19. Agency Part Two: Trauma and Agency

Post Number 19 of The Movement We Need

(Painting by Kevyn Lutton)

Trauma and the Five Core Needs

In this series, I've been talking about 5 core human needs: safety, belonging, value, agency, and meaning. In earlier posts, I’ve discussed safety, belonging, and value, and the importance of agency, of feeling that we can make a difference, that we have an impact on the world around us, that we are the protagonists of our own story, not just helpers or non player characters, and have some level of power over our lives.

Trauma is an assault on all five of these core values. Trauma ruptures our sense of safety, and destroys the feeling of self-continuity, of being a coherent self that extends into past and future time. Trauma generates a sense of isolation, makes it more difficult to connect with others and challenges our sense of belonging.

(This series of writings is an experiment—I’m writing a book and releasing it a chapter at a time on Substack, accompanied with podcasts available on Substack, Apple, Spotify, etc. This is the second post in the section on Agency, and the nineteenth post in the series. New posts now appear in their own section. Earlier chapters can be found in my archives, numbered to make them easier to find.)

Trauma assaults our sense of value and worth. We often feel shame when we have been devalued by another person or by events, and one response is to retreat and hide, which deepens our sense of isolation. Our self-worth may also be diminished by guilt, deserved or not. When something bad happens, we tend to feel responsible in some way, if only because, painful as that guilt be, it at least gives us a small sense of agency, that we are not utterly helpless in the face of overwhelming forces, that there is something we could have done or could do in the future to ward off disaster.

Trauma is especially painful because it shatters our sense of agency, our confidence that we can make choices that impact our lives and others’. Finally, trauma often undercuts our sense of living in an ordered and meaningful universe. It may undermine our belief in God or in the goodness of our fellow humans, and leave us drift in a cruel and random world.

None of us want to be at the mercy of blind, uncaring chance. We want to believe that the choices we make matter, that we make a difference in our own lives in the world around us, that we are in the center of the story. Agency is that sense that we have some control over what happens to us, that we can be actors, not just acted upon. We can pursue our goals and go after our desires.

In the romcom Holiday, the charming, elderly screenwriter tells Kate Winslet’s character, “In life, there are leading ladies and there are best friends. You’re a leading lady, but you’re acting like a best friend.” All of us play best friend some of the time, and most of us are mature and humble enough to recognize that we're not the central character of everybody else's life. But we all want and deserve to be the leading lady--or gentlemen, or male/female/non- binary central character--of our own lives.

In order to play that central role, we need to have some power. Earlier I talked about various types of power: power over, that is, command and control; power from within, that is, empowerment and personal power; and social power, that is, prestige and influence. But a simple, overall definition for power might be ‘the ability to get what you want done’.

In the case of activism, what we want done is often simply to stop some ongoing harm. But we may also have a vision of what we do want and seek to bring it into being. Indeed, our movements are stronger when we fight for what we want, not just against what we don’t want.

Defined in that way, activism is one of the most inherently frustrating activities that human beings can engage in. That’s a truth activists rarely admit, but we might have more patience and stamina if we allowed ourselves to recognize that our campaigns often feel like an endless series of attempts to get things done that we don't actually have the power to do, or to get others to do them, or to stop horrific things from happening that we don't actually have the power to stop. It's hard to be an activist without often experiencing feelings of helplessness, anger, and anguish.

And these feelings are compounded because most of us are drawn to activism out of empathy, the ability to imagine how the world feels from another's perspective. Empathy is connected to compassion, the ability to feel for others. When we hear about horrors happening, children in Palestine burned alive, children in Ukraine kidnapped and abducted to Russia, young black men murdered by police, young mothers criminalized for having a miscarriage, all of the ills and injustices that go on every day, we feel anger, fear, and an overwhelming need to stop the awful thing from happening. And most of the time, we can't, at least not immediately.

Rage, fear, pain, and distress compounded by helplessness add up to trauma. Trauma is the result of an experience that overwhelms our own our own ordinary coping mechanisms, that threatens our life or that causes physical or emotional harm to ourselves or someone we care about. For those of us capable of caring about strangers, trauma is ubiquitous.

We are conscious beings in a world where everyone dies, a hazardous world where at any moment, our car could crash into another, a tree could fall on our house, a wildfire could destroy our neighborhood, someone we love could leave us, and where infinite other hazards abound. How do we handle the tension between our drive to live and our awareness of our own vulnerability and ultimate mortality?

We do it by maintaining what I think of as our ‘bubble of normality’: the comforting illusion that we're here, we're permanent, and that while bad things could happen, they probably won't happen to us, at least not right now, and that things will go on more or less as they always have been. Another way to frame this is self-continuity: “the subjective sense of connection between one’s past and present selves (past–present self-continuity), between one’s present and future selves (present–future self-continuity), or among one’s past, present, and future selves (global self-continuity).”(1)

We perceive ourselves as coherent beings that have been the same ‘I’ from infancy through the present, and will continue to be into the future, in a more or less stable world. That comforting denial surrounds us almost like an invisible second skin. Trauma is something that breaks that bubble and rubs our face in our own essential helplessness, at the mercy of overwhelming external events.

