grief-soaked realities of what it might have developed that way is a reminder that even if i'm having that reaction, i can still sympathize and have compassion for has played out in those communities and how the Vietnam war and its horrors is still playing out in that country and in those communities. I do shudder to think how and where the processing of these illegal and ongoing wars in the middle east will boomerang back and affect the US and Britain especially.
 
 
Jonathan Megaw Hmm surely there is something of the notion of a defining wound in most major world religions and creation myths? Without trying to list them, Id suggest as examples that the Christian ‘Fall from Grace’ is treated as an original and defining wound very much in Christian churches’ dialogues and dogmas, and that there is much fetishisation of Christ’s wounds historically, As another example that Buddhist traditions have as a fundament the suffering of our unrealised condition! Post Nietzschean Western thought has incorporated the notion of a defining condition of dysfunction or wound for which healing is sought, from Freud, as alluded to by others here, to Marx!
It is clear though, as was well documented in the observation of and experience of soldiers of WW1, that what have become the defining symptoms of PTSD are observable and predictable, particularly in war zones. The culture of personal politics which seeks to emphasise the harm that has been done to individuals by other individuals or by a dominant culture, as self-defining may have had its antecedents in post=WW11 post-modernism, counter cultural trends that had their most popular flowering in the period from the late 1950”s-70’s, with therapies developed in Esalen Institute California for example perhaps specifically influential here. However we should not forget that it does in fact have roots in resistance to slavery, colonialism and patriarchy.
Surely the notion of psycho-somatic wounding may have become in some quarters a wearisome self-aggrandisement and projection of the cause of negative states onto others but I am concerned that the experience of war veterans for example are not diminished by an aversion to any unfortunate cultural trends!


 
Cator Shachoy hmmm.... I'm not sure whether I am understanding your questions correctly, but within the field of craniosacral we recognize that birth trauma is very common. This has nothing to do with war or overwhelming physical/emotional experiences we may have later in life (but can actually lay a foundation for our later patterning). Birth trauma can result from a variety of sources. It can be a result of medical interventions which somehow disrupt the natural flow - induced labor, forced separation of mother & child, being put in an incubator, etc. We recognize these interventions may be medically necessary to save the life or mom or baby, and that they are not necessarily wrong or bad, but there is an imprint of trauma on the nervous system. Birth trauma can also result from a 'normal' healthy birth... because birthing is intense, about survival, life/death, and separation. The imprint on the nervous system is what indicates trauma. As a cranial practitioner I can feel it in the cranial wave -
a physiological pulse. Stanislav Grof talks about the birth matrices and trauma in one of his books...

 
  • Christos Galanis Thanks for this Cator -- might you be able to describe your understanding of what is actually *happening* when a phenomenon imprints and remains in the nervous system? If this is an indicator of trauma, how does one integrate epigenetic or ancestral trauma into a neuro-biological framework?
  • Cator Shachoy all good questions Christos Galanis. I have to think about this for awhile. I'm not immediately sure of who has developed the language and/or research on this. What I can say immediately, based on my direct experience as a cranial practitioner working on alot of bodies is that trauma will reveal itself in the cranial wave. It is in the tissues and nervous system. It may be conscious or unconscious in terms of what the person knows of their history, but the body doesn't lie. It's within the system. I can give you an example of how it can appear in a session. On a more general level we (cranial practitioners) recognize that sometimes movements arise as someone is relaxing. Movements that are jerky, repeating, and/or lateral are highly likely to be trauma related. In time with skilful work (on body & mind), these will fall away and become movements that are longitudinal, free form, spiral, non-repeating.
  • Cator Shachoy Christos Galanis the same thing (ie movement) can be happening on an internal level that is not visible to the external eye, but it can be 'seen'/felt within the cranial wave by a skilled practitioner (meaning someone who has training in what to feel for). Once I/a practitioner feels this, it can be teased to the surface, and eventually released. This could be quick or slow depending on the client, where they are willing to go, what their process and consciousness are ready for/can allow. It may or may not involve dialogue, psychological process, etc...
  • Cator Shachoy Christos Galanis ancestral trauma and epigenetic factors are absolutely included within this model. Again I'm not sure who is developing the language or written text on this at this time. I have to think on it a bit.... craniosacral emphasizes in utero development and conception/preconception as having important impacts on our future development. Recognizing that these are times of interconnectedness with mother and all ancestry. Epigenetics is about genes getting turned on or off. This can happen at any point in our lives, as well as in utero. The patterning will get into the tissues, and can be changed at any point in our lives. We may all be traumatized but we also all have the potential to free ourselves.
  • Cator Shachoy Christos Galanis As an aside, I basically see genetics as karma. This is based on my background as both a buddhist practitioner and biology undergrad who took grad level genetics classes, as well as my ongoing training in CST. Epigenetics backs up this theory. Karma is an unseen and unknown force which is impacting our present moment choices, views, and opportunities. However it is fluid, as a result of our actions we can change our karma... and yet there will always be an unknown quality. Similarly, genetics has an unquantifiable influence on our life and health. However epigenetics reveals this impact is constantly changing, and can be influenced by how we live our lives - diet, lifestyle, environment, personal experience, the experiences of our ancestors.... we can't know it all but we can make positive change
 
