“Oh Lordy!” The hatred, indifference, injustice, bigotry, and predatory capital-“Ism” have made us a country of institutionalized trauma. Is this a coincidence? Not really. It’s a relationship. A society solely based on profits can never be allowed to collapse in a purely capitalist economy — even if it means driving every last one of us, except Jeff Bezos, into abject misery, despair, anxiety, and poverty.
Let’s think together about what trauma really is.
Human beings have three primal fears. 1. The fear of annihilation, 2. the fear of abandonment, and 3. the fear of engulfment or being overwhelmed. But these are precisely the three fears that we are confronted with on a daily basis — as if it’s perfectly normal to exist this way. We’re constantly made to feel that we could be annihilated, abandoned, engulfed and overwhelmed every day. In fact, most days many of feel this way.
That’s exactly how Ism’s, particularly capitalism, control us. The implication is, we’d better work eighteen hours a day! Or else we might be abandoned. We might end up with no job. And what happens then? Then, we might get annihilated. We might fall through the cracks, end up homeless, bankrupt, invisible. Do we want that? I don’t think so. Then we are engulfed and overwhelmed — by work, which in most cases the only point for working is to make mega-rich people richer, while we face financial ruin every single day.
This way of thinking is itself evidence of an immature, split, broken-apart personality — a personality that has never really learned how to value life itself or anyone else’s life in any mature or thoughtful way. It has made us face a perpetual, terrible, and impossible dilemma.
On a daily basis, we have to choose between three of our primal fears. Either we must choose to be overwhelmed — so we’re not annihilated; or we must choose to be abandoned, so that we’re not engulfed and overwhelmed; or we must choose to be annihilated, so we don’t fall through the cracks, end up homeless, bankrupt, invisible. Think about the effect this has on our relationships! In other words, we are left in a terrible existential trilemma, having to choose one of the three great primal fears — abandonment, annihilation, and engulfment — so as to minimize our others fears … but we can never not choose any of them. This is a painful and un-healthy place to live.
Who can blame us for being angry, stressed, distressed … depressed, anxious, suicidal? I had to take a step back from shaming and blaming the person who attempted to annihilate me on social media after I responded to a post from one of my closest friends. This person, whom I didn’t know, wrote back to me saying: “I am ____ and it makes no difference who you are!!!!!! If you can’t take constructive criticism than just don’t respond!!!!!” To tell another person, “It makes no difference who you are,” and end it with six exclamation points … Wow! Wow!
We are traumatized! And badly traumatized! In the textbook sense. I’ll bet more of us than not literally have panic attacks thinking about money. Many of us are suffering heart palpitations thinking about our future. Our blood pressure runs high thinking about retirement. We feel dizzy, sometimes losing our bearings, when we think about our lives and where we’ve ended up. We are walking around in shock, irritable at work, disconnected, numb, sad, over-medicated, high …. hurling blame at everyone else. These are all textbook signs of trauma.
Why doesn’t anyone notice? Why doesn’t anyone care?
I think the answer to this question is even sadder. What happens to us after we’ve been traumatized long enough? We don’t just consider it normal — we adopt the stance, often, of the one who has traumatized us—the perpetrator. We think, “Fuck it, if this happened to me — then I’m going to do it to you! I’ll make you suffer, too!” This way, we can prove to ourselves that it couldn’t really be this bad! Being a perpetrator makes us feel powerful, as if the world is fair again! And, a person who takes up the stance of a perpetrator possesses a deep conviction about it, because it makes them feel strong.
Unfortunately, this is where a lot of us are. The folks who want active shooter drills — instead of fewer guns. The folks who don’t want their neighbors to have healthcare. The folks who think giving kids free college education is somehow a bad thing. The folks lashing out violently, I mean violently, on social media because someone disagreed with their opinion about a certain political candidate. They are all displaying textbook signs of having been traumatized so badly that they’ve adopted the aggression and rage of their perpetrators as a classic defense mechanism against rugged self-deception … against ever having to admit the truth to themselves.
For some, this truth is a difficult one. Perhaps the most difficult of all. I believe that we’ve been utterly failed, by people and systems whose job it was to lead and look after us. To nourish and nurture us. To protect and value us. Instead, we’ve been being preyed on, bullied, duped and abused.
Now come the tears. Of shame. Of guilt. Of anger. Of injustice, of time forever lost, of relationships ripped apart, of love lost, and truths never told.
But hopefully, in the end, comes something beautiful. The truth, which sets us all free. Then, the knowing that we are people of genuine, intrinsic, inalienable, essential worth … magnificent and complex human-beings, made in the perfect image of the Divine — then we’re whole again. Or at least a little more whole, because the truth is, there is always an emptiness inside us, a place of fear, deep and true as an old and almighty ocean.
Now we can step in that almighty ocean gently. Just dip a toe in. Instead of drowning in it. That almighty ocean of fear is the place where our primal fears of abandonment, annihilation, and engulfment reside. These fears always flow through us.
Yet these terrible fears also give us the greatest gifts. Do you know that? Our fears are why we can feel empathy. Why we can love. Why we can be touched by a sense of grace. Why we can say, “I feel this grief and pain in you, too.” Wow!
Then relationship happens, like magic. Then we can love, hold, see, know, listen because we have kissed the truth. But we can’t receive those gifts until and unless we learn to manage our fears a whole lot better.
Take care of yourselves.
Love and blessings,
Paula
