The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing, and Social Justice by Staci Haines (2019) - DNF

Nov 01, 2021 20:39

The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing, and Social Justice by Staci Haines (2019)

Healing and Activism
Child sexual abuse is deeply traumatizing. It is also very early training in power-over, in victim and offender, in coercion, in silencing, and in adapting to violence and domination. This is training related to all systems of oppression and power-over social conditions (8).

This Book Is for You
Embodied healing means we can make choices based on what we care about, rather than react from survival strategies, even under the pressures of living, loving, and social justice work (11).

This book also asks the question of what causes trauma. What experiences, family and community dynamics, and social and economic conditions cause most traumas? It looks to social justice as the primary prevention of trauma, while also acknowledging how essential healing from trauma and oppression is to that goal, to decreasing suffering and to increasing safety, belonging, and dignity. If we do not understand and integrate the shaping power of institutions, social norms, economic systems, oppression, and privilege alongside the profound influences of family and community, we will not fully understand trauma or how to heal from it. We will not understand how to prevent it (11).

Oppressive social and economic conditions cause traumas that need healing. Social change requires masses of people building together toward collective safety, belonging, and dignity, and systems that support this (12).

Part 1: Somatics and Social Conditions
Chapter 1: Somatics-A Radically Different View of Who We Are
Somatics is a holistic way to transform. It engages our thinking, feeling, sensing, and actions. Transformation, from a somatic view, means that the way we are, relate, and act become aligned with our visions and values-even under pressure (17).

Somatics introduces us to an embodied life. It reminds us that we are organic and changing people. There are vast amounts of information within our bodies and sensations. When we learn to listen to the language of sensation, to live inside of our skins, a whole new world opens. What is most important to us, what we long for, is found and felt through our sensations, impulses, and an embodied knowing. Through the body, we can access ourselves, develop self-knowledge, and change.

The habits and survival strategies we develop through life are also bodily phenomena. One of the most effective ways to interrupt reactions, and instead respond based on what we care about, is through the felt senses. This is where we can learn about and retrain our nervous systems, and develop ourselves.

Lastly, somatics can remind us that we are human, connected to a much wider fabric of life. Objectification of others and disconnection from the land and our living environments require us to numb, separate, and dissociate. Sadly, we as a species are fairly good at this. Not feeling ourselves allows us to not feel others. Opening to our own senses, perceiving, and aliveness allows us to develop and remember our empathy and interdependence (18).

In Western(ized) cultural and economic systems, we fundamentally live within a disembodied set of social beliefs and practices. This means we have learned to hold the body as an object separate from the self, rather than a living organic process inseparable from the self. Thus, the distinctions around body-based work can get unclear and sloppy. Anything that has to do with the body can be called “somatics.” I’d like to get more nuanced to make this grounded and useful.

The word somatics comes from the Greek root soma, which means “the living organism in its wholeness.” Although it can be cumbersome, it is the best word we have in English to understand human beings as integrated mind, body, spirit, and social, relational beings. In somatic speak, we call this embodiment “shape.” One’s shape is one’s current embodiment of beliefs, resilience and survival strategies, habits, and actions. We can somatically perceive an individual’s shape, or the collective shape of a group. In a group this is the embodied and practiced culture, norms, and dynamics, especially those that you see when the group is under pressure (19).

Somatics asks, “What are you practicing? And, is what you are practicing aligned with what you most care about (20)?”

Somatics pragmatically supports our values and actions becoming aligned. Somatics works through the body, engaging us in our thinking, emotions, commitments, vision, and action.

It helps us to develop depth and the capacity to feel ourselves, each other, and the life around us. It builds in us the ability to act from strategy and empathy. It teaches us to be able to assess conditions and “what is” clearly. Somatics is a practicable theory of change that can move us toward individual, community, and collective liberation (22).

Dissociation, minimization, and numbing are normal responses to trauma, oppression, and difficult life experiences. These are all ways to remove ourselves, or aspects of ourselves, from feeling. In turn, being connected to sensation helps to bring us back into contact with ourselves. It also brings us back to what we have been avoiding or protecting ourselves from. This can mean feeling physical and emotional pain that made us want to leave or numb in the first place. Thus, returning to sensing and feeling can also require support, training, and/or purposeful healing.

I know this may sound strange, but so often what we are reacting to is not being able to tolerate what is happening in our own sensations, emotions, and experience. We react to get rid of the feeling, to push away the sensations, because they are associated with something intolerable, painful, and uneasy. Increasing our ability to “allow for” sensations and emotions gives us more choice and decreases our reactivity.