 
Eric Chisler Here's the rupture that the response would seem to emanate from in my view:

What must have befallen a people to whom mutual grievance seems a sane qualifier for personal identification? What must have been in prolapse in regards to all things identity which trauma has rushed in to replace? And, what must have been that thing's capacity to mediate trauma such that it would never ossify into an identity in the first place?

 
  • Christos Galanis this is pretty much it, non? it's beyond heartbreaking to really be with the implications of this
  • Eric Chisler Yeah, heartbreaking only begins to unveil it
  • Dare Sohei belonging to mystery and time beyond one human lifetime...
 
 
Dave Carrier Interesting -- but not at all arresting -- to my simple mind how thought-threaders go to the mind to look and find new verbal explanations to make "our times" seem especially troubled in relation to other past or concurrent times. Folk have come back from war in trauma forever. Always. Always part of being alive in groups of folk, be it tiny tribes -- harsher yet there/then?! -- or expanding nations.
 
Madelanne Rust-D'Eye Christos Galanis - just encountering this thread now, and will chime in as it's a topic I'm passionate about ... I use somatic approaches and paradigms when working with PTSD in my psychotherapy practice -- very much informed by Van Der Kolk (as mentioned by Katie Lee Weille), Stephen Porges, Peter Levine, etc -- and I also teach about how PTSD happens at the neurological level in my Body-Informed Leadership courses. I believe that understanding the neuroscience behind PTSD helps us to identify elements of our own experience that may be related to PTSD, to have true understanding and compassion for others who are experiencing PTSD, and paradoxically, to also access greater resilience, both in terms of understanding the power of post-traumatic growth as well as understanding what isn't PTSD, and in such cases building the skills to get better at tolerating discomfort in our bodies & psyches. So in a sense, becoming more specific in our collective use of the word "trauma" can also support us to be compassionate while working collectively towards resilience. In terms of your earlier question about integrating epigenetic and ancestral traumas into a neurobiological framework, my experience has been that with trauma healing, you don't need to diagnose the "original cause" (which can so often have happened in early life, before conscious memories could be created, or be stored in non-conscious brain systems, or as you've suggested actually originate ancestrally) in order to help the nervous system to do whatever it needs to do to restore integration. You just listen to the somatic cues the body presents, and offer appropriate support as the healing process unfolds -- it doesn't necessarily matter when or where the trauma originates. Although re-weaving the story of the trauma is often a very meaningful experience for the person in recovery -- it's just more often an end result, rather than a diagnostic jumping-off point.
 
Christos Galanis Just to say, I sincerely appreciate all the incredible sharings and insights and generosity of all of you in this thread and some other related ones. I'm also appreciating the level of respect and kindness and general consideration and care I'm experiencing in these threads, especially compared to the way such themes can often descend into bullying and nastiness in other places quite quickly. There's some very sensitive and vulnerable and triggering themes being discussed here, and I love being able to trouble them with all of you. 

<3 to the brave
0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    Picture

    Author

    Christos Galanis is a Canadian/Greek researcher, teacher and artist currently living in the UK.
    CLICK HERE for more info

    Archives

    November 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    August 2018
    April 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.