Trauma Engaged Nation

No more shall we bind up the nation’s wounds[1]--it is time to actually heal them. We need to be a trauma engaged nation which means that we must fundamentally change the conversation about trauma. Changing the conversation about trauma means moving away from the simplistic idea that the trauma we are trying to heal is the result of any one single event or one single story. Most traumas aren’t a single event but instead happen so frequently that they are woven into the fabric of our lives.  We need to stop discussing trauma as if it were a short-term trauma, like a car accident. Most traumas that we humans experience are what I call repeated trauma. Repeated traumas are the traumas of child abuse, sexual abuse, domestic violence, racial and ethnic violence, community violence, and war. Traumas that happen for months, years and generations. These are the traumas that we as individuals and we as a nation need to heal from and it is impossible to heal if we don’t understand the distinction between single incident trauma and repeated trauma.

Single incident trauma produces a predictable physiological effect on humans—startle response, increased arousal, narrowed attention, loss of sleep or appetite and flashbacks of the event— symptoms, which if they persist, we recognize as Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. But what happens when trauma gets repeated? What happens when it’s not one frightening event, but a frightening event that happens every day for years? A one time trauma overwhelms the system—and you are caught off guard.  But imagine how exhausting it would be to get caught off guard every night for most of a childhood or a lifetime of racial discrimination? Our brains and bodies are designed for efficiency and survival which means finding the least demanding and most protective ways to cope. When trauma is repeated, we don’t wait to get caught off guard—instead we unconsciously, yet wisely, build a system of defenses against being overwhelmed and getting caught off guard again, because building defenses to withstand repeated trauma conserves our energy for survival. Instead of getting flooded with emotion, with terror, fear and all the responses to trauma --we go numb, we feel nothing and we do whatever we have to in order to maintain our distance from ourselves or others. Our lives become about self-protection.

Treating trauma as if it were a single event to move on from, and not a repeated trauma is getting in the way of healing ourselves and our nation. Repeated trauma consists of three separate aspects and each require different interventions for healing.  All three must be worked through in order to heal.

 The first aspect of repeated trauma is what did happen. These are the traumatic events. What did happen is actually the form of trauma that most people recognize and our media culture idolizes: we love a good trauma story. And we falsely believe that once the story is told, we have healed and we can ‘move on.’ Being able to share your trauma story is necessary, and it is a crucial part of healing to have your story validated and witnessed. But the story in and of itself is not sufficient to heal.

The second aspect of repeated trauma is what aided survival-- that is —the protections we used to survive the trauma. With repeated trauma, we don’t just experience trauma, we develop ways of surviving it and those behaviors get woven into our way of being—they become part of our personality. We may have learned to shut down or to not feel emotion. We may have learned to equate any conflict with the violence we experienced and equate assertiveness with the power that was used to hurt us. These trauma survival skills may have served us well then, but they often turn out to be everything that is wrong with, or interferes with, the behavior and conversations that are needed to heal. They interfere with getting and trusting help. And they interfere with being a source of trusting help for others. For example, as a white woman I am aware how my personal trauma history impacts my ability to hold shame, conflict and difficult conversations—how it makes me want to stay silent rather than assertively intervening in conversation or duck away from the role of the perpetrator that must be owned in antiracist work. How healing from our own trauma is required to support the healing of others. How it is required to contribute to a trauma-engaged nation.

And there is a crucial third aspect to healing trauma which is often hidden— it is what didn’t happen. Repeated trauma is about what did happen and what didn’t happen. What didn’t happen was the normal developmental growth that would have taken place while the trauma was occurring. It’s not just the remembered acts of violence but also the necessary and healthy developmental tasks that you weren’t learning at the time the trauma was happening. A country at war isn’t building roads and schools, a child who is enduring abuse at home is not learning to trust adults and ask for help, and communities combatting violence don’t have time or energy to meet and create arts or education programs.

Attending to what didn’t happen is where survival stops and growth begins again. And not growth of what once was—because our country, like a child who has grown up in an abusive home, has never known a life without trauma—but instead it is growth of something new. And we all have a part to play in its healing.

Copyright 2021 Gretchen L. Schmelzer PhD

[1] Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address

How do I live in a world without her?

“On the occasion of the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg”

I’m sitting out on my back porch early in the morning looking out into the yards behind my house and the only thought in my head is “How can I live in a world without her?”

And my next thought is that this isn’t the I first time I’ve awoken early from a sleepless night with this thought and a broken heart. There is a disorientation, an instability, a deep disbelief of the world after the death of someone important to you. It feels like there is less oxygen. It feels like you have to move more carefully. And the denial of death always makes me want to wait, hope the news was a mistake, just sit still long enough, patient enough for them to return. And then you breathe and take in reality again. How do I live in a world without her?