A trauma may be an event that is immediate and short-lived, such as an assault, a fire, an earthquake, or a car accident. Such traumas are acute. Trauma can also be chronic: the physical or sexual abuse of a child that goes on for months or years, the battering of a spouse, or the ongoing assaults on one’s well-being and sense of value caused by racism, homophobia or other forms of discrimination.

Trauma can be direct: you are the person getting beaten. It can also be secondary: you watch someone else getting beaten. It can also be vicarious and indirect: you hear about someone getting beaten or see the images on social media. And finally, sometimes the most damaging trauma comes from being the person who does the beating, especially if doing so contravenes some of your own moral standards.

We are constantly being vicariously traumatized. We look at the news and see Ukrainians huddled in bomb shelters, or horrifying images of a father holding the broken body of his child amidst the rubble in Gaza, or George Floyd gasping “I can't breathe!” as Derek Chauvin murders him. Our bodies go into trauma response. We're flooded with adrenaline and cortisol, activated to respond to danger.

Responses to Trauma:

The classic understanding of how we are wired to respond to extreme threats is that danger triggers a flood of adrenaline and other stress hormones that prepare our bodies for ‘fight or flight’. To simplify a complex biological process, adrenaline shifts blood flow to our muscles, dilates our pupils, causes the liver to release a flood of glucose for energy, and increases our heart rate and breathing. The classic descriptions of how someone responds to fear: “My heart was pounding” or “Their face went pale” describe aspects of the adrenaline response. With that extra energy, that increased muscle power, we’re ready to run fast or fight furiously.

There are additional responses we may have to a threat, especially to a longer-lasting situation compounded with dread and helplessness: freeze or fawn.

When we freeze, we go numb, and instead of running or fighting, we become paralyzed, unable to act. When neither running nor fighting are possible, freezing up and disassociating may be our primary defense.

In my early 20s, I took a self-defense class for women. Its focus was not on martial arts or fitness, but on what the instructor admitted was basic dirty fighting that anyone could do to protect themselves.

I was inspired to take the class because that summer while travelling in Europe I had been attacked in the Sagrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona, which was still under construction at the time, by a guy who’d been following me and tried to drag me off into a dark corner. For a long time, I just stood there in shock, before my brain went into gear and suggested that I scream. I did, and immediately five workmen came running to my rescue. But I decided that I never again wanted to feel paralyzed and helpless, should I be in a similar situation.

To my surprise, our instructor began, not by teaching us judo moves or karate chops, but by teaching us how to scream. Many women get attacked, he told us, and simply freeze up and can't even make a sound. He stressed that making a loud noise and gaining attention is your first line of defense. I was never much good at the physical side of fighting, although to this day I still remember how to kill a man with an umbrella, (so stay on my good side when it’s raining!) But screaming did save me a few months later, when an intruder came into my bedroom and I awoke to find a stranger pawing at me. I leapt up, yelling forcefully, and attempted to gouge out his eye with my thumb, another of the few techniques I could actually master. He fled. But had I not taken the course, I might have gone into shock and not been able to anything other than submit in stunned terror.

Another response, one that we unfortunately see happening all around us right now in response to assaults from Trump and his henchman, is to fawn, to attempt to placate and please the attacker in the hope that they will treat you better. Yet this response may trigger more aggression rather than compassion, as it will feed the attacker’s sense of power. Kidnap victims are advised to run or fight if they can, but if they are overpowered, to calmly comply, avoid provoking their captors by being belligerent, but also not to grovel, cry and beg, but stay calm, neutral, and hold on to their dignity. Unfortunately, giving in to a bully often encourages further bullying.

All of us experience some trauma in our lives, but trauma itself does not necessarily lead to lasting emotional damage. We evolved to cope with a dangerous world, and we are resilient beings. What compounds the damage of the trauma is isolation and lack of support. And what amplifies the harm is helplessness and lack of power. When you can do something, when you can take some action, especially something that furthers your connection to others, you can better withstand trauma.

Understanding the role of powerlessness in amplifying trauma is important in understanding why agency is so important for political movements, to counter the ongoing trauma we experience from our awareness of unfolding events. We want our movements to do something effective to stop harm from happening and bring about a world of greater justice. We don’t always know what will be effective, nor do we often have all the power we might wish for to reach our goals. But doing something feels better than freezing, fawning, and succumbing to helplessness. Movements offer healing by providing actions we can take and things we can do.

