The place where even “trauma informed” care fails is that it assumes safety can be “reestablished”, that safety after a traumatic event is primarily internal (e.g stopping dangerous coping behaviors or reducing the peaks of emotions), and that the world is a fundamentally safe place and your trauma was an aberrant blip. I feel that this is inseparable from the fact that PTSD was coined for and modeled off of veterans whose trauma was first and foremost foreign to their life- that is, they quite literally were transported away from that trauma and were expected to subsume back into their Safe Normal American Life as Heroes and could not (how can you expect someone to see and commit the blood tithe required to maintain an empire and not come back wounded?). The political context of this experience are erased (your imperialist country sent you to suffer and die to maintain its power and now you’ve returned feeling the immense burden of what you’ve done) and it becomes merely an issue of falling “out of time” and being “unable to realize that you are safe”- something which may ring truer for some veterans, particularly those with no qualms about the role they played in imperialism, just the pain they had to suffer to do it, but still conveniently ignores (by design! because the military had a hand in this!!!) the political contexts.
For many traumatized people, the world is not a safe place- for women, for trans people, for disabled ppl, for BIPOC, for really even the most privileged person under capitalism… this isn’t a cognitive distortion, it’s a truth. It reminds me of being in eating disorder therapy and being told that we’re not fat, it’s all in our heads- but what about those of us who were? Who know what society thinks of and does to fat people? Who have been ordered to and encouraged to develop the exact behaviors that we performed too well or too literally? Even some of the best trauma care wants people to believe that all fear and danger is a product of a diseased or broken mind, rather than a very reasonable adaptive response. I’ve spent so long trying to berate myself for continuing to feel terrified and worthless in a world which is both terrifying and committed to telling me I am worthless. We have to find ways to live and thrive within this danger, to feel out the boundaries of danger and carve hideouts within it, to create livelihoods where we are naming it + confronting it + destroying it, rather than finding a way to slip back into the unconscious illusion of a safe, picturesque American life.
andulkaphoto
origamiaround
areudirty
