“Usually, trauma is seen as something that needs to be healed. Something to be “processed” - to be dealt with privately, in therapy or among a circle of close friends, to be addressed as a problem and solved. To be neatly and tidily compartmentalized, separated from oneself, shrunk smaller and smaller until it no longer affects one directly, until it is altogether stored away. “Your trauma should not define you,” clinicians will say.
If an event or circumstance is harmful to or painful for a trauma victim or survivor, it is framed as “triggering.” It couldn’t possibly be that the event or circumstance is in of itself harmful, and that an individual’s trauma has provided them with insight into the event’s harmfulness. No, the issue is that the victim has not dealt with their trauma effectively enough, that their trauma is still affecting them.
In this sense, trauma is framed as a singular and isolated incident, as an exception to the rule. The world is a generally safe, just place, but victims and survivors have been falsely convinced by their traumatic incident that the world is unjust and unsafe. It is not possible that trauma could be an ever-present constant, perpetually occurring in every sphere of life.
Not only are experiences of victimization not seen as expertise, but they are seen as pathology. As something that causes victims to see the world less clearly, to think less rationally.
Yet for me personally, my victimhood has only allowed me to see the world more clearly. I grew up in a fairly conservative, capitalist family and shared and embodied those values for a large part of my life. I had been taught, and so it seemed to me, that the world was a fair place, and people who were economically marginalized (for example) were just not working hard enough. My victimhood fundamentally rattled my trust in the safety or justice of the world, and as a result I increasingly developed empathy for other victimized populations. My victimhood did not cloud my judgment or get in the way of my thinking clearly; rather, it radicalized me.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating for victimization or attempting to justify victimizing people because it gives them expertise.
But I wonder how our communities and contexts might change if, instead of always asking people how they plan to treat or heal from their trauma, we gave them more opportunities to share what they have learned about the world, about the human condition, about power structures, about the impact of ongoing and pervasive systemic issues. What if, instead of asking, “What happened to you [as an individual]?” we gave victims more chances to situate their traumatic experiences within a broader framework of systemic injustice and contextual power imbalances that they now have insight into?”
Victimhood as Expertise by Emily S. Cutler
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