Those who are drawn to activism often remain functional and optimistic, even under grave and discouraging circumstances, as long as there is something they can actually do. I noticed this when I was in Gaza in 2002, supporting the team that had been with Rachel Corrie, a young volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement who was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer operator when she stood in front of him to prevent him from demolishing a Palestinian home. The Palestinian activists who lived in Gaza had no illusions that they were going to ultimately win their struggle. Every single one of them expected conditions to get worse over time, not better. Yet they somehow remained cheerful and focused as long as there was some action that they could take, whether that was organizing a Children's Fun Day for the traumatized kids of Rafah or helping to support the internationals who were there to bear witness.

The most acutely traumatic experience of my life was in Genoa in 2001, during the protest there against the G8. The protests were met with extreme violence on the part of the police, clouds of tear gas, brutal beatings, and one protester, Carlo Giuliani, shot to death. In response, the more militant protesters had smashed the windows of banks and stores and left the city in a shambles, further angering the police. After a day of close calls and narrow escapes, my buddy Lisa Fithian and I had gone to a meeting at the Indymedia Center, across the street from a school where many of the protesters were sleeping. At the end of our meeting, an alarm was raised. The police were there, raiding the building.

We ran upstairs and hid beneath a table, but eventually an officer discovered us and brought us down to join the crowd of activists corralled on the lower floors. Among us was a member of the European Parliament: presumably that's why the police withdrew without harming us, although they kept a guard at the door and we weren't allowed to leave.

But across the street, at the school, the police came in and brutally beat the protesters, dragging people out of their sleeping bags, smashing heads and kicking in ribs. We watched out the windows of the Indymedia Center for hours, knowing something terrible was happening, not knowing exactly what, but imagining the worst as we saw groups of people marched out with their hands up to be loaded onto buses, and others carried out on stretchers. We were sure that we saw body bags being carried out, although fortunately that turned out not to be the reality. But at the time, we had no way to know if people were actually being killed.

I'll never forget the anguish and helplessness we felt during that night. The build-up of emotions was intolerable, because there was nothing we could do to help our friends. Then, suddenly, I realized that we were locked in the Indymedia Center which was filled with computers connected to the outside world.

There was something I could do! I could bear witness. I could write. Immediately, I felt a flood of relief at being able to take some form of action. I wrote a short post, not easy to do on an unfamiliar keyboard set up for Italian, not English. I had no helpful list of emails or contacts to send it to. This was before the era of smartphones and I didn’t even have a cell phone. But there were a couple of email addresses of friends I knew by heart. I sent the post out to them and asked them to forward it around. I didn't know it that night, but by the next morning it had gone around the world and been read aloud back home on KPFA, our local progressive radio station.

After the event was over, I experienced some of the impacts of trauma. At times, when I was speaking about Genoa, it was as if my mind just went blank. I had to stop talking and consciously force myself to focus. At home, I needed time to reconnect with friends who had never experienced anything like it. I found myself writing post after post to send out on the internet or put up on my blog. A young man on one of our community listserves finally asked, “Starhawk, why don't you just go out and scream?” “Writing is my way of screaming,” I told him.

Post Traumatic Stress and PTSD:

What I experienced were normal responses to trauma. We might call them post- traumatic stress. After an intense experience, it takes time to reset your nervous system, to reach out and reconnect with others, and to open up again so that you can experience joy and beauty. I remember taking a walk after shortly after I'd gone back home, at one of my favorite places, on the headlands by the Pacific Ocean where someone built a labyrinth. Walking the path between the stones, I felt cut off from all the beauty around me, until I stopped in the center and made a conscious effort to open up. I was able to do so because I received a lot of support from friends and community, and because writing and taking action had allowed me to preserve my sense of agency and personal power.

Post traumatic stress is not the same as PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder, or other conditions associated with trauma that have can have lasting and extensive impacts. When time goes by and your nervous system cannot reset, when the level of distress you feel overwhelms your capacity to reintegrate, when you suffer from flashbacks, depression, addiction or other ills that interfere with your ability to live a fulfilling life, you may need help from a trauma therapist or from medications. Getting help should not be a source of shame, any more than it would be if you had diabetes or a heart condition and needed treatment. PTSD is a serious and potentially life-threatening ailment.

Post traumatic stress, whether or not it rises to the level of a disorder, represents the dysregulation of our nervous system and emotions that trauma causes. Exposure to trauma creates certain patterns of response in us that follow on from fight, flight, freeze or fawn.

So, from the fight response, when you've experienced a trauma you might find yourself being angry, aggressive, irritable, lashing out at people over some little thing that actually isn't the underlying reason for your anger.

Flight responses may manifest as withdrawal, anxiety, hyper-vigilance: being always on the alert for a new harm, even paranoia, seeing enemies where none actually are, and creating patterns of persecution out of unrelated events.