Somatic awareness and ongoing embodiment-living inside our own body and aliveness-give us more choice. They grow our ability to be present in more and more situations. They help us act connected to what matters to us rather than react to get away from something. Somatic awareness often reintroduces us to what we most care about… what’s in our hearts or our gut feelings (24).

Three key principles in somatic opening are: supporting the contraction, or blending; connecting more resilient places in the soma with more stressed or numb places; and allowing more aliveness to move through the soma connected to purpose, which includes opening the tissues to allow for this aliveness and sensation to flow.

Let’s unpack these principles.

Blending is the principle of joining with. This is joining with a contraction or habituated shaping in the soma, rather than trying to break it up or unlock it. The assumption behind this blending is that there is intelligence in the protective patterning. We want to be curious in our conversations and touch. What has this somatic contraction been taking care of? What has it served? When did it get established, or how long has it been around? How does it work? In supporting the contraction, slackness, or numbness-physically and verbally-the soma will begin to tell its story. We can discover how the somatic pattern works and what its key purpose has been (27).

We are taught to distance from sensations and the body, rather than living inside them. This distancing from lived experience, from feeling aliveness, also prepares us to be quick to objectify others and other types of life (soil, air, trees, animals). The dismissal or degradation of sensing and feeling atrophies our empathy. Sensing comes with lots of information including impulses and needs, habits, current time experiences, historical patterns, deep cares, and wisdom. The disregard of sensing dismisses a realm of information that holds both evolutionary wisdom and interdependence (39).

Somatics is not just an effective and potent set of tools by which to heal and transform deeply. It is also an invitation to mend a profound personal and social mind-body split, which has consequences that are more harmful than life affirming. I posit that returning or reintegrating into the life of our bodies allows us to return to a greater connection with each other, life, and land. It is a practice to help us deobjectify life. It lets us sense and feel life more readily (44).

Chapter 2: Sites of Shaping, Sites of Change
While engaging in healing and personal transformation is vital for our lives, actions, and relations to become more loving, purposeful, and skillful, it does not create social justice. In fact, I see many wealthy and privileged people engage in personal or leadership transformation, and NOT engage in changing institutions and social norms that cause harm to others and the planet. Even though this is allegedly aligned with their values. I rarely see teachers or leaders of transformation, meditation, therapy, or neuroscience call their organizations and students to engage in social justice movements, or integrate a social analysis. Rather, the social norms and systems of individualism, capitalism, white supremacy, and others confine and coopt the transformation. These same norms and institutions continue the concentration of wealth and consumerism, and allow practices like mindfulness and yoga to emerge as products of capitalism stripped of their history and original intent.

Engaging in social change asks us to do deep internal work, uprooting and recognizing how social conditions have shaped us through privilege and oppression. Most people do not intend to be racist or sexist or transphobic, yet are anyway. Most of us have a wide variety of experiences (from resilient to traumatic) and occupy varied social locations-some with more privilege and some with less. This does not equalize our various social locations. We need to recognize our complex participation in social systems, rather than flattening everyone’s experiences by saying we have all experienced hardship (53).

What creates offenders, or people who sexually abuse children? Yes, we can give them a diagnosis, find them deplorable, or react through vigilantism or denial. If people are not born sexual abusers, what makes them that? Why are 96% of them men? This requires a complex answer. The statistics will tell us that a majority of people who sexually abuse children were neglected or physically abused as children. Those in treatment consistently report having felt helpless as adults, yet able to easily assert control over children. Typically, it takes a year of treatment for people who have sexually abused children to begin to thaw out enough to empathize with those they hurt. If we look to male gender socialization, we find lots of training in power-over beliefs and behaviors with little permission to feel afraid or vulnerable, to not know, to not be in control, to have needs for connection. There is encouragement to control, win, fight, and know more, to earn one’s worth and identity. Even the benevolent patriarch forms of these messages are power-over: protect, save, know, assure. There is deep social training in sex as power, sex as violence, and very little training in the social conditions of sexual empathy and mutual consent.

Why do so many people surrounding child sexual abuse not notice, deny it, or do nothing? Again, a complex answer. We have automatic survival responses to horrors and trauma. Denial and numbing are some of these. Running and hiding are others. The vast majority of child sexual abuse happens to children by their families and other people they know. There is a strong social stigma against intervening in the family. We are not supposed to comment on others’ child-rearing. We have all kinds of shared social denial-they (children) don’t remember anyway, kids are resilient, I would have known if it was happening, or I know him (offender) and he could have never done that, and more (58).

