What We are Learning About Healing
About Healing (pt 1).
David Anderson Hooker
One of the greatest travesties visited upon humanity has come in the form of an old folk-wisdom which states: “Time heals all wounds.” This piece of folk wisdom has now been effectively countered by every major scientific school of thought. The evidence of its inaccuracy is also clearly visible when we consider the unhealed and ongoing global conflicts, local ethnic, class and political turmoil and especially when we consider the legacy and aftermath of racialized institutional enslavement in the United States.
What we are learning in our research to support Coming to the TABLE is that in order to heal from and interrupt the multigenerational transmission of trauma, we must understand and address every dimension of each individual’s life (physical, cognitive, emotional and spiritual), every level of societal organization (individual, family, community, institutional, national and global) AND we must attend to both the Legacy and the Aftermath.
Over the next several installations of this portion of the CTTT Blog space, which considers healing, we will expand on each of the following lessons:
Trauma pain that is not transformed will be transferred— when an individual or group of people is faced with circumstances that seemingly threaten their survival and overwhelm their ability to respond, the person or group is traumatized. Trauma has impacts at several levels: biological, cognitive, emotional, and even spiritual. When trauma is not healed it has natural expression in behaviors of the traumatized persons and, by extension, entire societies. Acting in and acting out behaviors are symptomatic of trauma.
Multi-generational transmission of trauma. When trauma is experienced over extended periods (even generations), what were once recognizable as predictable and even appropriate responses to trauma, become “natural” or “regular” behaviors and societal conditions or arrangements (consider for example segregation and the continuing state of separation in geographical/living arrangements). Often the behaviors, thoughts and beliefs have biological consequences, which themselves are passed on and considered “the natural difference between groups” (i.e. hypertension, cancer).
Trauma Impacts more than its victims. Research is clear and now more is being conducted which demonstrates that the experience of trauma has predictable and yet previously unacknowledged impacts on victims and also perpetrators, witnesses and bystanders. Rachel MacNair’s work on Perpetration Induced Traumatic Stress (PITS) and Kaethe Weingartener and Ervin Staub, et al’s work on the roles of witnesses and bystanders in diminishing or increasing the traumatic quality of any experience is pointing us in a direction of a need for all inclusive models of healing for societies and not simply healing for those identified as “victims”.
The Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and the Multiply Wounded Society. Much of the early research concerning trauma and trauma healing was developed based on the experience of individuals suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Enslavement Trauma and other historical wounds that engulfed entire societies over extended periods, while sharing some features with PTSD, have much more complex and profound symptoms; some of which start to resemble the “natural order of things” in that society. Martha Cabrera, a clinical psychologist working in Central American countries after the civil wars of the 1970’s and 80’s, describes these societies as Multiply Wounded Societies”—Societies in which individuals, families, every institution and organizational entity has been impacted by continuous and multidimensional traumas; either as victim, perpetrator, bystander or witness To address the healing of Multiply Wounded Societies Cabrera states: “Multiply wounded societies run the risk of becoming societies with inter-generational traumas. It is virtually a law that one treats others the way one treats oneself. Anywhere that large population groups are traumatized, the trauma is transferred to the next generation. Working with the multiple wound phenomenon means accepting that the wounds are collective as well as personal.”
LEGACY and AFTERMATH. Finally, we are learning that every historic wound which is experienced by an entire community or society will have both LEGACY and AFTERMATH. “Legacy” refers to the stories, mythology, prejudices, old folk wisdom and other practices that transmit the “lessons/meaning” of the experience to another group or another generation. “Aftermath” are the structural and organizational remnants that exist in society. These were originally instituted or constructed to either reinforce or teach a particular component of the legacy (bias, discrimination, privilege, and marginalization). As part of a healing process, it is difficult, if not impossible, to undo the prejudices, misunderstandings and false senses of superiority and inferiority among the victimized and wounded if the structures that were constructed to teach those lessons still exist. A complete Healing requires an understanding of History and taking Action to address historical markers of Trauma.
There are significant advances in the biological, psychological, spiritual, individual, communal, societal, ritual, artistic, energy and narrative fields of Trauma healing. I would be very interested in hearing from the CTTT blogosphere as to which of these subjects you would want me to elaborate on more and which first.
A Luta Continua, lassima tushinde mbilisaka (The Struggle continues, and we will undoubtedly be victorious!!!