Sometimes this can all flip over into the opposite, and you may fail to exhibit reasonable fear and caution. Coming back from Palestine, where we were in severe danger many times and people were literally being killed around us, I joined a big anti-war march in New York with our Pagan Cluster. We were supposed to meet up with friends at a certain place, but the police blocked us. I found myself completely ignoring them and walking through the intersection. They were on the verge of arresting me, but one of our affinity group ran up to them crying out “She’s an old lady! She’s deaf!” Not flattering, or strictly true, but they let me go.

I realized afterwards that I was behaving stupidly and running into needless danger, because I simply was not feeling a normal level of caution. I had entered what I’d come to call “the zone of deadly calm”, an internal space where real danger simply no longer makes an impact because you've become oblivious to it. Wartime heroes and intrepid fighters may exist in that zone, and calmly take life-endangering risks because they have faced so much trauma that they have shut down their fear response and become inured to danger.

Freezing may manifest as dissociation, withdrawal, or emotional numbness. The powerlessness and shattering of our bubble of normality can cause a kind of mental or emotional paralysis, the lack of what we call the executive function, the ability to think ahead and move toward your goals. When your sense of being a permanent being in a relatively stable world is ruptured, how can you possibly plan? If you can't trust what the world will be in the future, or who you'll be, or that you'll even be alive and functioning, how do you set long-term goals?

Fawning may create a need to submit to powerful people and attempt to please them. “Stockholm Syndrome” refers to the way kidnap victims often come to identify with their captors. When someone holds power over us, it’s a natural urge to try and make them like us. In doing so, we may come to feel for them, whether or not they deserve our sympathy, and even adopt their ideology and world-view.

Patty Hearst, heir to the Hearst newspaper fortune, was kidnapped in 1974 by a radical leftist group called the Symbionese Liberation Army. Held captive, subjected to immense psychological pressures, she eventually came to adopt her captors’ ideology and even helped them commit a bank robbery. Later, arrested by the FBI, she used Stockholm Syndrome as part of her defense. Unfortunately, she was still found guilty and sentenced to seven years in prison, although President Carter commuted her sentence after two years. At that time, the public still lacked a wide awareness of how powerful the psychological need can be to identify with those who hold absolute power over us.

In the early 2000s, when George Bush was President, I noticed that every time I spoke in public, somebody would ask “Shouldn't we be sending healing to President Bush?” Why? I wondered. He wasn’t sick or ailing, he was invading Iraq and taking other actions we strongly disagreed with. Exerting our magical or mental powers to make him change his ideas and stop doing destructive things might be desirable, but it’s not the same as healing. And no one ever suggested we send healing to Osama Bin Laden.

As I was pondering why this was happening, I ran across Judith Herman's book Trauma and Recovery.(2) In it, she describes how prisoners of the Soviets who were subjected to torture and brutal oppression realized that they could not afford to chat or banter with those in charge, because they would then be too susceptible to the urge to please them and unable to hold out against giving them information.

I began to see those pleas to heal Bush as a variation of Stockholm Syndrome. As President, he held immense power over all our lives. Seeing him as someone in need of our healing and empathy diminished his perceived power, made him smaller and more vulnerable, ourselves more powerful by comparison. This may also partially explain some of the more inexplicable defections by former progressives to the Trump camp, and the calls to ‘not dehumanize’ Trump or ‘make him the enemy’. Painting oneself as somehow above the fray feels more powerful than admitting that Trump is actively harming our democracy and causing suffering and death faster than we can stop him. Holding someone accountable for their actions is not dehumanizing them. On the contrary, it is profoundly humanizing to expect those in power to act like decent human beings, and the most ultimately compassionate thing we can do for them is to stop them from continuing to hurt others.

We're seeing a lot of fawning and placating these days, a lot of people contradicting some of their most basic values and their best instincts to get on the good side of the powers that be. If we see this behavior as, in part, a trauma response, it doesn't mean we should condone it or emulate it, but it may help us understand it and find more effective ways to counter it.

These responses combine in complex and sometimes contradictory patterns. One person may suffer from insomnia, another may sleep too much. Some become paralyzed with anxiety, others counter-phobic, numb to fear and unable to exercise sensible caution. Some self-medicate with drugs or alcohol. Some will be unable to make decisions, others will need to control every detail of a project.

After World War One, many soldiers suffered from ‘shell shock’, as it was called at the time. We now know the syndrome as post-traumatic stress disorder. PTSD can involve isolation, anxiety, insomnia, nightmares. Another symptom might be flashbacks, when the traumatic memories intrude on everyday life, sometimes triggered by something that reminds you of the stressful situation. For example, a loud noise might trigger a panic attack in a soldier who has come back from the trenches. Soldiers suffering from shell shock were often scorned as weak, even when they had previously committed heroic acts of bravery. It took a long time to recognize the toll that trauma takes.