Sumitra Rajkumar, longtime political educator and movement builder, somatic practitioner, teacher for generative somatics, and writer:
Once I found somatics, I realized my work was in the body. It was literal. I had to tolerate the blankness in my brain and the sensations in my insides and look people in the face without being scared of them until my breath and thoughts came back. I had to allow that trusting people was not necessarily dangerous. I had to face the terror and the longing to be seen all at once-to reveal myself, to be more vulnerable. I opened my ribs up, sat in my seat more, eased up on my hypervigilant eyes and throat. I had to talk about and face all the fear and shame of growing up in Dubai, the disorientation and inability to connect the dots of my own life and realize that I, like everyone else, had a story. In the midst of this, I opened up my original love for literature and my passion to write but I was terrified of the irrelevance of my voice: again, the blank, dry loss of words. I had to ease my armored system to be more porous, allow for relationships with trust in lovers, friends, family, readers. I had to get over myself. I had more choice once I did this. I could choose to be less lonely, to not press the eject button, to stop collecting the evidence of loss and hurt to build the case against relationship, as though loss only happened to me, to dare to stay and build love and community and even share my own voice. Even now, I’m scared to write this but writing feels so much more alive than staying silent. That awareness deepens my embodiment of courage to help build our collective radical will to change our individual lives and the world itself (62).

Part 2: Trauma and Oppression
Chapter 3: Individual and Systemic Trauma: A Somatic Understanding
Here is a somatic definition of trauma:
Trauma is an experience, series of experiences, and/or impacts from social conditions, that break or betray our inherent need for safety, belonging, and dignity. They are experiences that result in us having to vie between these inherent needs, often setting one against the other. For example, it might leave us with the impact of “I can be safe but not connected (isolated),” or “I have to give up my dignity to be safe or connected.” This is untenable, because all of these needs are constitutive or inherent in us (74).

One aspect of healing is widening the range of sensations and emotions we can feel, be present with, and allow to move in us (75).

This “survival shaping” impacts identity, interaction, relationship, physiology, emotions, behavior, and thinking or interpretation. The shaping remains, even when it is no longer useful or relevant to the current context. It is preparation for the worst, rather than being able to assess for danger, safety, connection, and dignity; and the nuances of each (76).

Some ways that survival shaping may look in the physiology are:

• Someone who consistently hangs their head or casts their eyes down, not taking up space. It may seem that they apologize with their bodies. This can be a survival shaping of appeasing, or one shaped by a deep sense of shame.
• Someone whose eyes are more fixed or held wide, like they are shocked or scared.
• Someone who knows where the exits are, and may be “on the move” a lot. This can be survival shaping of unprocessed shock, or one who is looking to escape, to run.
• Someone who gets angry, defensive, or controlling quickly. They may seem sharp or cold in their eyes, or jaws. The chest and jaw may protrude. This can be a survival shaping of “fight” or defense, when defense is not needed in the current situation.
• Someone who has a hard time staying “here” or present. It may seem like they are not paying attention, or that they don’t care, or that they are “checked out” a lot. This can show up in the eyes, in not “hearing” or tracking what’s going on. The person may somatically appear more airy or floating. This can be a survival shaping of dissociation, of staying away from feeling or experiencing life (77).

Connecting Individual Trauma with Systemic Trauma
While we may have traumatic experiences that are very personal, and may live alone with them for years, traumas such as child sexual abuse, intimate partner violence, harassment, and police violence reveal themselves to be systemic due to their sheer numbers and spread across regions. Violations that occur frequently, and across many communities, show us that there is something happening in the social and economic fabric that actually supports, or allows for, their occurrence.

Thus we need to see the trauma in a more complex way. The immediate violation has impact, the relationship to the offender(s) has impact, the social denial or blaming of the victim has impact, and the overall lack of effective collective response has impact. The broader social norms that feed this narrative of who’s to blame and who can remain unaccountable have impact. These are all connected.

Here are two situations to unpack using this lens of the interdependence of individual and systemic trauma.

Let’s look at the sexual abuse of children. One in four girls and one in six boys will be sexually abused before their eighteenth birthdays, and 34% of people who sexually abuse a child are family members (National Sexual Violence Resource Center, 2015). That’s a big and painful set of numbers. As we know, around each child who has been sexually abused, there is the person who violated them, the other adults who may or may not be intervening, and then other children, teachers, and people in their lives. Child abuse, both sexual and physical, and neglect stun me because it is so prevalent, yet there is so much silence. It’s so hidden. How do we do that? What social norms and practices allow for both the abuse and the silencing of it? Given the statistics of child sexual abuse, and that the vast majority of people who abuse are known to the child, most of us know someone who has sexually abused a child.