When someone dies it’s not just that the world feels emptier without them, it feels like there is something in us that has changed. What is the world without them? Who am I without them?

It’s an odd day to be thinking about identity—as today is a pilgrimage of sorts. This morning I am meeting my colleague Eddy and we are going on a short trip to my hometown in North Jersey. Not because there is anything really special about my hometown, or that there is anything really to do, especially now with Covid, but because in our work and travels I have been close to Eddy’s hometown in Zambia, and now we’re closing the loop on an old conversation and going to mine.

We are mosaics. We are made up of pieces that makes us who we are: we are where we come from, we are where we have been, we are who we love and have loved, and we are what we hold dear.

 In American culture there is such an emphasis on the individual—that I am solely myself. But this notion of identity is an illusion and that illusion is shattered when someone dies. In that moment you can see and feel that the person who died held an important support rope for you. You may not have even noticed it when they were alive. But in their absence you suddenly feel vulnerable, wobbly, as if you could topple without their support. You realize that you could be who you were because of them.

It was my friend Eddy who taught me this. In our work in Zambia and across the world, he brought the belief he was raised with, ‘Ubuntu’ to our work. ‘Ubuntu’ means ‘I am because you are’— that we are who we are because of our relationships—we are who we are because of our community.  As the psychologist Jean Baker Miller says we are selves-in-relation. And this is the fact we feel most keenly when someone dies: I am because of you. And now, who am I without you?

We are mosaics and when someone dies those mosaic pieces must shift. When someone is alive, they hold those pieces of themselves and through our connection to them we feel the benefits and borrow the strengths of those pieces. And then when someone dies we have the work, the growth, of taking in, of integrating those pieces that we are able to. Taking in those strengths and capacities into our own selves—for us and the community.

That’s why our hearts must break. This is why we must fall apart. This is why grief shatters.  We need the brokenness. Without the brokenness we can’t take in the new pieces. Falling apart allow us to absorb the mosaic pieces of the other. It is this grief that  allows us to rebuild a world without them, that includes them. This is why time is so necessary to grieving. It takes time to weave these new pieces in. It takes time to remake our mosaics.

How do I live in a world without her? Maybe the short answer is I don’t. Because I bring her into my life every day. I stand in the voting booth and my grandmother is standing next to me. I dig up plants and share them with my neighbors and my mother-in-law is right there with me handing me the spade. I rearrange my schedule to make time for writing and my friends Inger and Janet are raising their glasses and toasting my decision. Our hearts break open and our mosaics, the world’s mosaics, get bigger. First, let yourself grieve. And then, let yourself grow.

 Copyright 2020 Gretchen Schmelzer PhD

Making Kindness Cool Again

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. ”

— 1 Corinthians 13:4-8

I believe that most people would agree that caring for others, even if you don’t know them, is the right thing to do. This level of kindness or love or respect is a part of every world religion. It is the one thing that all of our Gods agree on: ‘love thy neighbor’ --with no exceptions.  It was the golden rule we were taught in school and scouts—and if you were lucky, at home. And I have never in all of my 54 years seen a more desperate time to stop what we were all doing and have a national day of kindness, a focus on caring for others, and a collective prayer of love. America needs a serious time-out to regroup and reconnect with this idea. Maybe the whole world does. We need love and kindness and caring for our fellow man to be cool again. We need kindness to be the coolest thing ever.

Yes, love is patient and love is kind. But love is also really hard. Love, kindness, care. These are not easy or weak emotions. They hold up the world. They require strength, patience and willingness to hold the other end of the rope—the willingness to be the bad guy, to be unpopular, the willingness to hold what is hard. The willingness to hold your stuff and their stuff. The willingness to do what you don’t want to do, to be inconvenienced, and at times to be burdened. Love requires us to hold the most difficult, impatient, cranky, frustrated, and stubborn aspects of ourselves and of others. Love requires muscles.

I’m not sure when it started, when it became a sign of weakness to be kind, to show love. When did acting on behalf of people, taking care of people, or protecting people become weak? When did love become a one way street that is only about ‘whether someone loves me?’ I’m sure it didn’t start with the President who behaves like a 7th grade bully but he has certainly worked hard to make a brand name of meanness and contempt. He demands love and adoration but cannot bring himself to exhibit it towards others. And now too many people are mimicking his words or behavior-- but the truth is we know better. All of us, even the people following him. Any thinking adult knows better. We know being mean isn’t the answer. The reason this bad behavior works in 7th grade is that it’s hard to feel a sense of belonging across difference when you are young and haven’t yet built a sense of self. It’s easier to connect around the things or people you don’t like—than find connections in the things you do like—or harder yet, hold that we could like each other and be different. That is a recognizable struggle of the young. But we grown-ups (and many young people) know better and we can do better. Even when we don’t want to. Even when it is hard.