In later wars, understanding of trauma expanded, and post traumatic stress disorder has been recognized as a disease, not a moral failure. Nonetheless, soldiers continue to suffer. Our streets are still full of unhoused veterans who never recovered emotionally from the traumas of Vietnam. An estimated ten to eighteen per cent of Iraq war veterans suffer from PTSD. (3) Four times as many veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan post 9/11 have died of suicide than died in combat. (4)

Perhaps it’s time to reconsider our expectation that men should go off to war, fear for their lives, witness friends and comrades being killed or horribly maimed and wounded, kill other soldiers and at times, civilians, and then come home and be emotionally unchanged. Much as we tend to see men as inherently aggressive, the reality is that war is extremely damaging to men as well as women, children, and other living beings,

Those negative traits we feminists are wont to attribute to men—being cold, unfeeling, emotionally shut down—may actually be trauma responses. Most of us who were part of the Second Wave of feminism in the ‘60s, ‘70s and beyond were raised by men who had seen combat or at least military service in World War Two. Many of those veterans carried lifelong trauma from their experiences. Why should it surprise us if they were angry and distant? And why should we accept those symptoms as endemic to or desirable in men? Currently, we have billionaire tech bros like Musk urging men to forego the ‘weakness’ of empathy and Zuckerberg calling for a return to a ‘warrior’ masculinity. It’s as if they were themselves suffering from rotting limbs, and extolling the virtues of gangrene.

Many of the extremely challenging behavior patterns we observe in others can be traced back to trauma as the underlying cause. The teenager who shoots another in response to some trivial act of disrespect, the over-controlling boss who micromanages, the flake who can never get anything done, all may be responding to underlying trauma. Some of the most bitter and intractable conflicts we face on the political front also stem from underlying trauma. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict or the bitter anger between some feminist separatists and the trans community reflect the underlying trauma on both sides. Identifying trauma as a root cause doesn’t condone or excuse harm, but it may explain otherwise confusing behavior and give us insight into how best to address it.

Offering Trauma Support:

So, what do we do about trauma? We're all being traumatized now, either directly or indirectly. Some of us are being kidnapped, denied our rights and spirited off to horrific prisons in El Salvador. The rest of us are hearing about it and, if we are caring and empathetic people, anguishing without being able to directly stop it.

So it's vital that we understand a bit about how to offer trauma support, both to direct survivors and to all the rest of us who are suffering from low or high levels of chronic trauma. Again, the symptoms I described above are all normal responses to trauma, but if they go on for an extended period of time, become extreme, or interfere with a person's ability to reintegrate back into their life, they may rise to the level of post- traumatic stress disorder. We can watch out for one another, and support those who need it to get help.

Some of the symptoms to watch out for are isolation and withdrawal from one's community or family, sleeplessness, flashbacks, alcohol or drug addiction, or personality change. If the symptoms are extreme, or go on for many months without improvement, a person may need professional help from a trauma-trained therapist. No one need feel shame in seeking help. PTSD is not a sign of personal failing or weakness. It’s the response anyone might have after exposure to extreme or long-lasting trauma, and it can be life-threatening. So if you or someone you know is experiencing severe reactions, please don't hesitate to seek help from someone knowledgeable in this field. Some pharmaceutical drugs can also be effective and helpful, and we should no more be ashamed to take them than a diabetic should be ashamed for taking insulin. Herbal remedies, homeopathy, acupuncture and other alternative therapies may also play a role in healing, but if pharmaceuticals are needed they can sometimes be lifesaving.

However, there are also many powerful ways we can mitigate the impact of trauma and support one another in community, and many helpful interventions that do not require years of training or a medical license. The key is to find ways that we can counter the isolation and sense of helplessness that trauma creates, and help survivors find connection and empowerment.

Listening:

The first thing we can do for each other is simply to listen. In the practice called ‘active listening’ or ‘looping’, we listen to another person tell their story, giving them our full attention, and then reflect back what we’ve heard: both the text—the actual words someone says—and the subtext—the context, emotional tone, underlying meanings, etc. What’s most important is to refrain from judgment and avoid offering advice or trying to fix the problem. It's always tempting to try to make things right for someone, or to tell them what they should do, but it's not helpful to a trauma victim to take away yet more agency over their healing, although if someone is suffering from full-blown PTSD, at times a life-saving intervention might be necessary. Short of that what, someone needs is not to be told what to do or offered helpful solutions, unless they ask, but simply to be offered the human connection of someone willing to sit, listen, and witness their pain.

Create Containers for Healing:

In the global justice movement of the early ‘00s, we organized many mobilizations to counter the meetings of the elites who were forging trade agreements that overran democratic laws and undercut environmental safety and workers’ rights. We often committed civil disobedience, risked arrest, and at times faced tear gas, pepper spray, tasers, billy clubs and lethal police violence.

In 2003, activists Martin Shaw and Gesine Wenzel staged a nonviolent civil disobedience to block a road leading to that year’s G8 summit meeting in Evian. Experienced climbers, they stretched a rope across the highway on a bridge, and each hung down from one end over the river below. Above, their affinity group marked the rope with flags and negotiated with angry drivers and police, informing them that if they cut the rope, they risked killing two people. But the police didn’t listen and cut the rope.