In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure no one listens.
(Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence-From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror) 84

Elizabeth Ross, artist, somatic practitioner, longtime harm reduction organizer, and teacher for generative somatics:
Well into my youth I was told I was “intense” and “serious.” I did not feel ashamed of these attributes; I felt I was different, separated from my peers. The magnitude of trauma, fear of losing my parents, my community, and all I knew, alongside the perception of my parents as enemies of the State, resulted in my developing a buoyant, strong, creative inner life. I constructed an alternate world: a refuge of art and nature, a forecast of my becoming a printmaker, painter, and denizen in a rural area. My parents deeply loved and wanted me, which has to this day been an unparalleled resource in surviving trauma. But it would be many years before I would tackle emotional intimacy with another person outside of my family. The idea of voluntarily depending on a person, telling my story, was years away... I have been a politicized Somatic Practitioner for fifteen years now. Training and working in this area deepened my knowledge of trauma, and widened the aperture onto my courageous political family history, allowed me to reestablish my artistic life, and instilled in me a renewed aliveness in my body. The hidden corners of my life were brought to daylight. There is calmness and confidence while moving from my internal life to the outside world. It is no small achievement that through somatics I gained the ability to deeply connect with others, reveal myself, and discern when and how to fight, and to relish the wonder of life (93).

Chapter 4: The Impact of Trauma and Oppression
Fight, flight, freeze, appease, and dissociate are protective and adaptive responses that come with the package of being human. These protective responses aren’t perfect. Usually once we have been hurt or endangered, our automatic defenses generalize and assume the harm will come again. When this happens, we can’t “put down the defense” to see trustworthy, good people and situations. It feels more like we are waiting for the next bad thing to happen. When these defenses “generalize,” they become a foundational embodiment from which we are functioning. These survival reactions can then create suffering and breakdowns, mistrust and disconnection. We can mis-assess safety, love, dignity, and others’ actions.

If we look at the purpose of automatic protective responses being generalized, this makes sense. Being prepared for your environment and its stresses means you are better able to survive. This is adaptive. And it has its costs-generalized survival reactions are hard on our bodies as stress increases; hard on our relationships as suspicion and mistrust can occur; hard on our families and communities when there is a lack of empathy, boundaries, and accountability; and lastly, hard on our organizations and social movements when feeling helpless, critiquing to a destructive degree, and when lack of trust and a generalized distrust of power arise. You get the point.

Matt Ridley, the author of Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, writes dynamically about stress, which has many implications about trauma, healing, and our shaping from it.
On chromosome 10, there’s a gene which makes an enzyme which creates cortisol from cholesterol. Cortisol is the body’s stress hormone. When you feel very stressed, it’s caused by having cortisol in your blood system. Cortisol goes around switching on and off genes and that changes your behavior and your sensations. This means that external events in your life, which change the stress you’re under, can actually change your genes. It can switch on some genes and switch off others. So our genes are at the mercy of our behavior, as well as our behavior being at the mercy of our genes.
(Matt Ridley, from an interview online)

In his chapter on stress, he discusses that when this stress gene is “turned on” in the pregnant mother, the infant will be born with it turned on as well. That blew my mind, thinking about intergenerational trauma. The good news is that our behavior, healing, and practice can also switch the stress gene “off” (97).

Like other survival responses, a fight response can be learned young, then generalized, and show up throughout one’s life. Fight as an ongoing shaping in the soma can look like:

• A defensive or positioned, immovable shape-jaw and/or chest stuck out slightly, making yourself bigger, clenching your fists.
• A hardening or thickening of the body-organizing to be impermeable.
• Making yourself bigger and louder. Taking up space physically, relationally, with your voice or presence. This may feel “normal” to you.
• An automatic “no.” Having automatic avoidance and boundaries that don’t take care of you or those you care about.
• A lack of feeling or access to your self and body. Or, a tension, pressure, and pushing outward, feeling “normal” to you. A pressure internally to act externally.
• Engaging or creating conversation and situations that have conflict, or are difficult. These may feel like “safer” ways to relate, even when they do not take care of your life and commitments.
• Distrusting people “getting along” or agreeing. Only trusting people who can fight with you.
• Separating, critiquing, hardening as an automatic way of being. The critiquing or separating feeling “safer” than connecting or softening.