I am especially talking to leaders right now because the recovery from the pandemic is going to be a long, hard struggle and in order to come out of this traumatic situation more whole than we went in we are going to need all of the kindness, love and care we can create. Leaders of states, communities and towns. Leaders of organizations, businesses, and colleges. Leaders of schools, churches, and clubs. Leaders of groups, neighborhoods and families. For all the leaders out there (and I really count every citizen as a leader) if you thought shutting down the world for the pandemic was the hardest thing you have had to do as a leader—wait for the recovery. Reopening the country is a bigger leadership challenge than shutting it down. And that terrifies me because I am a leadership consultant and I’m not sure I’ve ever witnessed a greater failure in leadership than the United States in the month of March. It was like watching a slow-motion car crash: leader after leader waiting to act. Waiting to follow someone else. Waiting for someone else to act to create the cover of their decision so no one could accuse them of being ‘weak’ or ‘making the wrong move.’

Leadership is the act of acting on behalf of someone else or something bigger than yourself. Leadership is working with and supporting other people to use their gifts to accomplish a goal. Leadership is an act of love and caring—of making hard decisions and risking the blowback that comes from them.  I was introduced to the idea that leadership is an act of love because my first big leadership position at the age of 21 was as a waterfront director at a day camp for 450 kids. I was responsible every single day for 450 of other people’s children. So when the skies darkened and it looked like thunderstorms (long before the age of the weather app) I cancelled swimming, the most popular activity at camp.  I had to tolerate the rage from kids, counselors and parents alike on multiple occasions. I spent many years working on waterfronts, leading canoe trips, counseling in residential treatment, and teaching in schools and colleges working with other people’s children. When you work with other people’s children you not only worry about the children, but you imagine the conversation with every parent or caregiver explaining to them about why their child was or was not kept safe based on your decisions and actions. When you work with other people’s children you know that you hold in your heart and your actions the most precious asset a family has. Working with other people’s children makes it easy to lead from a place of love, kindness and care. In fact, it’s your only option.

But really, don’t we all work with other people’s children? Or other people’s parents? Other people’s grandparents? Whether they are 8 or they are 8o? Aren’t they all a human in need of our kindness? Shouldn’t all of our leadership decisions be held with the level of care that we are responsible for the greatest asset of a family or community? Recovering from the pandemic is going to require all of us to simultaneously hold the losses of this year with the hope for the future. It’s going to require us to create a solid platform from which to recover. It’s going to require us to connect and communicate with people in ways we never had to before and across hurt, and frustration and difference in ways we never had to before.  And we are going to need to hold all of these leadership challenges with love and kindness and this behavior is a good bet because love never fails.  So, let’s make it easier to lead with love and kindness. Let’s make love and kindness cool again. Let’s make love and kindness the coolest thing ever.

 © 2020 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

Mourning a son on Mother’s Day: Racism and White Responsibility

Artwork by TL Duryea

www.TLDuryea.com

One hundred years ago, during a deathly viral outbreak, a woman sought to bring together mothers to collectively mourn the death of their sons in war, to create safer conditions from the virus, and if possible, to have mothers heal the divide across communities in the aftermath of the Civil War. The hope was that mothers could talk to each other because all mothers understand the painful loss of the death of a child. The foundation of mother’s day was loss and love.

And so on this Mother’s Day I ask all of us to collectively mourn the loss of a son who was killed in February, though his death came to light last week. Ahmaud Arbery. Yes, he was the son we all have, even if like me, you don’t even have children. I picture our son leaning over to tie his shoelaces. A scene every parent of a teen and young adult son has witnessed over and over. Tying the shoelaces of his running shoes, maybe talking about the next pair that he wanted, and then sitting up, looking at you and saying he’s going for a run. The door closes behind him.  He gets killed. Our son gets killed because he is Black and you are not safe in your body in this country unless you are a White, straight man.

I read the article about Ahmaud Arbery last week. Actually, I didn’t read the article. I read the headline. A ‘25 year old Black man running in a neighborhood is shot to death, no arrests’ and I put my computer down and spent the next two days crying. I couldn’t bring myself to read the article. The headline was all I could bear because this is such an old, old story.  This brutal death broke my heart and broke through some veil of patience shattering some foggy belief that the long arc was bending toward justice. It’s not.

