Neutralizing Trauma
This article first appeared in the Minden Times on January 18, 2023.
It’s hard not to feel like you’re missing the party if you can’t claim to be traumatized by some event in your life. Or as Parul Sehgal asks, in a New Yorker article in early 2022, ‘has trauma emerged as a passport to status – our red badge of courage?’ I don’t mean – nor does he -- to diminish in any way the negative impact of trauma, and maybe it’s the circles I’m keeping these days (memoirists: wow, they’re a battered gang!), but it seems to me that being traumatized has become normalized, and I don’t think that’s a good thing.
I doubt that the world is any harsher now than it has always been – in fact, there’s some fairly compelling evidence that, on average, life is better than it was. But average doesn’t really count in day-to-day life; it’s what happens to you and your inner circle that matters. And the inner circle, the people we care about, has expanded with social media. Disaster anywhere is immediately on your screen and feeding on your brain - you don’t even have to wait for the evening news or the weekend paper. (Imagine, for a moment’s contrast, our pioneer forebears who received news by letter months after the event, or even us of a certain age, receiving the rare long-distance phone call that was only warranted by very good or very bad news.) And we can surely blame, to some extent, mainstream media’s ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ philosophy for mainstreaming trauma, and pop culture’s love affair with trauma that Sehgal’s New Yorker article unpacks.
But the bottom line is that life is guaranteed to include bad stuff, even for the most fortunate of us. And since we can’t change that (and would we if we could? I’d say no, but that’s grist for another time), it behooves us to consider how we deal with bad stuff.
Imagine my delight, then, to hear Gabor Maté on the subject. He is the doctor who developed an approach to working with people in the den of iniquity that is Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside that is revolutionizing how we understand psychological malfunction. His position is that addiction and mental illness originates with trauma. Period. Even as geneticists and molecular scientists and others uncover hitherto unknown information about the physical operation of our brains and bodies. Maté was facilitating a weekend retreat for five women who had been drugged and raped by Bill Cosby, including the woman who successfully brought him to trial. This newly released documentary, The Case Against Crosby, is available on CBC Gem and offers an in-depth understanding of how trauma operates, and – this is the important part – a re-positioning of how to protect ourselves from injury, or recover, when life delivers us damaging experiences.
Maté’s position, simply put, is that trauma is not what happens, but the stories we tell ourselves about what happened. This is absolutely in sync with most talk therapies that guide us toward modifying how we understand our history. It is consistent with the perspective that underpins many Indigenous philosophies: Harold Johnson, in The Power of Story, says simply, ‘We are the stories we tell and we become the stories we tell ourselves.’
This is not to say that protecting yourself, or healing yourself when you have been injured, is easy. It’s not – as the women in the documentary attest. But it is in your control. In fact, you may be the only person who can protect or heal yourself. I’ve spent my professional life explaining that we can’t make people be what we think they should be or what we want them to be; we can only do our best to create the conditions under which the choice we hope they make is available, accessible and attractive.
The other lovely lesson from this documentary is that we do not – and should not – heal alone. We should not keep the traumatic event a secret. We should share it as soon and as fully as possible. I invoke Sarah Polley here from her recent memoir, Run Toward the Danger. She received this advice related to dealing with concussion, but I think it has broader application. Courage beats cowering any day, I’ll say (although I can already hear the pushback!)