Martin fell 65 feet, breaking his back, pelvis, and ankle. Only by a miracle did he escape death. The affinity group managed to grab Gesine’s rope, and she was saved. Martin survived, but with injuries he still carries to this day. Gesine was physically unharmed, but experienced extreme fear, as she hung from the rope not knowing if at any minute she too would fall. Her terror was compounded by the helplessness of not knowing if Martin was alive and not being able to help him. Afterwards, while Martin physical recovered, she found herself suffering from anxiety and depression. Eventually, she was able to get help and counselling, and realized that she was suffering from PTSD. later became a therapist herself. Her emotional trauma was as debilitating as Martin’s physical trauma. Both she and Martin realized the necessity of educating activists about the impact of trauma and brought trauma healing spaces into the global justice mobilizations. They further retook their sense of agency and restored meaning to their experience by using it to help others.(5)

A trauma healing space must first of all be a safe space, removed from immediate danger. When the threat is still present, we cannot integrate and heal the trauma. Instead, we must simply marshal our defenses to cope. Only afterwards can we allow ourselves to be vulnerable enough to heal. Soldiers can sometimes function quite well throughout battle after battle, only to fall apart once they get home.

In the space, local therapists might offer counseling. Massage therapists and acupuncturists might give treatments. At times, simply providing a quiet space where someone could retreat, rest, nap, or cry was enough. Just providing a trauma healing space gave permission for activists to be vulnerable, to acknowledge the traumas they might be experiencing, and that it was not a sign of weakness to feel grief, fear, or anxiety.

Ritual and Ceremony:

When we suffer a loss or experience a trauma, we need a way to fully feel the grief and sadness, the fear, rage, and even the despair, without drowning in the emotions or getting stuck in them. Traditional cultures and religions provide grieving rituals. In the Jewish tradition, when someone close dies, you sit shivah: for seven days, you do nothing but grieve, sitting on the ground, covering the mirrors, not bathing or shaving or doing any form of work. Relatives and community members bring food and offer company and consolation. But at the end of the seven days, you get up and resume your life. There are special prayers you say for thirty days, eleven months, and on the anniversary of your loved one’s death, for a gradual reintegration.

Other religions and cultures have their own ways of marking a death or a loss, from the Irish wake to the offrendas and visits to the graves of loved ones on El Dia de los Muertos, the Mexican Day of the Dead.

Catharsis is a term that originated in ancient Greece, and meant a ritual purification through feeling a combination of pity and terror. Ancient Greek drama began as a ritual to evoke catharsis through the enactment of myths and stories. By empathizing with the characters, and suffering vicariously, we can purge some of our own pain.

We can also create new rituals and traditions that help us integrate losses. In San Francisco, back in the ‘70s, the Latin(x) immigrant community were too far away from their family graves to visit on El Dia de los Muertos, so they began holding a procession every year every year instead, and filling a local park with altars and offrendas. This ritual has now become a local tradition, involving people of every faith and background, and on November 2, the streets are filled with mourners holding candles, drummers and dancers, altars in parks and doorsteps, and a procession of thousands of people, united by our common experiences of grief and loss.

Joanna Macy, who developed a series of books and workshops to share what she calls “The Work That Reconnects”, created a ritual back in the ‘80s around our fears of nuclear destruction, to move from despair to empowerment. She and her colleagues have created many forms of ritual designed to let people express their grief, be acknowledged, and reintegrate into life. “The critical passage or hinge of the workshop happens when, instead of privatizing, repressing and pathologizing our pain for the world (be it fear, grief, outrage or despair), we honor it. We learn to re-frame it as suffering-with or compassion. This brings us back to life.” The ceremonies take different forms, but generally involve a chance for each participant to tell a story, express pain, grief, rage or fear, and be witnessed and affirmed by the group.

Our own Pagan group, Reclaiming, has created rituals to help us reintegrate after actions in which we may have suffered or seen physical violence or been arrested. We might create a ritual circle, place salt and water in the center, and invite people to step into the center, share their experience or express their pain, drop salt into the water, wail, scream or cry, and be supported by the group singing, crying out or chanting around them.

The container of ritual, or the limited time-container of a therapy session, allows us to feel the intense emotions without the fear that they will overwhelm our lives and we will have no respite nor return from the depths.

Support strength and reintegration:

One approach to trauma healing centered around emotional catharsis, getting people to recall traumatic experiences and consciously feel some of the painful emotions they may have suppressed. Traumatic experiences often do not encode into memory as a coherent whole, but in isolated snapshots of painful moments and incidents. Recalling and reliving the experience could bring buried memories to consciousness and keep the pain from festering.