This was a lynching. A young man goes out running and gets shot because he is Black. A young man goes to the store and is killed because he is Black. A young man walks through a neighborhood and is killed because he is Black. A young man drives home from work and is pulled over in his car by police and is killed because he is Black. The killers of these men are not held accountable. Their cases are dismissed. They are exonerated. Our systems of laws of accountability are broken. But even more than that, our culture of responsibility is broken.

This isn’t the first time I have been outraged about a racist brutal death, but it is the first time I am writing about it. I have spent much of my career writing about trauma and I believe that experiences and stories of trauma belong to the survivors. And racism and the acts and outcomes of White supremacy and genocide are traumatic and writing about acts of racism has always felt dangerously close to usurping someone else’s story, a story that belongs to the people who have endured those particular traumas.  I am a White woman and I don’t tend to write personally about traumas that I have not endured. But I need to write about the racism of this event because this particular week not writing about it, staying silent feels like an act of violence. I don’t mean I was not talking about it—talking it about it with friends and colleagues or voicing outrage at the injustice. But talking about it in my own world is a private conversation. And today, I can feel in my bones that a private conversation for a public evil amounts to silence. And when our son gets killed, we cannot be silent.

And I want to be clear that this isn’t a piece of writing about White guilt, though there is plenty of behavior by White people to be ashamed of, and plenty of my own behaviors and inaction around race to be ashamed of. This is a piece of writing about White responsibility. It is time for the people who consider themselves White, who benefit from being White, to take responsibility for the racism in this country and the resulting violence.

White America has lost the meaning of responsibility. We lean lazily on some legal definition of responsibility –that if we can’t be blamed directly with committing a racist act with proof that would hold up in a court of law, we aren’t personally responsible. It seems that the legal definition of responsibility or fault has replaced a much more common sense moral responsibility—a responsibility to what is just and right. A responsibility to something bigger and at the same time something much more basic. A sense of ownership of the problem--that we all, as White people, every single one of us, have a responsibility to the racism that killed that young man. He belonged to us, as one of our children and we have failed him, as we have so many others. We have a responsibility to this young man and his family even if we didn’t pull the trigger because we go along with a society that allows others to pull the trigger and we don’t hold them accountable.

I have gone along in society because I have often fallen for the great lie that ‘it’s getting better’ because I have believed in what Ta-Nehisi Coates names as the ‘dream.[i]’ The vision of America that Americans who consider themselves White envision. A country that is made up of Memorial Day parades, and picnics and school plays. Baseball games and hot dogs. As a woman I have fallen for the same dream of gender equality and it doesn’t exist either. Every example of ‘progress’ –a Black President, a Black CEO, a woman Supreme Court Justice only makes the dream stronger. The dream is an opiate that allows you to keep living in a deeply unequal and unjust society without feeling the pain of it. And if you don’t feel the pain of it, you don’t take on the hard work of repairing it.

But leaning on legal definitions of responsibility is not going to dismantle and end racism. It has never just been the laws on the books that have held people accountable. Laws are important and crucial to justice because they provide a means to establish minimum behavior. But laws on the books only get upheld because the community wants them to.  In the 70’s there were laws on the books that prohibited assault and battery, but growing up in a household of domestic violence I witnessed that even when the police came, they didn’t treat the violence as a crime.  It was illegal for one adult to hit another. But domestic violence was seen as a private matter and not a matter for criminal proceedings. Laws are upheld when culture and community say “this is wrong.” There was a turning point with domestic violence, and in many places it’s no longer tolerated in the same way it was in the 70’s. The laws did not change. People’s tolerance of violent behavior changed.

Racism and White male supremacy continue because as a culture we let them continue. We tolerate racism in our culture and media as a ‘difference of opinion.’ Racism is not a difference of opinion. Racism is the underpinning of violence and death. There has become an obsession with hearing both sides of something as if they have equal value. There isn’t another side to racism, it is just wrong. But just because it is wrong doesn’t mean we don’t all struggle with it. As the playwright Suzan Lori Parks states, “Racism is a virus and we all have it. So, what do we do with that information[ii]?”  

What I am doing with that information, and I invite you to join me, is sitting as long as I can with the pain of Ahmaud’s death. Letting that pain find the places in me that have fostered indifference or inaction in situations of race. Letting that pain find the places that have ignored where I could have acted differently—said something or not said something. Done something or not done something. Feeling that pain in my heart because in the very fabric of my being I love children and I feel the ache and the shame of behaving in ways that have put the lives of other people’s children at risk. And using that pain, and especially that love to motivate me to keep looking at racism and owning my part in it.

 © 2020 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

[i] Coates, T. (2015). Between the World and Me. NY: Spiegel & Grau. p.11

[ii] https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-white-noise-suzan-lori-parks-oskar-eustis-20190417-story.html

Between the World and Me

By Coates, Ta-Nehisi