There are situations when the protective impulses of fight are evoked, and it does not serve our circumstances. The fight response can “take over,” even though you may now have more choices or power. An example is the person who, nine times out of ten, brings discord, distrust, or challenge to a conversation and either leaves it in distrust, or is calmed only by the conflict being engaged. This can have a high cost on a relationship and a group. When we are deeply shaped by a generalized fight response it affects how we see and interpret people and situations, our mood and emotions, and our overall physical state (114).

Somatics will ask you how you dissociate, not necessarily why. Trauma and threat are why. The how one leaves also reveals how one can return (116).

Dissociation, as a strategy used over time, shapes your soma. Like other survival responses, a dissociation response can be learned young, then generalized, and show up throughout one’s life. Dissociation as an ongoing shaping in the soma can look like:

• A shape that is more floaty, otherworldly, not quite there. A dispersed energy up (toward the head) and out.
• Not very present in the eyes, or to the touch. Pulled out of the eyes and away from the surface of the skin.
• Very sensitive to others’ moods, emotions, and shifts in energy and movements, but not present to your own, or not feeling yourself or others deeply.
• Physically, emotionally, and/ or relationally checked out or numb feeling more “normal.”
• A somatic organization of being tucked deep inside the guts and body-where no one can reach or find you.
• Avoiding or at times not remembering conversations and situations that have emotional intensity-from conflict, to difficult decisions with others, to love.

There are situations when the protective impulses of dissociation are evoked, and it does not serve our circumstances. This response can “take over” under threat, even though we may now have more choices or power. We may be checked out when we really want to be present, and not be able to control this. What does it cost us to split ourselves like that over time? What does it give us to bring ourselves whole again (117)?

Traumatic Amnesia
Traumatic amnesia can be understood as a deep type of dissociation, or a shutting down of what is intolerable. Again, its adaptive intent is saving us from what we cannot live through. Traumatic amnesia is when we do not remember what happened until a time in the future, in which it is safe enough to do so. The remembering often comes through visual or physical flashbacks. These often do not make any sense to the person because they have built a self-identity that does not include these experiences. The thawing and remembering process from traumatic amnesia can be very jarring to the self-image and one’s constructed sense of invulnerability. Traumatic amnesia tells us that something so traumatic happened that one’s self and survival were deeply threatened.

What neuroscience is telling us thus far about traumatic amnesia is this: we do not yet understand a lot about memory and how it works. We do, however, understand that memory and emotions are linked. We tend to remember, long-term, emotionally meaningful experiences more than non-emotional ones. Whom have you loved? Whom have you learned from? What life-giving, challenging experiences made you who you are? We tend to remember those meaningful experiences.

Unless those experiences are so overwhelming, threatening, or debilitating that our systems move into a kind of survival override. Sometimes we will just not remember the feelings of the experience: “I was raped, it wasn’t a big deal. I’m over it.” Or, we don’t register the experience as we would a regular memory. Then, we do not remember the experience(s) mentally, or in our self-concept. We do, however, remember them in our tissues, emotions, and survival reactions. Often people with traumatic amnesia are perplexed by their own reactions to threat or fear. They may over- or under-react to a challenging situation and their own behavior makes no sense to them. They may have an overwhelming sense of shame when showing fear, sadness, or anger that conflicts with their current self-concept.

Often this points to traumatic experiences that are compartmentalized, literally put away, in the soma. Often through somatic opening work, these experiences will show themselves to resolve and heal (120).

Chapter 5: Safety, Belonging, and Dignity
The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you are alive, and die only when you are dead. To love, to be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of the life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.-Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

Safety, belonging, and dignity. These are inherent needs in human beings. We are tracking for safety, adapting to belong, and organizing ourselves to find dignity. We are at our best when we have, and can offer, all three. We need to understand these more deeply to understand the impacts of trauma and oppressive social conditions, as well as how we heal and create equitable social change (133).

Trauma and oppression negatively impact all three of these needs. We may be physically or sexually harmed; targeted by racist or classist ideas, actions, and policies; told we are worthless and do not belong; and/or objectified through social norms or family practices. Our survival strategies to navigate these experiences may need to prioritize connection over ongoing safety, or dignity over connection. We are then trying to survive and navigate our experiences while internally set at odds with our own nonnegotiable needs. Traumatic symptoms set in: depression, anxiety, lack of self-trust, distrust of others, shame, numbing, and more (134).

politics, 2019, instructional, non-fiction, trauma, medical

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