But over time, therapists came to realize that too much catharsis was not necessarily helpful and could actually be damaging. When a person’s sense of self-continuity and worth was damaged by trauma, reliving the events could keep them from recovering the functional, creative, and empowered aspects of their lives and freeze them into identifying as a victim. Effective support needed to focus on helping the person to rebuild their sense of self, reclaim their agency, and integrate the disconnected pieces of memory as a narrative rather than a relived experience.

A better approach is to encourage the traumatized person to maintain some distance from the painful events, to imagine them as a movie projected onto a screen rather than something they had to relive. That can be a helpful image to suggest when we listen to someone recount a painful event. We can also look for opportunities to reaffirm the person's sense of self, the things they normally do, that they're good at, that give them pleasure and especially any ways that they have a positive impact on others.

Doing the dishes:

Sometimes the most helpful thing you can do is simply to wash the floor, do the dishes, take care of some of the simple, basic life needs that are much harder to cope with when you are traumatized, depressed or grieving. There's a reason why so many cultures share the custom of bringing food to someone in mourning. Trauma and grief have many similarities and one of them is that, at least for a time, it becomes much harder to cope with the everyday tasks of life. So bringing around a hot dish or casserole, taking the dog for a walk, or vacuuming the living room may be unglamorous, but far more actually helpful then demanding to hear every detail of the traumatic event.

Activities that reregulate:

There are many things that we do that help our nervous system reregulate itself and return to normal. Many of the things we do in ritual, for example, breathing together, grounding, meditating, singing, chanting, and dancing all help our nervous system bring itself back into regulation. Resmaa Menakem, a Minneapolis-based psychotherapist who works with black, white and police clients, describes in My Grandmother’s Hands how activities that are rhythmic, sensual, that involve moving, smelling, tasting, art, poetry, or music awaken our sensual/emotional self, help us heal from trauma and create a sense of belonging. That's why every culture on earth has some form of ceremony, music, rhythm and dance, all activities that help us come back from trauma.

Sleep, good food, rest, time spent in nature, are also ways that help us return to a sense of safety and normality. Sleep can be especially problematic for someone who's traumatized, and many people are finding sleep hard to come by in general in this current political climate. Developing a clear routine, limiting exposure to news or upsetting information before bedtime, using a helpful sleep app or meditation program can all be helpful. Herbal remedies or doctor-prescribed medication may also be worth considering if necessary.

EMDR:

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy is a specific form of therapy designed to help change the way memories are stored in the brain. Patients are asked to concentrate on a memory while moving their eyes in specific patterns. An experienced practitioner can help a traumatized person reintegrate the memory of a traumatic event so that the emotions associated with it lose their potency, and the triggers lose their power to restimulate terror and pain.

Changing internal dialogue:

One of the residues of trauma can be negative self talk. When something bad happens, blaming ourselves may be an unconscious way to take some control over a terrible situation. After all, if I somehow caused this awful thing, maybe I could prevent something like it from happening again? As bad as guilt might feel, it may be preferable to admitting we had no control whatsoever over a painful situation. If others have died or been more seriously harmed by a trauma, we may also feel survivor’s guilt. Why have I been spared when others were not? It should have been me!

Believing “I’m a bad person and I did something wrong” may seem better than facing a universe where terrible things can happen to good people. But that negative self-talk is ultimately damaging. Consciously changing it, replacing the loops of self-blame with positive inner dialogues can be an important part of healing. To do so, we may need counseling or professional help. But our friends and community can also help, by acknowledging our feelings, refraining from judgment and offering affirmations.

Affirmations can work even when you don’t believe them, if only because they interrupt the tapes of self-blame. “I’m a strong and resilient person and I have gifts to give the world” is a better inner refrain than “Why was I so stupid?” Repeating them often disrupts the cycle of guilt and self-hate. Writing them out, posting them on your mirror or computer or refrigerator, where you see them often, creating a nightly or morning ritual to repeat them to yourself will help establish them as the default your mind turns to under stress.

Audiobooks can also be helpful. When we’re caught in those endlessly repeating inner tapes, having someone in your ear telling you a story can be another way to interrupt the cycle.

Desensitization and positive experiences:

Finding ways to create positive experiences in situations that might trigger old fears or traumas can also be part of healing. There’s a reason why we say “Get back on the horse that threw you!” If we can redo a frightening situation safely, we can sometimes avoid instilling a fear or phobia.

Many years ago, I got caught in a riptide in Hawaii and almost drowned. The next time I went into the ocean, as soon as I swam a few feet out from shore my body went into panic mode. I started to hyperventilate and had to rush back to land. But over time, I gradually grew accustomed to once again swimming in the ocean, something I truly enjoy, by going in with others around to support me and swimming out a short way, then coming back in to assure myself that I could safely get to shore.

This of course doesn't work for every traumatic situation. If you've been abducted by ICE at your citizenship interview, you don't want to repeat that experience in any form whatsoever. But if you find yourself going into panic whenever you enter an office, you might want to enlist help to create some positive, enjoyable experiences inside an office building to help you desensitize and overcome that fear.

We are more conscious, these days, of how certain stories, words, or images might trigger trauma responses in others, and often people will put ‘trigger warming’ at the top of a disturbing post or video. In general, I’m not a fan of this practice. I think it reinforces a trauma survivor’s sense that they are powerless in the face of a dangerous and retraumatizing world, and powerlessness reinforces trauma. Better to support someone’s inner strength and resilience to desensitize the triggers, recognize that being triggered is not actually the same as being harmed, and recover their freedom of movement and action.

There are times, however, when someone has recently experienced a trauma, when exposure to images of violence and cruelty can be overwhelming. Shortly after I returned home from Genoa, my husband David suggested we go see a movie about Stephen Biko, the South African anti-apartheid activist. At the moment when the film depicted him being beaten to death in prison, I ran out of the theater. When David came to find me, I lashed out at him angrily and told him I wanted a divorce! It was simply too soon, after what I’d experienced, for me to tolerate seeing that level of violence. Luckily, David and I were able to reconcile after I calmed down.

So use your good judgment in deciding what to expose yourself or others to after a trauma. We don’t want to go through life pinging from trigger to trigger like a super-sensitive billiard ball, but we can also recognize that time and a clear process may be necessary for us to find our center of resilience.

Restoring self-continuity:

Because trauma fragments our sense of self, restoring our self-continuity can be an important aspect of healing. Some of the ways you might do this for yourself or a friend are:

Think of your life as a journey. Draw a map of it, with milestones as landmarks. Include a path that leads into your projected future.

Remember happy times from your past. Look over old photographs, play the music of your earlier years, make a recipe from your childhood, talk about positive memories with friends and family. Nostalgia can help restore that self of self-continuity.

Write your autobiography. There was a meme circulating on the internet for awhile, of people posting significant dates in their lives: “At fifteen I was………”. “At twenty I was …….” “At thirty-five I was…..” “Now I’m forty-two and I’m ……”. This can be a simplified form of autobiography, less intimidating than trying to write a book about it. The point is to connect your past self with the present, and then to include some visions for the future: “At fifty I hope to be…..”

Write a letter to yourself in the future. What do you want to remember from this time? What do you hope to be? Or write a letter from your present self to your earlier self. What would you say now to that struggling person? Finally, you could write a letter from your future self to your present self. What do you imagine you’d say, ten years, twenty years on?

Rebuilding a sense of agency and competence:

Ultimately, to recover from trauma we must reintegrate with those aspects of our lives in which we function as adults, exercise agency, and make a positive difference to our families, friends and community. It's a well-known cliché that, after a loss or trauma, a survivor will want to keep busy and hurry back to work. We encourage people to take time to grieve and mourn, but work and responsibilities can also be an important part of recovery. If the essence of trauma is helplessness and powerlessness, finding places in which to exert our power can be healing. When we create, take action, offer help to others, and fulfil our responsibilities, we rebuild our sense of competence and self-esteem.

If you are supporting someone who has been traumatized, don’t just talk about the traumatic incident over and over again. Instead, ask about what they ordinarily do, talk about the things they are interested in, their families, their hobbies, their creative outlets, their achievements, and what they hope to do in the future. All of these help rebuild the person's sense of who they are as a full human being, not just as the victim of a horrible event.

Activism as a Healing Force:

Activism means exercising agency. Understanding the relationship of trauma to powerlessness, we can understand that movements that help people garner power can also help counter the trauma that oppression creates. When we take action to counter an unjust system, we feel better about ourselves. We’ve set a goal and made a choice to pursue that goal. With all its frustrations, taking a stand for social justice together with others and building a powerful movement feels much better than fighting alone, fleeing, freezing with paralysis or trying to placate the powermongers. And the broader and more welcoming we can make that movement, the more we can end some of the horrors that cause harm and trauma.

In future posts, I’ll look at ways movements can further agency in our organizing and governance.

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Notes:

1) Annual Review of Psychology Self-Continuity Constantine Sedikides, Emily K. Hong, and Tim Wildschut Centre for Research on Self and Identity, School of Psychology, University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom; email: C.Sedikides@soton.ac.uk, E.Hong@soton.ac.uk, R.T.Wildschut@soton.ac.uk

https://www.southampton.ac.uk/~crsi/Sedikides,%20Hong,%20&%20Wildschut,% 202023,%20ARP.pdf

2) Judith Hermann. Trauma and Recover: The Aftermath of Violence, from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York. Basic books. 1992, 1997, 2015, 2022

3) National Center for PTSD https://www.ptsd.va.gov/understand/types/combat_exposure.asp

4) Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University. https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2021/Suicides

5)

6) https://www.joannamacy.net/main#work

7) Resmaa Menakem. My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Healing our Hearts and Bodies. Las Vegas, Central Recovery Press, 2017